Photo by Thomas Sayers Ellis.

Or Oreo, or
worse. Or ordinary.
Or your choice
of category

or
Color

or any color
other than Colored
or Colored Only.
Or “Of Color”

or
Other

or theory or discourse
or oral territory.
Oregon or Georgia
or Florida Zora

or
Opportunity

or born poor
or Corporate. Or Moor.
Or a Noir Orpheus
or Senghor

or
Diaspora

or a horrendous
and tore-up journey.
Or performance. Or allegory’s armor
of ignorant comfort.

or
Worship

or reform or a sore chorus.
Or Electoral Corruption
or important ports
of Yoruba or worry

or
Neighbor

or fear of…
of terror or border.
Or all organized
minorities.

—Thomas Sayers Ellis

—Dorothea Lasky

Russian Prison by Sebastian Lister.

The model prisoner
edges his way through
the narrow gap between
the lock stile of the gate
and the high prison wall
and has his first look
at a pavement that doesn’t
belong to anyone
in particular, where rules
are so lenient, the hardly
amount to rules. He puts
his left foot out and down
against it (the way all marches
begin), and it doesn’t
give way like a trapdoor,
no bells or buzzers
or sirens, no loudspeakers,
no spotlights. His right foot
follows slightly ahead,
and he’s officially
back in the free world
which didn’t exist, which doesn’t
exist even now. He moves
both his legs, one after
the other, pretending this
is legal exercise
permitted, even required
by regulations. He keeps
close to the outside wall,
in the shadow for as long
as it lasts, then at the sharp
end of it where the sun
rebounds from the concrete
and glares up through the whites
of his open and shut eyes
to see what he has to say
for himself or anyone else,
yet keeping his mouth shut,
he puts his correct, corrected
left foot down on it.

—David Wagoner

Detroit Riots in 1967. Police in a squad car guard a man under arrest. As looting and unrest spread, arrests mounted. In total, police arrested 7,231 people.

It means stand still. It means
stay just as sweet as you are
and where you are and don’t do
anything you were doing
before or might have planned
to do or be anywhere
else you might have in mind
and you’re wrong and have lost your chance
to keep your hands to yourself
as long as it may please
the court or its officers
who have their eyes on you
and all yours. It means your freedom
of speech may now be turned
around and up against you,
so it’s time to specialize
in the right to remain silent
except for those natural,
involuntary, wordless,
exclamatory, heartfelt
murmurs from behind
your tongue and a locked door
where you must take your turn
for the worse and explain yourself
to people who don’t know
you any better than you.

—David Wagoner

The plain was flawlessly paved.
Nothing, absolutely nothing but the chair and I
were there.

The sky was forever blue,
No sun gave life to it.

An inscrutable, insensible light
illuminated the infinite plain.

To me this eternal day seemed to be projected —
artificially—from a different sphere.

I was never sleepy nor hungry nor thirsty,
never hot nor cold.

Time was only an abstruse ghost
since nothing happened or changed.

In me Time still lived a little
This, mainly, thanks to the chair.

Because of my occupation with it
I did not completely
lose my sense of the past.

Now and then I’d hitch myself, as if I were a horse, to the chair
and trot around with it,
sometimes in circles,
and sometimes straight ahead.

I assume that I succeeded.

Whether I really succeeded I do not know
Since there was nothing in space
By which I could have checked my movements.

As I sat on the chair I pondered sadly, but not desperately,
Why the core of the world exuded such black light.

—Hans Arp

Clarice Lispector

I like poisons, the slowest
and drinks, the stronges
and coffee, the bitterest
and the craziest hallucinations.
You can even throw me off a cliff, I’ll say:
So what? I love to fly

—Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector (1961)

I have grown weary of literature: silence alone comforts me. If I continue to write,
it’s because I have nothing more to accomplish in this world except to wait for
death. Searching for the word in darkness. Any little success invades me and puts
me in full view of everyone. I long to wallow in the mud. I can scarcely control my
need for self-abasement, my craving for licentiousness and debauchery. Sin tempts
me, forbidden pleasures lure me. I want to be both pig and hen, then kill them and
drink their blood.

—Clarice Lispector

(Top L) Man Ray, (Top R) André Breton, (Bottom L) Yaves Tanguy and (Bottom R) René Crevel.

In 1928, André Breton published the following statement in his Surrealist Revolution:
“I accuse the homosexuals of affronting human tolerance with a mental and moral
defect that tend to advocate itself as a way of life and to paralyze every enterprise
I respect. I make exceptions one of which I grant to the incomparable
Marquis de Sade.”

One must assume that a similar exception was graciously extended to René Crevel.
Difficult Death was a risky book to put out in 1926 because it was a public statement
of the author’s ambivalent sexuality.

The risk-taking that leads up to the suicide in Difficult Death has one thing in common
and failures that led to Crevel’s own suicide, and that is that neither has anything to
do with sexual problems.

In 1925, Crevel was writing Difficult Death, Surrealist Revolution canvassed its
contributors on the question, “Is Suicide a Solution?” Crevel responded;

A solution? Yes.

People say one commit suicide out of love, fear, or venereal disease.
Not so. Everyone is in love, or thinks they are. Everyone is frightened.
Everyone is more or less syphilitic. Suicide is a means of conscious
choice. Those who commit it are person unwilling to throw in the towel
like almost everyone else and repress a certain psychic feeling of such
intensity that everything tells you had better believe it is a truthful and immediate sense of reality. This sense is the one thing that allows
a person to embrace a solution that is obviously the fairest and most
definitive of them all, the solution of suicide.

There is no love of hate about which one can say that it is clearly
justified and definitive. But the respect (which in spite f myself and notwithstanding a tyrannical moral and religious upbringing) I have
to have for anyone who did not timorously withhold or restrain that
impulse, that mortal impulse, leads me to envy a bit more each day
those persons who were hurting so intensely that a continuing
acceptance of life’s little games became something they could no
longer stomach. Human accomplishment is not worth its weight in
horse mucus. When personal happiness leads to even a modicum
of contentment, this is more often than not a negative things like a
sedative against me. The death that tempted me several times was
lovelier by far than this downright prosaic fear of death that i might
also quite properly call a habit the habit of timidity. I wanted to open
a certain door, and I got cold feet. I feel I was wrong not to open it.
I not only feel, I believe, I want to feel, I want to believe it was a
mistake not to, for as I have found no solution in life, notwithstanding
a long and diligent search, I am not about to attempt to pull myself
together to give life another try unsolaced by the thought of this
definitive and ultimate act in which I feel that I have caught a
glimpse at least of the solution.

René Crevel

Hands pressed against hands, palms wedded palms. Pierre shuddered
and then was nothing but a droplet of blood transfused into another life’s
bloodstream. Little by little, he altogether ceased to exist.

—René Crevel

—Cotton Mather