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audzu billahe, audzu billahe, audzu billahe minash shaitauner rajeem

the devil plays mind games like mind craft and grand theft and shoot em up video's duck hunts...the devil lays whispers llike twilight vampires in the movie theatre, telling me to sink a little lower in the couch chair, till i am in my living room slouched and 8 hours have gone by in breaking bad binges that i swear to everything i will never do again...the devil tells me it feels so good to burn and sip and burn and puff and listen to music that has me making .22's out my hand - bang bang, harder than paint, wock flocka flame boy. i go harder than red paint, splatting people on the dance floor, so shorties can see my bravado inside my berretta like biggie smalls pretending gangsta through lyrics that have dudes in party shaking like ya, that's me...yeah, you're right, that is you, the fake, wanna be, lower you. the nafs. the devil kid.

exorcism is taking off your costume. stop trying to be down with the frequency of falsehood, of that which justifies your emotional disequilbrium. forget the shrink and the pity parties and talk that celebrates your role of being a victim. you are ancient mathematics. you. You. the Real You.

ancient is timeless, is never and nothing and always and everything all at once. all of a sudden the grave is clear. travel light. no new shoes necessary. my feet feel a million in this ancient mud. feeel a billion in my brothers beat up kicks, that my chachi-ma made in bangladesh outside the factory, where women in selawars came out of a 22 hour slave shift without a break. shhh...

alhamdulilah. that means all praise is due to the 1ness (ALLAH)...

learning the meaning in the meaning by listening, away from the lectures at the university. all praise is due to the heart, to speaking from a place of Higher. all praise is always due, so shhhh....

today, i recalled in my homeboy's breakdown, what was important. he shared his disease, how he nearly died and came back, but has been wondering about his mind, about whether he lost it somewhere along the way. been wondering where mine was...whether i was in the right, whether i knew what was right, what my purpose was.

my purpose is to be of service, to be abd'allah, abdullah, abdul jabar. i am a slave to the Compeller, compelled by Essence to do. doing is showing up for what is Real. what is Real is balance. we created you and spread you out, in different tongues, so you could learn each other. shhh...learn. be humble. listen, be kind by moving, walking, talking, thinking from Essence...

the Lover is always Love, is always them-Self, is ALWAYS. 

today, i am a cafe bedouin, running from coffee cup to coffee shop, having a million conversations, writing here and there for no one. no  source of income. no  job. no employment forecasts. no one to financially support me. yet, today i am the full moon that is formed, that is always there, has always been there, even though it is concealed by blackened clouds crying transatlantic slave trades. today i am still, even as the coffee stirs my nerves into ecstastic seizures. today i am figuring it out. 

today, Source energy tells me to stay put in the neighborhood, tells me that i am not missing out on something happening somewhere. today i learn that being present, showing up for friends is important, even when it means hours of listening...

today my brown was osiris, trayvon, iraqi, sadhu, muahmmad, public enemy...

it's after 10pm. 90 degrees has become 55 after the rains earlier today, and my leg hairs stand like empire penguin men with babies on their feet, in mass huddles that would have the feds gunning down the community through mass media outlets calling them cults. waco. philadelphia.

this cafe. in this cafe. outside. sitting outside and watching the remnants of an old block in the drunk who walks with a shopping cart like a refugee, crying out loud, like the guy who used to cry out loud, decades ago, when i was a foreigner in this neighborhood. we are still foreigners here but there's a difference. today, i  understand that it is the perceivers challenge and hardship to view me as inferior, as other, as repulsive. and it is my path in Surrender to realize that I AM, even in this manifestation, even with the family i was prescribed,  whose incrediblenss is bulldozed at the moment of birth, at the moment of accepting path of bowing in the opposite direction of wallstreet and suburbs and real estate and car dealerships and malls and black fridays and nets stadiums and yankees and beyonces and brad pitts.

i bow down to a path that is al Khaliq. i do this through discipline. through meditation. through listening. through drawing clear boundaries. therough values like compassion, kindness, diligence in Purpose, being present for my tribe, building community, actively being a Lover flirting with life in my doing, in my manifesting of Purpose, in staying away from fantasy and making meaningful soul-aligned dreams happen. 

my dream is for us to be villages, to have Purpose, to have community, to work the land, to love the land, to write novels and poems and share and learn and be cared for and care with my family and village of tribe. my dream is to build tribe with others throughout the world, by building with others in creating creatively, sutainaible communities, that are self-dependinent and interdependnet and driven by the attempts to reach stars, something deeper, greater, and in doing so, finding deeper Purpose. my dream is to do this by practicing the touch of healing through herbs, massage, music, food...my dream is to have this as part of collaborations with others who are also invested deeply in building community and giving energy to this by spending time with the muqtamin, the believers, those who bow to something Greater than the capital that they critque. 

i bang with the doers of Real, by getting down with those on the path of Real, and give love to everyone else along the Way, by being clear on what my Purpose is and that i love them, but have limited moments in this brief outfit, to carry forth Purpose and if yours is to make it in hollywood or get recongition for your projects and doing work with colored kids like the one you were, or to come in union with me because i am not them, than i have to say peace be unto you...this is not my path, and i don't believe it is yours. 

when you are ready to get down with Real, holler. but for now...i am focused on giving energy to that which is being extinguished, that which can save us all - community. Real, deep, meaningful community. i am here when you are ready. in the meantime, we can chat while i am in the cafe. but only for a little...

misssing out on illusion

miss out. that's been the lesson over and over and over. brooklyn artist scene taught me this. miss out. 

bk  parties were fly. everyone was fly. perpetrating artist cool. i was. 

wanting to get down. really down. how? by missing out. that's what i forgot tonight, this evening. didn't want to be in the out, daydreaming on what i'd miss at the coffee house here. ebbed. fell back in the space that cuzin's dad was in last year, when he hollered at his soon to be daughter-in-law. 

forgive him, i said. life is full of ebbs and flows. we need each other as reminders, unless we are just really good at taking the lessons and growing deeper in purpose. 

i get good at it sometimes. stay clear. focused. uncompromised like the moon's orbit. like the 28 year old revolution of saturn. 

hey  saturn, you wanna hit Alpha Centauri, the quasi-neighboring solar system? there's sposed to be some fly comets tonight. real fly. 

saturn responds without a word. stays in worship in its orbit. for years. forever. in islam. 

my homegirl spits Qur'an. knows it well enough to inspire a nod of apprecitation from me. she is running in circles through the drunken streets of pan-african bk nights. knights in shiny outfits and doo's that cost half a day, appear at the rooftop cool with a pose. 

post-indigenous-soul is a soul culture bent on vogue on being so committed to mundane, that, look at me, that, idolize me. like pharoahs. 

la illaha illalla.

paused. peace, i say. left. but i knew before we linked. i knew from jumpstreet, when the undercovers of iblis' team whispered fun, and possibilities, maybe wifey materials...

...word, i nodded, as i strutted out the crib in i'm the man, like it was friday 1999, like i was stuck in a saturday night fever...

and even though i get worship and spirituality and maya and yogic science and vedic mantra and dinacharya and sattvic frequency, beats and rhymes were playing, and fly guy came out.

the music of the pied piper, of fela and bob, an alternative cool to frnechie and ross, lured me. army shirts, dimples and game...damn...still...still slip into this...just for seconds, but still...

walk with purpose, blood, atiyo, bhaiya, apa, ahkee...

let purpose govern your moves...

fly like an eagle, like a dolphin, tiger style like a shaolin master, scorpion asana like a meditating swami...and everything else.

write. wriite like the graveyard

...and goto the yards of stoop giveaways for paper and a pen, and some groceries from the coop...

...and let these spaces in between work, in between writing and making medicine and asana and massage, be the social interactions of sup love how you doing. lett this be the space of reverence for and with elders and young, men and women...

...worship them and invite them for dinner, for meditation, for practicing asana and writing ciphers, and massage exchanges, and a hike through a mountain to pray...

thing is i forget. i forget what i'm supposed to be doing, forget that i'm supposed to be doing this like this, that i have options that i can be clear about...

...working on an album, you want to come to the studio and chill, and spit with me? add some music or art or some film strips for storyboarding a video...

...building on this asana sequence, want to practice? want to try it out? 

writing saturday at gimmee, would love your company for a tea, coffee and side conversations...

...reading wretched of the earth, fanon. heard of him? want to be in a book club with me? take morning walks, jog when the sun is sinking, but not too low, cause maghrib...but you can join me for any of these.

fasting for 10...would love your community in this...stay over... we can squeez broccolli into juice, kale into lymph...

...chess, scrabble, siesta, builidng community...

...can i interview about this? community? education, in finding it's soul, in building sanctimonious, accountable, intergenerational, modest, humble, warrior, surrender-communities.

...miss out and fold deeper in purpose until your spine is straight over your leg.

...miss out and learn from masters...everyone is great at something...

I will hang tonight if you read me a poem, if I can share a poem with you, if I can interview you...if you will do 7 chand namaskar asanas with me and if you tell me about your artistic process...

energy actualizes

ancient mathematics like a mantra...my ammu tells me that we take nothing with us, sref (except) our deeds. what've you done? what are you doing?

my amma, always beautiful, grows more stunning each time i see her. and my abbu grows more into a giant, even as age chips away at his height. i love them, i think, as i watch them and hear the ancient mathematics ooze through their mannerisms, their slight of hand that is forever open to guests for conversation and music. 

even as we move through another decade in the same apartment, even as the building becomes a place as alien as brooklyn, as a new war emerges, a war that is scented with barristas and specialty lager bartender talk, a break from the bats, cuss words, and racial epithets of the older communities in the concentrated block of one thousand, i call this place home. shakily. 

my mind wraps around mind maps out of whack, scrawled like espresso drunks with a pen, 3 years of unemployment, and loss of purpose.

i forget my purpose sometimes, then recall the signs spoken by ALLAH. 

i look up and see the moon, full, growing, waning, waxing. past the midway mark since the last full moon. 

i recalled, earlier, what my intention of letting go was, earlier today, during a podcast i was listening to. intently.

everything we are today is a refletion of everything we've done, the host of the soul of islam podcast said. that's right, i thought. familiar. 

beyond excuses, and complaints, and being a victim, we are who we are because of what we've given energy to, he expounded, and i fell into remembrance.

my letting go intention this past month was to release the judge, the critic, that gives energy to second-guessing, to the can'ts, to the it wont's, to applying this to those who are doing, and critiquing them from this lens, just as a way to keep myself at bay. 

safe behind the bars of babylon, even though the sea and boat are right there, even though the keys to the prison door hang inside my cell. 

what is it that i want to give energy to? why am i not? what am i giving energy to instead? 

energy is the power of music, of a divine frequency that can give rise to beautiful, or tap into iblis and produce self-incarceration, polemics, talking bout it...

i want to give energy to growing deeper in path of yogi, by teaching asana in the way i find it to be sacred. i want to give energy to home, to community, to real community, based on relation to land and the principles of Surrender, of buidling these self-sustaining communities, i want to give energy to being a healer that is helpful, that practices in ancient ways, and is able to generate income towards building family and community. i want to give energy to doing actualizing the world i want to see.

the methodology of traditional medicine

methodology is at the heart of the production process, my boy kaz schooled me, on the ride up, in the elvator, back to his office space. i was wodnering about the degrees thing again, thinking out loud on how it was a scam, a set up to get people to spend a whole lot of money for a paper and a way of knowing that may be okay, but just okay.

what you're speaking of is the process by which knowledge is produced. how knowledge gets produced is based on who the producers are, what their values are/based on, and the methods by which they obtained this knowledge. 

kaz pushed back his glasses, looked at the marble ground on the 22nd floor we walked out onto, and nodded at his intellectualism that flowed like bedouin poetry of potetnial prophets in 7th century mecca.

the methodology you seek is very possibly non-existant in the current educational institutions, so you may have to devise one. w.e.b dubois, paul robeson, booker t., angela davis, malcolm x, were all producers of methodologies that interrogated the machinations of societal systems and in turn, also allowed for building alternatives. 

as a traditional medicine man, what is the methodology you use/value to discern what is medicine, healing, health? what systems do  you use to derive at this knowledge? what legitimating systems are parsel in this methodology?

kaz looked between me and hi checkered shirt, a chess board of sorts. 

make this the crux of your methodology. when people from prominent organizations are interested in learning about an isssue, they often call me, to get a snese of how to excavate meaning. i give them some tools to work with, but not everything. it's not for everyone to know.

i squinted my brows in question. kaz noted this through his state of intellectual-spirits.

you can't give everything to everyone. it could and often is misused. so, you just have to give a piece. then  they may come back and maybe you give a little more. intuition will tell you  whether to go further.

kaz's language spoke to me. it was the way of the guru's, the process by which they shared or didn't, the methodology absent in yoga classes, where everything is taught to everyone who can afford it. dead presidents grants the keys to sacred knowledge. then it can't be too sacred. 

but someone this past week, this stone-specializing massage therapist was saying how there is no competition, because no two people are alike, and that because of our uniqueness, what you offer, no one else will or can. so, even when someone has the currency for vedic secrets, they may actually be getting something cheaper than earth-frackers... real can't be bought. 

my methodology in deriving at medicine is...

"Die before you die." -prophet muhammad

inside this new Love, Die, rumi stated, in his exegesis of the prophet muhammad's words. but shhh...don't mention the prophet. atleast don't say his name. rumi's words will lose credence. bettter to think of these words as rumi's for the new age spiritualist's who want no part in ancient mathematics. 

want to get deeper with al Khaliq. me. i want to. with this creative energy. so i threw out the mirror. i shattered it with my phone that wouldn't buzz with the texts i was looking for...wherefore art thou juliet? 

it was a store window on madison ave, after the parade, the one with puerto rican flags waving like a magic wand, like a national anthem before indpendence. the diamond shop's alarm blared and the cops had me down by my neck - freddy grey. they drowned my floating ribs till i choked. 

smoked the ashes of newports from my boy ash's stogie, and became smoke when the bombs rained a million miles away 29 years from now, when the last of us were killed and immediately memorialized in upstate taker-culture teepees to celebrate the greatness of these great seekers of this path of surrender  (islam). we were all mostly dead so we were cool now. we could be romanticized. our prayer rugs collected like feathers and hung on car mirrors like dreamcatchers. 

got my face covered. had it concealed since b.c.e...before isa came without a word. 

decoded freud and jung after the first million words of my room-mate in match for a phd at cornell. he  didn't know that i burned my degrees and pictures in a prairie fire by the colorado river a canyon away from the grand-canyon hidden tribe of rain-dancers who stomped thunder and storms...

...you could keep your psychological textbooks and destroy other people's lives just as yours is through mind drones that drop precision bombs on the mindset of ancient ways like turmeric for inflammation, until people of the ancient ways give it up and you have it.  keep it homie. it was never mine to begin with. go ahead sell it. that's what you do white/black/brown/yellow-man of the hoard-greed-consumer-cracker-boss-complex-disposition.

prayers. hugs. love. where'd you lose it? what made me want to lose it? to  be down. to be down with maya, i lost my heart and pink floyded into the nihilism of rick ross. 

al khaliq, if done right, will have you so invisible that bang bang...

i bang with a shawl and shari and shhh words from refugee bangladeshi ebony outcaste converts who jump a sinking 3rd world for below minimum wage. 

no i don't recite my poetry. i never even used that word, i told my sudanese queen, who cried herself into her grandmothers womb, till she was talking her mother's words on nasser and umm kalthoum.

Die...

...before you die, Die. 

...n how would u interpret that? friends texted back, when i shot it out with the proper punctuations and the reference marker - the prophet muhammad. 

funny thing is, they got it, they wowed, when i sent almost an identical text last year, with rumi's name after. deep. babylon psychology works on babylonians tuned in.

tuned out and listened to abdul basit cry quran from neptune satellites...you might know...maybe...

...tune in...and Die, by becoming a vessel, a collaboration with al-Khaliq.

full moon: may 2015

all praise is due to the Essence of life, the Guide...

...the One, known only through the secret science of 0...

...the mathematics taught by the prophet muhammad and recognized by the higher I of everyone from the arabian peninsula, to the abysinnians of ethiopia, eritrea, somalia, kenya, to the sumerians, persians, egyptians, nubians, moors, berbers, saharans, dogon, namibians, through the north and east of turks, mongols, chechs, hindustanis, ughurs, javese...

...mass enlightenments/conversions with the metaphorical sword of Higher, from the land and peoples who brought to the world khemetics, zorostrianism, judaism, christianity...why? 

...there must be something to this grassroots knowledge that has no picture to bow to, no idol to worship, no symbol of an ethnicity or a suffering, but of the universal signs - moon n sun (star), no belief to suspend disbelief for...

...only this, only acceptance of what is - there is no Essence, but Essence, no Energy but Energy, that which is always, that which cannot be created nor destroyed...

...the Guide is my intention for this month, is the  One that replaces the i of this man who is in the way of himself...this month, the letting go is more than just getting away from perfection and trying things out through circumstantial structures, through being a conduit, instead of getting all the pieces in, instead of getting it right, instead of doing randomly, letting go of the critic, the judge, the lower i of just practice, of just trying...by being a conduit, by being of service with what it is i know, have had the privilege of getting deeper with...

..what gifts have you been bestowed with young? a beautiful voice? acute observations? illustrating the world outside your window through words? hands that heal? cullinary concoctions that leave diners cured of...

...channel Higher, and offer up your gifts, see what happens, worry about the money later, it will come...do, offer this gift you've been bestowed with, that, thay you have cultivated, that you have spent life time energy groing...offer it, because the world needs you kin, needs me, needs balance, for more than just today, and this year and lifetime...the world needs this Gift as part of a conversation with the past, present and future...

99 names: al Khaliq: the Creator

all praise is due...creation, the Creator...the creative energy...saw my math in an anatomy and physiolgy book...axial/appendicular skeleton, sarcomeres contracting skeletal muscles...

...the human body, a paintbrush of genius, of Creativity so sophisticated that gasp, wow, how...

...al Khaliq resides in our natural disposition to create, to live artfully...

...in marakech everyone i met was an artist. lamb-skin lamps in the cut of midnight sahara, in the shape of desert women...

...in noakhali, my chacima gave me a tour of a day in the life of a villagewoman...herself a village woman...she made the bamboo chairs we sat on, the straw mat my other aunty seperated rice grains on. my chahci me gave me the quilt that stitches a story like ragas that played from the flute of my cousin, who blew song in the sound of trees, after a day of tilling land...

...art is life in the tradition, among traditional people...there is no separation, no cullinary school...

...my mom's laboratory is the kitchen, where she spends the majority of her time concocting masterpieces that have guests all-praising...

...all praise is due to the Source, al-Khaliq that lies within us all, when we get out of our way, when we let go....the success is in the doing, in the practice, in the Way, in the service...

....al Khaliq is the Creation. how  does your art account for community? what role does it serve in building, enhancing, maintaining community, beyond you, beyond this brief moment in this brief body?

...how do i/we tap into al-Khaliq? al-Khaliq is here. here. do you see? hear? shhh...don't talk about it...thing is, i find al Khaliq when i am my most vulnerable self, when i allow for Creator/ivity to work through me instead of audience, instead of paying too much heed to the opinions of those who are tuned into a lower frequency...

...and me, little me, little i, wanting to connect, wanting to be down, wanting just to be normal, and not gossiped about, and not have burning ears, and a kick-me sign, me - i try to get it right, try to say the words that will sound like jay and johnny...

...in the process of this tapping into lower, into an audience, into compulsion by those who i make idols , i lose al-Khaliq. 

...what would happen if al-Khaliq were my voice, my walk? my writings, my use of paper...stacks on stacks on stacks of art in collab with you and you and trees and seasons and generations...a dialectic...conversations between 500 b.c. 300 a.d. 1442 and 2015...all praise is due for the letting go, for the vulnerability, for working through al-Khaliq...