Black Mirror Matrix (Unplug)

Rabbit Trail #22 X Dispositions of a Return

I find myself talking to generations who haven’t seen the Matrix.

Repeatedly

Haven’t lived with it long enough to know

Unplugged.

Before Lauryn blessed it.

Before Jay finessed it.

We would unplug at every chance to leave the house

Street-light-curfew

Holsmon street

“Y’all lil’ niggas playing tackle on concrete!?”

How we made it..? I don’t know.

My mother blasting En Vogue at the stop light, over the bridge of the Passaic river

The bridge by the courts where we’d lean over and watch the shopping carts work like a filter for the rest of the garbage floating downstream

Over to River Street

A burgundy Cutless Cierra or

A faded goldish Volvo

Thick, blocky and heavy as you’d expect a car made of cast iron pans

Wheels on rusted grate

A rubber to metal melody

A bridge the color of the Statue of Liberty

Which we must pledge our allegiance to remind the world it has always existed on the Jersey side

Again we cross this bridge

And I realize

I’m at the airport, lost in a memory

Is this some version of nostalgia that takes on a different texture?

Miami, on my way to New York

I look up halfway through the flight and think

It’s our necks arched down

anthropologist will study, tens(?) hundreds, thousand or millions of years from now?

Maybe they’ll call us the aliens

Black mirrors like crystal balls

Some opportunity awaiting us

Some future of a memory we’ve felt but yet to live

Beaconing with eagerness

A boy shouts to break the nervous and turbulent silence

“We’re flying into a tornado”’’ 🌪️

Halfway through the flight

I laugh louder than expected

Look up with a smile

Turbulence rises

Thoughts about how I’ve lived 3 lives and how fragility exists between nostalgia and indifference giving birth

Some longing for a past

Stuck and sunken,

Unaware awareness

Some eagerness to get away from now

I’ve seen it

Watched board members,

business men, pastors, politicians and parishioners burst blood vessels

over land and lease

Men still calling down fire from heaven

Fear and impulse of a scarcity-minded trauma

We had to strategize a war waged in unity without role models

Our enemies won’t feel this oxygen

What did we see?

What did we learn?

When will we get further away from the custom and lack of creativity in the question

“Where are you from?”

And what will be its innovation?

I look up again,

I unplug.

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