“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”

― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“” Listen also to what is not said. It is a listening not just with your ears- though ears are a fine thing- but listening with your whole body, with your heart and the hairs on your arms and the small toes of your feet. Try doing it this way, when you read James Baldwin, one of our great American writers, out loud: “ (Old Friend from Far Away, pg. 27)

“On the 29th of July 1943, my father died…
(reading from Notes of a Native Son James Baldwin Full Audiobook mixed with old radio recordings from 1943 and other found sounds. mixed by Si Matta)

Listening to the sound of words in my brain tossing with the gusts of wind blowing south through the San Luis Valley, hitting the house in waves like a chorus for the sonnets rattling in my bones.

{Here alone, listening to what is not said in the daily search for clarity, divinity, or, just a padded cell far away from the prying eyes of gossip and social reproach.}

No matter the criteria for a forced hermitage, the silence can be deafening, a meditation to madness, and/or the peace that always seemed so elusive and out of reach-, like soft dust in the mesa wind, fleeting like fathers, and like Baldwin I understand that father wound. Fueling pen and therapy bills.

“I often wonder what I’d do if there weren’t any books in the world.”

— James Baldwin

A good book can grip you like that, old memories, kitchen sink, shadowboxing someone else’s story. A good book is a hustle, and a grift with reality, a dance with the matrix programmed by others vulnerabilities and tastes. Like a home, a good book can trap you.

{I listened with my organs,
straining through black
tar tobacco smoke
and words
shoved
down
throats,
spoken
in rooms
that didn’t
deserve
me.

“Don’t you know me dad,
I’m your native son”}