Between Anima and AI.

A poem.

The Sugar Shack by Ernie Barnes

Safe to say that when Thom Yorke had begun to work on Anima he surely didn’t think that a black man would play it fourteen times as he wrote the first words of a new chapter of a book & safe to say that the theme of anxiety and dystopia is a worthy subject for both of us to attend to & I think that the reason my anxiety and the dystopia within my own brain feels a kind of burnt orange and smoky grays and empty jugs of water and sticks from my grandmothers yard as I pretend to be Denzel & I imagine that when Thom began to write Anima and he tells the news reporter that it had followed a period of deep anxiety and writer’s block he didn’t know that I would tell my editor the same thing & I suppose its safe to say that the block that builds a partition between what we see and what we sense and what we feel and the characters and the arc and the scene and the action and the resolution is its own kind of apocalypse & the bitter irony is that when I listen to “Dawn Chorus” it is preceded by me watching a film where the ambulance traveling up that windy road on Lake Washington Boulevard where it would be announced that Kurt Cobain is dead & there have been so many times I thought the story of my life would end the same & in the next few frames I see him screaming his lungs out with a white and black shirt looking like one of the coldest and craziest of white boys & his hair had changed two times and I suppose that anxiety has phases and that somedays you a blond and then others you’re ginger & safe to say that the other day when I left my doctors appointment to go pick up the next round of medication for my anxiety and dystopia I think I played “Dawn Chorus” twelve times on repeat & that is something of the writing process for me: I play music again and again and again and again until I begin to feel the words creep towards sentences and sentences creep toward paragraphs and then somehow I finally feel like something magical has happened & I wonder if this is what made Kurt slip into his own form of darkness, the pressure, that haunting desire to be larger than the limits of our own existence & safe to say no machine can worry about that, no machine has to wonder about its place in the world, no machine has to look itself in the mirror and stare in the face of its own graduaer and struggles & the first time I saw Terminator I wanted to save the world just like Jesse did and his star rose and fell as swift as the bullet ended Marvins life in April & I wish it was a joke because it was the first and the world stood as still as every bent and beauty dark body in Ernie Barnes “The Sugar Shack” & when Ernie had got done playing he decided to paint and the world becomes much more whole when the body is in service of beauty instead of breaking & safe to say that when Ernie snuck into the blues concert and saw people moving on the floor with passion it was an unforgettable experience of escaping & I imagine that the kind of warning that the cyborg from the future bring was less about the machines and more about our humanity about our inability to escape to dance in the cover of night no matter the reason for our sadness & I guess 1984 was a hell of year just like 2026 is a hell of year just like 2019 was a hell of year & the virus came and the reporters called it a world ending event and we looked back and nothing was the same and we never got to say goodbye and the grief of unsaid goodbye’s hurt the worst because you just never know what could have been & it absolutely okay to not have a word to say because you are attempting at your own survival & if you must, you must, please let me know when you have had enough & when you reach that point, I will reach back out to you and the hand that will hold you will be flesh, not metal, not coding, not digital, not fast, but patient and honest and merciful and oranges and reds and purples and golds and the blues and whites without a need for apology or control or dissent because everything is in its right place & safe to say there is no safety like the kind of safety that meets you where the anxiety and dystopia dwells and sits long enough for us to figure it out together.