DEDICATION

"see you had a lot of moments that didn't last forever"

-Lil Wayne

"Everyone wants a performance from the people they consider brilliant." 

-H. Abdurraqib

i tell her my heart has a hole bottomed, a rot larger than the mouth

a lipping i tongued so you try to outline, i reuse words so much i am

nothing outside repetition: tell me is that love

someone will love you then love nothing, i lay down 

to sleep, pray to take, down on my knees
pray to take, when i wake you are are gone 

my childhood bottled, my city smashed the globe of falling 

gently what is the debris of drowned bodies floating, what of bodies

in my city held suspended, your body lay me down on the porch

of abandoned houses, tell me is that love

can you hear me sobbing through sound, slipped

the anchor called "other people" onto your tongue 

is that love, i thought i could hold, hold the lens up 

what is the trespass, do you gamble with breaking

how netted to surfacing, draw me monstered
enough to terror part human, part dream

whisper, new orleans, do you know the cost 
of dancing in the streets while the dead unrest 
memory of bodies anonymous collect at my feet

you can wade into death so deep the smell
leaves, hard rock in the palm, so we tread miracle
i have seen what cannot be cloaked in this time

blocks of prayers fallen debris, a do not touch
me kind of song that starts: is there love

enough in the world to call me back home

its stain: she says, you have so much trauma 

you lifetime, hold the barrel of the gun up to your mouth

i microphone the harbor of desire where no one can reach 

tell me love, we are not the same. write my name on the bullet

pull it like a kiss, throw it against my body, throw it 

against the soft spaces i made syllabic as punch 

syllabic as what is beautiful will stay in a way you could 

not, tell me is that love: still frames amuse

i was never part of the view, this theater i constructed 

set design of artifacts writing out from under you

& then saw finally that none of it was true

Lil Wayne's "God Bless Amerika" shot in Hollygrove

Link to the official VIMEO video: http://vimeo.com/70374545

I don't forgive Wayne for his lack of NOLA love, but I do love the faces in this video and that it was shot in Hollygrove. And this is one of Wayne's better songs that doesn't rely on his cheap misogyny.



I just don't understand how Lil Wayne consistently seems to have the worst PR people in the world.

This is the behind the scenes video that has people up in arms about the flag being on the ground and him stepping on it.




So instead of any mention of New Orleans and its people or the point of the song in relation to this video, the media and every commenter is instead arguing over whether Lil Wayne intentionally stepped on the flag and what that means.


That's all we are getting out of this video.

Are you fucking kidding me?

Day 29: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

this one
this one
this one
this one
this one
                                                            Here is a neat problem in poetic logic: if the Dactyl Cyllenius is an alias of Hercules, and Hercules is the thumb, and Titias is the fool's finger, it should be possible to find in the myth of Hercules and Titias the name of the intervening finger, the forefinger, to complete the triad used in the Phrygian blessing.

once you vivisect that best laid
you picture this anatomy a dangling at best
this is not really happening

                                                           Paulus considered. 'I am rather rusty on mythology, my dear Theophilus, but I seem to remember that it is made of the bones of Pelops.' 

so you girl a dragon fire
time yourself so the endings come
each begins & then all storied in the last

                                                           The king is being warned of his ritual death. A Moon-priestess has come to meet him: a terrible robed figure with one arm menacingly akimbo, as she offers an apple, his passport to Paradise. 

when are you 

when are you gonna change

when you change 

                                                         In mediaeval times a garland of periwinkles was placed on the heads of men bound for execution. The flower has five blue petals and is therefore sacred to the Goddess, and its tough green vines will have been the bonds she used on her victim. 

say you are the stories you recall

say you lean in to the where you walked

say you were invisible but then no, you said, no to that

let them bleed

RapGenius on the 30 Days of Weezy Project

The great people over at Rap Genius have published all 30 of the poems from the 30 Days of Weezy Project on their site, and I am slowly annotating them along with some help from my poetry collaborators, Geoff Munsterman and Gina Myers. 

They are calling the Weezy poems: "An Epic Poem for our Times" 

*Love*

You can see all the annotations under my album.

This is as close I will probably ever get to being a rap star. 

Poetry Genius also has a nice blog post about the project focusing on the collaborations as well.

It begins:

 For National Poetry Month last April, New Orleans writer Megan Burns set out on a mission to write 30 poems in 30 days, all about Lil Wayne. Mission accomplished! In a truly Rap Genius-esque collaborative effort, Burns partnered with fellow authors Gina Myers and Geoff Munsterman to complete 30 Days of Weezy—and now all 30 poems are on the site with killer Verified annotations!

Burns kicks off Day 1 of the series with an “epistolary response” to a Lil Wayne quote about how some women have “deep and dark” reasons for not being able to love.

Full Blog Post

Weezy and I thank you for all the love, Rap Genius and Poetry Genius!

Day 30: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

Photo by Gina Myers

(Collaboration with Megan Burns and Gina Myers, Atlanta)



"chest...caved in, mess on the pavement"
-Lil Wayne

Dear Weezy:

outlined this blue, a world of debt accrued
turning every day into something worthy
& new, blacklisted I bite down on
a slipping beat. Chew on that [for
a bit] ashy-mouth shapes form a gesture
in thrown shades.
My shadow tattooed to the sidewalk
iced or blown, a specific song for any
outlands, a specific object for best
intentions, like a chasing--
blazed down a path, a satellite
of pretensions, an art of mistakes
and the mistaken, rapt gaze caught
on the link joining the last hook to the break.
[Take it all down.] Restart the tape
till shuttering a slammed down solution gutters
down the page. This the new sound,
the future splintered, it's grappling a precise
measure tamped down to its tight lip.

Love,
Megan Burns & Gina Myers

Day 28: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

"there goes that monster" 

 -Lil Wayne

Beauty Selections

slumped outstare a moaning, this gristle torn 

put song under black wing, a typical cutting

look mama, a roaring

What I said was I hardly know you anymore

almost seated camera side, glanced

that myth: you ate it up & again

how do you let go of someone

who falls into you

urgent urgent this morning's whirr

case studies of girls who seize 

who pose the pretty laced set

take it this dollar bill

the boy has a name for everything

the knots, the loops

a just imagined below the surface

ruined decay of where we break apart

the way water crushes you as you go deeper

the way your own body turns against you

as you rise : a calling in separate tongues

Day 27: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

desire as the trade 

of what you move around in

beyond an eliciting of words

say you keep the loss of where you thought

a half of what you meant to say

I remember you from the first moment we met

it happens and then it happens again

some bodies beyond the touch of trespass

this recording captures the slip

stumbled forward to press this time a bit short

you always pull away and the scene clips

I didn't know the name of the game we played

stolen back along water where we watched till no sun

once we were and this life is tethered to regret

tried wishing that arc of your life crossed closer

not broken lighted across these doorways

the last time we walked away from the levee

there was no looking back

let it rise as it rises

let the black night stay closer to you

than I will ever muster

"gave up on love

fucking with those heartbeakers" 

 -N. Minaj

Day 26: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

"No air stirs, but the music steeps the center --

It is not the sea, but what floats over it." 

- Louis Zukofsky [A-2]

An Other Song

The boys are exiled and generous. The boys have fallen and there is no ignoble gesture too paltry to sweep the errors. The boy is a phantasm of where the parting began fresh as a daisy then dirtied clouds of aphorisms. This boy turns outward in a company constantly or all arts the wind blows. Like and unlike, this one is a manufacturer; he unwalled porticoes in a child's shoring scale of colors. Like everything in America, the boy holds centuries of barbarism in his skin. Then the boy is an executive asset, a simple and smooth machine that cannot doubt nor quite muster indifference. Feed and be fat for no reason at all, this boy keeps a lock down on language, this boy is unaware of the deftness of magpies. "He hath a legion of angels." But don't wonder what martyrs our own offices have futured in a yesterday ceremony: for the next ten thousand years, imagine this book a standard equal to mastery, equine to the flatlands. 

Day 25: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

Amends

it was all I could hear any longer

the concept of gesture

the concept of civility

this concept of generalizations: can I 

be a certain kind of celebrated?

came home to a dark but not long 

and never lonely this way of travel

to make an anomaly

you must begin anomalous

can't help wanting to be rescued

I was programmed that way

a distinction in belief if you believe the world

can hold you or it can't

you get all the tries to get it right

until trying is a face of failure

you can't complete

can I be a less than 

culpable story repeated till 

fumbling all day so beauty

shatters the points receding

Day 24: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

"I came from there and I promise you do not want to go there." -Lil Wayne



New Orleans


suicidal doors a walkabout in dissarray
some cities come higher or better leveled
this haphazard warrants deathing & decrees its last
surrender, ward to a warding off collected bits
of oracles so the winds blow right or neither
this lessened wishful thinking: rotations
record spins, a storm's caress in repetition
taught the game new syntax for color
models in constraints, for money
you spit tracked back over barricades
through borders, skeins of barnacled
ropes tied sternside for unraveling
boys in their smallest faces
taking their bodies out into the sun
did you ever doubt in your radical
dreaming that all that everything
was just within hand's grasp
and still so much would stay
irretrievably the same

Day 23: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

"the writer you are in relation to the deaths you have experienced..." -Lil Wayne


"a moment of terror/ happening every day she/ every day forgets." -Anne Carson



A Project


fielded children in the wayside, a gathering so they squared brick by brick
a city is a drumming, where you congregate, where you push back
& here, a culture slips streeted beats, it is irreverent, then too the martyrdom
of being skinned & of being gendered & of being bodied in a place
that crumbles, in the ruins where we built up from disaster
now the arc is towards white plains swept clean the erasing of doubt
how to monster what we feared what was invisibility is now too clear
occluded: can you build a big enough cage to hold the rage
one by one escaping is a poor tool for making
you break down the master demos for a moneying
forget the places that etched clay red dust into your soles
you carry around the bullet hole that got away
here dying in dozens and dozens & the ones that get
away, sent away, back & back to Angola
a city is where your life span is 18
a city is where old age for certain men
is a never arriving space

Day 22: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

Absolving Distance

once in a once again threaded to an ancient backslide in a gracing, i timbered wishful in small steps a stoning, a remembered where wondered how footprints mark a way out, an exit strategy well rehearsed, a number of poems you can't recall so there is no making up for where you falter, then you retrieve who you once were or in other days you place the lid back on tighter, i couldn't help but daughter, it was contritionless, never having confessed as i was absent on the day of atonement but went down into the confirmation of shapely sins & without reckoning, wanted a god smack the way you speak to yourself before you fall asleep, the way the day rolls on as if we are not pathward to extinction, a plateau of no worries, you slumber in a welling of gentler illusions

Day 21: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

Smoke

[frame 1]

between object and open window

morning            barely swiveled

pitcher       jewelry box    pearls    table       chair

woman     water      jug     still   point

bathed sunlight     she merges

resolves    trapped     wedged

map to jut

very neck        ghosts of 

unruffled         trans/mute          

[frame 2] 

still waters

centered     absence      orate       bottles     decor 

gas lights sidewalks      glitz    frenzy       barscape

trapeze sail        chandeliers    women spin    of love

glass thoughts 

Day 20: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

"it helps me to imagine I'm still alive" 

-Jean Rhys

"So the heart breaks 

Into small shadows" 

-J. Spicer

"doves exist, dreamers, and dolls

killers exist, and doves, and doves;

haze, dioxin, and days; days

exist, days and death; and poems

exist; poems, days, and death"

-I. Christensen

Dear Worldling Under Fire

where a new ocean is forming

imagine a continent

i tried to quit 

six seeds summer side 

walked dark version a splitting 

told mother about a break

line the copse in devil's tongue

temporal experiment

don't believe a girl who wanders

isn't asking to be cut 

there is consumption

there is every waking minute

you can't go deep enough

or write it out 

years enough to ever 

make it stop 

you gloss & mute

a gushing wipes the slate clean

wonder these waters 

how we witness their ending

Day 19: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

 Dialectics of Intertextuality

1) That you will be loved or you will not be loved.

2) That you will love someone and they will know it or you will love someone and they will not know it. 

3) That you will be loved by someone and know it or you will be loved by someone and not know it. 

4) That you will love someone and they will love you in return or that you will love someone and they in turn will love someone other than you.

5) That you will love someone and at that time they will love you or that you will love someone and at that time they will not love you. 

6) That you will be loved by someone and at that time you will not love them or that you will be loved by someone and at that time you will love them.

7) That you will be loved conditionally or you will be loved unconditionally.

8) That you will be loved indefinitely or that you will be loved for a definite amount of time. 

9) That you will love conditionally or that you will love unconditionally. 

10) That the love you receive will fill a gap in your self or that it will not.

11) That the love that you give will change another person or that it will not.

12) That the love created between any two people changes the world or that it does not.

13) That the love broken between two people changes the world or that it does not.

14) That you will love all that you are meant to or that you will not.

15) That love comes to the heart by way of the breath which is the line or that it does not.

16) That all love is an afterthought, a memory or that it is not.

17) That love in the world is declining or that it is not. 

18) That we are a successful species because we have learned to love or that we are not.

19) That all love is a performance or that it is not.

20) That love does not exist or that it does. 

Day 18: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

Found Poem 

•  Face Tattoos
  • “Fear of God” on his eyelids with a cross above the ‘of’ between his eyes
  • Saints which is the Fleur de Lis Symbol with “Orleans” above it
  • “Misunderstood” and 2 rows of stars with some of them being ultraviolet
  • “I Am Music” above his right eye
  • Cracks coming from his hairline at the top of his hairline and also on the sides of his chin as well as various other parts of his body
  • 3 tattoo tears, 2 under his right eye, 1 on the left side of his mouth, and 1 under his left eye which he covered up with a symbol because his mother said he had too many tattoo tears. He’s also admittedly said that he’s never killed anyone and that he got the tattoo tears simply because he wanted to see how it looked and once he saw it, he liked it.
  • “Tune” next to left ear which is short for Lil Tunechileoncious, a nickname his grandmother gave him as a child
  • A smileyface on the inside of bottom lip

• Lil Wayne Neck Tattoos
  • “Lucky Me” under his left ear
  • “Soo Woo” under his left ear for his bloods
  • A flower placed right below “Lucky Me”
  • “W” and the name “Weezy” on the right side of his neck which represents his nickname.
  • A gun on the right side of his neck that covered up “I Am Pimp”
  • “Blessed” in the middle of his throat, but it was later covered up with “You”
  • “YM” which is the Young Money logo on the left side of his neck

• Lil Wayne Hands Tattoos
  • “Steel” on the back of his left hand
  • “Concrete” on the back of his right hand
  • “Sqad Shit” on the backs of his fingers
  • “Hot” on one hand and “Boy” on the other hand which is a group that he was a member before going solo.
  • In each of his palms he has “A Gun” and “The World” so that he can always say he has them in his hands
  • “Trigger” on his finger

• Lil Wayne Back Tattoos
  • A filled in sillouette of a plastic army man
  • An outline of Louisiana
  • A Skull
  • Prayer/Bible passages
    • “Give me the patience that I need
      To keep my piece of mind,
      And with life’s cares,
      I hope, Dear God,Some happiness to find.
      Give me the courage to face life`s trials
      and not to from troubles run.
      let me keep this thought in mind.Thy Will,” not “Mine,” be done.”

• Lil Wayne Arms Tattoos
  • “Nae Nae” on each of his forearms which is his daughter, Reginae’s nickname
  • Right fore arm is his birthday and Birdman has same tattoo
  • The Rolls Royce symbol on his left bicep with “Thugged” running vertically next to it
  • A microphone on his left arm
  • Flames running up his arms
  • “Loyalty” & “I Be Power” on his right bicep
  • Numerous tattoo tears in a pattern similar to bandana across the both of his arms
  • An alien on his left arm
  • A marijuana leaf near the wrist of his left arm
  • “Lauren” on his right forearm to show his love for Lauren London that has a very long history that was later covered up with “Carter”
  • “Rabbit” on his right forearm in memory of his lost step-father, Reginald Carter
  • A star on his right forearm
  • The “ESPN” logo on the back of his left arm
  • Dice on his left shoulder
  • “Baby” and “Slim” on each of his shoulders
  • A matching tattoo of his birth date that Birdman also has in the same area on his arm

• Lil Wayne Chest & Stomach Tattoos
  • A skull on the upper right side of his chest
  • “Bang Bang” the top of his chest in memory of his lost step-father who was shot to death
  • “Life’s A Gamble” on the upper left side of his chest
  • “Cash Money” on his stomach which is his record label
  • “17″ on his abs which represents 17th ward of New Orleans
  • “MOB” which stands for Money Over Bitches
  • “Cause They Breed Envy” on a banner below “MOB”
  • “Damu” (Swaheli word meaning blood like) in red ink between the letters in “MOB” respresenting his Blood gang ties
  • “Piru” (first Blood set out of Los Angeles, CA) in red ink above a red skull that’s placed overtop “Cash Money” & “17″
  • “Apple & Eagle” representing the streets he grew up in New Olreans
  • “BM JR” standing for Birdman Junior
  • 5 Red Stars across the top of his chest
  • “RIP T.B.”
  • On each side of his ribs, he has stars just above wings

Day 17: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

I saw a butterfly
in hell
today

-L.W.





remember when there
was a time
when you believed
in something

sometimes it doesn't get better
and there is no bottom

there's just lists
of phrases
we tell each other
to pass the hours

Day 16: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

Still from the Love Me Video 

a bleeding

lost bitches 

assaulted not skinned

not faced

under moss drips

i will clean this 

bright at the core

light to light in the reddening

failure to clan

cubicled in evil

i will erase

sleeping in the war zone

so many pasts past

i echo this trespass

wipe the words about

till the smell of this staining

comes clear

Day 15: 30 Days of Weezy for National Poetry Month

dr. carter to the rescue

(collaboration b/w Megan Burns & Geoff Munsterman) 

no kids & no dinner to make — i take my lack of life

seriously patient dying but the truth is doctors

warp round the last religious ablations, satiate

the pain of failure with god complex & dexadrine

percentages toyed more than what sick get

because people die whether you is helping or is not

so winged trespass a wrought level to escape

just get paid & keep low the malpractice suits

blazed sorrows in cases shaped a seizing

keep grinning through burnt chest procedures

& just so you know i’m worried all the time

you will take your life before i do

that Sexton/Biggie mashup playing Ready & Waiting

under stubbornness rewound low brow humor

where we elbowed interrupted by moments

of connection it’s imperfect at best, just a figment

at worst, & conditional on my grateful yeses always

every mouthpiece locked gravel pitch bit the curb

where it would’ve been appropriate to hold you when

there is no other, my cock washed is a fraternal

refraining a gold dusting that splatters dashed

 wishful thinking b) habit or c) fucking pointless

because i’m a cab driver, doorman, doormat fat boy

a coffee-brewing, dogshit collecting, poem-revising

solicitor of no futurists chasing covenants so any

punching bag craves a body bag: he counts driving

all the bridges from where i keep my books to where

she before disappearing the obscure wrestles herself

in gym clothes nosing the door the be let back inside

having read them never matters. it doesn’t now. riddled

in a knotted pull over i force interest these days

because it pays to discover there is nothing left to

hunger dark nouns in a creasing dirt & river, the sex

was good but you learn to turn that brain wave off

unconditional     a lie     of course it is but what comes

from saying it aloud & be not dead tonight be better

than okay even if dying parallel to the crated cement

i found & taken i’d know it’s out there but where there

are four bridges from bedroom to the bar & cops

park sullenly at the feet of three of them. when

you are roped:  coal-colored city of domestic ache

i’m the doctor & you’re the patient don’t expect

to get better—no other, i make no bed in no, i tell

what is dark to the light, a blaming ends doubled

you my throat music. i reply knife. Time kinder,

rewind the tape & let the music move closer.