Responds to John Murray’s
‘Untitled’

Untitled,
early 1980s
John B. Murray
Marker and paint on paper

he made songs from trapped air and pain. wet blanket boy
skips on the sadness, skips above it. until the pain is an inherited thing.
he expressed it. cried it. sung about dancing with his father, like Luther Vandross sung it
sung it in longing nostalgic a space safe to ponder salking backwards in time is encrusted in broken dreams cut your feet.
i will ask him in his hospital bed in Puerto Rico to say things into a recorder things that as a child i needed to hear
sometimes the people you come from will tell you lies about yourself cause a shit they see and feel when they look in the mirror. lies our ancestors was told and betrothed
i remember losing track of my body when I was 12 my dad laughed at me when I danced in my own way, felt the rhythm in me that was beyond him and belonging to my own divine. his body always afraid of things leaving his control
my dad was a dancer as a young man danced on subways, beating a bongo drum
doing Cruzan dances busking a runaway boy. an island kid in NYC away from home and afraid of home sleeping on train cars
twenty, fresh out the navy West Side Story desires linger
a visceral dreaming of dancing and leaping on broadway a leading man a dreamboat, Poitier, Belafonte
daddy dreamed of dancing and I didn’t even know he could dance, until I was grown
his first baby mama, told me once when I was visiting her in Harlem that when she met him, he was a red island boy visiting from the navy she loved him when she saw how he danced and left him after a daughter and his crazy busted her ear drums
these days i am obsessed with affirmations of sweet positive love i get on YouTube and find a 7 hour video of loving and waterfalling words on repeat. i want these words to splash and dance in my skull my chest my solar plexus
i know i can dance i got rhythm i know how to surrender to the beat, i know how to do bends and extensions
i am a body that takes up space.
how would I spirit write you?
i would just spirit right you. let loose the ghosts and hauntings and fling the insides out. daddy. the legacy of your beauty is outstanding.