No news today - Guest Post - Ras Mashramani

we can watch but it's not ours.

it is such a live stream, it is like you can almost feel. you can almost touch every brown [but not too brown!] body and smell his arms linked his stranger his nothing left to lose but anger and his national heritage. you can click refresh. heritage is losing, dear god they got the mummies and you can think i am really a part of something like history. you can think especially if i leave an embittered comment. you can be like no solution is easy be sensible cynical humanistic. now they know i'm on their side and i agree that they are people and complex in a complex world.

wonderful angry something we gave up for softcore youth.

angry something you are almost jealous. our streets are for walking and our texts are for guarded jealous irony. you say because there's nothing left to throw rocks at and they don't count because i recognize the ecology i've read about got an A in it but i don't see it cause i stay on my side but tell my married friends i don't. you say i have [oppressed ethnicity most likely Native American] in me. you say listen. i know all the names of the Philly bums west of the river. and not just their descriptive epithets. wheelchair bridge bum his fucking name is Ezra.

YOU WOULD NOT TAKE TO THE STREETS FOR ANYTHING BUT BASEBALL.

because there is no news, there is only pixel and light. there is a fiction on a foundation of narrative—which you rejected, i’ll admit—but you can’t make a life story out of a character from that movie Almost Famous. you can’t live fiending for the blue and glowing rage and clicking pause to heat up your shwarma iron out your peace scarf so you can party up in Fishtown. you can’t simultaneously attempt to embody the whatever and the scream of punk and feminism without BEING THE WHATEVER AND THE SCREAM. you cannot blame this on the patriot act. you cannot giggle fuck the police but talk about wu-tang like no actually there is good rap music just. listen.

[you can’t even superimpose the neighborhood west of 50th st. you shudder. if shoulder to shoulder were a choice you'd choose your parents' spare room and abandon every part of them [of me!] we gentrified]

you have to feel your cheek to the concrete. no, you have to get up spitting because we are young and that’s what kids do.

if only we could abandon our degrees and feeds.

working within, integrating, consuming, forgetting that what i am needs bricks to defend.

glued to the fucking screen

yes, yes i fit in here too.

Ras Mashramani lives in Philadelphia and blogs at motherwap.blogspot.com.