Author: Eden Bloom

Posted on

Time Machine

I built a time machine so I could go back and say I’m sorry.  It took years, timing and patience, emergent yet formulaic.

But then I got trapped in a notion, the desire to remove the offense at onset, at the root; of wanting to make it completely go away.  Take it back to love, fix it, and stay.

I wish I could light up your face the way I did back in the day.  The way today you sometimes still light up mine, trying to rebuild and improve rapport, trust, between you and I. Faking, unspoken begging, worshiping, praying that you’ll fall back in time and when you return in kind.

I want to use the machine to go back to the days before. Before you knew I was as lost as you and that all the stories were true. That the solution was an illusion, my hands were tied too.

When it was primal, we were on, it was new.  Before you knew, splayed out wide before the rose-fingered gates that I, we, me, they had lied to you.

As anticipated, I pause, have paused and will pause.  I know to take time back would lead me down the same old path.  The one I’ve defaulted to time and time again, Mephisto and Faust, no ease, all attack.

Circumradiant stop. Light everywhere, enough to see the parade of time charade couldn’t hold. The spell couldn’t take/long/break down/fall apart.

The bright light of knowing the only truth I’ve known has been based on my life since the fall.  Since falling from or to grace, since being driven out of the garden, since being kin-ripped from all.

The life we’ve had while I’ve been trying to make it up to you is the only thing close to life I’ve ever had.  The repair has surpassed the breach. This peace demanded my fall, a sacrifice. 

Catch 23.  By hook and by crook the eldest jesters sing.  Do it any way, means necessary. But be of mind, to wipe away evil also wipes away the valor that would rise to meet it.

We cannot return to the care free days and gaze without distorting the very essence that makes us long for them.  I am sorry is all that remains.

It can’t change.  The blemish and the blame, the vision and the voice.  These are spirits material since matrimony.  Huzzah and Ashe.

Even though I am foolish, I am not foolish enough to try to ‘time machine’ them away.  And so the machine goes unused.

It is in the backyard, overgrown, lights hung once gone, on its way to forgotten science.  These notes and this schematic are the only keys made, for just in case days, just like these.

Out of, and all in, time.

© EschatonLife

This piece is included in Eden Bloom  Eschaton Life

Posted on

Eden Bloom – The Death of Bloom (Remastered)

The Death of Bloom in its fully remastered state is now up on my Bandcamp page. Heads up: May 7th, 2021 will be another Bandcamp Friday where they are waiving their revenue sharing. Thanks for looking!

Posted on

Thee Dream, Thee Record, Thee Moon

Had thee dream last night. The one about making thee record. The one that I used to have all the time. The full moon dream sessions, lost hot wax traveling through time space, her face. The desire to see and be seen.

Reoccurring drama, doubled up pain. I should have never asked her to sing, but there was always this crossover between wanting to make the music, getting laid and love. The Black hit of space, sucking everything.

This time I got closer to seeing the cover art than ever before, digging through the archives in the back room of a once and future record store. I should have just hired back up singers who could sing and wouldn’t care. Thrusting hips, tits, lips…

Powerful apocalyptic soul singers, end time rag huffing blues. Astounding. Another dimension, reached through tintinnabulations; voyeuristic intentions. 12 inches pressed clear against my face, shrink wrapped, warped.

I did it again. Last night, full moon April 2021, I almost made it out alive and almost got in and out of the studio on time.

© EschatonLife

Posted on

Ode to the Bassheads

One of my favorite things about living in the city are the sounds; the rhythms.  The way in which patterns weave together only to fall apart again.  The bassheads booming, rolling up and down the street, while we’re porch sitting with the kids on a Saturday night. 

Summer.  The crackled call and response between the backseat bass and blown out backyard stereos blaring over the leaf blowers. The un/holy gospel arising from the cacophony.  Whenever my ears reach out to a rumbling on the horizon my heart leaps, smiles, smirks, eyes close, listening deeply.  Taking it all in. ‘Life in all its rich complexity’ or something the old man on the mountain would say.

With respect, Black culture born, hip-hop, replicated and amplified.  Copied in the suburbs sure, you know it can happen anywhere.  Bassheads, rightly so, come in all shapes, sizes, skin tones. But for me, nowhere is it more meaningful, more beautiful than when the knobs are broke off past ’11’ by young Black hands. So mote it be. 

I see buffalo stance, not fashion, not trend, but soul survival. Powerless manifesting power, Paulo Freire, punk rock, raw industrial, metal horse noise.  The rumbling remembrance of chains breaking, rolling, bouncing, bumping criss-cross all along the fields of hearing.  Hope in every beat, beats blurring, the more crackled the better.

May the bassheads protect us, the drag racers defend us from those who would twist, fold, manipulate and further homogenize this fucked up urban paradise. Anything that strikes fear into those who would resurrect Black Bottom after burying it twice.  Point bass at the Becky’s and their banks that prey upon basement fire, post-bankruptcy blight. That’s racist! Which part? You’re right.  

Brigades of masked motorcycles, jacked up rides with rims rollin’ roundabout, weaving in and out across lanes, oh my!  Love it like I love seeing black bow ties with sweet potato pies and The Final Call at the crossroads because it points at something we can’t know.  This rumblin’, micro-rioting, a movable feast of ‘these are OUR streets’.  A mental blockade on displacement, a grassroots game on gentrification.  Black men with bass wildin’ to some white eyes.  We’ve killed for less.  

So yes – ‘Alhamdulillah, Allah, Jehovah, Yahweh, Dios, Ma’at, Jah Rastafari’ – Baduism, anything, protect them from us, from those who look like me. 

Pirates sailing, bass cannons blaring, flags flying, fists flailing, heads noddin’ against genocidal systems calling for proactive policing on the Black ‘terror’ in Black  territory, Black bodies, Black streets, that we occupy.  As if million dollar bike lanes, bulldozers, bought-out block clubs, services cut to bones, water shutoffs, mass evictions and militarized malicious mostly white militias were not a thang. The Thing.

Let the bass drop, crossbones style.  Let those of us who would lose some sleep.  Let freedom ring and rang.  Let the youth flex, get the full context of where you live.  Let our ears bring our eyes to see the codes through the rumbles and the bumps coming from the street.  Who is being shook?  Trace the vibrations to their root and you’ll get to where the violence and the terror really lay and lie.  Who are the most dangerous people to many on these streets? You and I.

Re-cognition, Respect
William S. Burroughs, Hassan I Sabbah, Spinal Tap, Erykah Badu, Cat Power, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

© EschatonLife

This piece is included in Eden Bloom  Eschaton Life

Posted on

Babbling Belief

The things I believe in, that I worship, no longer have names I’m able to pronounce.

They are rumblings, babblings and bubblings, barbarous to my domesticated ear.

I could probably learn them, track their motions, map their meanings, but out of respect I don’t and won’t.

I’ll not cage them with my desire to understand but let them remain wild.

I will do the devotions, fan fires, throw bones, dance patterns, and mumble the gibberish they press upon me in dreams.

I will love and fear them when they come, miss them when they’re gone, and let them be.

© EDEN BLOOM 2024

This piece is included in Eden Bloom  Eschaton Life

Posted on

Writing the Anathema

Someday, maybe I’ll have the time to write a book about the fact that wasn’t necessarily those in power that prevented more meaningful transformation in this city, but so-called allies, the do-gooders, the good guys. The ones who say they’re all about justice. The ones who appear to be and say they’re on community’s side.

The ones who can cling to Black Lives Matter, but are repulsed by Majority Black Detroit Mattering. The ones who denounce ‘identity politics’ and don’t get centering blackness in a threatened majority Black city as a means for every one of us, my kids and your kids, to benefit, to live, to dream.

The folk that wouldn’t allow people they didn’t or couldn’t control to get a crumb, or even get a bandage to those in need. Those who want to pick and choose who gets free based on ideology. Those protected by the very structures we’re kicking against, conspiring in remodeled suburban basements and behind gated community safety nets. Those who can’t support progress because it will stifle their revolutionary pipe dreams. Those who whisper the same racist rhetoric that the right screams.

I’ve got the notes, the dates and acts going back 10+ years now. From the first time I was told to ‘stay in my lane’ by the white men trying to run the show to the most recent efforts to disparage me as misguided and misinformed. All the times they tried to get me to turn on my commitments to Black leadership and the times I was told I was too negative, too harsh. I’ve got a timeline of all the campaigns they’ve tried to undermine, the coalitions they f’ed with, Black women leadership challenged, almost every time.

Don’t get me wrong, rightly so, I’m just a small cog, and we’ll still organize, fight and we’ll still win, but someday, maybe I’ll have the time to write a book. It would be a book about how it wasn’t necessarily those in power that prevented more meaningful transformation in this city but so-called allies, some so-called friends.

© EDEN BLOOM 2024

Posted on

The 33rd degree

28 sunrises since the last 23rd,
5 to go till the first spring moon.

The movement of the moniker is the easiest of the motions made this month.

A cycle of clarity, allowing the chaos to encircle without calling corners, to clean out cobwebs, reconnect synapses.

Pain allowed to be perceived. Thoughts unwanted, thawed. Sights blindered seen.

Sober, stone-cold, starring sunward to survive, surrounded by sharks.

Weed wafting everywhere. Wounded soul soldiers. Shops, sky signs, songs circumambulating my senses.

Anger, regurgitating repressed patterns, possession repossessed. I’ve been excommunicated twice already, third time’s a charm.

Fingering perishing flesh, aware for the first time in years, far from perfect, enmeshed in filigreed failure, in love with death, for ah pook’s sake.

This is me in the garden wailing at old gods, gnashing, grinding gears, giving up the game, gone.

Good morning, good night, good bye to the 33rd degree.

The real work begins in 5 sunrises, the first spring moon, 33 nights passed since the last 23rd.

© EDEN BLOOM 2023

Posted on

Looking Back and Forth

I went looking for the others, those like me.  But they turned out to be too much so for my liking.  I could stand them only slightly more than I could stand myself.

Our very existence is an expression of cowardice, of weakness.  The denial of Darwin, the rejection of reason; faith unfounded.

Blindly accepted, indoctrination unseen, unquestioned, unopposed, mother to child, diseased and dismissed, unfixable, broken.

Landfill material sold as green pastures. Forgiven or forgotten, formaldehyde in the formula, fluoride in the fountains, flaws in the fabric; feedback blotting the fibonacci.

Replicated, I fell into it…

I remember he would say; pray for me, but don’t pray for me to change.  If you pray for my conversion you are cracking your creed, laying layers on your own conceived damnation, and insulting me and mine.  

That what I worship and work with lost language long ago.  The closest thing I’ve got to gods are my gods.  You can’t recognize them as I do, see what I see and still see yours in the same light.  

That is not due to their or my superiority, it is due to their very nature and the angle of the light.  Just as any meaningful recognition of your God on my part would sully the waters with mine.  Leave me and them be.

My ways are wild.  My universe muddy but I’ve been overly mild in my approach so as to not make too much of a mess of the space we share.  

Truth be told, he’s a coward, like me.  He would correct me and claim survival. That it is more important to stay alive, strategic and chill, than crash and burn.

He knew from the very moment that ‘he’ began.  All claims of unawareness are a sham. Even the he himself was to hide multiplicity. Identity and personality were created based on negating their very existence.  He knew how and why he was here.  He knew what was going to happen.  He knew from the visions, even in the womb.  The hows, however, were a mystery.  Going forward and back there was self-imposed blindness; some repairable, some wiped at the source.  Offline moments, blackout, gnosis. Intentional all; self-imposed butchery.

If anyone got to know him well enough he would have a tell, but few did.  Most of those who did ran away.  I remember the days when he would writhe, shift, change, and howl through the night.  A real horror show and I remember those strange witches that tried to hold him.  The two that tried to trap him and the three that set him free.

There is a church upriver of Kebek the Europeans built using their devil as a steed. One of the high witches took me there to bind me, to see the devil’s rocks in the church walls.  To walk the path of the hooves that dragged stone from ships on the so-called St. Lawrence. Rather than tame, the church, the path, the road, the river, served to set me free.  The spirit storms on the shores of Kaniatarowanenneh that night revealed a pattern and passed a key.  He thought they’d die, but they escaped through crevasses, the river, and into the sea.

© EschatonLife

This piece is included in Eden Bloom  Eschaton Life

 

 

Posted on

Misanthropy Embarrassed

When it comes down to it, though I am hyper critical of our current state, ultimately I have some level of faith and hope in humanity.  My misanthropy is embarrassed. It’s the greatest curse I’ve been given, serious pandora shit. It was there before the kids, visions of a kinder gentler me, massage, yoga, health food, but the kids sealed it.  It’s bad form to seed where you know they mow without a strategy to fuck up the machinery.

Out beyond these dogmas,
right left ideologies,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

A large part of this work, this parenting/radical urban planning that I’m attempting to influence, is rooted in a mandate to live a mutually beneficial life without recourse to dogma, religion, or ideology.  This stems not from ego or moral superiority, but rather the realization that, due to my choices and the current state of Detroit, my future, and my children’s future, though admittedly privileged, are interwoven with Blackness and poverty.

In the tall grass, overcome,
the world wide within,
one and all, no kingdoms to control.

It doesn’t have to be that way?  Due to my work I’m extremely aware of how passive/non-critical racial spacial integration and economic status without self-awareness can put one in service to corporate domination and white supremacy.  Aspects of this service are mandatory with a pulse in this place, but there’s room for some ethical/moral play.  It doesn’t have to be this way, but if it were not it would be the other, and I’ll no longer lend my silence in service to that.

Paradise rekindled,
struck between eye for eye
and you and me.

I’ve sold my soul a few times and still rest my head as required in beds made.  Recently, I’ve tried to set a better example and keep those in my care off the ledger all together.  For me, this is what an active approach to transition looks like; a somewhat calculated attempted decent from hyper/disaster capitalism. There is a method to my madness; cull faith, court hope, and seek solidarity beyond ideology. Abolitionist intent to what end?

Supremacy propped toppled
by blades of grass, trees, water, air
once again proud animals, beings, we.

© EDEN BLOOM 2023

This piece is included in Eden Bloom Eschaton Life