RESPECT | Django Novo | IRIE™ Magazine

Django Novo

Man on the Run

Slowly, slowly we turn our heads to the peeling tarnished mirror of where we live, and see, what, stranger man… is there a stranger man? Can there possibly be a stranger man, or are we condemned to kill them all, one by one, until there are no more mouths to feed than bites of bread to feed them… and high over the avenues, the privy-ledged ones order up their Chinese, order up their grocery delivery boys, ride their mobile fortress limo jeep hummer combat vehicles to the local entertainment emporia searching for cheap gas, metaphorical nipples to suck on, and intravenous doses of that post apocalyptico reggae beat, stranger than strange…

Every winter when it gets cold, I hide down in the basement of my suburbia, with a little loom in front of me, weaving woolen shawls. Slowly the before-ancient rhythm of a spell descends on me in the dimness, click-clack with the rhythm of the reed beating the thread of the weft into place, the color spelling itself out along the alternating threads, the needle waiting to finish off the hem…

I am suspended by my fingers over twenty-five thousand years of instinct, trying to keep myself warm in the damp cellar of life, while the ticking, clicking waves of hot, tropical revolution pump into my mind like a hot stew of chicken, onions, peppers, and sweat…

And when Django felt that reggae snake wound around his throat, his voice went all flamenco, like the men sitting off to the side there, wringing their sinewy hands, clapping low, clapping high, wavering into scattered melismas like the muezzin on the mosque…

You can hear the anxiety trying to creep out through the crack under the wall of the door of old Django’s voice, the plea to share, the weariness, the zero holding the space where something called love used to linger…