Author: Eden Bloom

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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

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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

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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

 

 

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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