on Untitled Toast

notes on Eric Berryman’s latest offering to the canon

It is the guilty pleasure made visible,
A wink from father to son,
A son without a father in the dark
Of a bar where the language
Makes his kindergarten blush
And chest hairs pop.
It sounds like dick, big dick, giant
Questions like where do I
Stack up against the competition,
Will my genes propagate
In a Dawkins kind of way and
How far are we really from an
Animal state and an unending
Fascination with effluvium
And its color

It’s the laugh I suppress because I’m
A man, a black man
In a room full of white people
I desperately want to love me

It’s wishing I could play the drums like that —
Holy fuck if I could play
A beat like that and not worry
About breaking shit

What is it like not to worry
Or worry so much that the worry don’t matter
Make a shrine to my fuckits
And hand em out, I got so many
They had to record em

And now i worry I’ll be witnessed
Nappy head bouncing to the rhythm of
People who knew what they were talking about
You’re pushing the buttons
My buttons. I know these spells
I’ve still got my head in the sand
And all four feet on my back

How dare they
Keep this from me
Call me Black and lack the language
And I tell my friends about it,
Berryman’s thing,
And they say, oh, yeah, of course
I knew Signifying Monkey
And I’m like, well,
I never heard it and moms must’ve
Done a good job at punkifying me
Cuz how would I have learned this
Other than these bros in the know
Of how things go
Or went

So I’m glad I saw it
Heard it
And it had that effect of
Disturbance
In the shape of river falls
Dancing over rocks
And the words know the
Only way through
That means survival,
Departure,
Arrival?

Special thanks to The Wooster Group and The Performing Garage

Shoutout to Eric Berryman