You can get up and do anything you want to. That is the situation. In this country and at this time. But you find yourself between what they want you to do and what they don't want you to do. You end up chancing, seeing what happens—the things they don't want you to do that you get away with, and doing the things they want you to in order to build up good will. A kind of point system.
Only sometimes what you get away with, you really didn't. And those points you added up weren't really there. They might not have been there because they got taken away when you did what it was you thought you got away with. Only it turns out you didn't. Or, you didn't get away with it because when you did what it was they wanted you to do you were only doing it to get those points. You weren't doing it in the spirit they wanted you to do it in.
They. Them. How you can't explain who they are, but you know that they are. And whoever it is you're talking to knows who they are, but can't say it either.
Always there, like they're watching you. But they don't have to, don't even have to. As though they constitute the structure of what's there, erasing what used to be there.
What used to be there.
This is how you drive down the street. Watching for heat. Watching for white anywhere, like a flag. White, better watch out, get out the way. White, time to remember that incident. White, watch your family and friends tense their necks. White, here comes the talk, the jive. White, somebody acting everything in the world like they're not, and they aint never been a person in the world not-white could act like that.
And here's the question. Some talk about them, and some talk about white. And some make it the same thing. Then, some say they is bigger than white, they is outside white.
This is where you are, driving down the street with the boom on, with the neck-move, the hand-move.
And you already know all our worst cliches are true, don't nobody have to tell you that. And you know that's true for white too. The space between what's said and what is.
Where you are.
