Saul Williams - Said the Shotgun to the Head

, said the shotgun to the head.

Also by Saul Williams

She

The Seventh Octave

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Page vi: Paul Robeson, from Paul Robeson Speaks, Kensington Publishing Corporation. First published by Citadel Press/Carol Publishing/Carol Communications, Copyright 1978 Bruner Mazel, Inc. The Night/1, from The Book of Embraces by Eduardo Galeano, translated by Cedric Belfrage with Mark Schafer. Copyright 1989 by Eduardo Galeano. English translation copyright 1991 by Cedric Belfrage. Used by permission of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Page 3: All Those Ships That Never Sailed, from a poem by Bob Kaufman in The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978, copyright 1958, New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Copyright 2003 by Saul Williams

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All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

ISBN-13: 978-0-7434-7079-7

ISBN-10: 0-7434-7079-6

eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-8456-1

First MTV Books/Pocket Books trade paperback edition September 2003

10 9

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To my mother

The man who accepts Western values absolutely, finds his creative faculties becoming so warped and stunted that he is almost completely dependent on external satisfactions, and the moment he becomes frustrated in his search for these, he begins to develop neurotic symptoms, to feel that life is not worth living, and, in chronic cases, to take his own life.

PAUL ROBESON

I cant sleep. There is a woman stuck between my eyelids. I would tell her to get out if I could. But there is a woman stuck in my throat.

EDUARDO GALEANO

Have you ever been kissed by God? Passionately (tongue, lips, etc.)? Or are you one who simply condemns God to the realm of the invisible? When do you feel most comfortable? When do you feel most loved? Perhaps it is in the warm embrace of your lover or in the assuring touch of your mother. Perhaps, like me, you have likened this person to God in your life and realized that God was loving you through them. Or maybe you dont believe in God. Cool. Heres a simpler question: Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss? I mean pure psychedelic inebriation. Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you. Licking the sides and corners of your mouth, like sealing a thousand fleshy envelopes filled with the essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over againthe first kiss of the rest of your life. A kiss that confirms that the universe is aligned, that the worlds greatest resource is love, and maybe even that God is a woman. With or without a belief in God, all kisses are metaphors decipherable by allocations of time, circumstance, and understanding.

This book is the result of a kiss. A kiss that brings symbols to life and fear-based shortcomings to their symbolic death. To be kissed by a deity is nothing short of a miracle. The mind altering/altaring effects can last more than a lifetime. Here is the account of a man so ravished by a kiss that it distorts his highest and lowest frequencies of understanding into an incongruent mean of babble and brilliance. He wanders the streets disheveled and tormented by all that he sees that does not reflect her love. He is a wandering man, sort of like a modern day John the Baptist, telling of the coming of a female messiah that he has known intimately. He is the babbling man you cross the street to avoid. He is the unavoidable end before the new beginning. He is a lover in search of greater love. SHE is One and many: Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction and creation; Oya, the Yoruba orisha of death and rebirth; the Holy Ghost, which is to say, the woman restored to her rightful place in the Holy Trinity. No longer ghost, no longer virgin, SHE is mother of us all.

saul williams,
Los Angeles, 2003

CITIZENS, children of the night, bearers of the day torch: scorched and burned. BURN NOT. the dam is broken. the curse is fled. once muddied and still, the river runs RED!

ALL those ships that never sailed the ones with their seacocks open that were scuttled in their stalls TODAY i bring them back HUGE AND INTRANSITORY and let them sail FOREVER!*

if ever there were currents uncurrent

the wind could not serve as truths currency

as is ALWAYS THE FIRST SIGN of a NEW AGE

i had begun to believe my blackened toenails were on path to decay when, in truth, they had begun the gradual process of CRYSTALLIZATION. i am he who walks on wind scorned feet with toenails of AMETHYST AND ROSE QUARTZ.

my path now crystal clear.

i AM COME TO TELL YOU SHE IS HERE.

it is not written NO pen MAN ship was ever CARGOED with her character

NOTE:
BOOKS ARE CAREFULLY FOLDED FORESTS void of autumn BOUND FROM THE SUN

Likewise, she made her residence ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF A SHADOWING HISTORY ON THE DARKSIDE OF THE MOON where the searchlight of the sun COULD NOT SPOT HER nor rot her the seed of forbidden fruit every tree HAS A HIDDEN ROOT

YET, SHE HAS COME TO LIGHT

THE SWELLING PATCHWORK OF VIBRANT DREAMS

YES, THERE IS A SCIENCE TO THE AROMA OF SLEEPING WOMEN

(AND TO THINK OF THE GIRLFRIEND i WAS TEMPTED TO BREAK UP WITH BECAUSE SHE SLEPT TOO MUCH)

i now know, they NURTURED her there: they slept in packs dreamt in cycles NURSED HER IN SHIFTS and became her ON ROTATION

unnamed her

everytime she was named so she would not be known to anyone