Reflections from the Fire

#calltocreate2019

process notes

I’ve been embarking on this creative journey for a little over a year. It’s been thrilling, frightening, awesome, expensive, frustrating and intense. And here I am. Back in school when I swore on everything I loved that I would never return. School is for suckers. Ain’t nobody tryna be homeboy from the Late Registration album interludes with mad degrees. Or in debt. Yet. Here I am. I am investing in the purest part of myself and all sorts of beautiful and terrible things are coming to the surface. So, I remain on the yellow brick road of this trajectory. 

I am back in school, I am a JCAL/Jerome Arts Foundation Fellow, and in the Mother Mercy 2019 cohort. It’s almost been a year since I’ve been back from Spain. I’d made it an aim to post at least a poem a day and have been vigilant about keeping that promise to myself. I made a vow that my art would be on walls in a year – and it has been. So why not? Why not just take all them bars you been ignoring and write them down and record them? It’s not like you don’t know how to rhyme. You’ve been told that you’re a great lyricist. You’ve been known to melt a mic or two. And that’s what has me where I am – back in the classroom and in the booth.

I am looking forward to moving forward in all aspects of my creativity. Mother Mercy demands that we as participants identify what is not working. What was not working for me was putting my inability to produce work all on the notion that the end result had to be perfect. The quest for perfection is an incubus for procrastination and I strive daily to conquer that. Forcing output on myself has been my answer thus far. What has particularly ignited my effort to promulgate the true reason behind all the work I endeavor to produce is the reason. 

Why am I making art? It is my contribution to the revolution. It is how I participate in movement towards informing my community and helping my folk to heal from past and present incursion. The sounds I am working on will address all of this. It will be fire hence the name dracarys. I am ignited. There will be flame. I am working on this frequency and am excited for the completion of this project. 

#dracarys