“Land of a Thousand Rappers: Protagonist” by Michael Kaufmann

I gestate, I mutate, I birth myself anew, take up the talk and the dribble and armor. With gilded riddle sling shot dialect and droll scattershot chicken feed vernacular, I boast therefore I am. The voice in the ink, the song in the spheres. If the battle is to be won, we must take up the sound that binds ALL and artificially amplify. The resounding echo, eternal sustain of the Maker, the Speaker, the woofer and tweeter. We must speak and create and rip the silencing curtains that Buck$ sets like nets and boobytraps with blasting high, mids, lows. We must boom box and ghetto blast. I enter this graphic novelization.

With shotgun shell selling my seashore to Sally and company, I am octapine below the belt. Mandolin hoisted, unfurled locks and keys of pianos in a bag over my shoulder, I sprinkle minor chords over crops and fishing holes sprout troops and killer whales. I am an army of more than one, a ton, girded and weighed heavy, ranked, tanked, flanked tasseled, low-rided, glittered and glutzed. I slink in, three feet slouched and groovy. I transgress, progress, convex, retextyoureyes, retextualize. Why the hyperbolic self-dressing, the fictitious redressing? It is the rhythms of the hiphop verbiage, the spam eschatology, the river tongue, the early bird that catches the worm, destroys it in his beak jaws, regurgitates life and death to its offspring. Proud? Most certainly, otherwise the clock tap dancing drowns out the policed ego, and ego evaporates, leaving madness to fill the skull.

So onward, me, the crustacean superhero, boots and chest plate are the shed skins of Alaskan King Crabs, spiny lobsters, prickly, red/pink/white, a little blue. I must incarnate for this unhinged battleground. I speak myself to 9feet 3inches scaled and tipping in at 672. Oversized, super-sized, biggie fries, hush puppy, enough about the dawgs, I will tell you about the goldfish. I have them hanging ‘round my neck. Fourteen carat looking squigglers, individually bowled, with multicolored rocks. I am at times a double-sided tentaculated pentapus (that’s a Siamese ten total armed sea jiggler). We have become content with cliche, redundancy, self-swallowing cultural reiterations. We use them like bludgeoning devices.

I am a wunderkammer of phonic exercises, deserving the lack of classification, uncatalogable, yet still providing a well disentangled alphabet, tornado breath and snapping turtle action. I offer the dissemination/decimation of the traditional melodic/harmonic/rhythmic triad blurring the incidental, composed, and/or implied. Massage sounds, retune ATMs to F sharp and kick blog-egos to the curbs in a hush of dial-up static. Paypal begging legless on the medians of the information toll road, white-collar prison chain-gangs pick up the litter of misinformation, abandoned urls. I spin a dialectic game of either/or tag fading out evident back-patting paradox and syncs, flesh joining flesh, something or something again. Herding thick gilled turkeys.

Frangipani poach cumin ronnie megalomaniac risk diffeomorphism bilge abbe cud desmond commodity effort restraint dichondra devil geographer default desmond enunciable agree beatrice conciliatory  acquittal goldstein princess granville molly estimable imperishable quinn anther kaolinite Stanislavski Richard Gregg royal rumble Ahmed Shah Voticists Ketevan the Martyr Ben Chapman Cassevetes Fazal Mahmood Richard Nicolls salad bar sir issac Newton daniel Johnston suddenly susan Jan z Kolna AFPFL Pol Pot vacuum tube integrated circuit Lollapalooza Ernest Rutherford Hyperkinesis the new Chekov play King George V tattoo Timur-i Lang recapitulation theory maternal impression Peter Higgs vacuum expectation value punch card Rodinia cyano-bacteria Giovanni Arduino Chou Shu-jen unitatheres inertial mass Marie Curie bridesmaid gargle vamp berkelium godfrey blunder tarpaulin defunct  differentiate autoclave crowbait chromic crafty conrad cobb cantor wrathful bowstring gravy keep centerpiece znkadh sans babe coadjutor allocable artichoke jytomu copra Activate your code

Pulsing killer graffix through my bloodstream, I glow in black-lit environs, flash animation on my forehead. I expect a little maturity and tote a horn section. No-wave supplemented, casio-clunk infestation. One-man gamelan, gopher bones seed pods rattle and rustle, kneeguards of folded license plates keystone and the garden states. Stacking plastics and corpse, doling out monetary combustion and diffusing world economies into homilies, sounds like an end! But it is a multiplicity of jumpstarted beginnings.

I am quizzical, pass physicals, spit fiery 16bit digitals. Prehistoric haircut beats, Paleozoic clipped snare samples, trampled bass line, sined off waves. Spilling verse thoreauing pond lilies to in on you the loge rappers walledin unaware floored and low-ceilinged. Baroque all your harmonies into polygonal sonnet trills. Dropping one to one scales, my maps spread wide and equivalent. I write my raps on graph paper delivering the world’s most dangerous paper cuts, vacations and vaccinations. You will need Dewey to decipher this dressing you all in decimals. You are ancient history because I will kick you to 930. Don’t give me your loose lip 8-0-2 review, your 303 lays beats, mine lays social processes. Or should I say prosi. Silicon(e) tuxedo thieves ride the neon jalopy into countless loss and dross. Here I am with no sword but a fluorescent light tube. I spent my money on my spine stunt-crooked now Fabreje’d inscribed in helvetica bold 12 point font, sayings of St. Thomas Aquinas and Emmanuel Kant.

Discount high-tops float in a sea of dead air. Pull them down and lace up. Head kicking resumes as the air guitars are smashed, ending power ballads for another 12,000 years. Style battles and addled rattling tongue jive, mere soaked floats and oversized coats with pockets for watches, time for every zone: Adriatic, Pan-Latin, Mesopotomac. I have evaporated into enigmatic non-rapper, or rather, all-rapper… The new old dirty, the dirty old new. An ancient mariner with seabird headdress and primordial blood coursing through titanium banded veins. The Then, the Now, the Not-Yet Time Wrangler, Déjà vu Loop Eliminator, your trusted Protagonist, the Future Rapper.

[author_info]Michael Kaufmann and his family happily reside in Middle America. He studied art theory and creative writing at Bucknell University, and has lectured on the subject of experimental music and art at Bucknell, Butler University, University of Redlands, Calvin College, and the University of California San Diego. He finished his graduate work at San Jose State University. Other selections from his work-in-progress, Zero Seed, are forthcoming from New Dead Families.[/author_info]