m. sayyid:
i'm times sq in the air with the life
over here
we go near out of sight
switching gears
from those years under knife
underneath all the tears
and the strife
laserheads
and
the theory of light
laserheads
and
the theory of light
light
switch lanes for the bitchmade
put him on a beat with a six-tre
caliente x2
m dot swingin
like a mf sensei
kunta kente
on my trail
slave to the page
wake up with a growl
after the cage
and the days of the foul
ask hp
it's the call of the wild
full moon howl
like im in 8 mile
woah
descendant down in to the vetements niggas
im eminem every time when he delivers
tequilas
mojitos
that spill on your liver
mosquitoes and
beetles
and everything
shivers
im squeezing torpedos
and craving for winter
bald eagles and diesels
and everything
glitters
and turns into gold
while i'm in my suspenders the fork and knife
and my fist for the dinner
and cheddar
and feta
cause i cant remember
september
december
when shit was like timber
and i'm getting slender like woah
i had to recenter
and had to get rid of
the shit in the mirror
that causes me terror
and now im in feathers in
mink with propellers
you put it together it's blow
i'm times sq in the air with the life
over here
we go near out of sight
switching gears
from those years under knife
underneath all the tears and the strife
laserheads
and
the theory of light
laserheads
and
the theory of light
vyle.:
too tall stan
cleaning watching
uhaul van
block captain
trying to see what kind
of recruits y'all is
juggle razorblades
born in the daisy age
big igniter urban young
turns to assimilate
stalk force say they wanna innovate
now you talk to me
you never come around the way halfway down the block
is no way to exonerate
his momma taught at tanner
so he stayed out south
with grandma
made it out the gangway
cause he read that room like manga
they engineered them codes
cracking cards
like that's all that mattered
they did commerce out that viaduct
till they got wet
and changed
like ranma
oh
you was with your friends
please tell me who them is
same people
saw you with on road
but ain't speak ever since
at least until the wave gets reclaimed
and then made to print
same kids that hopped out
that breezeway
ducked under that fence
had to explain the coordinates
halogen blurring on horace
please just input your address
that face it don't go with the swordfish
landscape
it don't go with portrait
your mandible
stay on my dorsal
on stoop
calculating speed
like the same corner camera
pointed at them droves
in beserk mode
....machinery docked on alert mode
real-time processer
ejector
it will convert nodes
you don't want them to play role reversal
pastel look like graphics shaded
photoreal composited
without retracing
whole time
we watch you
when you obfuscated
we derched out
leaving you
mechless
and evaded
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Chicago, 2009
The car rolls past Rothschild Liquor Store on 63rd, the city unfolding like an old map, creased at the edges but never unreadable. Hyde Park fades into Jackson Park, and the viaducts stand like thresholds—marking where the tone shifts, where the structures of academia give way to something else.
His mother, the head of the Department of Psychology at the Chicago Board of Education, was at one time the School Psychologist at Tanner Elementary in the area, and others on the Southside had worked down the street. She saw what these streets did to people—how kids teetered between survival and ambition, how some made it through the gauntlet, and how others got swallowed by it. This wasn't Hyde Park, where bookstores and student cafés hummed with debate; this was where corners doubled as marketplaces, recruitment centers, fields of volley.
But before that—before it was all so coded, before the structure hardened—there was something else.
His mind drifts to the ones who built Chicago's first culture-makers—the B-boys, the footwork crews, the early hip-hop pioneers. The ones who took up space in the way they knew how—battles in basements, park district gyms, school lunchrooms, any place that could be flipped into an arena for movement. Bodies moving at impossible speeds, beats chopped into jagged patterns, rhythm as a weapon, dance as a form of defiance.
Then—his grandmother's house in Chatham.
The stretch between Hyde Park and Chatham was its own passageway, two different Black realities. Chatham, with its history, its pride, its middle-class resilience, but still—survival had its own architecture.
Hopping fences wasn't just sport—it was defense. You needed to know how to move, how to create barriers, how to cut a path where none existed.
And then, anime and manga.
The walk to the basement video store, the stacks of Ranma ½ tapes, something about it always pulling him in. The way Ranma changed when hit with water.
Changed.
That word—Chicago's own dialect turned it into something heavier.
To get "changed" meant something else entirely.
It meant you weren't coming back.
And then—slang as survival.
The weight of language in a city where words meant everything. A place where if you didn't have the right vocabulary, the right tone, the right posture, you were already behind.
And if you had nothing? If you couldn't claim value in a world that required it?
You were left "Mechless."
No armor. No weight. No protection.
A liability in a place that had no patience for them.
The car moves forward, past Rothschild's, past the viaducts, past the places where kids had to learn to move before they ever learned to stand still.
Some things get left behind. Some things stay. Some things just change.