Backbone:
Maturation of a Cow-punk

Kofi Fosu Forson


Deceased! Do we ever arrive at the point where we used to exist? To then say we are newly born, ready to begin the promotion of a personal portrait starting with the self, pronounced I, me, my?

The ego is death. We are afraid. And so we are forced to keep it alive. Figure the ten-inch protruding musculature. The bulbous size D on a virgin! Listen to the perfect pitch of a soprano.

Worrisome, are they? Leave that to the African cowboy, a supercilious persona that need be vexed and honed. Is it the cowboy that begot the African? That his ego is similar to an African cowboy singing the blues at midnight on New Year’s Eve inside a club somewhere in Switzerland?

Must one exercise the ego to the point of flatulence without pardon? Is that not shameful? Are we limited to what we can’t do all because we have a huge ego. What warrants the size of the ego?

This African is at first African and yet he’s a cowboy. He imbibes everything from Country and Western to Juju. He welcomes all women of worth, from Shania Twain to Les Nubians.

Is he then definable? Does discipline not shape the individual into a person and not a creature? As if to say, the creature is an entity. A person travels along a protracted deal of birth and death. Why shouldn’t we then curse the creature and adore the person.

The creature in this case is the artist who is challenged by fear, making him or her susceptible to numerous amounts of outside forces. These can be found in music, poetry, theater, etc. Among the likes are Rimbaud, Patti Smith and Trent Reznor.

The backbone of a cow-punk! It requires a soldier. Iggy Pop, the ultimate punk is his own Sergeant. Sensitivity becomes of any and every poet. The poet, given his socio-political upbringing is a punk. He is truncated upon by the levels of society, family and history.

Internalizing these variants allows for a form of creativity. It is known that psychologically, the poet is fragile. It is not his mental frame work that defines him. This is defined as a foundation. The ability to transcend defines him as artist, poet, punk.