Confessions of an Off-Broadway Waitress

Kofi Fosu Forson

I once knew me a European black boy. His accent built a bubble in my ear. He came struttin’ beside a blond woman-chile. We were Off-Broadway. The men came in colors…colors. They talked foreign movies. Beside them were the cappuccino girls. I stood ever so straight, hands behind my back, waiting on these men and their Carson McCullers wannabe’s. Just like them, I loved the word “mellifluous.”

I filled up my diaries with stories about love. I couldn’t find it in the after-hours.

“Burn my back some,” I would say to a fella. He’d strike a match to a cigarette. Then he’d burn my back some.

Come morning, I’d fix him mud in a China cup. He’d come back with his marching boots on to peel me like an onion, stockings and all.

I’d been hunting down forgotten poets. Made them learn the haiku. Prayed the day he came struttin’ beside a woman-chile. He had funk in his hair, down to his waist. What he wanted was water. I gave him more…A bit of Flannery, a little Baldwin.

That evening gave me something to work with. Cool breeze and the dizzy lights drug me plenty. He never did mind the play I had brought him to see. Surely, I had other plans boilin’ inside of me. It wudn’t long before he was sitting on my sofa, drinking malt liquor.

“Burn my back some,” I said to him. He lit a match to a cigarette. Then he burnt my back some. In the morning he robbed me of the money I owned.

Standing ever so straight, apron around my waist, I remember the way he said…

“Don’t ever say a word. That’s all you heard. I’m the song you can never sing. A drug you can never take. Yet I filled you up…I filled you up…Pushed that lovin’ all the way down.”

He lit a light in me that had been pale for too long.
He lit a light in me that had been pale for too long.
He lit a light in me that had been pale for too long.

Copyright Horatio Monologues

Spatiality:
Cyber/Internal/Physical

Kofi Fosu Forson

Circumstantially, the individual dwells within a cyber, internal and overall dominant physical space.

What are the advantages of cyberspace? How does it overwhelm the physical world?

As an entity the physical world defines our existence as a species. This is however managed separately and conclusively through technology and evolution. The balance of which is the ability of the human to adapt.

Cyberspace allows for such a transition. It’s a means by which the world is intellectually encapsulated. Moreover, this circumstance prepares for the individual a transformation from the physical world into a web related form of perception.

What has become of the individual is a will to constantly search for information. This then encourages him to circumvent through the trappings of the internet.

Is it the intellect that binds the conscience of a divided world? If so, is it fair to say that to dialogue in cyberspace is far-reaching, more so than the conversation between two people in a governed physical space?

How then do we protect the internal space? Are we free to dictate what happens in the world within or do we conform to the world outside?

To exist in cyberspace certainly becomes a world where we are in control of our actions whether to promote a lack of morality, intellect and self-will.

By happenstance, cyberspace influences the internal causing the physical body to remain disposable.

Is imagination then a resolve to sit under an apple tree and dream of butterflies?

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Education of a Strange Fruit
Kofi Fosu Forson

A.
Art, dance, bebopaloola
Long, silk, powder, woman
Atlas, shook, carborated, nerves
Thumb, tacking, middle, age, dispiritia
Black, boards, City, University
Cafeteria, cockatoos, counting, sheep
Bell, bop, brown, skin, pixie
Les Russes, assemblage, la fume
Mulatto, toto, cosmopolitan
Genius, age, language, aromatheque
Leaving, Las Vegas, romance, Chivas
Intellectual, goons, class, rooms
Chalk, mark, education, Ritas
Cinema, Cinderellas, playing, muses
Greenwich, boys, day, dreaming
Academia, semiotic, pachanga
Balanchine, musical, chairs, Mississippi

B.
Expressionism, Cuba, Opera, Africana
Silhouette, leaves, Vincent, trees
Campus, culture, bibliotheque
Les livres, philosophie, Americain
Outsider, Euro, femmes, sexuelite
Black, Market, Kokoschka
Italian, nudes, Brooklyn, elegance
L’hombre, connoisseur, Monsieur…Quip
Drawings, Sharon, Hazera---
Sado, masochistic, Cocteau, Baldwin
Literati, East, Village, nouveau
Chinese, cuisine, black, girl, coiffeur
New, Wave, Avant, garde, Chelsea

C.
La morte, sa mere, ma conviccion
Performance, invitation, resignation
Mentor, editor, confidant
Photographs, exotique, l’adultere, rouge
Irish, café, Bettie, Serveert
L’idee, originale, petite, amies, vieux
Joyce, Paris, pre-eminence, depeche, mode
Gift, friendship, misunderstanding
Love, mask, never-ending
Telephone, ma voix, sa ridicule
Je suis, debout, Africain, Americain
Other-worldly, strangely, interesting
Interestingly, strange

New York Gender Politics:
Idiomatic Pussy

Kofi Fosu Forson

What if all women were like the ones featured in drawings by Diebenkorn? In a postmodernist world they would want to be Vanessa Beecroft’s models.

And what about men…would they prefer to be in a Brett Easton Ellis novel? Probably Richard Kern is the closest thing to how modern art begot contemporary pornography.

Language was Anna Nicole Smith in a Guess Jeans ad…statuesque, blond, beautiful and feminine. The black woman preceded that notion with Pam Greer.

If language is metaphorically female then our only options are common women found in cyber-erotic films, female pop stars and Hollywood actresses. Personally I prefer lady volley ball players.

In New York, women train their minds to be Kathy Acker and yet carry themselves with the grace of a character from a Joyce Carol Oates’ novel. New York women are less Edith Wharton and more My Mother, Demonology.

Prose is a foundation. Semiotically, advertisement is the bible by which we locate a sum of things that are estimated to form what is said at a bar, cocktail party or lecture.

The pattern for communication isn’t intellect. It’s centeredness, whether as a mail man, construction worker, secretary or waitress. What is said however warrants a means of conviction as to what one demands or deserves. The in-between is purely systematic. There’s a common ideology but logic is nothing but fodder.

Within means of a heterosexual world, men and women are driven by personal success. It often brings about fornication. Much is assuaged by religion, morality and family. Other than that pressure to perform coitus lingers in the mind, as cyberspace has made it more pronounceable.

New York sex is two people, a man and a woman sitting across from each other in a subway car. They lust. Nothing is said. The same evening these two serendipitously meet at a party. Later that night, they walk their separate ways having had sex in a bathroom.

Philosophy
Blood Heroin

Kofi Fosu Forson

Drug pusher with no reserve serves up the heroin. Sure to be damage done to the body.

“Philosophy, my blood heroin...”

Trust the letter “t” in the word “titillate.” It resounds with proclamation. Existing in its hilarity is the conviction with which we suffer at the thought of language bone-thin.

Seduction is the crust per bloom in every thought. The agony therefore has to do with the lack of patience given each word or do they form in fragments? The word “titillate”… does it possess? Should a word border seduction in order to possess? What about the word “magistrate”? Certainly it presupposes a feeling of order.

Does dialogue cause cancer? If there ever were a cure for cancer, it’s in the dialogue. Suffice it to say, embodiment of language is definitive not of usage but how and with what relevance do we continue the modification through modernity.

Perhaps seduction qualifies each and every one of us as convicts. If convicted, would one admit to carnivorous behavior or with option stirs a rise in blood temperature only with tone, tough-tongue, language, not just words but a pattern of words flowing within a particular unannounced melody?

Seduction, the pattern of all evil..? Must we dismember the qualifications from which we prove our angst to then absorb a feeling of paradise in a sigh, comfort in a term of endearment?

How then does language morph into philosophy, my blood heroin? Much like music put to words, blood boils to the sound of a voice. We are bound to seduce every word, every notion, much like the invisible cup.

Is it befitting to serve the word “supercilious” to a stranger?

Yes…A letter at a time.

Displacement:
Euro/African/American
New York/Liverpool

Kofi Fosu Forson


The word “nigger” is commonly used in this postmodernist society. That in itself is a digression. Patty Smith laid claim to Jesus Christ as nigger. She was before her time.

Before this deluge of the common man as nigger, I anointed myself as “Euro-nigger.” From here on forward I whole-heartedly reject every notion of any individual as “nigger.”

There are those who draw a conclusion between what is black and what is global. This identity is founded in employment, cyber space and personal conclusion. What defines them is language, not as vernacular but as philosophical appeasement.

If America is the great divide, I count myself as among those who have benefited. What would have happened had I lived in Liverpool?

New York City is a sponge. It soaks up the eccentricities and poignancy from all over the world. It is a place I call home. And with the fortune of having embraced people from different cultures, I hereby define myself as American.

What then becomes of my heritage as an African? I am not African-American. Or is there room for a new definition? I am African. New York is the city where I live. And recently I have formed a logical conclusion with Liverpool as a conscientious and philosophical state of mind.

The two people who make this possible are artists/curators Gaynor Evelyn Sweeney and Jo Derbyshire. Together and through cyberspace our minds and existences harbor a place of art, ideology and inclusion of the self as body in space manifesting while the politics of the world revolve.

Jo is my intravenous needle. Gaynor is my heroin. There’s a metaphor here. That philosophy to me is a drug defines my displacement and hunger.

Gaynor Evelyn Sweeney fuels my need for intellectualism. Jo Derbyshire is the resolution, the hereafter.

I live the reality as seduction of language. To convict any further would be orgasmic.

Electric

Kofi Fosu Forson

I remember the first time I saw her picture. I thought she was hot. Hot! Not “hot” like I wanted her. “Hot” like… Yeah! I wanted in on her game! I wanted to be perfect!

I don’t know what it was. She was beautiful, yeah! That wasn’t it. She was electric. I didn’t believe a woman could look so wicked and still be motherly. I wanted to know her. She knew how to dress. She had a great figure. I wanted to know her. I didn’t know what I wanted from her. A friendship would have been fine. I think I even had that much just by looking at her photograph. Maybe we could go out on the town. It wouldn’t be difficult for the guys to find us. I am tall and she is well…Electric.

It was nothing but a photograph…but looking at it, I could tell she knew how to handle a man. She had that look. It could burn a hole in any man. So I looked at the picture and looked at it and looked at it. I tried to see if I could get turned on by her. I came pretty close. I kept focusing on her eyes. I started to breathe in and out. I didn’t imagine myself making love to her. It was more like breathing her energy.

We were introduced at a going away party for a colleague of ours. When you work in the same building, sometimes all you get to do is nod “hello.” She was standing before me. We were actually talking. What about? Shit! Most of the men around us had slept with the same women. There they were. We kept matching them, position by position, branch by branch. We stood in a corner, drinking, looking perfect. I could taste her breath by smelling it. It was intoxicating!

That evening we stood next to the bathroom sink, talking business, watching the women walk in and out of the stalls. It felt like high-school. I wanted to smoke…with her. I even had some pot in my bag. I kept looking at her. She was talking like we had planned this meeting in the bathroom all along. I remember holding the door for her to walk out.

She was everything I had imagined. I’m a serious woman. I’ve got a job I love. I’m not lesbian. But honestly, don’t women get away with a few things every now and then. I kissed her on the lips hello. I grabbed her ass when she told a funny joke and she couldn’t get herself to stop laughing. We didn’t make love. We did however sleep naked in the same bed. It was an honor. I never touched or kissed her. It was one of the most enjoyable times I’ve ever had sleeping. Whenever I wanted to touch her, I pulled back. I wasn’t in love with her. I was in love with everything about her. There’s a difference. I didn’t want to make love. I wanted to be loved.

Copyright Horatio Monologues