Horatio High-Wire Act
Kofi Fosu Forson

Horatio is a street. There’s a park not too far away. I swear to God, some nights I look close enough, I can see needles. You know the kind. I sit there and watch the hot guys…Those with the thick veins popping out of their arms. If I were to die, I’d be the girl with fake eye-lashes. How can I ever be bone-thin? I’m a fat cat stretched out on a bed reminiscing about a guy I fucked over.

So this guy used to wait for me in the rain. I used to pretend I was Madonna. I’d call him up around midnight. I’d make my voice sound sexy and shit. I taunted and teased him. “Oh you know. Come on, like you don’t know. I will. Anything you say.” I’d meet him down on Washington Square Park. We were wet. Kinda like a horny divorced mother during happy hour. Yeah.

We walked in the rain. I had my head on his shoulder. He mumbled a lot. We would go into some bar or whatever. This one night, we were so fuckin’ drunk. I noticed my lipstick on his teeth. Coming down the stairs, I begged him to stick his finger up my skirt. I wanted him to talk to me like a pimp.

On the grey couch as you walk into the apartment is where I lost my virginity to a guy I don’t even give a fuck about anymore but on those Monday nights after I had spent Sunday evening on ecstasy it’s easy to think about him so I just crouch in the fetal position and picture him in boxer shorts.

My lovers would walk in. One after the other, they banged me. After they got through hammering me, I would go to sleep. There was blood between my legs. The telephone would keep ringing all day. When I picked it up, the guy I had fucked over would start bitchin’ about wanting to kill himself. I ignored him. Why? I was thinking of chocolate. I was a fat cat bent over the kitchen sink.

I had this guy come over once a week. He was into bondage. I made him beat me up. I had all these bruises on my face.

Every morning, I’d sit there all alone. I had a knife in my hand. I scratched my arm with the dull part of the knife. I’d keep scratching myself with the knife. When I started to bleed a little bit, I would stop. It got pretty intense one morning. I got pissed off about one thing or another. I sat there with the knife. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing. I looked down; there was blood all over the place.

I woke up in a hospital. A week later, the fuckin’ looser guy comes over to see me. I dragged him into the bathroom. Didn’t wanna do him or nothing. I just wanted a smoke. We came over to the waiting area. I was lying on my back. I told him to get on top of me. I wanted to do it. He kept staring at me, looking right into my eyes.

Copyright Horatio Monologues 2007

Mother Ghana:
(My Scent is in Sekondi)

Kofi Fosu Forson

Nkrumah, we’re calling on you
Surrender the earth to mother Ghana
Fifty years since our independence
That day at midnight, your words spoke…

“Our independence is meaningless if not linked
…With the total liberation of Africa.”

Western Sons have fetched Apollo 1:
Space to afford many more moons
Together in creating peace

Streets catapulted to kpanlogo
People danced on La beach
To the spirit of High-Life

Year I was born, you had been overthrown
Ghana made it to Mexico

Could it have been the living among us
Answering our prayers?

My mother was Owunta, gave birth to twins
I lived in Osu. My scent was in Sekondi
Carried with me flavor of house wives
Smell of fried plantains wafting in the air

Far from the city of Accra, its fishermen
Contemplated the pull, mastered the wait
Dreams of villages came to us like water
Touching the shore

Exorcisto in Stereo
Fantasy/Reality

Kofi Fosu Forson

What if every potential human being on earth meditated at exactly the same time, to the second…What would happen?

Do we exist in stereo or are we damned? The Police delivered an album called Zenyatta Mondatta in the ever-loving 80’s. That was primarily an existence in stereo complete with reference to Humbert Humbert, from Nabakov’s Lolita.

The mind is radio. We are always in transmission. Ipods are of no ultimate use. One can, if admonished summon a tune from the list of files without mechanical help. A song is playing in the back of your mind. There’s no sign of radio or Ipod.

How else then can the mind exist in stereo? Humans are forever connected psychically. The more we value relationships, the more we imbibe the solitary definitions that inclusively form as bond and universality.

Unfortunately our minds are isolated in this, our current form of intuitiveness. What is immediate is perceived as fear. Why then is love a form of fear and sex adopted in acceptance?

Is the revolution coital or an exorcising of sex? Where then is the moral application? To commit to an act yet refrain from the overall value of our roles as human. The sexual animal is at first intellectual. It knows no such relevance in the current sense of modernity.

In stereo, I live the beauty of the performance artist, Gaynor Evelyn Sweeney. Her multiplicity of natural colors is released as a form of Technicolor and hyperrealism. Her physical self is a fantasy, indeed disposable. As an entity, she is founded in sex as lover. To me, she is an experiment, whether as a muse or fraction of my reality in cyberspace.

If we’re not to exorcise our attempts at beauty and sex, we’ll be committed to the understanding of gender politics as male and female bonded by one element; that of the penial entrance and vaginal reception.

Motherless Daughter
Kofi Fosu Forson

Where would I bury these lonesome boys? These romantic American jocks looking for love, the dysfunctional kind. I wasn’t like the others. They made steak with French fried potatoes, held hands while walking through Central Park and even cared to spend the night. I am a motherless daughter.

Pigtailed, wearing platform shoes, I walked among the punks. They came dressed in rock and roll black. They had names like Einsturzende Neubauten and Fugazi on their tee-shirts. We were misfits. We smoked Camel cigarettes. When I felt like it, I shaved my head or got a tattoo. It never bothered me. The girls I cruised with were “it.” They looked the part and played the part. They were “it.”

Who didn’t go clubbing? We all went clubbing. Who woulda thought? He was a dee-jay.

Every night I went over, I wished I was the turn-table. I wanted his hands doing that thing they do, all over my back. He was a flunk from the local college. He loved slam-dancing. His hair was made up into spikes. I got all soft inside when I saw him dancing. There’d be people all around him. His boys! He turned, pumped his fist, jumped up and down, bumped and grinded. All I was thinking was, “I could have you faster than you could run home to see the Giants win the Super Bowl.”

It wasn’t long before I had him inside his dorm room. It’s all fine and good when they can’t make up their mind. When it’s all said and done, I get ‘em either way, with my legs in the air or my face against the pillow. I didn’t know whether I wanted him to be my father, brother or lover. I had him. That’s what it was. I liked him. But that’s what it was.

Back in high school, he was the king of the locker room. He gave up football for strippers. I laughed when he wanted me to laugh. We had our days drinking at the bars, thinking with our devices, his dick, my pussy.

Long live the American jock! Men don’t get it. Some girls do with their minds what men do with knives. I get the urge on lonesome nights to fuck. Home is where I cry, “Mother?”

Copyright Horatio Monologues

Alien Identity
Punk Conduct

Kofi Fosu Forson

“What is the punk conduct?”

In every individual is the bearer of sorrow. Musically, it’s qualified as blues. Metaphorically, this represents our alien identity.

The common ground shared between two strangers isn’t race or gender. The alien in each individual allows for significance as a universe of people.

The punk conduct is featured amongst those who are disciplined and by conduct step into an ordinary world hoping to affect, redeem, question and help mould a distinct order through language.

In doing so, they acquire a following. The evolving of the alien identity into punk isn’t that of the musical format. Punk is indeed music and showcased as a movement. In modern society punk is that of the uniform, from tattoos to hair and makeup.

Whereas Sid Vicious is eternally punk, he was so because of his legendary status within the movement. His could be interpreted through his music, mostly speculated in his defiant status, paving the way for the conglomeration of music and fashion.

Arthur Rimbaud is an example of punk outside of the musical perception. This therefore expresses use of language to mark the voice of a generation.

Exene Cervenka, primarily known as female vocalist for the punk band X, lives graciously the life of the punk conduct as a performer, writer and painter.

Lydia Lunch is also part of a generation of musicians who veered into writing and film.

If there ever was a person who defined the alien identity merging with the punk conduct it is David Bowie.

Beauty is White
Black is Beautiful

Kofi Fosu Forson

“Beauty is white.”

The white conscience… It seeps into the subconscious like a snake in the grass. Who are its guinea pigs? How do they reform? Do they ever reform?

Beauty isn’t white. Beauty as a concept knows no color. As a part of the immigrant experience, children are inundated by images of Euro-American women. They grow to forget the notion of beauty in the eyes of the women they have known. As children, it’s impossible for them to understand the subtext of beauty.

There are those who are infinitely ethnic. They are one with family and have strong beliefs as ethnic people. But through the walk of life they attract a white culture. This could be due to place of education or employment. They too become alerted by a white conscience.

Ethnic culture is perceptibly defined alongside a white culture. Generations are influenced to maintain its history. This can be found in academia, education, scholarliness and articulation of history through art, music and dance.

There’s a form of segregation here. Meaning stay with the ones you feel comfortable. When it becomes an integrated society whereby ethnic people and those of an Anglo-Saxon background are not only socializing but inspiring ones cultural identity or even persona, it’s a reflection on how we are quick to turn into aliens.

Alien identity is defined by people not race.


“Black is beautiful” is meant as an inclusion to maintain the identity of blacks as a people. It’s a fair statement keeping with a sense of empowerment.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

Ask Revlon.

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Displacement
Black Personae

Kofi Fosu Forson

Emotional distance between place of heritage and immediacy in one’s current status results in a longing. This is known however as displacement. What we fail to examine is the personae behind each individual who supposes a new identity in a new land.

The suicide of Paul Kakra Forson caused me to rethink my schedule of white females. They began with a classmate at The Royal Preparatory in Accra, Ghana. I had never laid eyes on a white female, save for an elderly anthropologist who found her way one evening onto grandmother’s compound.

The skin of the white person I thought was yeast. The black person’s was the bark of a tree. Having transplanted to New York, I lost my prejudice.

At this stage, conscience as a black person was uplifted and replaced with an awareness brought about by rock and roll, pornography (white flesh), advertising, literature and Catholicism. There was separation from black culture. Found it in early hip hop, endured it as voyeur.

The white female then took on the prospects of lust, love and sex. Having experienced language of art history and French cinema, it was natural to love internationally. Distinction between what is black or white wasn’t an issue. It was more so personal philosophy and intellectualism as black person.

Familial suicide then brought me an emotional awareness as to place of birth. In a somewhat polite luminescence, I envisioned myself as a young boy running around the Nyaniba Estates, perhaps playing mango football, barefooted.

Displacement overall grants an advantage to maintain one’s ethnicity yet exist in a newfound language, spoken and written as in philosophy, felt through music, experienced in virtual reality, knowingly, accepting the mystery of life, no matter where we are.

Click To View:
Horatio Hire Wire Acts http://blip.tv/file/444716/

Carolyn Day reads from Carcass (Monologue)
Horatio High-Wire Acts
Kofi Fosu Forson

Aria For Diva
By Kofi Fosu Forson

I
Love was a summer stage
And by its definition, fasting
Could have become idolatry.
The pajama possibility and my
Cracker thin body crumbling.

Hers beckoned towards opera:
An accented femur, fleshed.
Our faces flushed the trust.
What seemingly could become?
A floundering or just suppose
Gathering mouths to speak.

Evenings hint at toasts of passion.
There holds the reasons for
All Diegos' and Fridas' redress.

Liberated by choice as masculine-
Her overachieving tie,
blazer's politeness never causing a stir.

It was to be a night of words
Fallen onto the lap of a magnum
Opus surviving a reader's punk,
Celebrating a strapless gown.

As evening dwellers left wondering,
We exchanged tongues as "Shalom"
To all the "Englishes" I had known.
My poetry was her unleavened bread.
To think the wind hollers Jerusalem.

Walking without effort of wings
Helping us, towards Chinese delicacies.
She never had a Tsing Tao, certainly
Heineken is preferable for a visitor
Having hung her eyes on strangers.

I defied the intolerable maladroit
Campaign between us, assuming
A world leader's role, only to break
Some bread as a symbol of peace.
Boston, had swallowed her whole,
Where other strangers had borne
Witness to temples and matzo.

I pressed time by releasing steam
Caught inside ironbars within me.
Never thought divinity was blessed
By touch-tone, until Raymond Carver.

II
Our mornings were kissable but
We left them dry among napkins.
The forks friendlier than any
Absurd vulgarity from windows.

It should have been July. October
Shook a leaf, hiding behind masks
Offering a feeling for late cinemas

Still, imagining ourselves as birds
Headed south as a latitudinal means
Never boarded the "V" in the sky
Or any Paleolithic ritual where
Rubbing our bodies to keep warm
Would suggest camping under mattresses
While a bang-box belted a Costello.

Supposing a song could ever be written
About two labyrinths on Christopher St.
What roles would we play in a bel canto?

Our secrets turned into an arousal for
Neighbors bagging groceries to heaven,
Trampling staircases, longing for air
As keyholes were imaginative tolerances.

The days' matinee had an original heart
Circling from avant garde art, then cheese
At an Italian cafe, where conversations
Cured the afternoon corduroy thoughts.

Roads left us that aggregate load
Separating regulars from stubborn
Travelers jigging. We were neither.

On her birthday, we left some of our
Clothes attached, but we contributed
A romantic play written as one act
Which featured breathing without words.

And the eloquence of our bed--
Today, it sits as a heralded thing
Collecting newspaper headlines.

Friends found festive cups cozy
In the apartment where we simulated
Mating chimpanzees surrounded by
Texts that should've made pedagogues
Proud at the sound of the word
"Mesozoic" or a generation captured
As photographs governing quirks.

III
Good-byes were something unexpected
As the Venus in Furs she gave me.
To one day laugh at the moment
Spent opposite each other over
A table at her favorite Japanese,
Where she breathed pass my shoulder
Words meant for a commoner in lust.

She failed me and flowers would never
Ressurect the attituide I had grown to face.
What had collapsed neared a wounding.
The stranger must've been magician
Or a jester in the autumnal chill
Atop winsome roofs observing in
Pauses, her incriminating body language.

I challenged him with expurgations
Knowing he had been a fiddle to other
Violins, since he jolted for a Soho triumph
That very night when all I saw were
Taxis awaiting my ride onward.

Each moment wore an expression
Made of plaster, I broke with hammer.
Sleep was an owl's eye as the moon
Created a riddle while I succumbed.
Next morning, a fellow teetotaler
Did everything to keep me from drowning.

Her words when we met again, were that
Of a precocious school girl fibbing.
Speaking not sympathizing in shame.

We walked a short walk towards a pizzeria.
Later I watched her pack compact discs
And tantalizing clothing into luggage
Which were sending her cross-country
As a diva demanding roses after each
Curtain when men block egos
With handkerchiefs and live to suffer.

Postal service sent me a photograph
And it was she who had her nipples
Exposed to the sun: The girth.

Never knew her as a performance, rather
An artist who willed her way willingly.

It was winter and she labeled herself
One with the gender that brings me chaos.

Queen for a Decade
“Do You Want Me To Seduce You?”

Kofi Fosu Forson


The best example of seduction is not to plug but be determined full of ambition. Chryssie Hynde in the video for the song “Brass in Pocket” is a sight of cool perfection. She’s got much of the kitten’s purr, poised pussy, emerging.

Neither James Honeyman Scott, Martin Chambers nor Pete Farndon take to her in the video. As a matter of fact, they are with their own, driving away at the end. Chrissie coos and sighs not having won. But indeed with seduction, the victory is in the dance. Not what Chrissie would call the “soft cell” but the selling of the soft cell. What is the soft cell you may ask? The very thing that makes the world go round.

The 1980’s were full of panache. There was a sense of frivolity which now is as tense as a wire-wrapped-testicle. Seduction was sold with a sense of culture, first, then skin. The truth about what is infinitely seductive is that it’s a text of plurality. It can be found within a postmodernist conscience.

Commercially, it is limited to the mastering of the plug and pull. However grand, it creates an illusion between both genders as to what is the serenade.

Cindy Lauper sang about Girls Wanting To Have Fun. That sentiment is eternal. The nuclear family has lent itself to a rebellion. Rock and roll has liberated many and is indeed our downfall. But as with every drug, we should be careful whose hands possesses and manipulates. Music is universal. Rock and roll is a dangerous drug.

Death in rock and roll as celebrated from Jim Morrison to Layne Staley found a heart in the 80’s with songs by singers such as Alison Moyet, Phyllis Hyman and Rosie Vela. Alison Moyet was a British singer from the famed band, Yazoo. Phyllis Hyman was a soul singer. Rosie Vela, a model, gained an acclaim with her album Zazu.

Postmodernist thinking separates one from the masses. It enables an individual to celebrate that governed ideology which keeps them within the balance of the past and embraceable future.

Seduction is an art. So is death. Embrace the two, the equation is life.

“Do you want me to seduce you?”

Click to view:
History of Fleshhttp://blip.tv/file/444609/

A History of Flesh
Originally performed at Yoga Mandali 2005

Even The Gods Have Wives
(For Zulal)

Kofi Fosu Forson

Amy Tan gave us The Kitchen God. I was humbly noted as Goddrums. Is one of the founding fathers of Cream truly God? Would you agree that David Bowie is Godroginy?

What then became of “Angie?” …A true wife of the gods! In marital bliss or not, as in the rock and roll clearing, a wife is as a wife as a woman beside is a partner. Among them are Marianne Faithful, Nancy Spungeon, Courtney Love, Jeri Hall (that of Brian Ferry fame not what followed Bianca).

Tom Yorke sang with P.J. Harvey. They never married. Nick Cave sang with Kylie Minogue. They never married. What’s a true wife of a god? Is she some one who puts up with the after-hours? In a world designed for sex and drugs, there’s very little room for morning tea.

Albert Einstein is a God. He was married twice. Marilyn Monroe would have made a perfect wife, an intellectual and a pin-up model. Authors like Jay McClnerny had their share of models to go along with their martinis.

The idea of a model accompanying a man of stature is cliché. Finding it appropriate in a relationship with an intellectual is quite the dream. Bookish gentlemen are known to date bookish women. The Henry Miller/Anais Nin connection is a matter of golden prospectus. Much of the same can be said for Sam Sheperd and Patty Smith.

Somehow, within the course of sex and drugs an abysmal connection is made which translates as a seemingly hot trend of literary text. It plays itself out as seduction, rendering literature and its giants as important and hip as those who make music.

Sam Sheperd’s plays showcase an element of musicality. Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads is a theatrical masterpiece. There’s symmetry between musicians and writers of a particular inclination.

How then do they choose the significance of women in their lives? B. B. King had Lucille. This then to every artist is his wife. His actual wife then is his mistress. Steve Earle has attempted marriage multiple times. He still makes records.

Motley Crue as with most rock bands are known for their groupies. Who then are the wives of these gods?

A published novel is greater than a night spent with the First Lady.

Intellectual/Intimacy
Virtual Exchange

Kofi Fosu Forson


With words do we map a territory in cyberspace? Is it more than an exchange? Can intellectual dialogue virtually lead to sexual arousal?

Eroticism is part of the virtual exchange I have with a particular woman on line. Upon her request, I design a text based on us making love. There’s no mention of the body in its physical state. It veers from pornography. The sentiment within and eroticizing of love points at a celebration of the feeling created by this unique element pouring out of mania, intellect and wit from both my envisioned partner and me.

What if there was intellectual dialogue between two parties, given a familiar space, whether virtually or within the same physical space…Would it lead to sexual arousal and if so, how?

The dialogue as text must first be recognized as pleasurable. Given the dynamics of male/female, either one must subject themselves to the notion of desire. Once this is resurrected, he or she falls into a pattern of abnormality as in spontaneous arousal.

Temptation is marked in the words we use and choose not to use. As in a dialogue about buildings, are these works of architecture masculine or feminine? This is a cause for identity. Much the reason each person entering the virtual world has an agenda.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have confronted my philosophical fate in an exchange with the performance artist and art activist Gaynor Evelyn Sweeney. This has been a session of legendary quality. Each thought envisioned as a packaged work of philosophy continues to meet the demands of structure and elegance.

The vacuous space between two partners in a virtual world can lead to a damning disguise. It plays itself out thought after thought, word by word. If not careful, it cancels out the original intension.

Understandably, the dynamics that make up text between two partners in virtual reality demands both to be at a balance. Any deviation would ruin the chemistry with which these texts are formularized.

It’s the difference between pleasurable text and deleted text.