FOR LIFE / FOR MAISHA (my advice to my niece) i love you & have nothing but encouragement for yr life in my missive to you, yr life, not mine, what you see & be, how you shape yr space & escape from the restrictions earlier generations have created, over their walls into the wilderness yes, but free free, & that's the real, to be free to be everything or nothing like what has been artifically erected by those who want young people to be old images, regurgitated thoughts, & rather stupendously stupid reincarnations of realities this world would have been oh so much better off without such twisted combinations you know & i know you may not know where you're going to but you know you're never going back to those bruising and battering befores, those false images of stability enforced by fists or incapacitating inhibitions & above all, never back to pick up on all that emotional baggage standing on every corner of the small town called crescent city it is so difficult to be young in this old world so strange, so frustrating trying to find community when every individual thinks they are a king or a queen or for sure that you should be their slave or knave co-dependent or some other reduction ad absurdum there are firing squads outside, paddy rollers in the woods ghosts riders in the sky & a million good reasons to stay holed up inside, be careful but don't be afraid even if you can't find the key to the combination at least climb out the window and keep going the only way to be really free is to never surrender so that's it, this letter is to let you know not everybody back here wants you back as a little brown girl reliving what never happened anyway except as some male orchestrated fantasy & i guess that is the essence —since life is real and finite— if you are going to be somebody's fantasy you might as well live & be yr own dreams regardless of the cost or how you may loose yr way sometimes, live & be, live yr dreams & be yrself however difficult or confusing it may be to discover yr life lived to the fullest is the best & only value you can give to a world already overflowing with frightened and repressed children dressed up in adult years, live & be maisha, live & be yrself —kalamu ya salaam