Praise the House Party

May 17, 200014

after Krista Franklin & Britteney Kapri

 

praise parents asleep in front of a television after a double or grinding the night of a third shift. praise the train i learned to ride: the red to the blue to a bus in the hopes the address was written down right on the quarter-sheet someone photocopied well before there ever was a kinko’s. praise the desire to sneak out & listen to teenage DJs mash bits of records together that didn’t make sense to the ear, new arrangements that propelled us out the house like an odd sonic bat signal so we could grind & jack the body & its parts. praise the body & its parts. praise the sweat & funk the body makes. praise the basement so hot it made the outfit you spent an hour preparing optional. praise new shoelaces & an old toothbrush to resurrect your busted kicks. praise jean shorts, the shortest ones. praise the wop & roger rabbit. praise radio shack & the mess of wires jammed into odd-fitting speakers. praise the vocational-high-school-know-how-to-rig bass box sub-woofers. praise Black hands manipulating black wax. praise the pans & knobs & casio keyboards put to use in ways manufacturers never imagined. praise the punch that wasn’t spiked. praise the punch that was. praise counterfeit chemists & quarter-juice shamans. praise the folk who came to get you when you needed them to. praise the lock pick, the lookout, the abandoned loft, the house of squatters. praise the friend that told a friend. praise the heat between bodies making winter bearable. praise the night that becomes day. praise the get down, the packed jam. praise your mans, an employee with keys to the storage facility. praise the factories that shipped jobs elsewhere & the jobs that did stay. praise the empty spaces we filled with some old records & new styles & ourselves. praise ourselves for passing time, for keeping time & making time stop & making time irrelevant, for forgetting time other than a curfew, when you knew your moms would wake. praise your moms waking up & for getting down, back in bed, before she did.