TUPAC IS NOT DEAD

And how presumptuous it is of my father to believe everything

he finds in the political trenches of his Internet algorithm,

how religious—

this sequestering of conspiracy theories with his age-old fingers

swiping through the matrix light of his China-made London-used Android phone,

in the dead of the night, distracted from the boiling mountain of garri set on the bench

by my mother. Tupac is not dead, the rising tone of his proclamation,

like a diplomat who cannot even believe his own manifesto.

How in that moment I pictured the oval-shaped crescent of an alternate dimension,

the same blessed epiphany in which Michael Jackson is Devil’s affiliate

and Barack Obama had to exchange all the whiteness of his soul to become

the first black president of our geopolitical America

and Tupac is not dead because Messiahs

only die to make us believe in the gospel of resurrection;

his black body, poised in the mystified angle of the West side

singing Changes and Ambitionz of a Rider with a defaced bullet hole in his chest

but Tupac is not dead; believing is believing and

there are many things an elder has seen sitting down that a boy like me

can't see even if I climb the elitist ladder, so when

My father says Tupac is not dead I laugh my way into his algorithm

and to my surprise I find there is a catalog of other divergent ideations:

one in which the CIA is responsible for installing a Jubril Nigerian president

who is a robotic sack of the original president who died of the EBOLA,

another where a 6 feet tall ceramic installation of the Madonna

is bleeding bloody tears to the sodomy of our 21st century existence,

and the last one showing that we, the Igbos, are true descendants of the Israeli tribe.

Tupac is not dead—

and I now believe that one man can be a detonator to my consciousness

of a world of abstract thinking so while I lie that night in bed,

I begin to think of how much more people like my father

are inherent to some post-actual reality and how much more people like me

are so presumptuous to our scientific worldview to things that

we can no longer imagine possibilities where there is none.

In fact, Tupac may not actually be dead and so are many of the ideas

I have buried in the grave that is the intellectual capacity of my mind.