An Open Admission of My Love Affair with Denver...

I have known many artists and great community figures in Denver over the past sixteen years.  I have made lifelong friendships with people who I am convinced are creative unicorns.  They are magic.  I have sat in the presence of friends and colleagues in awe of their talent.  They are brilliant, beautiful, mercurial, crazy, influential and consistent.  Some are consistent in the way that, I might know them to be consistently inconsistent, flakey, if you will.  Others are consistent like Sunday mornings and the scent of coco butter.  However they come, I have grown to adore the roles we play in this unrealized renaissance.   We are a community of writers, poets, activists, musicians, singers, promoters and all around hustlers who play our parts with the skill and execution of Cleo Parker Robinson gliding across a Juneteenth stage in Five Points.  We are unrelenting in our passion to live our art and carve a path toward individual enlightenment into the streets of this square state, where brown bodies are sparsely distributed and largely ignored. 

I have loved this community with all the passion and drama of a Terry McMillan novel, complete with such small degrees of separation in affairs, the cast of The L Word might shudder.  I have broken up with the muted glitz of Denver’s club scene to find myself writhing in drum circles.  There have been nasty departures from suspiciously run community organizations and hyper-sensitive exclusions from ciphers of men who, despite their self-proclaimed consciousness, do not want their Hip-Hop in high heels.  I have broken up with Denver on more than one occasion in hopes that it would miss me enough to call or write.  Each time I return with the determination to have Denver fall in love with me.  So many of us swear that we are leaving for greener pastures where our art is heralded and basement produced albums are consumed greedily at $10 a copy in venues much like the ones we have here.  We are confused as to why Denver just won’t love us enough to make us famous at home.  We become angry, break things, pack our shit…and leave.  We often return as lovers scorned with tales of the raunchy affairs and arid seasons we experience while away.  Denver welcomes us back with a pat on the back and a patronizing grin.  We are prodigal lovers.     

I have not relocated.  But I have refused to commit to being a native.  I choose to snub my nose in a different direction than packing my shit and leaving.  I hide my hurt and desire in my claims that, “Denver just isn’t on the same level as other cities.”  This is bullshit. It is my ego that taints the purity of the love that I have for this vanilla cone with delightful sprinkles of culture and artistry.  And I am an ungrateful and ornery artist lapping greedily at the sprinkles wishing the ice cream underneath were double chocolate chip.  I have traveled this country enough to know that if my cone was to topple and my vanilla art sprinkled delight of home would go “splat”; oh! The tears I would shed for Denver.  I don’t want to be loved by New York, they don’t know me.  They didn’t watch Ebony transition from nervous, permed, stage frightened poet chick to brazen, singing, rapping, stage rocking juggernaut Isis.  Denver, you gave me a wonderfully vanilla canvas to splatter blood, tears, bourbon and black girl swag all over.  Thank you for letting me love you.  Hopefully one day, you will return it tenfold.