‘TRUE CONFESSIONS’ of Maitreya
(Or, How To Survive A Church & Culture Blaming You for Its Indoctrination).

Sponsored by the Artificial Art Officials, The Adult Burping Society, & the Church of Abstract Physics. January 4, 2022.

Edited by W. Marmoset Yarn for ‘Shoot First & Ask Christian Slater’ productions.

(These are excerpts that shall later appear in book format, upon the appropriate hour, according to the length of the days that remain).

I was born Terence Trent Howard in Harlem, March 15, 1962 on a Thursday at 3:25 in the wee small hours of the morning, when the whole wide world was fast asleep
(& with the exception of whatever may have been at the time howling at its Ma in the driving rain). I debuted in Sydenham hospital in the exact same room as would be born another great hero of mine12 years earlier, Lewis Alcindor, later to be known as Kareem Abdul Jabbar.

My mother had decamped to a cousin’s cramped residence in Harlem in the early days of her pregnancy after having been banished by her self righteous pastor father from the family confines in Newark New Jersey for the mortal indignity of having been seduced by my older Rapscallion papà on or near his birthday. That he may have been white elicited no small sympathy from a grandad who much later would treat me like a Sovereign Solar Sun, greeting me with mustached kisses that would tickle me to jovial spasms of delight.

We were not allowed back to the homestead until I was in my 24th month & she’d found a reputable man to vouch for the return from her Fall from Grace.

At the age of 2, I were adopted by a 21 year old man named James Darby who was a minister of a faith that was as hardcore as it was unrelenting, as dogmatic as it were unmerciful & that for all intents & purposes, seemed positioned as a Plantation for the Human Soul & Judaism lite for negroes.

As well as an emasculation exercise in dynamic suppression of our Black spirits.
TAKE THE MEASURE OF WHO THEY ARE, and then, DEMONIZE what we do not CRIMINALIZE. And then SELL it to them as THEIR religion.

And OUR LAW.

I can vividly recall being smacked so hard across my face that I saw the Moon Landing
In rainbow colors & shooting stars merely for asking my step father as a very curious young boy if Jesus had a penis. A simple & honest question from a boy going through pre puberty as ‘Our Lord & Personal Savior’ was always portrayed as a human who wasn’t a human.

So did he have a dick ?
Was he dickless ?

Surely I wasn’t prepared to absorb the reality of an anatomically inappropriate Messiah.

If it’s all the same to you, I LIKED the idea of MY Savior being a well hung Jew, again if it’s all the same to you. MY GOD’s DICK IS BIGGER THAN YOUR GOD’s. A most child like fantasy.

But my stepdad was as irate as his quick right handed traipse across my supressed noggin would demonstrate. Wow, this Jesus was a hard dude to assimilate & come to terms with & in the cosmology of my existence would prove time & again to be more of a Nemesis than a guide.

We were not created in HIS image as much as we recreated him in OURS.

In the Year of our Good Lord 1987, about a half dozen of us ‘English Celebrities’ were asked by the once venerated NEW MUSICAL EXPRESS (NME) publication to pose for their end of the year XMAS Issue. The question posited to us was clear & simple.

“WHAT HISTORICAL FIGURE HAS HAD THE GREATEST IMPACT ON YOUR LIFE ?”

NOT what figure from history you most LIKED, or wished to be.
NOT what figure from the archives of our humanity you most admired or wished to emulate.
But what personage most impacted your life experience for better or worse.

Posed ANY other way, I’d have chosen Muhammed Ali or the Beatles.
Keith Richards, Sly Stone, William Butler Yeats, Beethoven,
or the man that I had read about that had been born with 2 functional penises.
A man born with his own built in Party Favors seemed like a lark’s way to spend a lifetime.

After all, I had won great attention befitting my arrival into Valhalla largely by stealing as much of master Muhammad’s’ ‘act’ as I could get away with, which in fact worked very well up until it didn’t. In person the grand master was NOTHING like the persona he adopted when selling tickets to his fights.

As were the same case with I.

But being much to my own detriment a LITERALIST as well as probably the most honest & transparent asshole you’d ever hope to meet, being SO green that even VEGETATION was envious of the cut of my jib, I gave the ONLY answer that felt true to the question presented at hand & like a stupid dumbass chose JESUS CHRIST.

GOODBYE CAREER TRAJECTORY !

When I showed up at the photo session, the photographer had set up a scene with a Cross.
I’d not asked for a Cross. I’d not asked for anything except for some proper grooming.

Truth be told, I was quite excited to climb up on what would essentially be my death bed as in my estimation to that point in the timeline, I reckoned that I probably LOOKED MUCH MORE TRUE to what the ‘Real’ Jesus would’ve looked like than the average blond dude with baby blues from Central Casting in Hollywood.

And felt ‘It’s About Time.’

I’d been raised in a CNN religious type setup, 24 Hours ALL JESUS, ALL OF THE TIME.
Step dad a pastor, grandfather a pastor, mother a missionary down to her choice of hats which could only find rivals amongst the English in their Horse race attending finery.

Having heard pre publication rumblings about my choice (“OMG, HE THINKS HE’S CHRIST NOW !!!”), I had written on the space above where routinely ‘INRI’ (‘Hello Henry, How Are Ya ?) was placed, ‘FUCK ‘EM IF THEY CAN’T TAKE A JOKE’. This went over like a dead roach in a peanut butter & jelly sandwich. Never mind the fact that another artist named ‘ZODIAC MINDWARP’ had ALSO chosen Christ as HIS reply & went unscathed & unremarked upon with his portrait of him in stringy hair, biker tattoos & a rather ironic disposition.

But as for YOUR BOY, might I say that I was ‘Crucified’ all over again ?

The NME, citing the controversy afoot, declined to publish my photo, but sold the pix to eager editors worldwide & much to my management’s great consternation.

It found an eager home on the COVERS of Italian magazines during EASTER WEEK, which
French magazines parodied, Spanish mags pilloried & German mags dismissed while as per usual the Americans FREAKED in that way peculiar to the National zeitgeist & I were thereafter more or less a Pariah.

And a Man without a Country.

It were debated & spoken of in the English House Of Lord’s, the Vatican, U.S. Congress & I were also told that the subject were of aroused interest even inside Buckingham Palace, where APPARENTLY my only defender was my steady apologist, the Princess/Goddess Diana, who was born the year before me in 1961.

Naturally, when the pix were sold internationally, NOTHING was said of the ORIGINAL INTENT of the photos nor were ANY CONTEXT given. ONLY the PRETEXT that somehow it had All Gone To My Head & I now belived myself to be (as prefaced by John Lennon years before),
Bigger Than Christ.

“WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE ?”

Did not Madame Madonna worship at the feet of a Black Christ in ‘Like A Prayer’ ?
Did not her good friend Jean Michel Basquait paint similar portraits ?
Do not the Eastern Orthodox religions routinely picture a black Madonna & child ?

Did not the same Rolling Stone who disdained my very personage not later put Christ in the form of Kanye on the cover in a crown of thorns ? Was a Metal guy with red light district tattoos & an awesome name less offensive as Jesus than a golden skinned upstart with a bird’s legs & a lion’s heart ?

Whatever.
I was toast, no jam, no butter.

There would be no climb back up the mountain as from that point forward, &
The Gods of Olympus would use that incident as just cause to throw my Promethean
assumption overboard as were I mere detritus thrown from the side of Noah’s Ark.

The ESTABLISHMENT that oversees the game had seen enough of the energy moving about in the penumbra of my ‘Working’ & determined that I were too ‘Controversial’ to continue being sponsored by their conglomerates, & conveniently, much to my chagrin I were more or less ‘Shelved’. Mine was NOT an image that they wished to export to those watching to see what images they were allowed to adopt & try on for themselves.

I was NOT what the system wanted more dudes of color to emulate.
Which are among the very reasons we are promoted.
To condition & program the public on desirable & acceptable behavior.
How to be, how to look, what to consume.

A menacing black image to scare the populations & justify our treatment ?
YES, & MORE PLEASE !
We can both sell many records AND raise money for LAW & ORDER Candidates.

The Black Man As Big Dicked, Open Hearted Lover ?
Yes, we can use that, it’s less threatening AND a hindering stereotype we can use to our advantage upon convenience.

The ambivalent gender stylings ?
Yes, we can work with that acceptable form of self neutering.

A ‘Self Styled Liberated Man of Color’ who (“seems to think he’s a white dude” &) encourages thinking for one’s self & claims many bloodlines with open arms ?
“NAH, WE GOOD.”

They didn’t wish to be responsible for that.
Nor its possible aftermath.
And being seen as neither ‘easily controlled’ nor a ‘Butt Boy’ I was fucked.

I then witnessed what it felt like to be literally ‘Politburo’d’ out of the picture that I once had shone so brightly within the frame of. One day I was on all of ‘THE LISTS’, (Top Tens, All Time, & the like) next day I was even erased from the top 500 bastards of the week.

So GOODBYE YELLOW BRICK ROAD.

Later, I was told by the great maestro Elton John how BRAVE he thought I was in having handled the Fall From Grace. And it were with him that I’d first met the grand Madame Pamela DesBarres who did what she could to coddle what Christian empathy hadn’t yet exited my spirit at the speed of light.

Man this Jesus was a complicated dude !

The Christians exhort you in all manner of praises to BE LIKE CHRIST.
EXCEPT up until the point where you get caught
Trying to BE LIKE CHRIST after which an ass whooping the size of Jerusalem comes thick wristed, willing & most definitely waiting to beat the primitive rhythms of dominance onto the mantle of your thick hedonistic skull.

I’ve always been a ‘Spiritually Inclined’ animation.

In that I believe that there’s more to our experience (& selves) than generally encouraged by societies of mass consumption. But my true religion is & has always been ART.

And LOVE.

I’ve been privy to tremendous sermons spoken by silk tongued men possessed of the spirit yet no sermon from a pulpit wrenched has EVER convinced me of the passion of Christ’s blood quite like hearing Mahalia Jackson, BACH, MOZART or brother BEETHOVEN in generous cathedrals of Stone.

While ‘HAYDN (IN PLAIN SIGHT) ’ showed me the humor evident in the breath of my very small understanding of what God is or may be. I remember hating the sheer monotony of Sunday School until a lady attending our local church got permission to practice BACH on the organ before Sunday services commenced, which thereby renewed my faith in what true ‘Gospel’ was. It wasn’t dogma, it was THIS MUSIC COMING FROM THIS KEYBOARD !

The young woman’s name was ‘GLORIA’ which was as befitting as it were soothing.
She was pretty, of Golden skin as were I, & equipped with a bubble butt which sat atop the organ bench like sweet grapes hanging from the vines of plenty. Mix the masters music with this presentation & NOW we can hear your speeches about how we are nothing but poor unfortunate, aimless niggers without the Lord & the culture’s heavy hand of probity.

Who of COURSE came to save us from our wretchedness & evil for the cardinal sin of not being born rich, noble & white, despite the fact that EVERY COMMUNITY on Earth was allowed a God that looked exactly like them EXCEPT us. But who was willing to serve us because he felt sorry for our proverbial plight & so in kind died for us (that we might live ?).

NOW PLEASE GIVE ME MORE OF THAT patronizing palaver !
And might I have it to go ?

I were much later informed that the late Pope John Paul Deuce had expressed an empathy with what were viewed as the way I managed to ‘handle’ the scenario I were placed within & I did in fact find something between the Holy Father & myself when I chanced upon the opportunity to get his blessing for me & my wife Francesca’s matrimony.

On that same day Lady Dolores O’Riordan apologized to me for something deeply offensive & ill informed that she’d said about me backstage at a festival that had circulated like a bad odor years prior when she took offense that her ‘Up & Coming’ greatness was being eclipsed by the fact that it were I & not her band the Cranberries that were closing the show.

I had no problem with her ambition.
It were her presumption with which I took umbrage.

“OK MADAME, LET’S SEE IF YOU CAN FOLLOW THIS !”

And thus commenced a performance for the ages she were bade to appear in the wake of.
I pulled out ALL of the Stops & left the stage with everything burning BUT its wooden frame
& the signage with my name emblazoned upon it.

In the hovering presence of his Holy Eminence I told her that I forgave her (kind of easy since she drank as much as 3 bitches named Tom, Dick & Harriet) & that I would remove the rather circumscribed MOJO that I’d placed on her in the midst of the maelstrom she’d maliciously created. She & her spellbinding witch’s powers would no longer be hamstrung by my broken & bleeding heart. This was made all the more poignant when she left her footprints behind her departure from the physical binds of the earth. (In any event, my life has been favored by the love of a few witches, she just wasn’t one of them).

I’d never recover from those pictures, my Bloody Valentine to the Lord & my own erstwhile naïveté.

Nor would the Church ever seek to know the truth of the circumstances affronting their buttoned & starched blouses that had brought me to such a serendipitous decline.
Serendipitous in the sense that it moved me from one tragic incarnation (& more than a few failed attempts on my life by establishment agencies) to the one we now inhabit with much more freedom, independence & control of my purse & muse.

And the blessings of having followed my own One True Faith, that of the Lone Ranger minding his own while placing the faith in his spirit alone & not that of a colossal figure designed to cripple my own personal sense of WHAT GOD IS TO ME, if for no other to whom I am not responsible. For I no longer accept the notion of Gods ABOVE me, but rather Gods WITHIN me. I can work with this, as there is ever yet still MUCH MORE WORK to be done, a few more heavy stones to move before the grave is opened releasing more of the light that drives the fuse of the earth around its own coil, embellishing it with the music of the spheres as well as
(Paul Simon’s) RHYTHM OF THE SAINTS.

Wizards learn their lessons hard, but they learn their lessons well.

I were later summoned to sing for a very prominent Bishop of the Pentecostal congregation.
I declined, just as the same sect had canceled & declined me.
The whole church that afternoon went silent at my hubris.
Though the Real Act of Hubris was to ask me to lift my voice in praise in the first place in an environment no more supportive of my suffering than had Judas been to Jesus’s.

I was done with religion and its anti human chains & for certain it were done with me.

Stay tuned for more REVELATIONS upcoming as the hours congeal into a steady drumbeat on the road where simple truth prevails & tender acts of mercy reign.

I love you bitches & thank you for your support, it means the world to a spirit of the world
& a faithful brother of our collective humanity.

SANANDA Maitreya
Tuesday, the Day of Mars
January 4, 2022
In the Shadow of MONTE ROSA,
Italy.