I was caught making ice sculptures while wearing my X-Uniform in 5 Pointz, Queens, and someone asked why I would risk exposure.

I wear my X-Jacket when outside of the Academy to empower myself, and to remember that being mutant is a global phenomenon — our gifts, largely and widely, will go unrecognized as our existence is fundamentally iconoclastic in an otherwise conformist world.

I especially wanted to visit the 5 Pointz Academy after having been painted over white.

If we expose ourselves and our abilities — especially in juxtaposition to the Homo sapien species, which values conformity and still suffers from psychologically primordial conditions, such as Group-Think — again which is inherently diametric from a mutant’s need to recognize the specific nature, “algorithm,” mechanics, and triggers of their gift — we risk the label “anti-structural” or “counter-cultural” for the change we represent; and thus might also ensue multiple degrees of alienation from the species’ collective consciousness — a risk that would place more mutants in danger, should the Homo sapien subconscious rebel against the presence of a higher-level consciousness that is Homo superior.

We have seen how this rebellion occurs systematically: with Senator Kelly, the Friends of Humanity, and pharmaceutical “cures” for the X-Gene. However, it is becoming more essential to expose ourselves considering the general imminent danger of planet Earth: overradiation of its waters, construction of “poverty” and “hunger,” and its hierarchical political systems. Vulcan intel gathers that the human race could save itself from past errors by recognizing the X-Gene in its population.

There are, of course, the emergent mutants which the Homo sapiens recognize in textbooks: from the time travelers to the earth shakers, from Malcolm to Mandela, the ones who saw the future and led humanity through that portal; yet other mutants only become recognized when the human monetary-based economic system recognizes a “profit” for a singular business, and not the human race as a collective — like Nikola Tesla who found a way to provide free energy to the world, only to have his dreams deferred by the entrepreneur Rockefeller who used his gifts to perpetuate “poverty.”

Yet some other mutants who write the textbook; case and point: Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist, who grounds his vision in the possibility of technology, physics, and future; Thylias Moss who writes in poetry the universe’s song, and in so doing “uncovers” its true vibrations!

Should the human species shift from the material to intellectual, creative, and paradoxical, the attention would likewise shift to identifying global gifts and talents (the expression of the X-Gene is most likely to occur internationally, in seemingly disparate geographies) that could save the planet.

In either case, it seems that humans are not “ready” for the Mutant Awakening, and have only been able to “handle” Level-5 Mutants (Tesla, Malcolm X, King), if Homo sapiens could control them through socioeconomic or political constructions — yet all either ended life in poverty or death.

Level 4s usually represent the political prisoner population, if not otherwise corrupted; those who still affected change, and yet were allowed to waste away in cells. Simply: Level 5s can access the hearts and minds of the subconscious, and so can also represent great evil (i.e., Hitler). Level 4s also reach the collective subconscious, but tend to be more tactical and need to be outside the confines of isolation or incarceration to amplify their abilities as change agents. Level 3s are allowed to live — teachers, doctors, lawyers, community members, barbers — because they keep hush about Senator Kelly’s Mutant Data Mining and Secret Mutant Police which has become public knowledge. Amiri Baraka was a Level-5 mutant who spoke openly about the policed division between mutants; and when he asked, “Who has ever stopped to think of the divinity of Lamont Cranston?,” was asking the reader to consider the existence of creative magic.

I am thus compelled to write why I wear my X-Jacket and X-Shoes when I am outside of the Academy and in the public; and that is because, the public are also mutants with gifts and obvious potential for great good and also great evil. Notwithstanding their latent powers, if certain Homo sapiens were awakened and made aware their gifts, this information would only amplify their abilities to change the world — whether for constructive or destructive means.

And, so, call me Professor Mex, the anti-Prometheus. The creative fire has so long existed that now exist those who control ice — the question is not power’s existence but application: fire and ice, as the Old Wizard (Robert) Frost would say.

Growing up mutant during Pre-Awakening — in the human socioeconomic construction of “poverty” and while the Homo sapien collective consciousness was just becoming racially aware — meant my gifts were statistically likely to be ignored because of my national, geographic origins and phenotype.

Many of my classmates were also gifted, but “poverty” systematically limited resources to allotted humans, especially those “racialized” as “intellectually” (one-dimensional) inferior (subjective).

It was in 2006 that I entered the Academy. In 2010, I returned home so that I could identify gifted youngsters. I often found that Homo sapiens in these systems most often misidentified mutant gifts for human inferiority — which led the mutant to internalize this misunderstanding, and therefore hate the very source of their gift and the power it produced. The human socioeconomic structure is racially biased and does not leave room for the inclusion of gifted People of Color; the human “system” is behind the presence of gifted people in general, and gifted people of color specifically; though, paradoxically, the mutant race, which transcends and imbues national and racial borders, will be the one to save humanity.

The first step, then, in this post-modern, post-Awakened world, would be the normalization of our mutant presence, so that other gifted youngsters, grandmothers, nurses, scientists, students, clerks, custodians, everyday people like me and you, can begin to speak up about their abilities, our abilities. Arthur Sze says “I feel what others are thinking and do not speak” giving a reader a glimpse into the visions of an empath. Tim Seibles lets us know mutants have existed: “there’s no place/they haven’t touched”… “the seen,/the unseen — the ones”… “you see them: shadows/not shadows, people who seem” Homo sapien and not mutant — thus lending to the reader the mutant’s double consciousness: that we know we exist, invisible, empowered, yet still silent, and here nonetheless. That it is time to recognize our gifts in light of the good we can create, in context of a world that needs solutions of epic proportions. Perhaps a better step is recognizing that the trigger for the X-Gene’s expression is the human condition of love.

Happy Awakening,

Professor Mex

Shout out to all the artist-mutants, the visionaries and healers, who were gentrified; and to the walls white washed unexpectedly.