Somewhere Not Here

 

It had taken me eight days to pencil the border lines for the inscription, outline the letters in pencil, and begin chipping the letters into the concrete. I’d never done any kind of stonecarving, and here I was trying to inscribe more than half a hundred words of text into a vertical concrete wall. My arms and my back ached by the end of every day, and I considered a dozen times a day cutting the project short, scratching the remaining letters shallowly and penciling over them and leaving it at that. I had to keep sternly commanding myself to return to my task. I had decided to do this, and I was going to do it, period (no pun intended).

I let my aching arms drop and stepped back to look at the wall, where my memorial to Leslie was partly inscribed, partly penciled.

LESLIE CAME HERE FROM SOMEWHERE NOT HERE

I CALLED THEM LESLIE BECAUSE THEY COULDN’T TELL ME THEIR NAME

I THOUGHT IT WAS DISRESPECTFUL TO NOT CALL THEM ANYTHING

LESLIE COULDN’T EAT MOST OF THE FOOD I BROUGHT THEM,

AND WAS ALWAYS COLD,

BUT I DID WHAT I COULD TO MAKE THEM COMFORTABLE

LESLIE DIED BUT I DID WHAT I COULD FOR THEM

Leslie had wanted to avoid having anything to do with the authorities, and I had respected that for as long as they had remained alive. Once I was sure Leslie was dead, I had walked up to the University and found a biologist who would come down to the underpasses to look at “an odd specimen” I thought was worth examining. I mean, once Leslie was dead, there was no sense in just burying them, was there? Probably the worms wouldn’t even be able to get a meal off of them.

But I was going to leave a memorial to Leslie here. That seemed like a good thing to do.

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "You do what you can."

Particles of My DNA

 

Particles of my DNA can be found everywhere in this house. I have shed hairs and skin flakes and sweat and saliva in every room. I have left blood in this house while repairing its pipes and its wires, so even if you tore out the carpets and sanded away the paint and replaced the moldings, I’d still be in it. My blood, my sweat, my tears, my snot, my semen. I’ve made love with three wives and eight lovers in every room in this house, mourned the death of my grandmother and my mother and the stroke which has left my father a living dead man in every room in this house.

Come to think of it, my children also have part of my DNA, so you could mark my presence in this house by theirs: their skin and hair and semen and menstrual discharge.

Even the soil under this house has my mark on it, because I dug two-foot trenches in the eight-inch crawl space under it so I could work on the pipes, and left plenty of sweat and blood behind in the process.

So you just go ahead and evict me from this house, but you’d better know that I’m still in it, and you will never get me out of it.

 

 The Magic Eight-Ball says: "We all leave our traces."

https://poets.org/poem/brief-meditation-breath

What You Can’t Know

I turned the cardboard sleeve over in my hands, looking at the photograph on the front, the text on the back. I propped it up beside the television screen which my son thought of as “small”, though it seemed immense to me, as it sat on top of the dead machine that had once been a top of the line television-stereo record player. I opened up my laptop, found the album and began playing it.

Pete Seeger sang “If You Miss Me At The Back Of The Bus”. I recalled how cheery it had sounded when I was small, not really understanding the background, the struggle against cruelty and humiliation it represented. Lehi joined me in clapping along, smiling, but when it was over, he turned to me and said, “Why did they want black people to sit at the back?”

“It was so black people and white people didn’t sit together. They wanted to keep people separate so they didn’t get to know each other and learn that they were all just people.”

“Why are you playing the album off of YouTube, instead of putting the record on the stereo?”

“The stereo doesn’t work. I can’t play any of the records on the shelves, or the tapes in the boxes. I can only play music if I can find it online.”

Pete sang “Little Boxes” and I said, “I used to visit my aunt every year, and my father pointed out the houses across the way as we drove up to her house. They were the same little boxes that Malvina Reynolds was singing about.”

Pete sang “We Shall Overcome”, and as I leaned forward, hands clasped, my face tight with emotion, Lehi put his hand on my arm and said, “Are you all right?”

“Yes. This song just always affects me, a lot. It did when I was little, and it does even more now, because I understand it more.”

He put his arm around me. I put my arm around him. I noticed he was singing along, and I joined in. God, it felt good.

We Shall Overcome Someday….

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Damn right we shall."

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49355/ninas-blues

As The August Earth Needs Rain

She had a dignity about her that I lacked. It was that gravitas, I think, that I found most attractive. Kissing her was not like kissing any woman I’d ever been with before. It was like receiving a medal. A knighthood, even. Not in the sense of being granted something out of magnanimity, but in the sense of its being something splendid and uplifting. I didn’t feel deprived when we took awhile to go farther than kissing and stroking. It seemed very appropriate to carry our physical relationship forward in stages. Anyway, kissing and stroking her was just…better than with anyone else. I understood why it was that until quite recently, what we call “making out” was what people meant when they said “making love”.

When we finally did proceed to having sex, that was something special, too. The word “consummation” never seemed so right. Yes, even in bed – actually, it was on her living room floor, to be precise, and it doesn’t seem wrong to speak in detail about our sexual intimacy. Maybe because even there she had an amazing elegance and dignity. I found as the months went by that every time was a “consummation”, not just the first time.

It was very hot sex, too, by the way. She was the first lover I’d had who actually preferred anal sex over anything else. I was happy to oblige – she taught me quick but thorough hygiene that protected us both from infection. I learned to really enjoy rimming her through a dental dam. Yes, even that was dignified. Her anus absorbed the love of my tongue in an august and stately fashion, as ridiculous as that sounds.

We’d still be together today if she hadn’t had that stroke. Oh, well, shit happens. At least it was quick. And at least I took something of her away. I’m a much more dignified and settled person myself now.

 The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Well, that was unexpected."

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42578/from-the-house-of-yemanja

R.I.P.,* Rush Limbaugh

 *Recede Into Pretermittence.

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "From your keyboard to God's inbox".

Did George Floyd Die of a Drug Overdose?

 The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Imgur.com rejected this, did they...?"

Rain Does Not Dampen The Land

 Rain Does Not Dampen The Land

“It doesn’t?”

“No. Land drinks it right up. Sometimes it gets a little more than it can hold at the moment, but the land deals with it one way or another. None of it goes to waste.”

“I dunno, I think you’re stretching a point, there. There’s such a thing as soil erosion.”

“Well, maybe that wasn’t the perfect way of phrasing it, but my point is, the land and the water cycle work together, as they have for a long time. They adjust, they adapt, the land works things out. Maybe not to the perfect convenience and satisfaction of Homo sapiens, but we’re just one species, we can’t claim a privileged position.”

“Okay, now you’re headed into George Carlin territory.”

“And here I was actually trying to sound optimistic. And more than that, even, to look to the future, to the other planets. We’re learning so much about the water table on Mars, for instance. We’re a long way from being ready to begin terraforming, but we’re learning a lot about how the entire water cycle works, and even about how the cycle works on bodies like Titan, where the fluid at work isn’t even water.”

“No - there, the water is the soil.”

The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Happy Mardi Gras."

 

https://www.facebook.com/poetryfoundation/posts/if-black-history-month-is-notviable-then-wind-does-notcarry-the-seeds-and-drop-t/10155000801099660/