Mid-April 2016

I hear but cannot see
                            coming from behind me
I go on reading
                           like this
Anyway,
                           I hear
                           (in a deep voice)
"Cuz 'nigger' is a weird word-'
                            "Yeah-yeah-yeah, I mean..." squeaks
                              another
And I look up to see
                            a preppy young black teen
accompanied by two of his friends
                           (a fast-talking Filipino
                           and a shy brunette, buried in her phone.)

The black youth is pushing a Diamondback,
                            (not the snake, the bicycle)
wears square-rimmed glasses, his hair is tightly trimmed.

Seagulls bitch and moan in the back-ground tarmac
bickering over scraps
                            (maybe sushi)
in the adjacent high school parking lot atop the hill
                             over-looking the ocean
(a
ffluent
beach town.)
He looks over
                              to the sea,
                              sighs and says,
"To me, it just means 'slave'"
They have moved on.




Image credit USMC [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Things were going along swell
rolling back and forth,
forth and back...
All is stimulating, titillating, and conversating
smoothly sailing the syllabic sea,
until suddenly-
I am slapped across the face (!)
with an open backhand,
knuckled under the weight of the word-
As though fired from an ex-husband,
who knows me better than me-
says he. Like a master I've never served,
who insists on digging up old dilemmas
from dank old trunks,
prying through and poking around
for the finest, sharpest, loftiest bone to pick.
Tossing ancient history at me like china darts
through fragile names like
-Racism and Sexism-
pointed accusations
hurled only by
an immaculate him,
who wants to deflect, deter, stall, divert, and exert
his preeminent preferences of him-
self-
less
threats to masculinity.
Never to be
for-
given
for-
peace
sake.



Image of Betty Ford's travel trunk, By n/a (Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.