sundays

"c'mon, boy, it's time to go to church"
          he puts down
          his book and picks up
          The Book
kid-sized
steps to a higher plane
one stair at a
time and again
          he finds himself
          sitting on still-tender butt
          first pew
offers the best view
of the pale flesh
with its plaster cloth
covering loins that
were never sculpted
          it's still the closest thing
          to what he wants
makes sundays easier than others

This Is Home

A cataract moon in a lazily cloud-painted sky, stars peeking through all the you-missed-a-spots, overlooks Broadway. The only snow to be found on this January street are glowing flakes hanging from streetlamps, defiant leftovers from the month before. The silently strumming statue on the corner of Broadway & Pine is the first black person I see on my walk, and I know I probably won’t see another. This is Seattle.

The bus cables hang above me as I cross the street, their shadows spun across the intersection like giant webs for Tolkien-sized spiders. I step over the ditch in the pavement in front of Seattle Central, the ground cracked from countless tires bearing the weight of busloads of students. The school faces the Bonney-Watson Funeral Home, an ironic contrast I muse upon while walking through the small crowd of late-night students and the haze of their cigarettes.

Leaving the thoroughfare behind, I make my way further up the Hill. The angle invites my gaze upward, and I’m reminded again of the city’s newness. Seattle’s infancy shows in its architecture. The buildings have little in the way of ornamentation; austere functionality is the rule, with few exceptions. The same can be said for the North Faced folks walking ahead of me. I overtake them, passing through their conversation expounding the virtues of organic food.

Their earnestness fits the city’s youth: expressed by turns through its citizens’ idealism, naïveté, self-righteous arrogance. Seattle is like a spoiled and gifted child, precocious and proud, with adulthood still some years off. These thoughts carry me past T.T. Minor Elementary. The empty schoolyard a nocturnal playground for three dogs playing together, their human companions each wrapped up in the glowing screens of their smartphones, probably reading HuffPo online.

Arriving at the corner of my block, I make up stories for each lit window I see and all the neighbors I’ll never meet. A newly arranged bookcase in one window catches my eye, and I imagine having tea with its owner, as we politely debate the literary status of bestsellers. My key turns in the lock to my building, the door swings closed behind me. This is home.

Black Day

Don’t remember which
Black Day was my first
Just the setting aside
The segregation, if you will
Of this one day
A sneak preview of
Black Month

My cynicism came later

After I’d learned
Their pale stories,
His story seemed^{1, 2, 3}

My cynicism came later

I don’t know when
Black Days will end
Don’t know when
We’ll integrate
Into brown colors
Bleeding through

A calendar still to come


¹Accidental
²Afterthought
³Footnote