NaPoeWriMo, Day 6

I had to wrestle with this one for a little bit, and it's still not quite where I'd like it to be. I'll be spending the summer fine-tuning most of these I think -- they're not bad enough to scrap completely, but they're not good enough not to need some massive retooling, either.

It occurs to me I need a better poetry icon. :)

***

The Persistence of History

Like most of you,
I desperately wanted a culture that wasn't mine.
There was nothing interesting
in the old spirituals and tales of struggle
endured by my parent's generation,
nothing profound in the garbage
that littered the streets of my neighborhood
blasting bass into the night
in a never-ending turf war with the crickets.
This was not home for me. Never had been.

But unlike you,
my options for co-opting were limited.
I could not disguise my hair or my nose or my lips
I couldn't hide other cultures in my skin
I couldn't pass off the songs I heard on holidays as my ancestry
but I tried.
I told people that my forebears were Mongols
who somehow learned to cross the equator
and ended up in an arid land, eating insects and getting water
from songs that live under the ground.
People found this improbable;
they could see the lines of entirely different continents
chiseled into me, they knew what I was running from.
I only stopped when I knew they wouldn't let me get anywhere with it,

but to this day, when I hear
the muffled beats of my East coast memory
driving down the street
I have to sit down
and imagine
that they were just strangers shouting their identities
to anyone who would listen
instead of my brothers chasing me down,
calling me home.

NaPoeWriMo, Day 7

The Third Person

The last time he liked anything
it was a root beer float he made
from three scoops of vanilla ice cream
and a frosted glass,
and some gourmet bottle of the stuff
that boasted of roots that had come
all the way from Madagascar.
He had been thinking about it on the drive home, and,
after the dog had been fed,
and the mail had been attended to,
and his clothes had been put away,
he opened, took, opened, poured, and carried it,
so cold it stuck to his fingers,
and ate it with a spoon in his backyard.
It was fall, and the weather had gotten too cold
for this sort of thing but damned if he didn't
eat most of it, and drink the rest,
and licked what was left
while the smell of rain and dirt and dead leaves
were around him.
He could smell his own sweat
and the leather on his boots
and the stale tobacco in his right shirt pocket
and his dog, who farted,
and regarded him with an apologetic look.

It's hard to get worked up about much, he finds;
the job's a job, and his life isn't much,
and his dog doesn't do much besides eat and sleep
and shit where he's not supposed to
but every once in a while, he sits in his yard
with a glass of tea, or of whiskey, or of soda,
and he remembers that frosted mug, and he can't see
a single thing that's wrong with the world.