Failed Launch for the Rocket of the Day

            I was living in a rooming house and I’d just made tea in the common kitchen. I had it sitting to my left at the table in a white china cup when one of my roommates, a not altogether well but slightly self-amused guy with a skull-like, frowning face, took my tea, saying that it was his. I told him that I had to get to school. He didn’t seem to believe me and demanded to know the name of the school and where it was.  I don’t like being disbelieved but I told him that I wouldn’t reveal the name of the place (it was Olga by the way) unless he made me another cup of tea. I woke up feeling depressed.

            I was just finishing up song practice on Saturday morning when I heard something like gunshots. There were three, four or five of them and they didn’t seem that loud compared to rifle shots that I remember as a kid. I’ve heard similar sounds that have turned out to be mechanical in origin, but I stood there looking anyway and after a minute saw a few fairly young men running up Dunn Avenue. They looked pretty excited and seemed unsure of what to do. Suddenly a car pulled up and they all got in as quickly as possible before it took off at top speed.

            Five or ten minutes later the cops showed up and filled up Dunn Avenue with cars and flat feet, but since there was not a single ambulance it was obvious that no one was actually shot. Maybe bullets were fired at something but not at a person. Dunn Avenue was closed to traffic with police tape and the fuzz were there with all kinds of vehicles for at least five hours. I went out later that evening to see if there was any evidence of anything having happened but in my short walk down Dunn I found nothing, other than that there’s a new pizza place next to the Roti Lady on Dunn Avenue now. I searched online but all I saw was a report of shots having been fired at a doorway on Dowling Avenue about five hours before what I heard. I suppose that it was also a doorway that got shot in this case. Maybe the same kids were driving around delivering messages or returning them.

            I received another email from George Elliot Clarke in our continuing argument about my criticism of El Jones. He thought that I gave a very good analysis of Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” but still absolutely thought that I was being unfair to Jones’s “Light Skinned Girl”, which he reads as a “personal bio-directed anthem which is meant to make other light complected black girls think about their privilege – especially in light of the perils, rape and other issues endured by dark complected mothers somewhere in the genealogy.” He continued that doesn’t expect either poets or songwriters to give him unadulterated truth but he does expect the truth of their art.

            I wrote back that I agree that “Light Skinned Girl” is a valuable piece but that it did not require any untruths within it for it to be a good poem and what untruths there are feel manipulative. They remind me of some of the things I read on certain Facebook pages that exist primarily to push a political agenda. The ones that I’m thinking of are at the opposite end of the political spectrum from Jones but I sense within a lot of her work a similar push to propagandize. Some of them, for example, make an effort to prove that Mohammed was a paedophile by focusing on the earliest age that some stories claim that Aisha was when Mohammed married her. This does not seem dissimilar to what Jones does with her claims about the skin colour of certain evil characters in fairy tales. I have no problem with poets messing with the truth as long as they make it clear to the reader that the messed with version isn’t true.

            I worked on another ghazal that afternoon, exploring depression. I really had felt depressed during the morning but I tried to hang onto it later for the sake of art:

Failed launch for the rocket of the day just

into the sea with its stages.

Sinking, dripping self asks, “What’s it all for?”

but only the trash on the street answer.

Zombie drags its corpse through each moment.

It can smell its crotch while standing up.

Not connecting with the sad uglies

that continue with their mad slug eyes.

If I decide to shave and shower

it might kill the mood.

Fumbling the chords of a song, with no elation to sing it,

everything feels like it’s always been fashioned out of shit.

A failure masked by every success

plunges while strapped to the darkness.

Almost think of slitting my throat

but then what would I write about?

            I watched an episode of Leave It To Beaver that had an interesting conundrum. At the end of the second season the Cleavers sold their house and moved to a bigger one in the same town but not so far away that Beaver would have to change schools. At the old house though was a tree that Beaver was given for his birthday. When they moved they forgot about it but at school Beaver heard the poem “Heart of a Tree” by Henry Cuyler Bunner and it made him miss his tree. Since the tree was given to him as a present he figured that he could probably just go and get it without asking the new owner of his old house. He wanted to make sure though so he asked his mother if he was given a million dollars as a present and he put it in the bank but the bank was sold, would it still be his? She told him of course it would. He took that as confirmation that he could go and dig it up.