Tag: memories

We’re Engaged!

When I was single, I generally hated seeing social media and other posts about people getting engaged and being madly in love. Alas, I guess I’ve become one of those people, though I don’t mind that much.

For most of my adult life, I never thought I’d get married and settled down. My mental health was always precarious, and my early twenties were filled with addiction and psych ward visits. I did have long-term relationships, but the inevitably failed for various reasons. This time around with Rachel has been different. Perhaps it’s because I’m getting older (I turned 36 this week).

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House-Warming Party (a poem)

Floods of memories slap me
as I walk the neighborhood,
epiphanies connect obscure
stars in my mind’s galaxy –

birds chirp, my feet patter on paths
amid tree-lined streets and greenery
of springtime,
the earth changing, imperceptibly,
preparing to host summer
like a house-warming party –

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Unbreakable (a poem)

to say we were lost boys would be cliché

but clichés have ways

of cementing truths into language

like hard red suns that scorched West Philly & warm beers we guzzled ‘till we couldn’t walk straight & time went missing like a thief

who stole my innocence

& we packed into an old sedan on a road to nowhere &

perhaps, if time is not linear, this had to happen &

if free will is a myth, we had no choice in the matter,

merely swigging, smoking, fighting in adolescent wastelands

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God’s Polaroid Camera (a poem)

For my father

in the dining room, action figures were imprisoned in a green vase, and you returned from prison with my uncle, looking slimmer

from pushups in sunbaked yards

mustache and dazed look gone, down on one knee, arms open wide & smiling with teeth I learned were fakes

I thought you were fake, too

unrecognizable, a stranger from a blurred past we no longer spoke of, only at grandma’s house, when we opened letters decorated by your brother with cut-outs from Marvel comics

& were told you were away on business –

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On Racism and Growing up in the American South

Growing up in the South, you learn from an early age about racism. Our public schools taught from books that The Daughters of the Confederacy bought for schools. Eventually, we read books that actually told some truth.

I remember reading about the Civil Rights movement and its leaders.  I remember learning details about Martin Luther King, Jr.  I remember feeling shame to know he was assassinated in my home state of Tennessee.

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