Poetry Session #3- “The Black Men”

As always i like to share even the most personal things with my fans, here is a very personal piece i wrote a while back and wanted to put it out there. I wrote this which inspired a song and I thought id share. Song name “The Black Men” this is its story:

“What?”

You will never know the pain I have felt in your absence. I hope you never do.  Once a boyfriend broke up with me and I described it as ‘my world that had been flipped upside down and now it was time to figure out how to live backwards feet on the ceiling’. I really thought it had been. But this is the real thing. You doing that just doesn’t make any sense. I still play it over in my head, I still recount the memories and try to add them up and it never comes out right, my eye brow furls and I say with a gesture “what?”

Feeling un-lovable because spectators in my life have disappeared has been one thing. But it doesn’t amount to you vanishing like a plume of smoke, leaving me coughing, gasping, eyes watering, exclaiming “WHAT?” Like a magic trick you have gone and I don’t get it. I have begun to make up impossible possibilities to explain this stunt but in the end, I still, after carefully organizing it all, im confused, now I exhale a very soft eyebrow raised “…what?”

The sense doesn’t come easy…not like the tears, they come just fine. They are the only thing that makes sense right now. I feel pain so they turn on and pour. Much like a hose, turn the handle, the snake ignites and water comes out. In that moment you always think of  better times, whether crying or playing with a hose. Perhaps a time where running under running water was indeed, not almost but indeed, better than any raging waters could buy you. The adventures and possibilities followed. Then I flash back, and im here, instead of a hose its my eyes, getting red and the expensive black flocking south. I imagine little black men with sneakers running down my cheeks. It lightens the mood, I try to bring myself to present and the story-letter at hand the original subject…oh yea, my person has left me.

That’s you. You were my person. The one and only person outside of my five immediate family that I could count on. The one person. Who was always consistent, always there, always followed the rules. We had rules you know it and I do too. “I need you” meant an immediate call, it was a “as soon as humanly possible” finish your meeting and its callsville till the problem is solved. “911” meant even if you were in your final exam of the biggest test of your life, even if the love of your life is asking you to marry you, 911 was simple, CALL. Call, run, you start that 8 mile hike down the mountain because you need to get somewhere with better reception because my person just gave me a 911, I gotta go. And for 23 years, Happy Birthday was stone.  It started as letters in the mail and as we knew what a phone was or in person, it was wished and sacred…Happy Birthday was simply stone.  It was our unwritten unspoken code and we knew it well. We followed it for 23 years.

Even though things have gotten shaky and my “I need you’s” and “911’s” have been like throwing caviar away sadly my days birth was the day where you flipped the world upside down… you didn’t call. You didn’t write, you didn’t text, you didn’t, now one eye brow lifted, mouth tilted to the side….”WTF?” When it neared 6 pm a time where I knew you weren’t going to call for there were 9 hours difference… I cried. Men ran, my smile in a frown and I cried…”what?”