-amari

He walked towards me with an East Harlem limp, mean muggin the wind for making his ascent more difficult. Dude towered over his surroundings, city skyline dwarfed in the background like an unworthy opponent.  Steady strides conquered the hill.  Black leather set on broad shoulders.  Furled eyebrows and a chew stick.

This cat wasn’t nothin easy.

i was so focused on him, i ain’t see the baby boy behind him fumbling a football and clumsily failing to catch up.  Tears moved from his voice to his eyes:

Daddy,

wait Daddy!  Don’tleave me!

Daddy’s face grew confused, then pained at the possibility that he could even be slightly mistaken for possessing the same shameful traits as the man who came before him.  He swung around, picked up his boy, and with the fiercest gentleness i’ve ever heard, told his sun,

i’ll never leave you, you hear me?

i’m your father.  i love you.

This cat wasn’t nothin easy.

-amari



-amari

-amari

Rotting strawberries taste better than no strawberries at all.  Still enough sweetness to hip you to what they once was.  Vague memories of a vibrant life in its prime.  Each bite, a hopeful attempt at a remaining vestige.

The trick is knowing when to pick ‘em.  Well, you probably buying ‘em from a store, so the trick is knowing just how ripe they need to be to enjoy ‘em in time.  This requires you accurately judging how quickly you gonna eat them thangs.  If you intend to murk them suckas on the ride home, for example, pick the ones dark like a Sudanese sister’s shoulders.   If it’s just a quick snack every few days, you might wanna go with the paler variety.  The simple things make the biggest difference.

But right.  You don’t know the future.  Things may not play out as you intend.  You get a phone call on your way home, for instance.  All of the sudden, you deaf to them juicy berries all moist and shiny and sultry, summoning you from the shopping bag.  When you finally get around to ‘em, they not what they once was…kinda like finally meeting Pam Grier and having to come to grips with the fact that she’s no longer Foxy Brown….damn!

So a bowl of cereal, topped with bananas and your leading lady: Strawberry.  You know she not as…luscious as when you encountered her in the produce section, lookin all ripe.  And you, playing coy, tryin not to stare and that voluptuous plumpness, scarlet like nobody’s business, ooo!  But you had to compose yourself and say something.

“Excuse me” eyebrows bouncing up and down like a chulo’s Buick. “i couldn’t help but noticing that…your seeds are showing”

And she’s yours! Riding shotgun in your shopping cart…oh it’s on and poppin!

Now it’s nearing midnight on a weekday, and you, grown, munchin on some cereal like the kid you’d love to be again, filled with the ill nostalgia as you nibble on the spoiling body of your Sweet.  Everything else is gone.  It’s just you and Strawberry, backstroking in a bowl of tinted almond milk.  Momma always told you not to play with your food.  But you not thinkin ‘bout Momma right now.  You remembering the good times.  Eyes meeting through the pineapple leaves hating like overzealous defenders. A fairytale intro to a supermarket tryst for the history books.

And here ya’ll are.  Together.  You know this is it.  You know this is goodbye.  A reality too bitter to swallow, so you hold on to each passing second as if your obstinate patience could somehow alter the natural order of things.  But as you watch your baby drowning in that milk, you realize the time has come, that your time together will always be your time together and no one can take that from you.  Just that it will never again be what it was–an understanding that don’t ease no pain.  So you deny it even now, in the twilight of your affair, and comfort yourself by insisting:

Rotting strawberries taste better than no strawberries at all.

-amari

-amari

Oh, but if only i could steal a little more than the 4.7 seconds she affords me for greetings each morning!

“Hey, how you feelin today, sister?”

i’m fine, thanx.

“Gooooood.”

Smiling, always, in a neighborly way, fulfilling her neighborly duty and moving on to the day’s next task.  No pause in her stride.  No extended eye contact.  The whole exchange, warm, but…well, not exactly the temperature i’d like.

She doesn’t even know my name.  She: Kimberly.  Her favorite flowers are Marigolds, which she grows on her porch.  And Nefertiti better go somewhere if Kim decides to tuck one into her auburn-tinged hair.  Gliding, as she does, down the street like a Spike Lee scene—long, denim skirts perched on slim waist—leaving frankincense and desire in her wake.  A smile that lights up the whole block like springtime.

Kimberly, from which fruit stand do you pick your smiles?  i wanna bring them to you throughout the day!

But i can’t.  Because she got a man…if you can even call him that.

Hold on now, i ain’t hating.  i’m just observing.  This dude don’t know nothing about how to treat a lady, man.  He show up when he want, honkin his horn all loud for her to come out.  Always in a hurry, as if he don’t realize that there is no greater place to be than simply in her presence!  i mean, this dude don’t even walk her to the door at night.  Sometimes he don’t even wait for her to get inside before he pull off!  You see what i’m saying?

Then, of course, there’s the times he stays.

She never smiles the mornings after they’re together.

It’s the same thing every time.  Argue.Scream.Fight.Curse.Silence.  He’s sorry, i bet he says.  Kim, don’t believe it.  He’ll say the same thing tomorrow.  A few giggles later, two shapes meet in the window, drawn towards each other like a moth against better judgment.  The lamp extinguishes.  And i stay up.  i listen.  i wait for a knock on my door; for the chance to give to her what i’ve had for her all this time.

She will come.

But not tonight.  Instead, i hear them, together, dancing to different rhythms that culminate in a silent awe of disappointment that echoes through the neighborhood like an air ball at the buzzer.

He leaves.  Always before sunrise, as if she were the other woman or something.  To me, she is the only woman.  This is why i wait up with her.  And we cry together, from across the street.

i hate the following mornings, when she takes her hurt out on me; when she further  limits the limited time i have to feel her grace and show her beauty.  She forgets it was me who comforted her.  She forgets that in me, for her, there is nothing but the purest love capable of healing the bitterest pain shaped bearable by the unrelenting hammer of repetition.  How could she not recognize it?

But i suppose if a woman never had a man treat her right, she don’t know the difference.

So i greet her each morning as she passes.  4.7 seconds to give her the affection she does not yet know exists; 4.7 seconds to give her what could be extended over a lifetime, if only she would only allow me.

-amari

i was mesmerized as i stood there watching her perched perfectly in the 5^th story windowsill.   It wasn’t as late as the darkness would suggest.  The clouds had decided to chill for a while after hurling their contents onto the city like they was mad at the concrete or something, a summertime thunderstorm to feed the evening’s humidity.

More than alone, she was lonely, but comfortable in her solitude, carelessly or care-freely kissing a cancer stick and blowing carbon monoxide into the night.  Occasionally, she checked over her shoulder with a desolation, a familiarity that only experience could cultivate.  No expectations.  Just habit.  Caramel in a spaghetti-strapped tank top.  Long, black hair thrown in any direction away from her neck, which had to hold the scent of Canal Street perfume, sweat, and disappointment.

A solitary silhouette in a city full of shadows.

It all looked like a postcard.  One of them artsy kind they sell in the Village for $6.50 with corny titles like “Evening Blossom” or “Forlorn Flame.”  Mesmerized was me.  Feeling stupid, staring at a stranger who i could barely see.

And all i could ask myself was, “people still smoke cigarettes?”

-amari

-amari

amerikan democracy has been the most effective tool for political disempowerment ever developed.  Originated in the caves of Europe, fostered in the theiving barbarities of Greece and Rome, and exported across seas to  stolen land fertilized in blood and tilled by kidnapped souls, this absurdity of a social-political system was never meant to serve anyone other than a limited group of spiritless bones, those who call themselves human yet habitually fail to exhibit even one of the traits that defines the term.

When combined with an economic system that rewards she or he whose greed is most insatiable and that childish religion of slaves, amerikan democracy succeeds in turning even a most virile people into a worthless band of impotents, not only incapable of defending their own existence, but voluntarily submitting themselves to the sadistic torture of the enemy.

amerikan democracy also projects a fabricated history, organized as a linear movement of constant improvement.  “Today is better than yesterday and tomorrow, better than today.”  So using explicit chattel slavery as the starting point, everything looks better.  Consistent with the “lesser of two evils” philosophy, our assessment of a situation is always comparative. “We’ve come so far.”  While it’s true that bird droppings may be preferable to dog excrement, it’s still shit.

What exactly does “coming so far” mean?  Does it mean we have arrived at a point where we no longer struggle with ourselves about our full submission to an oppressive order?  Does it mean we have grown comfortable with the requirements of self-mutilation placed upon us by a society that hates our very thought?  Does “coming so far” mean that we willingly offer ourselves up to the fiendish whims of a lesser group (i dare not say people)?

Why have we, in my short life-time, sat back and watched, with eerie consistency, acts of police terrorism so gruesome as to rival any mid-20th century Texas barbecue and continuously invented some justification as to why so-and-so deserved it, or why we couldn’t do anything about it?  We have blamed everyone except the disgraceful duppies responsible, soul-less maggots sent to the Earth knowing only one purpose: destruction.  Rodney King. Amadou Diallo. Abner Louima. Sean Bell. Oscar Grant.  Names we’ve never known.

i ask, what kind of people, so intent on becoming something they can never be, sacrifices their children in pursuit of an apparition?

i’m hesitant to answer.

Oh, we have come so far. So far from the days when we valued ourselves enough to protect each other, clear as to what our best intentions were and courageous enough to pursue them; so far from when we understood Life as the ultimate purpose of existence; when we would rather die than subject ourselves to conditions calculated to murder our soul, because we knew physical death was merely a transition, but spiritual death was obliteration, erasure from the cosmos.  This here damn sure ain’t living.  We have come so far.

When cancer eats at the body, the only solution is to remove the cancer.  There is no negotiation, no compromise.  Because the nature of the two makes their co-existence impossible.

What will it take for us to finally remove the cancerous pig?

and just in case you weren’t yet convinced,

-amari