billdo

The man from the next building who pesters my ex drug addict, ex con neighbors for trite things such as cigarettes and beer and more cigarettes, all one at a time, maybe 5 times throughout the day, and exchanges acoustic guitar songs for BBQ and eats more than anyone, has been asked to find somewhere else to live.


"I have a potty mouth", he says. "Nothing racial or having to do with one's sexuality".


He looks at me and explains, no doubt becuz I am black, that we all share the same colored blood...cut each of us and we all bleed red bla bla bla bla bla.....you know, the standard white overcompensation for having been part and parcell to racial hatred, or the requisite apology for being white and superior and handing out inclusiveness like oranges to slaves. I digress.


He says he just says things, not quite torrets syndrome, but rather a manner of speaking. He'll call you a motherfucker as a term of endearment. He'll call you an asshole like calling a cute kid stinky. He once called a lady sweet pussyhole becuz she offered him a danish. He was thankful to the point of being profuse. He thought he had connected.


So yesterday someone in his building had a visitor named Bill. Our man was introduced to Bill, and later, upon seeing Bill in the courtyard, he blurted out..."Hey Billdo". The man was confused and felt put upon.


Now since our man is not a tennant there and is staying with a friend, he was asked to leave by the building manager. He had been warned several times to curb the way he talked to people. He had also been warned about running around shirtless and leaving peanut shells on the manicured lawn, as well as beer bottles. He had also been asked to move a chair he set in front of the buliding so he could greet anyone with a Led Zepplin tune who passed by or came to visit a tennant.


Come this weekend, our block will be one less heavy. This is sad.I kinda liked the guy. He was genuine...genuinely flawed in several egregious ways, but genuine nonetheless.


The 70 and 80's have passed. The world doesn't reach across the gulf of our lives anymore. The metal bands are gone into middle class memory and responsibility. And the cats who are left standing sing loudly, waiting to be destroyed.Here's to those guys who made the future by chance, not by choice.

One last "Rock On!" Romus Simpson

fretting in the fresh bread

i once wrote in a poem about spain, "silent as the prayer of mice/who worship in the empty dawn kitchen/who fret in the fresh bread and thank god."

         last night my homies called to lament over the lakers' loss to the celtics. earlier i had talked to two of my brothers about the same thing. and another friend had called to scream about the game. later my homegirl called to politic and laugh and hoped to see me soon. and i thought of all the people who move through our lives and the days made of moments that propell us on. maybe it's a green light that allows you to float and never break stride or the fruit punch being exact, beautifully cold, and fragrant. anything that allows us to fit easily.

         sometimes we are lonely or alone, restless and stationary in the late evening.  and through the soundless changes of the city evening the world comes to us. i think of the mice in my poem moving in the early dawn kitchen hoping to survive and finding more than ever hoped for and becoming profuse with praise at the bounty of fresh bread. not the normal crumbs, rinds, and rancid things beneath cabinet ledges, but  something so fundamental and affirming as fresh bread. the woman who baked the bread may be upset when she awakes to find the bread nibbled. she believes it belongs to her. but to the mice god used her to help them live, extended bread and the dawn unimpeeded to eat unhurried (if a mouse can do such a thing) and come to worship in the reeds and shadows of the new day.

              mice are mice. but i subscribe to the ancient egyptian existentialist philosophy that god became all things. so in turn we live in a divine landscape, within and among the mass representation of god. all things being equal, "i believe above the storm every prayer is heard"...."and i believe that someone (some mouse, according to the mice) in the great somewhere hears every word...."

              all this is to say that today i came home in 100 degreeweather. hella hot! and as i exited my car i saw a cat come to the sidewalk and drink from the curb. down the street someone was watering the yard and the runoff reached down the block. the cat drank long and good, eyes closed. i know that thirst from many places. we all do. and even more than all of us, everything does. everything alive that has ever been desperate. welfare mothers with no foodstamps, young fathers paying $4.60 a gallon for gas, parched cats in the fresno summer to trees in a drought going dormant to make it. we all suffer. and we all hope to survive.

              this is about the redefinition of what is divine. when cortez came to the americas, he and his men embarked upon a campaign of murder. one indigenous person who lived in what we call current day arizona recalled that, "they threw down our bodies with no respect for our bodies, and no respect for the ground"