Month: Jan 2021

Teenage

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

Teenage dreams were purple, I wore blue and saw red when it got to me. Temper the beast with green, and watch it grow on the other side of the grass I inhaled. Roll without it. Like luck. Washed out. Like denim. Once or twice. Leaves and lies.

Teenage love was letters sent to her mother’s address, with words that spied on her thoughts. She thought. And she’d reply in kind and cursive, signed with a four letter promise of peace and hair grease.

Teenage fears were dying young without knowing that I ever was. I stole and ran, got caught once. A cast hand was clutched by desperation. Who writes poetry for a mute heart? If they didn’t kill me in Harlesden then it wasn’t my time.

Teenage hope was a prayer and a song to quell an asthmatic larynx and shoot hoops to high school glory. It was trying to master lessons of speech therapy and fulfill the prophecy of a Physio. A narrow Queen’s Park corridor was a palace of practice to double dribble and carry my fate quietly.

Lens

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

An Igbo couple in Lagos, 1955, reads the caption. I still find myself in contemplation of the fact that once upon a time most lives lived were untold or rather undocumented. And it didn’t matter. Your world was a village. A town. Maybe the expanse of a city. And that’s all the world that might have known of you. The people you encountered. Perhaps they wouldn’t have a picture of you, so you would have only existed in the memories of people till they unremembered you. Cause you still existed in the memory. At least in real time, when you encountered and were accounted. So what can one do with images without a context? Maybe this is one of the chief reasons why fiction as a literary form is enduring and vital. These people caught in the lens of their lifetime could be any number of possibilities of character and story that is invented. It is probable, though I can’t prove it, that every human scenario has already been lived before so that even projections into vacant images to invent narratives are old tales retold in new clothes.

Today

Posted on by Napoleon Dozier

Paul. Medgar. Malcolm. Martin. Bodies of murder. Not all by the bullet. Hazel. Claudette. A day for one. A day for all. Slow death tames the loud and proud. They burried the living and laughed with them as they turned pages and cheeks. Mighty like Jehu. Zealous too. Lap the water with cuped hands and you keep your eyes open so that you don’t fall for the dream that sleeps with your unfaithful heart. That young man you see is that old man that sighs. Been here before. Been new. Been clean. Been old for sure. Been dead. Some die to live. Some love to death. And some tarry with the years they accumulate. Caesar takes his cut but no deals with black messiahs. Hoover up the Hamptons. Freddie’s dead as Curtis said. Been here before. Known the soil like they knew soul food. Like cotton. Like candy. Like us. We were sweet. We were lovers. She loved him dearly. Loved us to life. Dreams. That’s what it was. We were ideas. Not fixed. Not defined. We were possibilities for the pulled trigger to decipher. And bullets explore continents with names like Robeson. Evers. X. King. Scott. Colvin…….. ……… ………. ….. ……. ……… ….. …… …… ……. ……. …….. …….. ….. And years blow back to hunt the now before we wake with ideas to fix and define today.