Dear Whosawhatsis,

I would like to write about a few things that have occurred to me that I’ve overlooked.  Or ignored.  The latter is far more likely.

So I’m thinkin’.  There’s quite a few people I don’t communicate with on the sole principle that they’ve gone and pissed off the few people I care about.  Well, some of them have done a little more then pissin’ on absorbent berber.  That’s asides the point.  I don’t talk to them out of the bloody rule in the south that you don’t go buddying up to knuckleheads that have reamed your kinfolk.  

It’s a rough realization knowing that behavior can be likened to sheets of metal pounded in over storm windows during a hurricane.  We do an awful lot to keep our honor intact.  I walk away the instant I feel someone’s looking down their nose at me, or curling their lip in some smarmy gear-up for a ‘verbose bashin’.  

Then I’m partway down the sidewalk with my pride, honor and dignity and I’m struck still by the frozen smile of the maid halfway down the stairs to a stately home.  The homeowner is irate, slinging insults in such a way that they were her embodied frustrations slimed up into little leeches.  Really  no other way to put it, the lady had a bad day and she was flickin’ leeches at the maid holding about fifty pounds of laundry on her way out to figure out how she was going to get the merlot stains out of those 500 thread monstrosities. 

She damn well stood there.  Smiling.  Listening to the ranting, raving, her eyelashes not even fluttering when the sticky bodies of pent up bitterness bounced off her weathered cheeks.  I’m thinking, if I was there, I’d be up those stairs feeding the lady that premium manure she more than likely insists on ordering for her goofy looking porch plants.

But you know what?  I don’t got nothing to lose.

That worker does.  She’s smilin’ because she’s ten times braver then I am.  She’s a hundred times more patient than I.  All she’s got to do is smile, lower her eyes and get into her car that don’t got more then 10k left on it’s sputtering corpse.  Because you know what?  She’s taking that pay check home.  Her kid is going to get lunches at school, her bills are going to get paid and they won’t be eating out of the bean-crock for another week.  

So I’m sitting here and thinkin’ guys .. I’m coming to the conclusion I don’t really know what honor or dignity is.  I don’t know.  

And I’m willing to bet, you don’t either.

In my friendships, it was the union of our mutual griefs and joys that brought tears to our cheeks. Hot, sticky – with rolling breath filling in the fleshy caverns between.

It was cold when I laid beside the numerous pits in the rock floor, my fingers exploring the grooves within. Above me, in this cave, were explosions of wet fauna seeking to lattice downward and veil me into this cave. Here, my fingers bruised and bloody, I feel the women so far back pouring sweat from their temples as basket after basket of rough root or dried corn into paste for substance. In these intricate notches, I wonder when they went to gather the remnants of a days work – do they sweep them to the center of a pit without another thought or do their calloused fingertips gather the grainy discharge to the center of their bone-dry palms.

Rediscovery- the face that so many years was a sewing needle distance from your own, suddenly thrust into a world. I say a world – because I have no right to break it down. It was simply somewhere other, a place that the sun was left to simply skim over the dense fogs and the swollen rain clouds above. 

Some of us, that day would be the most marvelous of natures wonders. For others, like myself, my soul climbs, leaps, flies to the very point of the needle – and with one great big breath – scatters it all, so those young gents and gentlewomen can throw their heads back and see the true stars – dying messages, infant sparkles, the sky so blue that it urges those who would seek more to find that stone of cobalt blue within themselves. The sky, the stars, they do not attempt to reach you to impart a message. They reach towards you to find a comrade, a brother – because as you use the skies to see their extraordinary powers – their abilities see the budding galaxy within us all.

They say being unable to acknowledge insanity is a sign that one is truly insane.

But in the twilight of madness, there must be some sort of acknowledgement. Before the sun sets entirely, can man finally turn to see the shadow that has followed him for so long?

She can’t bear to turn around.

Instead she looks at the knobs of her wrists. Skeletal, the bones are winter trees on an empty skyline. Her fingers do not lay, they crouch. Bruises mottle her skin because she cannot bare to watch herself reach out to grasp what she needs, the very action reminds her of reanimated corpses clawing their way to air they do not need.

Her pores leak shadows, becoming beginnings of inky umbilical cords unfurling away from her body. Soon they will find their way into the moldering bodies of her ancestors, and between them, spark life into dormant genes.

Do you know what Unjust really is?

As much as I want to spin it into being a story of redemption, a collection of therapy sessions – it really is only about grief.

It is a lament of the generational curse, one of which none of us have ever been able to escape.

We die standing, we die in institutions, we die in secrets – hidden away in the many held breaths of those who still survive.

But still we breed.

Because what crawls behind our eyes will always need more.