White Men Redux

The 15th Amendment to the Constitution guaranteed the civil equality to black ex-slaves and the GOP has promised to honor their privilege, but the Republicans remain true to the immortal words of Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture, who explained why the party of Lincoln was short on blacks.

“I’ll tell you what the coloreds want. It’s three things: first, a tight pussy; second, loose shoes; and third, a warm place to shit.”

Earl Butz led into that comment by telling the following joke to White House Counsel John Dean and the singer Pat Boone on a flight from the Republican Convention.

"After a horrible forest fire, a baby duck and skunk orphan start a conversation.. all of a sudden, the duck asks the skunk what he looks like. the skunk replies “well, you have webbed feet, feathers, and a bill,…you’re a duck”…the skunk then asks the duck what he looks like,..the duck replies, “well, you’re white, you’re black, and you smell,..guess you’re a Puerto Rican”

White men were angered by Earl Butz’ forced resignation. Insulting the Pope about contraception and telling race jokes in mixed company were protected by the First Amendment or the Freedom of Speech.

Of course being white I never really hear too many white jokes, so a googled ‘fat white guy jokes'. The search came up blank, but I scored big time with ‘white man’ jokes.

Such as;

How do you stop five white guys from raping a white woman? Throw them a golf ball.
How many white girls does it take to screw in a light? None, white girls can’t screw
How many white men does it take to screw in a light bulb? One, white men will screw anything.
What do you call a bunch of white guys sitting on a bench? The NBA
What does a white man do at the club? Pout while all the colored folk are bumpin’ and grindin’ with all of his fine white bitches.
What’s the difference between a white whore and a bitch? The white whore would screw everybody in the room and the bitch would fuck everyone but you.
What’s the flattest surface to iron your jeans on? A white girl’s ass!
Why can't white men jump? They were too busy making racist jokes.
Why did white people own slaves? They were not strong enough to pick cotton – weak bastards.
And lastly what’s 12 inches long and white? Nothing.

That’s bullshit, because the proper response was, is, and will be John ‘Wadd’ Holmes, who was the champion of white cock. The blonde porn legend Seka had sworn that Wadd was the biggest in the industry. His manager had measured a fully-erect penis as 13.5 inches, although many actresses akinned his semi-erect penis to “doing it with a big, soft kind of loofah.”

Is nothing scared?

Only the GOP knows that answer.

MACAM KUMBANG by Peter Nolan Smith

In 1990 I got off the train from Surabaya a little past dawn and headed over to the port of Jakarta to catch the noon ferry to Sumatra. The inter-island ship was a big liner and I was looking forward to a cruise through the Java Sea to the Indian Ocean.

As I neared the dock, a man of indeterminable race approached with a smile. His greeting was in Hebrew to which I responded in Yiddish thanks to my reading the books of Isaac B. Singer.

Sholem Aleykhem." I readjusted the bag on my shoulder. I was traveling light, but also carried a small electric word processor.

"Are you Jewish?" asked the portly man in his thirties.

"No, but I'm the shabbos goy." I had spent the previous year on 47th Street schlepping diamonds between the Ashkenazi and the Hasidim. My commish from the sale of a 5-carat FSI1 diamond bought a round-the-world ticket from Pan Express Travel. Mostly by planes. The Bali to Singapore was by sea and land. My next destination was the West Coast of Sumatra.

"Then you're the closest thing to a Jew in this city." Jakarta was 99% Muslim and this was Ramadan. Not a single food stall was on the pier.

"I like pastrami and don't mix dairy with meat." The Javanese weren't too friendly to Christians and the imams reserved a special vitriol for non-believers like myself. "Some of my best friends are Jewish."

"And I'll be your newest." David Mussery introduced himself as a Syrian Jew running a nightclub called the Pink Panther. "Where are you going?"

"Padang by ferry."

"Have you bought your ticket yet?"

"No."

"I'll send my servant over to the ticket office, while you visit my club. Drinks are free for a Landsmann. It's a fun place. Girls and sailors." "What about Ramadan?" "There is no religion inside the Pink Panther, where Gods fear to enter "

"Sounds irresistable." I liked bars like his. "But I don't want to miss the ferry. There isn't another for three days."

"No worries." He checked his Rolex watch. Business at his bar was either good or the watch was a fake. "I'll get you on the boat."

"Okay, I'll check it out."

"Great, you won't regret it." David grabbed my bag and motioned to follow him down a muddy street.

Jalan Macam Kumbang.

"Macam Kumbang means Panther in Bahasa Indonesian. Are you a journalist?" He pointed to my typewriter.

"No, I'm writing a novel about pornography in LA." I noticed that the sailors on the sidewalk were drinking tuak, a cheap sweet palm wine in violation of Ramadan prohibition of eating or drinksbg anything between dawn and dusk. Their eyes were glazed from the morning's drinking session.

"Shouldn't you be writing that in LA?" It was a logical question.

"Probably, but I wanted to see the world."

"Well, you've come to the right place." David held open the pink door to his bar. "This is the crossroads of the world."

It was barely 8am, but his rundown establishment was filled with sailors from Malaysia, the Philippines, Indian, Africa, and Europe and they were drinking with an assortment of Indonesian women ranging in age from young to very old. The music crackling from the jukebox speakers was loud garage Indonesian rock.

"Dara Puspita doing TANKA AKU. Those girls were big in the 60s."

Several girls danced to the song. Their partners were doing the Twist. Most everyone rank a Bintang Beer, although several Bugis sailors chugged brown liquor from small glasses.

"Palm Whiskey. 40 degree in strength," David explained in a hushed voice. "My customers think it's whiskey."

"After a few I guess they don't care what it is." I sat at the bar and a wrinkled woman chewing betel poured David and me a 'whiskey'. Glancing at its effect on the sailors, I hesitated clinking glasses with my host.

"I know what you're thinking." David laughed aloud. "You meet a strange man in Jakarta and you're thinking I'll slip you a sleeping pill and get robbed."

"The thought crossed my mind." My version had me shanghaied to Sulawesi on a sea pirate prahu.

"I've been running the Pink Panther since 1974. It had been my uncle's place back then. He left it to me. I was the only one who didn't leave for Israel. I went once and came right back. Here I'm me. Back there I was one Jew among millions."

"And you have no trouble with the Muslims." Drinking and dancing were not condoned by strict Islamists.

"As long as I don't throw it in their face, everyone loves the Pink Panther. It's someplace you can come and not be yourself." He raised his glass. "It's good for you."

"Sie gesund." I toasted him and downed my glass. It wasn't bad and I ordered two more. David signaled for a waiter and ordered him to get a second-class ticket to Padang. I handed the man 40,000 rupiah. It was more than a month's wages on Java.

The jukebox switched to the same band performing A GO GO.

I started moving to the music. I like this place. It was rough on the edges and even rougher in the corners. A scary-looking tranny asked me to dance. David waved away the banci.

"Some things are always tref." He snapped his finger and a beautiful young girl emerged from the dance floor. She could have been Miss Teen Indonesia 1990. "Her name is Sandy. She's from Madura. They have a special way about them with men."

In the dim light Sandy looked about 16. She put an arm around my waist and stroked my thigh.
"Sorry, she doesn't speak any English. She's new to the scene." He smiled upon seeing my expression. "Don't look so surprised. Eveything goes at the Pink Panther. So where are you from?"

I didn't tell him Boston, but said New York and added, "I work selling diamonds for an old friend. Manny lets me work six months of the year and the rest I write."

"Diamonds? Maybe I should have slipped you something." David lifted his hands. "Just kidding."

A Javanese version of LOUIE LOUIE dropped onto the jukebox record player. Sandy pulled me onto the dance floor. She was a good dancer and loved a singer called Adnan Othman. When I came back to the bar, David handed me a 2nd class ticket. "My man says no one is in your cabin, so it will be like 1st class."

"Terima kasih."

"So you speak ein bissen Bahasa?"

"Enough to keep from starving." I signaled to the bartender. "Tiga bintang."

"Make it two beers. Sandy doesn't drink. She's a good Muslim girl. Still a virgin too."

"Are there any virgins in here?"

"Just Sandy. She's a friend's daughter. She makes her money from tips. Nothing else. But you can always think about it. That's free."

I spent the next two hours dancing and drinking with David. We discussed Palestine.

"They'll never be peace there, until Israel accepts that it stole the land."

"They'll never do that."

"They'll never say it, but they will think it."

"Thinking it is not as good as saying it." I knew, because I really wanted to kiss Sandy.

"Thinking it is the first step, but we're thousands of miles from Jerusalem. Here's to Peace on Earth."

I bought the bar a round. It cost me $20US. We drank to Meraka or Freedom.

"I love this place, because it has everyone from everywhere. We are all human. If only everyone knew that, the world would be a better place for everyone."

I drank to that and several more of his comments.

A little before noon he tapped his watch.

"Time to go, unless you want to stay." He offered me a job with very little pay. "A sheygutz like you could make a fortune."

"Money and I are distant cousins." I was counting on getting rich in my next life.

"I could teach you the ways of my tribe." David was lonely. I had lived in Hamburg during the winter of 1982. Everyone was a German, but me. I also knew loneliness, but I had a ticket for a ferry.

David accompanied to the port with Sandy. They bid me Selamat Jalaan with their hearts. Sandy cried on cue. I tipped her $20. David asked me to call him, if I passed through town again and the following year I swung by the Pink Panther.

Nothing had changed in the bar.

He was a good Jew, I was a good sheygutz, and Sandy was more indah than ever.

Both are a state of mind.

The Loss of Caul's Vision

On March 4, 2020 after a simple breakfast David, my guide, and I left Kibo Hut on Kilimanjaro to descend to Hurumbo Hut. I turned often to eye Africa's tallest mountain rimmed by hoarfrost. Near a grouping of old volcanic rocks David said, "We can get the Internet here. Maybe even a phone home."

I tried to contect my wives in Thailand without successs and read the Guardian online, while David spoke to his family in Chagga. The Guardian reported how the Coruna Virus was scourging Wuhan, China, Italy, and Iran. The world was a much different place than the one we left eight days ago.

David finished his call and asked, "You know about Covid?"

"Just what I've been reading over the last days."

"And what do you think?" David like many of the guides and porters trusted my eye on the weather.

"That we are in for a hard time, but not today."

Pendaeli, the Park ranger, greeted my arrival at Hurumbo with a broad smile. Basketball tied us tight. He was Lakers. I was Celtics. That night at dinner he whispered, "What do you think about Covids?"

I had been born with the placenta wrapped around my head. The phenomena affected one of 87000 births and the Celts believed the Caul granted the newborn with the gift of sight of the past, present, and future, but I admitted to Pendaeli, "I see nothing."

I hadn't foreseen the death of my longtime friend Dr. Bertoni.

Nor my getting Covid in March.

Nor the closure of the City That Never Slept.

All day I heard the sirens of ambulances speeding the sick to Brooklyn Hospital.

Death and illness.

No laughing matter as the world shrunk day by day, but I hadn't been so sick thanks to my Neanderthal heritage and O blood and Charlotta's D3 treatment.

I stayed home alone.

I spoke to the walls.

They spoke back in languages I refuse to decipher, but I understood they said, "Don't go outside."

I didn't listen.

I was a man of the world trapped in the USA.

I visited Guadacanal, an old punk friend, across the Hudson and saw the wonders of Jersey City. The guitarist never left his house and communicated with his wife in Kansas City and the squirrels in his back yard. He was leaving for the fly-over in the next month.

I wished I could click my heels to be transported over Kansas to Thailand to see my children and grandchildren.

The gift of the Caul was my only power and I remained trapped in Brooklyn.

FDTrump's HQ was on Broadway.

Fatso refused to believe in the pandemic.

Thousands of people died in New York City during May.

Then the ambulances stopped coming in June.

My downstairs neighbor Brigette and I became friends.

Her BF Jacob too.

We traveled to the Catskills.

I lost three more friends.

The numbers were mounting and FDTrump offered voodoo medicine as a cure.

I hate him more and more.

No one visited his Bushwick HQ.

There was no way he would win Brooklyn in 2020.

I wandered a little farther from the 'Hood.

Maine and New Hampshire.

THE BEAUTY OF BALI by Peter Nolan Smith

Back in the 90s I developed an annual routine of working seven days a week at the diamond exchange during the Christmas season. The weekly income and commission from the sales provided enough money for a 5-6 month hiatus in Asia and my yearly bonus paid for the around-the-world flight. Once Richie Boy and his father finished their January vacations, I quit 47th Street for the winter and bought a round-the-world ticket from Pan Express Travel Agency. Two weeks after January 1, 1993 I bid Richie Boy and his father good-bye for the third time in a row. Snowflakes swirled in front of our window. Richie hugged me and his gruff father offered a mean-spirited Bon Voyage. "Don’t expect your job, when you get back." Manny was serious about this warning. To him there was work and little else. "I won’t be back soon." February was dead in the Diamond District. March and April were also zombie months for diamonds, although young people got married in the summer and no one sold more wedding bands than me. "I’ll come see you." Richie Boy was a die-hard surfer. The surf of Bali was world-class. The waves in Ulu Watu broke double overhead in the winter. They were out of my league, but Richie Boy could handle the swell. "Maybe in March." "He’s going nowhere." Manny expected his son to uphold his fanatical work ethic. It was a lost cause. Richie Boy liked life. “Manny, sie gesund.” I wished him well. “You take care of yourself.” The old man got up from his desk. He paid my salary, and commissions,then and pressed a hundred dollar bill in my hand. "Have a few drinks on me." "See you in six months." I was leaving New York in the morning. The flight from NY to Bali took about 30 hours. A cab from Denpasar drove me up into the mountains. My parents had Poste Restante Ubud as my address. Ubud was a simple market town set in the verdant rice paddies. I lived in a simple house overlooking a ravine. Villagers bathed in the stream in the evening. The sun set between two distant volcanoes. The music of the Legong band warbled in the air filled with dragon flies. The small village offered backpackers a chance to discover hidden Bali with the comforts of cold beer and nasi goreng. The town was family friendly and many of tourists stayed at the hotel up the path from my house. It had a swimming pool and served a tasty Gado Gado. One couple from the North Shore of Boston were vacationing with their two teenaged kids. I came from the South Shore. The husband and I discussed the Red Sox’s chance for winning the World Series. The wife was into traditional dancing. Her daughter was studying ballet and looked like a dancing girl from a De Mayeur painting. Her name was Dawn or Kakatu in Bahasa Indonesian. The long-haired brunette stole peeks at me lounging by the pool, whenever her parents weren’t watching her every move. I had a good idea what she was thinking and avoided her, for young girls are big trouble for men in their early 40s. One night I attended a dance performance of the Legong girls at the temple. Their lithe movements to the acoustic music was a pleasure to the eye. The candle-lit courtyard was easily to mistake for the 18th century, if I ignored the rumble of traffic beyond the red brick walls. After the end of the show I gave the venerable teacher $5 or 10,000 rupiah, which was enough to buy her young performers a meal at the market. She thanked my gift and lifted her eyes to the flickering streetlights. They wavered with the dying surge of distant electricity and then the village was plunged into a primeval darkness. Outages were common occurrences in Indonesia and I flicked on my flashlight. Dawn stood in front of me. "Hi." She wore a red shirt without a bra. "Where are your parents?" I walked out of the temple. Kerosene lamps illuminated the small warungs. Car headlights lit the road and I yanked Dawn out of the way. "They went to the hotel before me." She pushed back her long brown hair. "Then I guess I have to walk you home. There were no taxis in Ubud, at least none that could navigate the narrow footpaths through the rice fields. "You're not scared of the dark, are you?" "Not with you with me." She reached out to hold my hand. "Just follow me." I skirted her grasp and proceeded down a small lane between several Balinese family compounds. The high walls created a narrow chasm leading to the open rice paddies. The hotel lay across the darkened fields and I felt a little like Orpheus leading his wife from Hades, except Dawn was no Eurydice and Bali was more heaven than hell. "Can we stop for a second?" Dawn's eyes shone with the rising moon. "I want to look at the stars. They don't have so many stars where I live." "Okay." I sat in a rice shack. Dawn sat next to me. Thousands of fireflies hovered over the golden husks of rice. Overhead the cosmos glowed in stellar streak across the equatorial night. Dawn lay down on the bamboo pallet. The stars painted her skin silver. "Do you think I'm beautiful?" She touched my thigh with a trebling hand. "Anyone your age is beautiful to a man my age." I thought about LOLITA and DEATH IN VENICE. My resolve weakened under the caress of her fingertips and then cracked with a kiss tasting of bubble gum. "How old are you?" I sidled to the edge of the rice hut. “15, but my friends say I look older.” She shimmered with forbidden youth. "You do look a little older." I had hoped 18. I had hoped wrong. "Let’s go. Your parents must be worried." "Can't we stay a little longer?" She unbuttoned her shirt. "No." I stood on the path. The rising moon showed the way.We walked toward her hotel. I had not crossed the bounds of decency.

"You don’t know what you’ll be missing." She pouted with the failure of seduction.

"Oh, yes, I do." I had been fifteen before.

Dawn's mother waited anxiously at the hotel entrance. Worry hardly described her expression and I said firmly, "Madam, I brought back your daughter intact."

"I’m not intact." Dawn pouted with vengeance. "I'm not a virgin. I'm a woman."

"Young girl, get to your room." Her mother nodded her thanks and the next day the family had decamped from Ubud.

I resumed my life without any threat from Dawn, but I remembered her lying in the bamboo hut wearing only starlight.

I regretted telling her 'no', knowing that I would have been wrong to say yes', but then it was only one regret of many and at forty I had plenty of chances left to regret doing the right thing instead of the wrong. Beauty was all around me in Bali.

Chinatown Dream

My cousin Sharon Mitchell's recent photo from San Francisco inspired a marvelous dream last night.

I was dressed as an officer and was aggressed by millenniums at a bar.

"If it were not for people like me you wouldn't be here now."

My uniform was from the War on Drugs. The other side.

I walked away without incident and two lesbians asked if I wanted to go to a club in Chinatown.

"It's not straight or vanilla."

"Sure."

It was music to my ears and I slung on my leather jacket.

There was no noise on the street, but the lights and muffled music assured this place was it.

The door person saluted me for having fought the DEA for decades.

We went inside and my companion abandoned me to hit a room of bearish women and frail waifs.

I silently wished them good luck.

The nameless club melanged into an orgy disco, a Lausida drug den, and every other den of inequity across the centuries was out of control.

Everything was go.

I danced a little and retreated to a strangely quiet room.

I sat and a agelessly beautiful trans joined me.

Their skin tight jeans had been cut at the crotch to reveal their penis and they pulled out a bottle of syringes.

"My name's Ava. This is the Nod Room. Wanna get busy with me."

"I only wish I could " For medical resaon I was straight.

"I really like getting in the ass and eject heroin while you're cumming in my hole."

Fifteen years ago I would have been sold by the offer.

"Sorry, Ava, I got to go.

The flesh was too weak against this temptation.

I left Ava and went to bar, hanging my jacket over a chair.

There was no sign of the two women.

I was happy until I discovered someone had stolen my leather jacket.

I trawled the club until I found an abandoned Armani leather.

It was a little large, but better than mine.

Ava caught me at the door.

"Last chance."

"Maybe next time."

Ava kissed me on the lips.

Wake up the sell of her perfume in the air.

It had been real.

THe chinatown dream.

JETS OVERHEAD by Peter Nolan Smith

Falmouth Foresides was a quiet neighborhood in the 50s. Ships blew their horns leaving Portland Harbor and channel buoys tolled out their passing wake. At night I listened to the Celtics game on a small transistor radio from Japan.

I set the volume to almost silence.

My older brother was a light sleeper.

My mother worried about my hearing and I pulled the earphone out of my ear before falling asleep to my brother's breathing.

None of this coastal quietude preparation me for our move in the summer of 1960 to a suburb south of Boston. The neighborhood itself was peaceful, however our split-level ranch house lay directly beneath the landing pattern for Logan airport. The jets powered down their engines sixty seconds apart, as if Boston was under attack from a bombing run.

I was eight.

Our first night in the house I lay in bed crying. My brother was dead asleep. Sobs and planes didn't disturb him, only the hoarse voice of Johnny Most calling the Celtics and they weren't playing this time of year.

Downstairs adults were laughing in the kitchen. My parents were having a house-warming party for the neighbors. Cocktails were popular in the suburbs. Their drunken conversation grew louder with each overflight and then subsided with the planes passing our house.

I covered my face with a pillow.

My Uncle Jack entered the darkened bedroom and sat on my bed.

"I thought I heard crying." Uncle Jack was the youngest of my uncles. "What the problem?"

"The planes." I whispered, as a set of jet engines whined down its speed.

"The planes." He laughed with relief. "Those planes are bringing people home from trips far away. Soldiers, sailors, mothers, fathers, and children. They're a good thing."

"But they're loud." Maybe the fireworks for the 4th of July were louder.

"Yeah, I guess you're right." Jack followed the plane with his eyes. His house was up the street. He shrugged a shoulder. "Believe me you'll get used to it. My kids did."

"They did?" Uncle Jack had three sons about my age. We were to attend the same school. They were the same as me.

"Yeah, you can get used to most everything." Jack said like he was telling a lie. "Well,not everything. I ever tell you about the time I was in the Chosin Reservoir."

"No." Uncle Jack had been a Marine lieutenant during that war. Comic books glorified these battles. He had won several medals for bravery. Everyone in my family called him a hero.

"I marched through that frozen hell with my troops. We started out two-hundred strong, but day by day we lost friends. I can remember their names. Their faces. The Chinese blowing their bugles. You want to talk about noise. Those bugles were loud and then we'd kill the men blowing them before anyone with a weapon. We mowed them down with machine guns, rifles, hand grenades, and rocks. Then it was over. The commies were either dead or so exhausted that they couldn't even breathe. Quiet. Just like now. Then there was a gasp. Not one, but by all the living, wounded, and dying. Some crying too, but none of it loud like that."

Uncle Jack pointed to the approaching roar of a jet. His eyes were wet and he wiped at them with his sleeve.

"Silent like no one was sure what they were, because we were scared. The chinks and us. No one wanted to die anymore. I went to sleep right after that. The only officer left in a command of ten men. I slept like a king surrounded by the dead and wounded. They knew how to cry, but in the end it got quiet. Now you go to sleep too." His voice had authority. Men of that era were knew how to speak like their fathers. He patted my head and then said, "Not an order. Dream if you got them."

It was a strange bed story, which probably should have kept me awake for hours, instead I slept until dawn and Uncle Jack was right. I grew accustomed to the jets that I didn't hear them anymore.

Years later I ran a cross-country track meet in East Boston. My high school against Don Bosco. The course skirted the beach across a channel from Logan. Neptune Road was so loud that the noise rattled loose your fillings.

A few of the opposing track team lived on that dead end street. None of them said that they had ever grown accustomed to the noise.

Not then and not now.

And neither will Uncle Jack to sobs at night.

For him the crying belonged to the dead.

Lazurus In My Blood

Two summers ago in the black night of Brooklyn
I spewed several liters of blood into the bathroom tub.
After wiping the retch from my face
More blood surged from my body.
Something was not right.
Something was very wrong.

I crossed the East River.

Inside the NYU's emergency room.
The staff took one look at my face.
A scrum of nurses, technicians, and doctors sped my body into ICU.
Hands stripped my body nude.

"Sir, can you hear me?" asked a young intern.

Nod.

“You are bleeding to death from the varices in your stomach.”
“Varices?”
“Small fissures. Do you have any family in New York?”
Head shakes from side to side.
“Do you want to be revived?”
“From the dead?”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
An oxygen mask covered my mouth and nose.
“If you have any prayers, say them.”

“Aathegue.”

The Celtic word held no meaning to Christians.
The hiss of gas.
Profopol.
Blackness swarmed my consciousness.
I was dead on the other side of life.
White light.
Nothing, only white.
There was something else.
Eternal nothingness times zero equals zero.
This was deathand I was cool with that.

And then I was back.
Life.
Here.
Pain.
The Here was not my own bed.
This had not been a dream.

I sucked air.
Another patient in the room.
Not breathing.
Never again.

Hospital.
Nurse.
Doctor.
An earnest doctor.

“You were very lucky.
We stopped the bleeding.”
“I like luck.”
“But I have bad news.”
Plenty of bad news.
Cancer, cirrhosis, the looming threat of death.
I was seventy.
Alone in a hospital bed in a city of millions.

Bad news

I was dead not alive.
Straddling eternity.
No fear
I had died before.

Car crashes.
Beatings.
Broken hearts.
Whatever didn’t kill me made me wish it was dead.
This time same.
Why fight?
Why not?

I was released two days later.

My friends saw death in my eyes.
My children in Sri Racha thought I will live forever.
I thought the same.

Once.
Not now.

I had had a good life.
Maine, the South Shore, the East Village, Paris, Thailand, Africa.
Months passed.
Jaundice, weight loss, pain predicted by my last days.
Then a miracle.

Yulemas

An avaiable transplant.
That night I was in the OR.
The room cuts to black.
Clear light.
I know it well. No gods, no heaven, no hell.

Nowhere. Nothing. No one. The white light of death.
I was gone again.
My body on a chopping block.
Parts scattered.
Like a beef slaughtereed in Smithfield Market.
Then I come back to life.

Antiseptic smell.
Clean sheets
The machines beep.
None followed a Max Roach beat.

A nurse gave me water
It tastes of nothing.

This was not my body.
A black scar marks the execution of the old me.

I am alive.
Lazurus the Second.
Bracketed by pain.
But alive with another soul within me. Paula.

Old School Lazurus II.
Back from the white profopol eternity extinct.

No Maine, no South Shore, no New York, no Paris, nor Thailand.
No permanent record.
Tabula Rasa.
Not a trace.

I am Lazurus II and Paula.
With wicked scars.
Photos reveal the massitude of my transition.
I was never dead before my time.
Only dead to the time before now.

Now under a gray winter sky o’er Brooklyn.
Time eternal, because there is no time in nothingness.
Only Nothing and Lazurus II and Paula.
We are not too lonely together.

Living forever again.
Remember from whence thee came.
Ashes.

Foto by Shannon Greer