11.

Guess What! I have a new friend named Christine, and she let me join an awesome email poetry group called the sweatshoppe. So I read their stuff and it was good. Then I wrote something to contribute. Hopefully I keep up with it. Even if it’s no good, at least it’s making me write something and it’s making my brain uncomfortable (which is good – it will get smarter and faster). Here’s my first contribution:

Tybee Island Jimmy C

This was real.
By my saying that you already doubt.
You don’t want there to be
things like this in your world:
long-fingered, crack-nailed, hissing and toothy,
dirty.

Unclean. Not, as you first think, soiled.
Soil is a hearty hand-made bread.
Soil is where you tuck in the crocus bulbs,
is what produces the grass that cools
your hot and blistered feet.

He is dirty.
Only smoke animates his limbs.
He covers it with expensive leather and pressed cotton.
Fancy.
Designer eyeware – the smooth molded plastic
as good as ebony trim
for that sense of refinement.

My story sounds like lies even to me.
These are the phrases that do it:
seriously,
I kid you not,
really,
so,
very,
super extremely totally.

But here are the facts.
He knew my name without my telling him.
He drank enough tequila to tip two men his size,
but did not even slur his speech.
He spoke a language I could not recognize.
He was angry.

He said I was a child of God.
He touched my hair and
I felt his cavern of loss.

He said, “I am not the Devil. But I’m the closest thing to him.”

Outside the beach is littered with
rum bottles, cigarettes.
The whole island rimmed with sharks,
(go fishing and their babies are all you will catch -
they are taught forearms, teeth instead of a fist,
fins at the elbow, skin that rubs yours bare)
could be seen as something very low,
very bottom. But it will never be close to that word-
the word I’d use to describe him
if only I believed it would not discredit me.

I run into the sand, fall, scrape my knee,
see the perfection in all those tiny crystals
sticking to my thick blood.

I thank someone. I thank something.

-J’et

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