here is part of a poem i wrote for one of my collections. it was written in massachusetts where i spent most of my adult years.
it is entitled "friends".
i sat at the place where you
work in the mornings,
waiting -- really, just daydreaming, humming to myself --
indolent or having only half the
rationale
you did ... being employed there. i wasn’t buying anything
much. you waited on tables and at the counter ...
used to my presence by the window.
a placemat, the crockery on
my table, silverware,
woven like the painting that you said
you liked ... me married to a scenery three
hundred miles away on a flat-topped
mountain
near the grand canyon.
i thought i heard you whistle
and turned around the
other day. you were not there --
leaving me to stare blankly at my tea.
the road waving in a liquid blue line
on the inside of the cup.
tomorrow you promised to
come back, filling your
work hours behind the
counter -- where you laughed
with your other friends, planning dinners and
holidays off at home:
sleeping, reading your books.
and you still see things
as if they are not the
dull flow of whatever you must have
planned for the week.
nice to hear from you.
write when you can.
i might drop by when i’m in town
and see if you’re still there.
here is my address ...
call
if you can.
[excerpted from "friends" from "Apple Cider" copyright
c Zara Brooks-Watson, 1993. if you like this poem
and the others i will post here, there will be a cd coming out sometime ($10
which includes postage in the US and Canada) with more poems, nice graphics,
my own photography and original music compositions as well. you can check
this link once in a while for updates. it will be designed to be a really
nice generic type gift with about one hundred pages of graphics, poetry &
MP3 audio with a choice of 3 formats to suit your PC: small splash page, full
screen for large monitors & an Explorer autoplay version which is for lower
capacity PCs.
The poem above was written in the Trident Cafe on Newbury Street in Boston where i used to panhandle seven days a week until the last bus ran down Massachusetts Avenue around midnight or slightly before that. i was just dreaming about traveling back to Arizona or California and some warmth. Boston is very cold in the winter and our shelter sometimes did not have blankets or sheets. so when you were cold or wet from the snow or sleet, you just had to curl up on a cold plastic-covered mattress in your coat. the idea of a hot sun was extremely appealing.
eventually i panhandled enough money to get a bus ticket to California where i stayed in the shelters there and for a month had my own room in a cheap hotel, the mighty St. Francis near Hollywood and Vine. i went back to Boston to panhandle during the summers.
my first novel, Jitter Bug is on Amazon Kindle now for the amazing price of .99 so that i can get some readers and reviews - and have some fun with it. it is also presently being submitted for publishing, as well. below is a synopsis of the book and a download link to the first few chapters will be up soon.
JUST A CLUE TO JITTER BUG - In 1950, a dashing, quiet young Italian-American tailor/farmer (Vincente Bonaventura) leaves the dark, deep cypress swamps near Caddo Lake, N. Louisiana to seek his fortune as a fancy-dressing Fuller Brush man. Raising his infant daughter, Julietta, competently but alone, after his wife’s death from Cholera, he takes the baby with him on a successful door-to-door sales circuit from Charlottesville to Philadelphia to Boston.
On Vince’s way to Virginia, a sneaky but treasured, old childhood “friend” (Bannister Willis) from Louisiana (caught in the trap of a family drug cartel since his sharecropping childhood survival from polio) stashes 5 kilos of uncut cocaine in his trunk at a gas station in the backwaters of Tennessee in a desperate attempt to run from the Feds. Gasoline stations of the era down south were famous for their smuggling and illegal activity. Jitter Bug describes, as a literary thread throughout the story, early cocaine laws in America and interesting history about 1950’s America such as the fact that there were not many highways -- thus not many traffic cops and one had to drive two lane rural routes such as Route 66 to drive cross-country -- without street lights. In Philadelphia, good-natured Vince runs into a family of bullies (the Scotts - a renegade part of the Willis drug cartel), the youngest of whom steals his sample bag and beats him bloody. The Scotts show no mercy, and, in the end, are not given any.
Antagonized constantly by the cartel in Boston, Vince runs away again, escaping with his daughter and rescued pug puppy (Romeo) to the wild mesas of Monterrey, Mexico to hide out when he finds out he is being falsely accused of murdering his assailant in Atlantic City. He accidentally runs into the Chief of Police through his now precocious eight-year-old daughter. Emilio García, the Police Chief, deputizes him in a sweep of compassion and sends him back to Atlantic City to prove his innocence, keeping Julietta and Romeo safe in his own home. If safety can include his prankish, pot-smoking daughter, Jacinta. The plot thickens with Vincente (disguised with a ton of forged papers and false license plates as “Roberto Garcia”) being trailed by Theodora Scott when he returns to Atlantic City.
He is protected and helped in his efforts to clear himself by the Jacksons, a black family running a fish-fry restaurant (Eva’s) in the black community. Theodora is the long-suffering mother of the teenage bully (Davey Scott). Dolores Jackson, the pretty petite young daughter of Eva, had attempted to kill Scott, Sr. for dealing heroin to her community previously. Theodora and the Coast Guard follow Vince and the Jackson shrimp boat, finding Davey alive and living in an old semi-abandoned cabin on a mostly uninhabited island near Wildwood on the Jersey shore. Scott, Sr., and one of his friends, Earl Small are also there.
The Scotts kick up some dust again, in a plea bargaining attempt, by accusing Vince of willingly carrying cocaine for Bannister Willis (Vince’s old friend -- who is revealed as a Princeton chemistry professor) to Yale, Princeton and the New York City intelligentsia. In other words, they accuse him of being part of their drug cartel -- which he isn’t. the midi song on this page, by the way, is an original composed just for this site . . . but, enough for now, more
poems & more of the story later . . .
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Updated: August, 2013.
