The Underground Man
Other books by Jasen Sousa
Poetry:
Life, Weather
A Thought and a Tear fir Every Day of the Year
Close Your Eyes and Dream With Me
Almost Forever
A Mosaic of My Mind
17-24: Selected Poems of Jasen Sousa
Humming Eternity
Somewhere Lost
Dampness
Fiction:
Fancy Girl
………..
The Underground Man
by
Jasen Sousa
Editor: Kalimah Mustafa
The Underground Man
Copyright © 2017 by Jasen Sousa
All Rights Reserved
Editing by Kalimah Mustafa
Photographs by Jasen Sousa
All rights reserved under international and Pan-American copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, electronic, mechanical, or by any other means, without written permission of the author.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-2879-6
In Memory
of
Alfred Soccorso
Chalk Dust
I placed my ear on the concrete in a park over a spot
where I lost a lot of blood as a 6-year-old. I closed my eyes
and attempted to find the sounds of a different Somerville
hidden somewhere underneath layers of heart shaped chalk dust.
A tennis ball
makes contact with a broomstick
I turned into a bat.
A tire swing
sounds like an old ship leaving the harbor
every time someone swung it around.
A fireman’s wheel
at the top of a wooden structure
that could take you to anywhere you wanted to travel.
An orange box
in the summer opened by a recreation leader
that contained a treasure of games and fun.
A basketball
that makes a magical sound falling
through a metal single rim.
Skateboards, bicycles, and scooters
that should have been an introduction
to the traffic of adulthood.
The sunset
above me that sank behind houses on Lexington Avenue.
The streetlights
letting me know that an older group of kids
would be coming to the park for a different type of enjoyment.
As I removed my ear from my youth
I yearned for it to be as simple as walking across the street
and playing a game. A childhood I almost forgot
because of the drugs and death
that wrapped themselves around my friends
like the coldest night of their lives.
Hopper
It’s alone
a gentle baby blue bicycle
chained to a “No Parking Street Cleaning” sign
with a missing front wheel
and a seat that has been worn down
so much that the fibers are sticking up
like hair on cold skin.
It’s alone
a book left halfway open text down
somewhere on a Boston bench
surrounded by peeling Green Monstah
paint staring down between
shifting planks at finger nails, nip bottles,
and grasshoppers.
It’s alone
in a room no one will ever enter
a cigar box filled with passionate
letters sealed in stamped envelopes
never to be read by the one
they were intended for.
It’s alone
in a subway tunnel on
an early Saturday morning. A translucent image
appears in a tinted window of a broken
down train while others
continue on to their destinations.
Disconnect
Consecutive days, a constant spitting
in the sky that doesn’t allow me to open my eyes
completely. I have viewed the splendidness and sliminess
of the city through puddles littered
with natural and human litter.
Routine continues, "have to be”
at places that cause knots in my stomach like
old sneaker laces. Stuck, like spots on the sidewalk. Stuck
to the bills and the poor souls who mail them out. I write
letters to my neighborhood friend
in the Billerica House of Corrections and wonder
as I lick the envelope
who is more free?
Wasted potential,