|
In response to a student at San Francisco County Jail setting an assignment to see whether I walked my talk about writing from the “underneath” of experience. On a torn off piece of paper, handed to me when I passed his desk, was written in meticulous handwriting: “From your deeper self, what is your incentive to help others write about what is underneath?”
|
|
I too am America, wrote Langston Hughes
Yes, says Matthew who insists on my calling him Mr. Matthew though his real name isn’t Matthew With a fake name and no ID card He lives in the shadows where matter does not matter Except the matter that allows him to eat sometimes And shut off the pain always Men locked up behind bars Invisible anti-matter Not part of society they are told As if society is the home that never was The parents who never were Throwing them out on the street Where they would cease to matter Or be matter Yes, says Mr. Matthew who really isn’t We are part of corporate America The bodies that feed the prison industry But he says it too quickly like he heard it somewhere And I can see that he believes that he is not matter Because he does not matter A disposable commodity with no disposable income Mr. Matthew and José and Daniel and Ravi Make sure they matter Rob steal rape kill No one’s going to forget me Catch me if you can I’m only in for a parole violation Ravi tells me as if he does matter And he does, whether he is lying or not He wants to matter to me And that makes me matter Daniel says he robs for the thrill of getting away with it Being smarter than, like my father too Who taught me to play chess and when I started winning Stopped playing with me and went on to steal from my mother Breaking in through a window Collecting the jewelry he had given her The wedding ring she no longer wore The gold band with six birthstones of their children The seventh never added Because my sister did not matter Any more than we did By then not worth the jeweler’s fee When I met my father’s family And found out who he was He disappeared around the corner Just like my students. I knew he was matter But not Jewish matter A shock considering how anti-Semitic he was I used to think we were one My sisters and brothers and I As if all our stories were the same I felt like I did not matter In the matter that was them By separating from their stories And weaving together the strands of my own I suddenly see I matter I am not just part of the mix The way my students feel Skulking along Dolores Park or the Tenderloin Unseen untended unknown I was not matter When I peed at a bus stop at thirteen Standing fully clothed I had to go and there was nowhere to go The bystanders did not blink or stare I was a wisp of air Floating past their frozen cheeks Between Glasgow’s sandstone buildings Black from soot Inside the two-story house Where my sister hung from the window a painting of a man screaming help, face outwards And I sat in the bathroom and scratched my arm To feel I could feel My father put his hands around my neck Being caught in the air even by my neck Was a relief as we floated from place to place Swimming in a gray sea of invisibility Later in a starched white hospital bed Out the window the bland green hills of Surrey On one side the stone-laden cemetery The other a brick-walled mental hospital It’ll be one or the other The women in the ward and I laughed As if it did not matter While we fought to keep our matter Later still when it should have mattered And it did My mother said Don’t call me Mom When I ran into her at a movie theater and said Hi …! It did not matter that I was happy to see her I had not seen her for a while And forgot in the slip of an instant That she did not matter Or it would not have mattered Except that she was my mother So of course it did matter Even if she was empty air Looking like she was matter Now driving by and seeing Ed Or is it Fred or Tomás With his street face on And a new beard I cannot recognize him His bone structure is the same As when I saw him in class But his expression so different Selling fake dope Risking his life Because he has so little of it left Never feeling he was or did matter Got a dollar? A smile to get the fee And then slinking off Selling the handouts handed out From have to have not Shoes or a take-out dinner or can of Coke Daniel tells me he runs around the corner And exchanges it for dope But now that he feels he matters Because he has woven together The strands of his own story The people who give to him matter They matter he matters I matter No matter which way it goes It matters, and it does |