Sometimes Unfinished Music

Sometimes I am asked to clarify my position
and
I say I’m equidistant to roil and root.

Sometimes I am asked to qualify what I mean
and
I say this hand is love and this hand is hate.

Sometimes I wonder what all of this means
and
I say to myself: I didn’t ask to be put on this ride but I’m going to have to ride it out.

Sometimes I rail
and
Sometimes I sleep through it all

Sometimes I think in English
and
Sometimes I think in Spanish

and …

In this way I moved ever so much closer to where I thought I needed to be. What I needed to do to regain some balance in my life.

I turned on my tuneage.

I listened to John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s Unfinished Music Series Volumes 1-3, all three records put me in the mood to do something drastic.

Especially after reading about the making of the records — now that I was weighed down with the knowledge that the heartbeats I kept hearing throughout the latter two records were the heartbeats of their dead baby.

By the time I came to the song “John & Yoko” on Unfinished Music 3, with the repeated and incessant cries of “John,” “Yoko,” and the heaving palpitations of the dead baby’s heart I started throwing books in the fireplace. I couldn’t take it.

I left the apartment and went to O’Hara’s — the Irish pub down the street on the corner of South Miami Ave and 26th Street — it was half empty and dark just the way I enjoyed it. I chose the end most stool by the rarely used back entrance, certain that I’d get some writing done.

No one would want to sit near a television with a screen saver on it, all the action was near the front where the University of Miami football game was blaring.

I ordered the Reuben Egg Rolls — not exactly the first dish one thinks of when one is thinking about Irish pub food.

That is how I got to this very point.

“If people where given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”

— Taylor Branch, to Isabel Wilkerson / Caste: The Origins of our Discontents