Rules Of Engagement
By the time you pass that corner, you have been so studiously avoiding everybody's street business that you are electrified by the calling of your name and the implied kindness of that declaration in that it says you exist in a way that is not a threat to others and that in fact he really is glad to see you, this despite or partly because you have hated each other for brief periods over the past seven or eight years (as love demands.)
You always knew you had no business asserting your idea of rightness into a system that in large part is disdainful of your presence but to let yourself be scavenged seemed right enough and in the end it turns out nobody took anywhere near as much as they gave.
The childish exhilaration of a (jailhouse) kid who is now a man by law and for so many years lashed out at the world at large for holding him back from this rightful position (king of a corner for a day?), is the part that gets me.
This simple thing he is telling me, him on the corner, me in my idling truck, as the cars line up behind me, is an admission of a shared lifetime lived out over a few lazy afternoons spent lollygagging about town with him and his cousins. I can't hold up traffic too long, it's not allowed. I want to get out and jump up and down with giddy abandon, and tell him just how "neat" is this thing he is telling me which in and of itself is nothing, nothing at all. But I'm way too cool for that, and besides, that would also be a thing that's not allowed.
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By the time you pass that corner, you have been so studiously avoiding everybody's street business that you are electrified by the calling of your name and the implied kindness of that declaration in that it says you exist in a way that is not a threat to others and that in fact he really is glad to see you, this despite or partly because you have hated each other for brief periods over the past seven or eight years (as love demands.)
You always knew you had no business asserting your idea of rightness into a system that in large part is disdainful of your presence but to let yourself be scavenged seemed right enough and in the end it turns out nobody took anywhere near as much as they gave.
The childish exhilaration of a (jailhouse) kid who is now a man by law and for so many years lashed out at the world at large for holding him back from this rightful position (king of a corner for a day?), is the part that gets me.
This simple thing he is telling me, him on the corner, me in my idling truck, as the cars line up behind me, is an admission of a shared lifetime lived out over a few lazy afternoons spent lollygagging about town with him and his cousins. I can't hold up traffic too long, it's not allowed. I want to get out and jump up and down with giddy abandon, and tell him just how "neat" is this thing he is telling me which in and of itself is nothing, nothing at all. But I'm way too cool for that, and besides, that would also be a thing that's not allowed.
- jimlouis 3-01-2004 7:39 pm