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Ode to 9th & O NW You hundred-year-old bastion of merriment You crumbling icon You hollow walls & sacrosanct floors You kitchen where rice burned & whiskey spilled You wondrous accident You ephemeral cacophony You first taste of adulthood You crumbled piece of adulthood You omnipresent laughter You roommate shuffleboard You millennial experiment You eye of the gentrified storm You Duke Ellington in a world full of yoga studios Three years in your grasp & we watched them turn the Boys & Girls Club into happy hour It’s something about how you sit on the corner at the intersection of where I
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WOW 🙍🏻♀️👵🏻🙏
do you know what it means for your existence to be defined by someone else’s intentions?
poor ain’t poor unless you name it so
She loved to rile him up like that, turn him into the boy she met back when none of them were keeping score.
That raised hands meant I would live.
😭
You are everybody’s best friend until you are not.
they call it wednesday
they say that it’s you who came cracked
The way Mom looks confused as to what exactly is happening but she goes with it, cuz she’s fly like that & has never left Pops hanging on the dance floor.
This was always about how a group of people you love all dancing in one room can make your chest rumble with something you almost forgot you had.
only what they have convinced themselves they have been built for.
But is anything built for what it ultimately becomes? When this steel was melded into a false deity, a pretense of human control, did it dream of what else it could have been? The wheels of a child’s first bicycle? The monkey bars from which they would swing to and fro? The car a family drives on a cross-country road trip filled with laughter and fighting and spilled ketchup across the floor? When did it learn it was to become a cage? What is a cage beyond that which it holds?
It is a classroom of men who refuse to forget themselves, each word provides the sort of freedom a parole board can never grant.
They write about their families, their children. Wanting them to remember their father as the man whose laugh would turn a room into a festival of rapture, someone who would read them stories before they fell asleep to a world that didn’t always make sense, but always made sense in his arms.
They want people to remember that they once existed beyond this place...
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It is not your job to prove a point here, to make a statement other than that there can be life amid these pages.
To deny the full humanity of others is to deny it within ourselves.
I want to see all of the complexity and mess and joy and distress of being a complex human being, which is to say a human being. Because isn’t this the problem? That we must write the most exaggerated versions of ourselves
to show them something they have already cho...
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between what was & never will be again.
it’s not that i’m resentful it’s just that we are addicted to what always leaves us
he was written for our boys to know they’re not alone in feeling it.
we bring a part of where we are from to every place we go.
looking like everything that has ever mattered
to get to see you each day before the rest of the world does,
but sometimes routine feels nice because it is familiar and you are something I hope remains familiar for as long as I keep waking up
It is hard to describe the comfort one feels in sitting with something you trust will always be there, something you can count on to remain
