Gratitude for smartasses

It takes me a little effort to remember when I met my poet colleague Robert Thomas. 2006. I do not know how he and his wife tolerated the trip across country, but for me the early evening was cold, rainy, with the Jehovah's Witness from Unlimited Staffing traveling with me, with her misery and diabetes and cat with broken leg. Liana, my nigger hustling burden to whom I was overly generous. Caucasian patronage, guilt, the fact that her face was wan, anxious. Roll your eyes at me. I gave her a loan for the cat with the broken leg because I thought Liana and I would work out, but she got fired, and I still extend myself too much to help younger women, i.e., Karina, but I was determined to meet my last Poets & Writer's sympathizer, so Liana and I traveled to Ardmore, and Ardmore isn't that far from suburban youth in Ridley Township. Eight years ago, my last sojourn out of the city limits.

My city limit range is about as far as the Rosenbach Museum and back to my apartment on a full charge. 15 blocks. I did not get a renewal notice for my membership, which is just as well, I told their director I was broke last year, but when I get out of combat range with Trudy Richardson, my area of marginalization runs basically from 19th and Chestnut to 23rd and Race Street. Everyone is in a hurry, except a defiant stout weather beaten spastic woman in a shawl, gnawing an Italian hoagie from an Asian bodega. In an internal disjunction. No rational reason to love what I have left, to endure. Not a friend in the world who voluntarily wants to telephone me, offer me the comfort of familiarity, my personal interaction with Linda C. Dezenski wasn't like that when I still had it, my former supervisor who evokes such enmity that she has been a law and order corpse beyond my ability to estimate, no. I pulled, Linda responded and then humiliated me. Were we ever actually friends? Somewhere in there, I think so, but it could not survive the fact that I hated decentralization that had to lie about what it was in the dead rhetoric of the revolution, and Linda's enthusiastic, shallow, dominance. Most of you side with her, because I am becoming nothing more than-- I was going to use the phrase "white nigger trash"-- but let me write it another way-- I am becoming a disposable woman in pain who will not make it easy on herself by giving in. The Medicaid system is going to kill me one way or another, but I am about to tell five African Americans who have the juice to go fuck themselves, in a hard contained way, methodically, with what acumen remains, and then? Well, the crowd funding content model caught on, and someone spiked my page views. Grazie.

He is just a man, shoulders as shrunken as mine, and I don't have the clout to compel counter terrorism experts to respond, but this is what I wanted, right?