Blues come dressed like introspective echoes of a journey.
What do you think will happen?
I cannot always tell if this is a mere question or if this is a prayer. Sometimes it is both. Rarely is it neither.
All around me I feel the escalating tension, the awareness of danger and the despair of the inability to avoid it.
What are we going to do?
Eight-year-olds writing racist slurs on notes passed around their classrooms, trafficking in the impunity of the benefit of the doubt.
Ok so what would you do then?
This question, both curiously and incuriously, is so often posed to the people who aren’t in power by people who are, typically belatedly, usually halfheartedly, infrequently with any intention to take the suggestion seriously.
What do you want to happen, and what are you doing to make that outcome more likely?
A question of introspection.
Attribution
No, my traffic is not with addled keepers of yesterday’s disasters,
Seekers of manifest disembowelment on shafts of yesterday’s pains.
Blues come dressed like introspective echoes of a journey.
And yes, I have searched the rooms of the moon on cold summer nights.
And yes, I have refought those unfinished encounters.
Still, they remain unfinished.
And yes, I have at times wished myself something different— from I Have Folded My Sorrows by Bob Kaufman