Black Man’s Guide to Bookselling / Snap Shot #46

Jerry Thompson

Baby on the way…

In this city of red eyes and milk-soaked men, the sky beneath Georgia Boulevard drips onto the disciples of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, clawing away the easy markings that cut the chase into tiny conversations behind the counter of TV repair shops lining the block beside me.

I’m sitting on the tip of hump day, trying to count the women and the mailmen who press against the elements that betray them: fake hair, no hair, bad feet, painted toes, and thirsty skin, their eyes rolling beyond the Do-Not Enter and Back-in-15-minute signs that dangle from the thread that holds the journey close to the dim light at the end of their clumsy addictions. Veins instead of streets surge with grape soda and cheap wine kneeling into a wasted youth and a black-eyed history.

By the water, a city with two mouths, one that chews and one that swallows, spitting up free verse and phlegm from past ecstasy adventures.

We wait in the jelly like every city born to spread a kind of light smiling in the sun. We wait for nothing, because no one comes into the shop the entire day. … and I suck it up to lousy parking, cheap marketing. I’m black, not black enough. I’m a bit queer and slutty around the backside of chasing shorts on the hot UPS delivery and the ex con types. I’m smart and I’m a fool for the love tucked away in the pockets of Sly and the Family Stone albums, Walter Hawkins Singers … in the cuff of struttin back into a dream I thought I had to give away for free …

Customers … what’s that? A kiss in the wind, a cube of ice sliding into the asshole mist of tongues like condos with no elevator or microwave.

sure, i’ll take a check and cash it twice … messy 

I got messy 

and drunk / new drunk virgin drunk / not like now /

i’m an extra crunch / spicy faggot / and i’m runnin wild around that curve everybody takes in the drive thru lane at 3 am …  and i still know how to find life in every dead lighter / comin off the Carqueniz Bridge on the balcony of Motel 6 room 17 with that white boy accountant oozing away his night, with my $20 and his crack pipe.

Book sales … yeah I tried to get them make them find them … arouse them pimp them bury them fuck them marry them adore them suck my dick in them need them got them but not from selling books, but from dancing and screaming and shaking my ass to donna summer hits and natalie cole lyp sync audition numbers …

I crawled around this city like a pack of Dollar Store bacon, applewood was nowhere to be found but my checkbook magnet was at 100 percent / ready to go down on any of those muthafuckers cuz they all had babies and babies on the way … like me. a baby on the way …