Photo credit: Kenn Thomas

Forgetting Home (or how can I forget you if you won't go away)  

Euphemisms white wash his-story

So truth disappears under vague denial

Southeast USA above Florida

Sharing a border with Pensacola

Where the past lives on 

In retrospective theme parks

The past is alive everywhere

Our world is full of museums

Memories gather into congregations

While a Southeast corner sorts

Misremembered stories until one Saturday

On a Jazz radio program a spark ignited 

Reminiscence of harsh tales

John Coltrane moaned and eulogized

In the cadence of MLK,Jr. 

Four little girls murdered in the Sixteenth Street

Baptist Church waiting for Sunday school in

His composition Alabama (about Bombingham)

Then a Cannonball Adderly Quartet rendered  

A version of Stars Fell On Alabama

The back-to-back synchronicity connected

In a Minnesota database of an American Indian Man

Searching lost files

Remembering pain in order of degrees

Cover-ups

Makeovers

Misinformation

Misunderstandings

“Thank you” he said

“For playing those two songs back-to-back

It reminded me of the meaning of the name Alabama

Originally Alibamu, means far enough West

So the white man would leave us alone”

Alibamu translated by those who do the translating

Those who cover their tracks with rose-colored his-story

Became "thicket-clearers"

Or "vegetation-gatherers"

My own Euphemisms give way to duende

And mendacious memories of Santa Clause

The disputed worth of Negroes

The color of God

And the price of a ticket to anywhere

Anywhere else

Colored water

Colored education

Obsolete history

Colored diet

Colored medicine

Colored religion

And corporal punishment like masa taught

His-story says the South lost the Civil War but

Our story

Says they’re winning the peace

Years of confederate air conditioning

In the home of the Rebels

Confederate Flags

And Dixie played by marching bands

Sounds elongate in curious places down there

Names have syllables where air ought to be

The past is alive everywhere however it’s

Mostly manifested in the Southeast corner of my low back

Pulling me deep into recollections of an unbroken agony

And the paraphrasing of Decoration Day

Remnants of unequal

Unrequited revolution sits there pinching

Debilitating - stalling work on the enlightenment

Not even Walter Croncrete brought news

Of the broken back of democracy

In 1540 Alibamu was a place to get away to

For the Creek and Choctaw 

In 1977 it was a place for a native born

African American to get away from