Stages here are Steps and attempts at evaluation (essays, assays). These are summings up, if only partially, of various steps, processes, beginnings, middles, endings in my life. These stages are also places whereupon acts occur and also those acts themselves, as part of one overall act, really process my life. And so these stages are like essays trying to help us understand and illuminate a portion of the American experience.
Within that American experience is the history and life of the African American Nation; a piece of the whole, yet unintegrated into that whole, black noncitizens whose only forward direction must be toward Self-Determination!
For me, being here has always been a condition of struggle and, hopefully, growth. These could be called Essays on the Stages of My Life. To essay is also to attempt! So these are attempts to sum up that life, before having lived it all. Attempts to “make sense” where it has been difficult to see any sense.
Step
of a life
turns
under the sun
& the sun
turns &
burns &
finally one last day
goes
out
Its history
is a tail
Tales for
remembering
words for
understanding
A long way (opens)
Back then &
there
we see now
again
To know
Seeing
& understand
Our
Being.
Why these “Memoirs”? Because it seems my life plagues a few people. They want to “know” how I got wherever they perceive I am. Why I would leave where they “thought” I was in the first place. But was I ever there, where they thunk? And where was they?
But it is, has been, a path. From the beginning. And these “findings” are meant as darkness-altering mechanisms, small lights for seeing what a person will do and maybe why.
But even so (just to put a little doo doo in the contest), who knows if this is the real stuff, the lowdown. Perhaps I’m distorting for my own reasons, hiding various things. Who can say? The lies officials will put out about me (even the unofficial officials) will be bad enough to make these memoirs of mine at least a relief. At least that’s what I say.