Red sticker in my car window
I’m ready now, a coin poised
for deposit, a key waiting to be inserted and turn in an old rusting lock.
The day begins darkly behind
me as if it was still night and I have only the light of my alarm clock to tell
me differently.
I'm awake but my eyes want
to close again.
I desire for sleep, but my
dreams made me sleep so fitfully, I felt little worth of the dreaming.
School is here, a dream that comes
to me out of desperation, like the one years ago when my mother and I spent our
times in the housing projects, barely surviving.
I only had half days school
back then because the city of
I always dreamed back then of
fighting back, beating up the others the way they beat me up, trying to dream a
dream in which I didn’t feel trapped.
Sometimes I feel just as
traps now as I did then, only I need to dream bigger dreams, and try to be less
selfish so as to include other people in my dreams so they might feel less
trapped, too.
I quit high school as an act
of defiance, a way of telling teachers and my uncles I wasn’t going to be bound
by their restrictions and not tamed by their wit.
Returning to college after
all these years is an act of defiance, too.
So is forcing myself awake.
I stare at the clock trying
to focus on its arms, knowing I am way too early for any of my classes.
I’m scared to move my car too
soon, thinking the law will stop me and impound it.
I keep thinking how unfair
justice is, how weak I am in defying this vicious society, and how much
institutions serve those who can best afford to pay the high cost of living.
This is the kind of society
that killed Socrates for asking too many questions, Christ for having too many
answers, and the Jews for getting in the way.
I am an angry
not-so-young-any-more man trying to control myself through reason, trying to
cool down the rages that are inside of me, rages stoked again and again to life
by my frustration and my sense of helplessness.
I move the car, the cops will
arrest me, I think, seeing without going outside, the all too obvious red over
due inspection sticker that will cause the cops to stop me, cause them to find
out I have a suspended driver’s license, cause them to ask me for an insurance
card that is no longer valid.
So I get up, get dress, then
stumble to the bus, passing my car as if a stranger, pretending I do not belong
to it and it does not belong to me.
I’m not yet certain when I
will have the money to pay all those tickets that I have left unpaid for which
my license was suspended, and over which society will put me in jail if they
actually know who and where I am at any given moment.
I’m safe on the bus, just one
more nameless person without identity, traveling from here to nowhere,
struggling to read books for classes I can’t concentrate on because I am so
afraid, when the one most significant less to be learned is right here on the
street: don’t mess with the man, boy. When he wants your money give it to him.
He knows how to get you if you don’t.