“Untitled (Unexceptional and Unforgettable)”
—Charles Tooker, 2021
“i’m going abroad now. please feed the fishes.”;
his last and lonely wishes.
Scrawled red on the wall, but in no way violent;
in forced solitude and deftly silent.
Well-nigh a decade then, he’d lived next door;
plagued and poor, El Bay the Moor.
Though we’d never met, we never let the other alone;
brotherhood as weightless as a bird bone.
As lighthouses and windmills trade signals at dawn;
reflections for revolutions daily shared with a yawn.
He’d say, “Don’t ever cave, rule your cave; the trick
is to be brave, but not too brave.”
No, we weren’t proud of our address, but we still had a name;
be it a Moor’s, mine, or yours, we’re all one and the same.
The forgotten, the disgraced, the one-night stands;
figure 8’s on broken skates in subterranean lands.
I can’t fight back the tears that I’ll never cry;
he was meant and made by them to die.
They threw at once the rock, the paper, and the scissors;
to bludgeon, to conceal, to carve mental fissures.
They found a martyr on cold concrete that night;
for them, it wasn’t too firm, rather just and right.
He chose to sleep, and it was hardly a choice;
rendered lifeless since they first entombed his voice.
*Ode to my first 3 years in solitary confinement; commissioned by founder of L.A.’s “Compassion Prison Project.”