My heart hurts, like a thousands arrows piercing one point on my shoulder and as I pull away the pain grows and intensifies. My stomach is uneasy and my chest aches.
I want to go home. I want to go back to the hot and humid thick air too heavy to breath while death wears tank tops and sweat bands…
Hot as the weight of the heat crushes your body down into a lymphatic leaning position where all you can, do…is relax.
Sweat doesn’t get a chance to bead up on you; it pours down your face and chest even your legs sweat because it is too damned hot.
Back home, where our one high school’s mascot, is a Wild Cat and when the Wild Cats play the town shuts down.
I want to go home!!
Chilling on the hill under the carport on the back of my great-grandfather’s pick up truck listening to my father and his grandfather discuss our ancestors.
Damn, my great-grandfather…Andrew Matthews, laid back and like a living dictionary of Matthewism and a practicum of manhood.
13-years on a chain gang simply because of his blood relations. His sickly brother committed murdered…and due to his terminal illness and the sheriff needing someone to be guilty, he took the healthy Andrew instead. Somebody always gotta pay!
I remember him standing tall in that heat, wearing dusty overalls and a paid button up. He loved trucker caps, but his body was so old and worn it was hard for him to raise his hand to place his hat on right, so he banged it before bangin’ was cool!!
In the mornings the dew from the pond created a fading mist, which carried the stench of mud, wet red clay mixed in Hog shit…but I love it.
I want to go home!! No offense to Milwaukee, I can’t deal with the rat race. You can keep your video fantasies of every young black boy being a rapper or if you’re above 5’10” being a hooper. I’m too old to rap and I have no jump shot so I want to go home.
I’ll pack up my wife and our four beautiful babies, load up the truck and head 55-South. All our vices and imperfections packed neatly in our souls. Ray Ray’s going back to El Dog, y’all!!
I want to go home!!
But now, the economy is stressed and I just got back to working after 9-months of weekly unemployment checks and rejection letter after letter from less than quality job interviews.
My mortgage is boarder-line delinquent and I’m on my last extension in the presidents home retention program. I can’t go home, not right now. I have to save money because the house I grew up in is not livable. It’s occupied with raccoons and snakes nesting in the walls. And the walls of my heart still ache.
I’m home sick, y’all. I want to go home!!!
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