Stephen Gibson

Stingily says on systemic violence in Black communities,

adding, “to not live in violence is a privilege.” Peepholes

are musts because you didn’t open the door for anybody.

I grew up in the Bronx River Projects—our door, metal.

After the war, my father was given electroshock therapy

(almost all of the violence I feared wasn’t out in the hall).

My father was in a tank destroyer unit and fought Nazis.

After the war, he was in-and-out of a psychiatric hospital.

Courts allowed home visits; then he was back for battery

(more shock treatment was an alternative to going to jail).

What Stingily is saying about a bat at the door isn’t pretty

but how you grow up is probably how you see the world.

It doesn’t matter if you make installations or write poetry.

Meiji period, not the Bronx, not Italian or Puerto Rican;

guys, like these guys, in wife-beater T-shirts, dungarees

rolled-up at the cuffs, always looked for shit to happen,

always waiting against the schoolyard wall in the 1950s,

eye-balling an outsider. Didn’t live there? You were one.

These guys in the photograph aren’t saying hello, please

enjoy our nice neighborhood and stay until you’re done:

where we live is more interesting than in the other cities.

Commodore Perry recently “opened” Edo: with cannon.

This is the next generation: what each of these guys sees

is a Westerner who did that. In their eyes is no invitation

to those who made them worthless in their own country.

Mock the guy with the umbrella? He’ll cut you with ease.

The boy is wearing one pin that says “Bomb Hanoi”

and another saying, “Support Our Boys in Vietnam”;

he’s holding a small American flag to wave. The boy

is waiting to march in a NYC pro-war parade. Bomb

Hanoi, what his Vietnam pro-war pin tells us. Destroy

the city. Drop everything we can on it, and if we harm

innocents, well, that’s war; it’s not something we enjoy.

I’d flunked out of college that year. All I felt was alarm.

Deferment, gone. From 2-S to 1-A. Not a shred of joy

knowing the draft was coming. I tried to remain calm.

Long story, short, I enlisted in the Navy, didn’t deploy:

in a roomful of guys, took the oath, raised my right arm,

and then cracked during basic training at Camp Dewey.

For a year, antipsychotic meds like Thorazine. Therapy.