Bam-Bam

make thee an ark of gopher wood

After school we’d stone him from running distance flinging and yelling, maggot-brain-donkey-cock madman. When a stone hit his penis, the hitter victory danced and we’d crowd around him screaming, target to rass, man! Saturdays and Sundays we’d never see him and I’d never thought to see him one Saturday afternoon, naked, in my lane, outside my gate.

He carried nothing other than his matted head, mud crusting on his skin. Yet I feared him to death as how’d I fear church, my tongue pebbled, he shuffled through the gate, talking as he approached, the closer he got:

the whole earth is hereall the arks are here, we stone the arks and poison food,you listen mosquito, boy, or you bite them and eat?Stone fly from your hand and you feel you is man,well, I am at heaven’s gate with a light on me tongue,a bulb, an electric bulb, shocking the ark to life.Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, mosquito, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz,you listening, right, or you in the flood, ark?All God’s children is ark, bird in hand of the manand now the whole earth is here, all the arks.

The gate banged, leaving a rock pitching against my skull, and I felt the light going out of the day, and a grey, lowering itself, covered all as far as I could see.