Street tar and summer'll do a job on your soul

I was going through old emails and folders today. I've never really kept a journal. But I did write emails. Oh, did I ever. And if you think my public blog posts are intimate, well. You can only imagine my emails, right?

So I'm thinking of undertaking some copying and pasting and filling in the gap years. Which means I'm naturally tending to an electronic journal. At least for that project. When, and with what time, is, as always, the question.

I came across some old poetry I'd written and then emailed to myself. Remember how I told you I was never the kid with my moleskin. Never with a pen. Not even a pencil with an extra big eraser. I've always tended to the keyboard. But, easy as it is to loose notebooks and pens and planners, it's as equally easy to loose (or loose track of) files.

The title of this song was taken from a Spoon song, Black Like Me. Which is the title of a book I came into possession of by way of my father but never actually read. And I keep meaning to.

I've been listening to this song and this line just speaks to me. And they've been repaving the street in front of my families house. And I was thinking, driving down it the other night, about the layers of street, of tar that is buried under this new layer. I know they sometimes strip the street before repave it or whatever. And I was thinking about the cars that drive on that road which just made my feet itch to be bare and be the first person to run that road barefoot. And I was brought back to a similar scene from my youth when that same street was being repaved. And, being kids, we walked in the still wet tar. And oh, was it hard to get that tar off.

But somehow, I don't remember the black stains. I remember yellow and black. Laughing. Honeysuckle. And I want to say a straw.

I was thinking all these things and naturally I thought, "I need to write that down". And then today, going through my old forgotten email folders, like a weed pushing up through the cracks in concrete, this poem found its way back to me. I had completely forgotten about it. I have no recollection of having written it. I don't remember how I felt when I wrote it. What I was trying to feel. It was 7/10/06. Lisa's birthday. Three months before I left to Quebec for my mission. I want to say it's incomplete. Though since I can't remember, I can't really say. I do know there is no period at the end. That's a pretty good indication I emailed it to myself in a sense of urgency. I do not forget periods lightly. Ha ha.

I must have beckoned it once, years ago. And then, I beckoned it a few days ago and it found its way, faithfully, back to me. I can't take that kind of coincidence lightly and I hope you understand why.

I'm posting it here. Unfinished. Untitled. (Because while I may steal their lyrics for my blog titles, I will never steal Spoon's lyrics for poem titles.) Like the stripped down layer of the road before the tar is laid, it's where the memories are, even if buried. And I'll let it see the light before I forget about it again:

Urban feet get stuck in mud too, you know.

Hot concrete on calloused feet,
Deevolutionized by the sun from road
to the soft tar laid one early morning
Years ago.

And isn’t that just how it is?
Time, I mean.

Because I remember the laying of that tar.
Hot season, burning blackness, had to stick our fingers in it,
Feet and toes.

Baby, all I wanted was to one day walk a million
different such streets in rushed stilettos.

I somehow imagined that the air I breathed higher would be deeper,
My pulmonary cells wished for that, involuntary.  Make this blood bluer,
They said.  Bluer.  More blue.

Such imagination.

I spent the early seasons waiting for fall,
fall wanting to return to spring,
Unable, nuclei, to imagine