“To Shaun, on Your 10th Birthday”

Let my fortune be rich in stories
shared on quiet nights
as we lay in bed
drifting into sleep.
Let the inheritance I leave to you
be the sounds of our laughter
as the whispers of your childhood.
Let both be comprised of our memories
as we took walks through my childhood
neighborhood, as I navigated you through
places long since erased. 

The origin of this poem started when I first heard the news about the Quintanilla family releasing a new Selena album, three decades after her untimely death. It was a mixture of fascination and disgust. That’s the only way I can describe the feeling of seeing a family continuing to exploit the work of their deceased sister. And I wondered what sort of things I’d leave behind for my son to find.

I never intended to take poetry outside of composition books. And I never intended to take it off the stage. And now as I’m in the last year of my thirties, I’m wondering why not? There have bumps and hiccups along the way. Events that pushed me out of the local poetry scene. And while I’ve allowed myself to be angry about it, and possibly will hold on to this grudge for a while longer, I think it’s time I just pick up the mic and where I left off a decade ago.

So what do I intend to leave behind for my son? Memories. Written. Recorded. Penciled in the margins of my books where he will find them should he one day decide to read them. I want him to remember our stories and share them with his children – should he have any, that is.

I want to encourage him to follow this music path where it ever it leads him, just as I followed my poetry path for a while.

Normally, I record an audio and slap it on stock video but this is still in a rough draft process. I believe this is the eighth attempt to write this poem. And I liked it more than the rest. But it’s not quite finished. Not quite yet. And the title isn’t the one I intended but it’s the one that made the most sense at the time of this writing.

So maybe one day I’ll break out the old Yeti and record it.