This is just another one of those stream-of-consciousness poems. I’m at a point in my writing where I can just write well without thinking too much of the consequences … if that makes any sense. Check the rhyme …
“They Reminisce Over You”

What will they say when I’m gone?
Will they look back to my electronic words as testimony
To everything I believed
Or everything I could have been?
Will they reminisce on conversations we had
And silent yet powerful moments we shared
via instant messaging?
Will they research on the small instances of my gratitude?
Crossing old ladies through the snow
And passing along his dinner to perfect strangers in the frigid cold
With no audience but the people in his mind?
Will they look up my file at the Board of Ed, SU’s records, and the CIA to inform them of my own, sometimes subversive, activities?
My teaching as well as my learning have certainly broken the effervescent barriers
between people such as myself and the mainstream idea
Of what a Black / Latino man’s supposed to be
Will they do those cool personal interviews with my mom, father, stepfather, brothers, sisters, cousins, ex-lovers, friends, co-workers, passerbys, and comparable visionaries of our time to explore my essence like they do in those VH1 specials?
Or will they simply look back in the words I laid out as the prophecy and the history of one man’s journey to understand his own surroundings
By expounding on the little that he really knows?
Who knows?
You do, because when my time has come,
Certainly my legacy will precede me through my words
Not just in the rhyme scheme and structure
But that this poet brought every word he put on page
Off the ink and into existence …

© jose vilson 2007