Prosopography In Blue

waiting with diaper on for this woman to get up off the kitchen floor and stop bleeding while a man hovers over her with grimace and clinched fist waiting for our first-grade teacher to stop crying over the P.A. announcement that the president has just been assassinated in Dallas waiting on the spirit of Christmas to return days after the news that mother's favorite song "You Send Me" had just been shot and killed a few blocks from our home waiting in the backseat of a Packard for the policeman to stop screaming at my father as urban soldiers toss fire from their hands in our neighborhood just outside of Watts waiting at LAX for Wilt the Stilt to come back and finish signing autographs after some idiot just called him a freak waiting for the bowtie and scowl to let go of my arm so I can shake the hand of the Greatest of All Time as he starts his comeback with an exhibition bout in East Los Angeles waiting with eighteen-year-old trembling knees for that sheriff deputy to remove his pump action shotgun from my temple waiting in the delivery room for the wrong woman to have my child waiting at a motel for the right woman to find the time to slip away waiting on the side of the ninety-one freeway for a motorcade to pass shortly after the funeral of a former president shamed by the Watergate scandal waiting and looking while holding onto the entry gate at 875 S. Bundy Dr. for some sign of what really happened that night waiting along with F.E.M.A. and the Red Cross for the distraught woman to come with us to safety days after the Northridge earthquake leveled her million-dollar home waiting at the hospital for my first grandchild to be born while her father who's been convicted of battery is nowhere to be found waiting, waiting seems like I'm always waiting