NONCONNAH YARDS One railroad came from Chicago, bound for New Orleans My father knew that Too restless for regular school My father went home to his father's farm He learned from his father My father returned to Nonconnah Yards My older brother and I were the Decades later I see that strange color deficient kid playing I sit here in this Copenhagen bar by Jack Mothershed (aka CanDoJack)
jack mothershed, spent most of his life as a computer consultant. From his initial work in satellite control software he spent most of his professional career in airline and travel software serving 25 world airlines as a man without a country. He mixed a nomadic computer profession with expeditions in diving, flying, sailing, skiing, and always at heart an avocational cultural anthropologist. "The web is my oyster; the world is my cloister," he says. Today, jack has reduced his 25 professions to a handfull that includes retirement. He still plays most of his 31 musical instruments. He still speaks four languages. He still runs some blogs, writes some books, and fears senility when a good poem does not erupt from his innards frequently. Jack's 2010 book, Psycho Paths and Con Trails published through Kindle, is being followed by a novel in progress entitled Nine Elevens that spans the period September 11, 1857 through September 11, 2012. His literary guide on comes from Goethe: "Get me up into the saddle Jack is the author of several poetry books including, Knight before Christmases and Loose Canon (not canNon). His book Driven to Perfection: From Road Rage to Road Sage combined driver improvement and self improvement. He is the creator of Play In A Day guitar course. His blogs include: bienestado (state of well being) and CanDoJack. He can be reached by email at: candojack@gmail.com
Or vice versa
One railroad came from Little Rock headed for Charleston
Or the other way around
In Nonconnah Yards south of Memphis
The rails crossed
My father rode those rails
Long before the Great Depression
Made it a commencement for many
My father educated himself
From a faggot of belt bound books
He studied in the school of empty boxcars
While scenes rolled by on
The screens of those open doors
Like high definition television
Before its time
In Sardis, Mississippi
Where to his Faulknerian family's dismay
He harvested a beautiful Cherokee sharecropper
Who became my mother
The art of building houses
He built good ones before he went blind
Going blind he blamed on
Zane Grey, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and Rabelais
Years later I would drive him through Memphis and he would say
Stop here or there so I could admire a house he had built
Back when he could see
When I was born, he was already blind
He would run his hands over my face to see what I looked like
He couldn't feel my color
Where he had jumped so many freights
Just south of those railroad yards in Memphis
That blind man built his last house
With a store attached to the side
Then he bade those trains from Chicago
Bring him boxcars of used shoes and clothes
Some he sold for cash
Most went on credit
That is, he gave them away
But people remembered and
By and by they made him money
Only white kids for five miles around
It never occurred to me that
My family was strange - half blind and color deficient
As I sit here in this Copenhagen bar where
People have no concept of racial discrimination
I am riding cosmopolitan rails
Looking out the door of my boxcar
At that boxcar door television screen
In my mind
With his friends
Totally unaware that five miles north
A great leader would be assassinated
Totally unaware that five miles to the east
An uneducated white man would own a grand estate
Paid for with money from singing black people's songs
Ignore-ant white people would come to pay homage
At Graceland
In a white town named White Haven
Totally unaware of Nonconnah Yards
Where the railroads cross
Drink my Tuborg
Amidst the clacking of the wheels
Of my daddy's boxcars
I hear Peter Gabriel singing
"I grieve"
Remain in your huts and tents
I ride forth into all that is
Over my head just the stars"