When i listen to audiobooks i go Vonnegut...*Warning: i use racial slurs, though i do not wallow in their hatefulness*

Steven has no place in the situation that he is in.

Stephen is a man. Young by the standards of his time, Stephan has, in the entirety of his twenty one years of walking around the blue ball of water and dirt that he lives on (though he's never tried walking on water, he's pretty sure it wouldn't work out so well for him. I've got faith in him, though), never once seen a man with skin darker than his own.

Nor a woman, neither, but the usage of man was in keeping with the passively sexist usage of 'man' as a generic reference to any human.

Stev'n has never seen a person with skin darker than his own.

Stephanie can't remember the last time he was this exited.

I lied just a moment ago: To say that Sanguine has never seen a person with skin darker than his own (by the way, Salvia is a kind of man/person/human referred to an albino. Albinos are the happiest people in the world because no matter how brown their parents are they are always as white as the milk of their mother. Mothers milk is white enough for you and certainly enough for me. When Scandinavia was born, his mother, who was herself an albinic negroid, like her husband, her mother was as happy as you please.

"This nigger as white as the sheet they'd hang him with!" she said.

Nigger is a cruel and hateful meaning word with a funny sound. In the history of words with horrible meanings that are inappropriately fun to say 'Nigger' takes the cake. Were there a consolation prize available to the words next in line it would go to...

okay, finish it. what's the word? why is S- in a place to have never seen a dark skinned person? of what worth is a black man who is 'as white as the sheet they'd hang him with'? tell me what to do next.

And the kitchen sink...

When i am an old man, and far from here,

The gentle tide of my living will crest

A crashing wave in my memory where

The softness of my sunken breast

Will see my memories ashore again in you,

Washed up against this black leather island.

We lie, entwined like so much a braid

Of legs and books and breath, in repose

On the sprung sand castle couch we've made

Here we watch the world we chose

To leave behind in a thrashing surf of yes and no

A dinner, date, movie and kiss ago.

This tide of worried life and expectant faces

A salted sea with blood in mixed to the soil of places

We've set down roots to grow together, here and there

But this squall of stuff-er-ing follows everywhere.

So here we've found an island home,

Black and sticky in October sweat;

A place to park after a day to roam,

To suction to in our post day heat.

An old man remembers these moments, i'd think

When he's far away from the places he knows

Caught up in the lives of the places he goes

And reliving love, and life, and the kitchen sink.

a rough compiling of two images i found compelling (the old man and the black leather couch as an island.) they probably belong in different pieces but whatever; i'm tired and i had to get 'em outta this skull 'o mine.