Lawrence Joseph - Curriculum Vitae lyrics

I might have been born in Beirut, not Detroit, with my right name. Grandpa taught me to love to eat. I am not Orthodox, or Sunni, Shiite, or Druse. Baptized in the one true Church, I too was weaned on Saint Augustine. Eisenhower never dreamed I wore corrective shoes. Ford Motor Co. never cared I'd never forgive Highland Park, River Rouge, Hamtramck. I memorized the Baltimore Catechism. I collected holy cards, prayed to a litany of saints to intercede on behalf of my father who slept through the sermon at 7 o'clock Ma**. He worked two jobs, believed himself a failure. My brother believed himself, my sister denied. In the fifth grade Sister Victorine, astonished, listened to me recite from the Book of Jeremiah. My voice changed. I wanted women. The Jesuit whose yellow fingers cracked with the stink of Camels promised me eternal punishment. How strange I was, with impure thoughts, brown skin, obsessions. You could tell by the way I walked I possessed a lot of soul, you could tell by the way I talked I didn't know when to stop. After I witnessed stabbings outside the gym, after the game, I witnessed fire in the streets. My head set on fire in Cambridge, England, in the Whim Cafe. When I applied Substance and Procedure and Statements of Facts my head was weary and earth. Now years have pa**ed since I came to the city of great fame. The same sun glows gray on two new rivers. Tears I want do not come. I remain many different people whose families populate half Detroit; I hate the racket of the machines, the oven's heat, curse bossmen behind their backs. I hear the inmates' collective murmur in the jail on Beaubien Street. I hear myself say, "What explains the Bank of Lebanon's liquidity?" think, "I too will declare a doctrine upon whom the loss of language must fall regardless whether Wallace Stevens understood senior indebtedness in Greenwich Village in 1906." One woman hears me in my sleep plead the confusions of my dream. I frequent the Cafe Dante, earn my memories, repay my moods. I am as good as my heart. I am as good as the unemployed who wait in long lines, for money.