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![1st draft, 55 Sinclair Rd, London, 22 July 1978, 2:08 p.m.—3:13; 3:50—5:32.
Changed 24 July, 11:40 a.m.—12:07
THE ONE YOU CAN’T FORGET: A TRAIN FROM LONDON
Riding backwards, [too late to change,]
I felt her opposite me,
[her lipstick something I remembered
Warm as wine spilled on my lips]
strange her [second] doubled self [a shadowed] in tranquil window-box outhinged,
glassframed, [and] floatfixed in my lucid eye
that saw it sharp as Paddington and Royal Oak
[outside] gliding outside, photo-real
[from] on stations [for each mind] to cling to,
like friends at destination Reading, [friends to cling to,]
[minutes left] twenty minutes left for [patchwork] picture[s], patchwork,
[clicking back] clickbacks to those lively whiles and [times] aches between
now focused on a dizzy track of life outside
that snatched my window-watching to [a] its stream
that [climbed] flashed across the glassy face and arms
of her whose placid self
ranged with me knee to knee,
her outdoor countenance alive
beneath the hordes that slivered her:](https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/system/resource/3/e/4/3e49d202-48a5-4ee7-9f75-d9879ccbc888/attachment/ea5d906662758acda118bf16f2f6052c.jpg)
![ah crease his paper roun the
Bobby Seale
foldin it slow for his arm.
Them brothers
getting they vitamin D
getting they 7-de/hy/dro
cho/les/ter/ol--
yeah--
when that blackness come
they gonna live.
1970
19[undecipherable]
Black Man, 13th Floor
Hotel Ameridemocratogrando
12 floors below me, 12 above
stops nothing at my life
(this 13th floor
this legacy from black charioteers
swung low, stolen away
ridin middle passage
between the breathin floors
ashcakers brought to bed on clay
massa’s thirteeners](https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/system/resource/f/6/e/f6ec82ae-7f65-4f12-b43a-7a85bf00f73c/attachment/fe86336d9bd0fc2e85e9b07218d94721.jpg)
![163
[*”Bill Collector in Harlem”: “Hi, there!: was a phrase actually seen on a low-income project hallway door in Brooklyn by the author, though the scene is here transferred to Harlem, which is in upper New York City.*]
Bill Collector in Harlem
“Hi, there!”
Some Harlem child
Had chalked on the hallway door.
Not a Georgia scrawl,
Not a “Hi, y’all”
In dirt on a sharecropper’s wall.
But tenement white,
Pert and bright,
Erect, and spelled just right
For the cockroach fat,
The shoebrush rat,
And the Upper New York cat.
Through a heavy hallway door
Some Harlem child said
“Hi, there!”
(cs. 1961)
1962](https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/system/resource/0/0/1/0017d2cc-17c2-4471-83b2-8951f78217e9/attachment/6f398ca2eb73bb8b60157979e893b7be.jpg)
