"Dat it bittah-sweet
Like a precious
Memory
Whe mek yu weep
Whe mek yu feel incomplete"
Johnson desires to touch his readers with melancholy and nostalgia. He's trying to elicit secrets long forgotten, deliberately, because they were too painful. His focus is upon the tragedy of time, which removes valuable pieces of a person's experience in its steady trudge onward.
"still,
mi naw goa bow an scrape
an gwaan like a ape
peddlin noh parchment af etnicity
wide ongle a vaig fleetin hint af hawtenticity"
Johnson is determined to identify with his heritage proudly, without any need to prove his identification to others. He sees legal documents as a weak contrived means of hiding one's own insecurity. Johnson is proud of his heritage and solid in his resentment of those are not.
"Mama,
don fret,
dont get depres
an doun-hearted.
Be af good courage
till I hear fram you."
Sonny urges his mom not to lose heart because her sons have been arrested. He alludes to the biblical figure of Joshua who is repeated reminded to remain strong and to have courage. In this way Sonny charges his mother with a sort of duty to remain optimistic. "till I hear fram you" implies that Sonny is depending upon his mother to offer some reciprocal encouragement.
"W'en wi can't face reality
Wi leggo wi clarity
Some latch aan to vanity
Some hol' insanity
Some get vision
Start preach relijan"
In this excerpt, Johnson observes how people strive to cope with reality in various ways. People willingly abandon their clear-headedness and turn to methods of coping to substitute, adopting alternate perspectives which may or may not reflect truth accurately. These methods includes self-absorption, delusion, and religion.
