Household Blues

An excerpt from Ghost Load-By Naima Yetunde(Ince) Hammonds

There are seasons where survival hums louder than joy—where memory, music, and emotion collide into something both heavy and healing. This piece lives in that space. It is rhythm and rupture, blues and breath, a testimony of carrying, releasing, and becoming.

The record spins on repeat

In and out looping in the same

Tired line

(sing)

Love Lives, Love dies

I still go on alright

My harmonica heart beat

And strained guitar strings pull

Melodies out of my arteries

Reminiscent catastrophe

Marbleized dreams plunge

Into open streams as mermaids

Create scaly fins

Screaming hero babies

That mocks the serenity of the sea

My rocking chair rocks steady

On my flanges as I tickle the idea of relief

I see hope in my blues

I drown in Niagara Falls

Tears and water raft my emotions

And build Sonnets like Shakespeare

That way my words

Are everlasting

Boxed in a padlocked safe labeled

Survive, against, fears, endlessly

Words cut like solid traps

And decorate, disfigured

Distorted laundry two years dirty,

5 years destroyed

And 5 days late to clean

Sterile stains burn holes

In my manipulated love tank

House hold blues drums beats

On my misery and comforts my security

In the midst of instability

I stand on a foundation

To preserve my sanity

Stop the pulse identify, brand me,

Call me the woman

With a co-modified soul

And house hold blues wrote the tune

For success

I’m stressed and so blessed

And I spit from a torn womb

As crying screams ignite the flame

To predict selected peace

Their judgmental eyes gaze on me

As if my existence is to be monopolized

By their acceptance

I dwell not in ignorance

But intellectual knowledge

That dares to call my energy

Friends now foes

I can look you in the eye

And tell you love is in my heart

I wish you the best in God’s name

Cause the thoughts of anger, resentment

Your breech speech with tainted words of hate

Were the same that entangled together

To create, creative babies

I’m not perfection but human

With the right to carry my dreams

In my knapsack

And strip the universe

With every syllable I write

So I tare out my voice box

And use it as my boom box

To bump loudly

So serine kisses me sweet

I’m bitter with joy

And so over whelmed with soul

Today I laugh

And tomorrow

I’ll cry, baptize my fears

In endless elations

Of Gods Future plan

And smile that house hold blues,

Introduced the melody

To my pursuit

Of happiness.

-Naima Yetunde Hammonds

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