The Poet Who Watched The Whole Parade

By Jay Floyd

The Poet Who Watched the Whole Parade, the personal memoirs of Jay Floyd, digs deep into his childhood with chapters of spiritual reflection between each shared memory. The author dissects the people and moments that crafted his psyche within its pages (39,466 words). This book explodes with laughs and tears, family, friends, pimps and the occasional psychological diagnosis. Every character has their own chapter, with poetic personal reflections sandwiched between.

Born Jason Edward Floyd in Cleveland, OH in 1976, Jay Floyd was the younger of two brothers, raised by a mother nearly forty years old at his birth; he absorbed a unique blend of generational perspectives, as well as intense tragedies. From his uncle's cocaine overdose, his brother's murder, finding his mother's dead body alone in her apartment, even reconciling with his father and then losing him again to a stomach ulcer, he was diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but still believes there is hope for the future. Jay explains that although he has gone through so many devastating losses, he is finding a way to wrap himself in the love and lessons he has received throughout his life, as well as liberating from the emotional threads that kept him bound to his past.

The Poet Who Watched the Whole Parade is based on a concept that life, for each of us, is a parade and we all witness figures coming into our lives, large and colorful and then we see them pass by, realizing how human and frail they always were. Jay wrote this book not only for himself, but for the ones he has lost. He tells their story to honor their memories and to stress the importance of what comes from these losses. His message is that love is how we heal and who we are, because to give love is to be human. We are all one and we are all participants in this parade called life.

This book allows readers to not only walk with Jay Floyd through his spiritual journey, but also explore the lessons of their own parade. Readers of all ages will relate to this book because we all have had losses in our lives, but it is through healing that we grow.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jay Floyd
• Release date: May 5, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310224256

Jay Floyd

Jay Floyd is many things: a father, a husband, a brother, a son, a poet, musician, and so much more. The Poet Who Watched the Whole Parade, the personal memoirs of Jay Floyd, digs deep into his childhood with chapters of spiritual reflection between each shared memory. The author dissects the people and moments that crafted his psyche within its pages (39,466 words). This book explodes with laughs and tears, family, friends, pimps and the occasional psychological diagnosis. Every character has their own chapter, with poetic personal reflections sandwiched between.Born Jason Edward Floyd in Cleveland, OH in 1976, Jay Floyd was the younger of two brothers, raised by a mother nearly forty years old at his birth; he absorbed a unique blend of generational perspectives, as well as intense tragedies. From his uncle's cocaine overdose, his brother's murder, finding his mother's dead body alone in her apartment, even reconciling with his father and then losing him again to a stomach ulcer, he was diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), but still believes there is hope for the future. Jay explains that although he has gone through so many devastating losses, he is finding a way to wrap himself in the love and lessons he has received throughout his life, as well as liberating from the emotional threads that kept him bound to his past.The Poet Who Watched the Whole Parade is based on a concept that life, for each of us, is a parade and we all witness figures coming into our lives, large and colorful and then we see them pass by, realizing how human and frail they always were. Jay wrote this book not only for himself, but for the ones he has lost. He tells their story to honor their memories and to stress the importance of what comes from these losses. His message is that love is how we heal and who we are, because to give love is to be human. We are all one and we are all participants in this parade called life.This book allows readers to not only walk with Jay Floyd through his spiritual journey, but also explore the lessons of their own parade. Readers of all ages will relate to this book because we all have had losses in our lives, but it is through healing that we grow.

Book preview

The Poet Who Watched The Whole Parade

By Jay Floyd

Copyright 2014 Jay Floyd

Smashwords Edition

The Poet Who Watched the Whole Parade

By

Jay Floyd

Contents

Prologue

Looking at Life

Myself

Grandma

Beginning the walk

Uncle Jay

Learning new steps

Junior

Ties that bind

Mom

Identifying Me

Dad

Feeding The Future

Epilogue

Prologue

To Dennia, you are my motivator.  Without you this book is never finished.

To Juliet, you are my shining star.  Read this book when you are older and understand where so much of your light comes from.

To my future children yet to be born, you will find pieces of yourself in these pages.

Living and dying are hardly the same things, but I could not fully do either one without publishing the stories detailed in this book.

These pages are dedicated to those who are no longer here physically that helped me build my foundation: Dorothy Floyd, Julius Floyd Sr., Julius Floyd Jr., Lucille Davis and Gerald Davis.  It is also dedicated to everyone who has helped me build upon that foundation.

My earliest memories are dated 1979.  They play on the film projector of my mind pretty vividly.  I have an excellent, photographic memory.  I have used this as my main strength throughout most of my life, but I know that like anything else, memory fades.  My main motivation for writing this book is the concern that one day, inevitably, I will no longer remember these things. I will no longer be able to effortlessly pull detailed images from my childhood back into the present and allow others to breathe in the second-hand smoke of my backroom, cabaret-party filled childhood.  Imagine a room with a dusty old film projector fluttering broken images against a torn screen.  Bits and pieces missing, or scenes distorted to where the chronology no longer makes sense.  To avoid that, I have written the book you now hold.  Please read this with the understanding that for the reader’s sake, as well as mine, I have held back very little.  This is literally life as I know it.  Enjoy.

Looking at Life

The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

Mark Twain

Looking at life.  Things come.  Things go.  The rains come down, then they stop and the sun steams the world dry again. Winds blow, carrying the sounds and scents of nature along with it, the constant respiration flowing over the contour of the world we live in. But those things that nature delivers to our senses can only account for half of the world we live in.  There are also the intrusions upon those natural surroundings- Trucks, cars, yells and screams, screeches, horns; Factories, warehouses, plants (not those kind), and mills.  The collective wart of human nature that has grown disturbingly large on the forehead of God’s nature.  That’s the way it was intended, I would suppose... if I was being asked to suppose.  Some things just are.  As strange as they may be, we are human and human nature is indeed strange.  I’m always intrigued by the transition one must make from the womb to the earth.  What motivates our spirits to take human form?   From being one with the Creator to being ‘from’ the Creator... or, a Creation.  To a newborn, I bet life is an acid trip set to cacophonic music - completely new and foreign shapes and sounds in a nonstop but un-circular merry-go-not-so-round creaking around in a not-always-amusing amusement park. Chaperoned by at least one adult who looks like you and seems to be communicating using a language they expect you to already know... or figure out really soon.  In a process probably similar to the Big-banging birth of the Earth, the whole thing eventually slows down. The once strange colors and shapes become familiar and defined. Eventually you make heads and tails of things and even start mastering that language everyone is using.  I am a firm believer that you never truly lose that connection with the Creator’s nature, though.  The godly umbilical cord is never cut as you proceed through life.  Birds flutter.  Wind blows by.  Grass sways.  Rain drizzles.  Sounds blur together.  Eventually you find yourself standing in a park… feeling the wind and watching as the sun slowly sucks the water from a puddle... lost in your own thoughts... hearing your native language.

Looking at life.  Many believe that we are defined in our mind’s eye by how we perceive we are looked upon by the rest of the world.  Our life becomes an object to be compared to an invisible norm.  We inevitably fall short of that norm and perceive ourselves as inadequate.  Life becomes a game and we become the managers, obsessed with the ways in which we don’t have enough points.  We go through a litany of experiences, some with pleasure, but many with pain.  We focus on our lack of certain things that many folks seem to have in abundance.  We are contorted by the presence of evils that some could never fathom.  We find ourselves at points in life where hindsight is merely used to replay your favorite or least favorite life events over and over.  The mind is a television of sorts, playing self-syndicated episodes of ‘This is Your Life’ whenever you have the time and memory to flip it on.  Well, life as I know it goes by like a bus ride from downtown to the county outskirts.  Along the way we pass by some of everything we can imagine, both good and bad.  Life as I know it - that bouncing bus - stops every so often and allows people step to in. People of every character image - savory, not-so-savory, attractive, distant, annoying, buzzing, smiling, yelling, and cursing.  We will remember them all. They all get a place somewhere on a shelf in our minds and hearts, each prioritized by depth of impact and importance to us. The bus also makes periodic stops to let some people off.  Some of whom we have grown to love deeply become a shrinking, waving figure in the rear-view mirror and a growing memory in your heart. That is life as I know it - riding that bus.  Seat uncomfortable, we adjust every so often.  We are certain of nothing about our destination other than that it exists.  We adapt to the ride. The unpleasant departures of loved ones are cast into a pit of thoughts we try to avoid to keep the ride pleasant. In their place are things that make us smile; beautiful scenery, fresh air, friendly smiles.  We seek what is pleasant.  We till a garden of soil fertile with vices of human weakness. Thrill-seeking lifestyles, sexual pleasures and drug highs are all common blossoms that help distract us from our woes. We stand at the fountain of the knowledge of good and evil sipping… fiends for the tiny bursts of sweet amid the unpredictable bitter acrid taste of life.  In reality, we very rarely even taste life. We live in a constant caution of danger that stands between our tongues and the flavor of life. When we do taste it, it’s an unbalanced mixture; mostly sweet or mostly bitter at a time, to the point where anything between fails to register on our palettes.  Life either sucks ass or there's a party going on, one of the two. The trick is that both are more or less a mirage when you really think about it.  Life most certainly has a point and purpose, but we most certainly are not the beings who are privy to it.  Sometimes I think everything around us, every institution, every concept, every tradition are all just distractions we have created to keep us from thinking about how clueless to the grand scheme we are.

Looking at life.  The best analogy I can think of is a parade.  It's like everyone gets to sit and watch their own parade of crazy acts.  The people in our life are no more than a succession of costumed characters marching by one by one.  They slowly come into view, growing larger with every step, twirl or bound.  Then as they make their way right in front of you, you see them for what they really are.  The papier-mâché mask eventually sways from its own weight and shows a real face behind it.  The stilt-man ultimately stumbles and a quick glance downward reveals no feet leading those awkward steps... just wooden sticks.  The person behind the character, in the end, is revealed to be much smaller, more mundane than initially billed, but all the more human and (now) relate-able; especially without the pretense and pomp and circumstance of your initial meeting.  You get to see the act, the person behind the act and then they're gone.  And you're left to decipher the full impact that they had on you.  The poet who watched the whole parade refers to us - each one of us.  We are all watching the characters in life's parade trot and waddle by, while at the same time dressing and doing our own routine through countless other parades of the people and souls we know and encounter.  We all have stories to tell in our own unique tongues.  Those around us watch on intently, trying to make out exactly what we are from their perspective.  All of us are party-goers in a masquerade ball, some with more elaborate costumes and party tricks than others.   

Looking at life.  Trying to clearly look back in life is tough.  It's like trying to crane your neck around while on a roller coaster; it's hard to do and everything behind you seems a little blurry anyway.  I read once that life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forward.  I hold the firm belief that yesterday and tomorrow do not truly exist.  Sure the concept is sound, but it’s simply that, a concept.  They are simply our mind's way of trying to better comprehend chronology and importance. Tomorrow is not.  Yes, that is a full sentence.  Tomorrow does not exist.  By its own definition, tomorrow never truly is.  We live in a constant today that lasts as long as this turn on Earth lasts for each of us.   Life should only be measured in lifetimes.   Everyone can only have one of three ages: here, not here yet, or on to the next.  Every moment is simply that - a moment;  a speck of ‘the happening’ that your mind can take a snapshot of.  Like a picture. It's the way WE work.  I don’t believe it's the way the universe works, but who the hell really knows. We are simply ‘somethings’ in human bodies; randomly going through life bouncing off of each other in so many ways like heavenly bodies.  Collisions, black holes, vacuums, etc.  If you read a book about the galaxy, it's always striking how easily explained the most complex looking things are.  A distant galaxy shaped like the face of Mickey Mouse simply gets described as the expected physical result of the underlying chemical reaction when some crash or occurrence happens.  Funny how we are not described that way.  In reality, aren't we all the expected physical result of underlying chemical reactions from some crash or occurrence?  

Looking at life.  Life is poetic.  Perfectly written prose. Sweet, shard, bitter, pungent tasting bursts individually chewed and consumed in the mouth of ever-digesting humanity.  Some are short haikus while others are long scrolls worth of tragedy, comedy, and everything in between.  Some are quiet gentle sonnets.  Others demand attention in the way that a car horn reminds us that we are now holding up traffic.  Un-fucking-ignorable. All are the wondrous tale of us, that when