I’m not a coincidence.
prose poems from 2011.
I found an old notebook of mine from 2011. It starts off with a group of prose poems that I can’t find in my files. Did I forget to type them up? I don’t know. They are in my handwriting. I can’t say I remember them, but that doesn’t mean much with me. I can barely remember what I had for lunch yesterday.
Here’s a few. JLJ.
It’s for you.
In the dream the sound of an old Baltimore streetcar from years ago wakes me up. I’m back in my old neighborhood of Irvington. I board the streetcar in my pajamas. It’s crowded with morning passengers heading downtown, and I am all the way to Pratt Street before a seat opens up. I sit, and a phone rings. A very old man man hands me a very old telephone and says, “Your life is calling.” Then, in this world, my alarm rings and I wake for real, still feeling the weight of the telephone in my hand.
I am Jobe, no other.
I never felt the need to find myself. Who I am was never a question to me. I’m not a coincidence. JL and Nena planned me from the start. I could have been born to another name or another hearth, even to the point of scales, fur, or leaves, but no. I am Jobe.
Life offers quite a few changes of scenery, changes of wardrobe. One doesn’t have to end as one began. I choose this life, just as it is. This body, mind, and landscape suit me. Every bump in the road, every sorrow; I can face it just fine.
So don’t pity me no matter what ailments of age befall me. I am Jobe, no other, and the path I have made by walking is here just for me.
The only hill.
I am sitting on the only hill in a very flat town. It is a small hill, and is green with summer. I pretend that the well-trimmed grass is a wild forest for tiny beings, human-like, but not humans. They race through the wild with their faces painted, fast and silent. No one can see them but me, and I choose to not tell anyone but you.
This is the place.
This is the place; fish from the city come here to leap into the ocean, city fish gone wild. It’s their nature. You can see them smiling below the choppy waves. Next year their children will come. So it goes.
This is the place; when my time come I join the queue with the others. With one maniacal leap I am free, swimming through chilly salt water. Now something calls me to go deep Deep DEEP. So it goes.
But I haven’t finished yet. Listen to your heart, to your blood. Don’t be afraid to leap, not ever. Freedom is the will to be free, and this is the place. Right here. So it goes.
James Lee Jobe
19 JULY 2026
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Adios,
James
'Freedom is the will to be free, and this is the place. Right here.' That felt like the heart of the piece for me. We spend so much time looking for another place that we sometimes miss the one where life is already asking us to begin.