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FICTION: Piano Rojo
November 28th, 2011Let me tell you where it came from. The day was late on – in a tired, thin shoed, tired foot, tired sun kind of way. A tired thin sky straining to keep within it the ancient sun beating down on the ancient grounds. Nicaragua was old and it was new and hot and busy and cluttered like some kitchen drawer in an old beat flat. It was useful, and loved but messy and frustrating. I walked past, in my thin shoes with my tired feet, some aging convent long abandoned and transformed into this dollar-a-pop tourist buffet of things those tourists can look at but don’t understand. It was as tired as the sun. You know, it is there, but people use it and take it for granted and try to make it something else all the time. I had a dollar. I went in to see the fuss. The big old fuss that every whoring attraction in every whoring country puts on like a bake sale. The old parts were grand, they were narrative and inspiring. The new parts were garish and giggling and you could see the stockings and the garter belts and the bumpy skin on their hard working, vain bodies. I strolled through the wide canyon hallways and under the stone umbrella arches and around the thousand-year-old and wise courtyards with their thousand year old and even wiser plants and trees and dirt. I strolled in and out of rooms big and small and old and tiled wall to wall with crafty, loved, vibrant tiles which comforted my dog-tired soles. Rich tourists with rich cameras bumped about awkwardly smelling like sunblock and cotton and ignorance and gutter fame. They were puppies in some new pen in some far off exotic magazine country.
After some time I found myself in what could have been a basement. Could have been, because I was on the ground level but the floor above was the main floor, the main attraction, where the money was spent and the time spent and meetings held and the arguments had. I was below this floor. So it felt like a basement, but was not. In this place that could have been a basement was a very large, very emotional, very Nicaraguan void. Sentinel pillars of stone stood vigilantly around the room leaving open a large, vast, vapid space in the middle. The floor here was different from the floor everywhere else in that dollar-a-pop convent convertible. The air was musty in a soothing, I-am-home, banana sort of way that tickled my skin and hugged my lungs and made me feel safe, and old, and tired and ready. There was some mash-up of colored, meaningless, afterthought tiles in between those vigilant sentinel pillars of stone. Like a city, or a park, or head office, or the world – the area had some method, had some reason that could only be seen if you were high enough. So I walked up a few creaking, whining, giggling wooden stairs and looked down upon that square, vast floor and saw some complex mosaic of a man. He had a beard, thin eyes, a kind smile, old cellophane wrinkles in the corners of his eyes that were like rivers of wisdom leading to his beard made of time and history. A man that had no doubt done something, or paid for something or done something so that he could pay for something. The wearisome, selfless sun seemed to peak in like some curious child through every archaic crack of wood and every knocked-out hole of stone and every open air courtyard throughout the rest of that expansive, daunting, fatiguing-to-look-at, convent.
I walked back down those creaking, whining, giggling wooden stairs. On my way down I saw something I did not see before. It was under some bulk-head like it knew to lurk in the shadows. Like it knew how valuable it was and how beautiful it was and is. There it sat painted in a decaying, peeling, emotional red skin, a blanket, a covering, a pelt. There it sat in the orange light of the glowing, gleeful sun. There it sat before my tired, thin, straining, tourist eyes. A piano with white keys that had gone yellow that were once in line and straight but now looked like some candy loving child’s parents-in-the-poor-house teeth. The golden pedals of three were warped and contorted like a misshaped women walking down the misshaped streets of colonial Latin America. I approached the piano with weary, curious, infant steps. It was like some star shining in the night sky that could not be ignored. Some star that you saw that night but no one else did and so you were the only one who stared at it, waiting for it to do something special, something Godly. It had some eye-shadowed force field of love around it. A woman who is naturally attractive but whose hair hangs down in negligence of her beauty and whose face sits plain in protest. A woman who is beautiful but does not want to be.
I struck a sour, worn out, hanging-on-for-dear-life key that echoed a sour worn-out din all throughout those vast hallways and umbrella arches and thousand year old courtyards. I turned around to see if someone was looking. The open space was now full. A hundred antique people in antique dress with antique hats and antique smiles looked at me like some time traveling tourist in their seventeenth century tableau.The air was still soothing and hugged me but it was musty no more, and touristic no more, and it was fresh and new and time-honored. Shit eating grins don’t change, they never have and those hundred people in there funny gowns and fluffy suits and vibrant, colorful auras and dark, Latin, brown-sugar skin all starred at me with some blank historic shit eating grin. A young man who was dressed more elaborately than the rest and who was no doubt the subject of whatever celebration they were celebrating, came close to me with his kind face and open hand and fruity step. As he came closer his eyes became less focused on me and more interested in what was beyond me which I knew was only that strange, haunted red piano. The whole scene was too much, too strange, too dream-like and too real. I stepped to the side to look at the piano and the funny man who wanted it. The magic. The imagination. The ghost like transformation of a thing. The piano was gone. Standing in its place was some stunning, beautiful, fantastic, perfect, dark Latin woman of youth and wonder and a hungry sort of wisdom. Her dark hair, thick and flowing like southern honey and her eyes gleaming out her tanned sockets. Her finger nails white against her brown fingers. Her face delicate and strong and flooring at the same time. Her body wrapped in a luscious, long, cloud of billowing red silk dress.
The vintage man said to that vintage woman something like ‘Hey baby, come and dance with me in front of all these people who will be jealous of our beauty and our youth and our love and our future’. And she took his hand and said ‘If they will be so jealous, we must always remember how valuable a thing we have’ with her eyes. The whole fuss was so colonial and special and once-in-a-lifetime I thought to myself how sad and sorry those dollar-a-pop tourists would be knowing they missed this amazing haunt. And how miserable they would be after clicking their cameras away into oblivion to find out that all those cameras shot was an empty space filled with empty air haunted by a thousand ghosts or more. The colonial couple gracefully, romantically glided onto the dance floor like actors in a tourism brochure in some bleak, cold, winter-bogged office or agency. The floor was no longer a complex mosaic of a man’s face, but was a simple, stark, layout of blue and white Nicaraguan craft. The whole gleeful, vibrant, jealous crowd watched the couple with loving, envious, vicarious lenses. I wondered to myself if people back then were born knowing how to dance. How could they have time to learn amongst all the strife, and history, and time, and war and planning. I wondered to myself who the man was on the floor that was once there but had changed. And then I saw him, in the flesh, in the ghostly flesh, standing amongst the crowd, eyes wider, skin tighter, smile healthier. I saw him with his hands held tightly together in awe and gratitude. I saw his eyes in the red beauty’s eyes, and his skin on the red beauty’s skin and his smile in the red beauty’s smile. I saw him watch his daughter glide around that dance floor, that would-be shrine, in happiness and ignorance and love. His was the only glare without jealousy and envy and wonder and was instead of pride and relief and thunderous joy.
Loud noises of guns, and boots, and hate, and prejudice echoed through those empty corridors and vast courtyards. Loud noises of guns, and boots, and hate and prejudice came closer and closer. Marching orders, chants, scared whispers carried on the antique wind. Some other Latin army from some other Latin country across some fake, perforated border was suddenly in the crowd, amongst it, on the dance floor dancing their very own dance of disgust. Guns fired, screams fired, shrieks fired, arms up in the air as the whole scene fired and turned from colonial love to colonial hate. That mosaic tile father stood before the army’s leader in some useless, proud, desperate plea. The lovers held each other tightly. They shot the young male lover for something he did or didn’t do and before they could shoot his bride the old mosaic man got before her and took her bullet, stole her fate. A father’s life to save his daughter’s. That young male lover looked up at his widow-to-be and said something like ‘Run, baby’ and she did run, she ran right to me, right past me and the army shot out a flurry of hateful, ignorant, pointless, tax-paying bullets towards me and her and me and her and me and her. She took more than enough bullets before falling at the foot of some new, not decaying, not peeling still emotional piano painted red behind me. I looked back at the fallen groom who looked upon his fallen bride with fallen eyes of sorrow and of love. I looked back at the groom as he looked up at me, into my fallen eyes of sorrow, right in the eyes I swear, and said ‘Hey man, you there, protect my love, protect my red beauty, any way you can, man’ and as I looked back behind me the bride was gone. All that remained was that piano, only now it was decaying, and peeling and emotional and a worn sort of red.
Now I was alone. All was silent. There was no army upon us, there was no crowd of jealousy watching. There was no loving bride or loving groom or loving scene and the only regretful father to be seen was to be seen amidst the complex mosaic tiles upon the colonial, worn floor. All was as it was and the sour, worn out, hanging-on-for-dear-life note still floated through the old air like sailors on some ocean cloud looking for the land of a better day. I paid a fortune for that piano and now it sits in my modern room surrounded by modern things bought by a modern man and it embodies love and it embodies history and stands for a promise made and the notes and cries and love still hang in the air like frozen rain drops on their way down to the sorry ground. Like some apocalyptic, Nicaraguan death-rattle.
END
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1,000 Words On Having Nothing
September 12th, 2011Let me tell you what having nothing means to me.
To artists, ideas are currency. Inspiration, quite literally, equals dollars. Honest art is bankable. Ideas are fuel for an artist’s idle mind. Artists run on ideas the same way nine-to-fivers run on food and watered-down coffee. Without ideas, artists don’t get out of bed. Without ideas, they meander about like forgeries of who they want to be. Without ideas, artists crumble. I am not talking about ‘my-mother-thinks-it-is-great-and-that-people-would-really-enjoy-it’ ideas. And I am not talking about some ‘great-idea-that-some-old-high-school-buddy-ran-by-me-at-some-random-party-last-weekend’ idea. I am talking about honest ideas. Art without honesty is just craft. Honest ideas worth sharing. Spreading. Ideas that nurture. Ideas that mean something. Ideas that are the food, the very sustenance of the future. And these ideas, when you get them, hit hard. They feel right. You know it right away. They must be developed. Those are the ideas I am talking about.
Without honest ideas, artists have nothing.
To artists, good honest ideas are a lot like love. They hurt. They provide. They enlighten. They must be. Lovers are jealous of those around them that know true love. Artists are jealous of their peers who have found that one true, virgin idea – no matter what they say. Like love, ideas are connected to the artist’s life. They are connected to their soul. And, like any lover, when the idea is not there the soul is broken. The soul is empty. The soul is a shadow. Love is this thing, this intangible thing, and you cannot calculate it and you cannot actually describe it. An idea is the same: immeasurable and infinite and inexplicable. You can talk about it, sure, and you can run it by people. But they will never, ever, know its true meaning or power. They will always and forever fail to grasp the application of it, the necessity of it, the inevitability of it. They will merely listen to it like the news.
Love is only real to the lover just as the idea is only real to the artist.
This is why those who love artists are bound to know pain. Because an artist must learn about ideas, search for ideas, find ideas, realize they are worthless, search for more ideas and hope, one day, to find an idea worth holding on to. A lover must learn about love, search for love, find love, realize that that love is false, search for more love and hope, one day, to find a love worth dying for. A lover must fight for love. An artist might fight for inspiration. But, at some point in an artist’s life, a lover will appear. And that lover will suffer through their partner’s fight for love as well as their fight for art. And because that artist’s soul is as attached to love as it is to ideas, his soul will be forever torn.
Without love, the lover ceases to be. Without ideas, the artist ceases to be. That is how important ideas are. That is the value of muse. The importance of applicable imagination. The reason for angst. The great, cosmic motivator. Art knows no rules. Love knows no rules. There is only feeling. There is only theory.
To an artist, to have nothing is not to be hungry or to be homeless or to be alone. To an artist, to have nothing is to know nothing, to think nothing. To an artist, true nothingness is a void in the soul and in the mind. Blackness. To an artist, having nothing is about non-existence, to everyone else, having nothing is about a poor existence.
Let’s look at ideas as a business.
Imagine if your business was something as elusive as love, as abstract as love, as incalculable as love. Imagine for a moment that your business was not based on the foundations of an academic curriculum. That the basics of your business did not exist in an over-priced textbook. Imagine instead that the recorded history of your business was a compilation of thoughts, rants, speculations and fantasies that belonged to a mad few. How would you educate yourself? What certainty would you have?
To the artist, the only certainty is the presence of uncertainty. The only permanence is impermanence. The only something is nothing. Faith in nothing. Faith in blackness. Faith that the true idea is out there and that it will come crashing upon his door, and into his living room, into his mind. Faith that something he cannot describe is still possible. Faith that something he cannot see still exists. Faith that something he cannot deposit at the bank is still, somehow, currency.
The practice of love requires blind, unmitigated faith. The practice of art requires the same.
This is the great torture of the artist’s life. Love is found in another person. The lover need only meet as many people as possible. But the pristine, undrunk idea floats in the air, blows around in the wind, crawls in the dirt beneath the rock and has no actual physical presence. Love can smack him in the face. Ideas can pass right on by. If he does not grab them, they will float onward in search of another artist who is actually listening. An artist who has not yet lost faith.
And when an artist loses that faith, when he forgets that anything is possible, when he looks to facts for answers and when he turns his back on nothingness, when he stops reaching in the seemingly empty air, when he feels that the next true idea does not exist – that is when the artist has nothing. That is when the artist is hungry. That is when he is homeless.
The absence of ideas is the artist’s one true fear.
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ESSAY: Every Man Loses
August 31st, 2011
This is what I have learned: every man loses. He loses his baby teeth. He loses his toys. He may lose his first love, he will probably lose his virginity. He will surely lose his temper more times than one, his job, his wallet and his keys. He will lose control. He will lose sleep. He will make bets and will lose some of them. After a while, he may lose his hair and he may once again lose his teeth. Soon enough, he will lose friends, family members and loved ones. He may eventually come to lose his sanity, his reason and his dignity. But he will most certainly lose his life. Every man loses, but, every man must gain as well and it is what that man does in between that defines his forward movement. It is how he tempers the loss with good sense that matters most. These are notions from a mind that wishes he knew then what he knows now.
My great-aunt passed away this week. She was an amazing woman, a beacon of not only hope but strength and fortitude as well. She was eighty-eight. I was exceptionally close to my grandmother – having lived with her for the last eight years of her life and was present at the unfathomable moment of her life’s end. After my grandmother’s passing, her sister, my great-aunt, took on a somewhat commemorative quality. To be in the presence of my aunt was to also be in the presence of my late grandmother and because both women were remarkable, the pleasure was doubled. So to was the pain when the former went to go reunite with her departed sister not four days ago. Now, there are no ‘great’ or ‘grand’ relatives remaining and an entire generation has gone to wind.
Such a profound loss effects a man deeply; strikes him at his very nucleus. When his core is shaken so, it becomes a challenge for him to temper his loss with any constructive judgment or rationale. Yes, he may have the support of a companion or the solace of a loving embrace but no less painful does the presence of a confidant it make. Does not the wind wear away the stone face of a cathedral no matter the strength of its buttresses? And so, how is a man to know the proper route through such a dimly lit and gloomy maze?
A man can lose all the keys, jobs and wallets imaginable but there is not a tangible object invented yet that can prepare him for the loss of a life. Do we not learn from loss? But what sort of character growth can we hope to obtain from such trivial displacements as these? As the loss becomes greater, so too does the wisdom gained from it. But does one not need the wisdom first, to bear the loss? Will we forever be one step behind fate? Likely. But, perhaps the anticipation of such a loss can mitigate the sorrow of it. To be forewarned is to be forearmed; and so, I find a certain refuge in the following concept by Achaan Chaa, the Thai meditation master:
“You see this goblet? For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”
A man’s loss is a writer’s gain.
Of all the idiosyncrasies and self-deprecating habits I employ as a defeatist writer, perhaps the most distressing is the inferiority I feel concerning the relatively smooth and colorless life I have led up to now. It is often argued that a writer’s work is influenced greatly by his own life experiences. If this is even partially true, from what reservoir is the dull writer to pull forth his readable tales and compassionate characters? Fiction is drama. And so, what drama can be expected from the author who has seen but little of it?
Take a look at some of the greats: Oscar Wilde was a socialite and a homosexual in a very conservative time. He was arrested for sodomy, tried for buggery and, upon refusing to flee to France, served two years in prison. He spent three years in exile and was separated from his wife and sons and died poor of syphilitic meningitis. Hemingway? His father committed suicide, he was married four times, fought in world war one, he was wounded, decorated, knew world leaders, refit his boat into a warship, survived a pane crash, fought in world war two, was decorated again and survived another plane crash. These men knew drama, they knew loss and they knew what it was to let life shape art. They experienced the full spectrum of human emotion and condition. Such a rich and plentiful bag of muse they had from which to harvest real and honest characters and venues. Not that they necessarily had to write about exactly what had happened to them, but what did happen to them gave them a certain insight into the measure of a man and how far he could go before he broke. They comprehended more accurately how loved ones react in extraordinary circumstances. The world is formed by the ebb and flow of cause and effect and these men witnessed more cause and more effect than other duller men. So, you see, it’s not the experience that inspires a writer’s truthful word, it is what that experience showed him about mankind.
I’m not exactly chasing loss or heartache, but, when it is thrust upon me by the crafty hand of fate, its value is not entirely neglected. When life hands you a lemon, right? The recent death of my aunt blotted out the shining sun above my cheerful day, it made bland all the wonderful latin flavors I placed upon my tongue, it warped the lens through which I observe the world. These tools: the sun, my sense of taste, my outlook – they have an immense impact on words which I write and the tales which I weave. Thus, the reverberations between life and art are impossible to ignore.
I suppose if I were given the opportunity to choose between inspiring loss and inert bliss, I would choose bliss, for blood runs thicker than ink, but my writing would forever suffer for it. It is a hard thing for a man to bear a loss, be it a wallet or a life, but the time comes when he must make the best of things and move on. Mourn, recover, create.
Originally Published in Digital Americana Magazine
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ESSAY: In This Crowded Shelter
August 3rd, 2011
The glassy blue water blended itself into the powdery sky creating, as it were, no visible horizon. Instead, there was but one uniform sheet held up in front of us as we motored through choppy, tropical waters in a small fiberglass skiff. We were off the coast of the Azuero peninsula, in the Gulf of Panamá, trolling for yellow-fin tuna at break-neck speeds. The peninsula was a wild sort of place with untouched forests that crept to a wind-swept beach upon which the lonely ocean crashed. With no signs of civilization, one would have assumed the small boat that had awaited our arrival, ten meters out, bobbing in the ebb and flow of the languid tide, was simply dropped into those lapping waters from an invisible chasm in the sky.
As company in the diminutive vessel, there was my father in-law, brother in-law, the pilot who flew us from provincial Panamá in his somewhat dated prop-plane and the owner of the boat who had brought along his teenage son for the afternoon – all six of us huddled around a busted cooler in the middle of the skiff like the homeless crowding around a rusty barrel of fire in the night. The fisherman and his son spoke no English and my Spanish was far too broken to rely on it for pleasantries, thus we hurtled forth, a fishing rod erect out either side of the craft like insect antennae, in virtual silence listening only to the crash of the boat on its own wake like some broken assembly-line machine. Just about the time I felt as far removed as was possible from the two bare-footed Panamanians – our lives, mine and theirs, seemed not like two variations of the same thing but two entirely different things altogether – the son of that weathered fisherman broke the silence, leaned forward to within ear-shot of me and yelled out over the hum of the Yamaha four-stroke in Spanish slow enough for me to understand ‘Do you have Facebook? I have Facebook.’
His simple statement, of which, I may add, he was perfectly delighted, was for me, a revelation. Here was this boy whom by experience alone was probably more of a man than I, and whom, if he did in fact go to school, probably did so in classroom with a dirt floor, this boy of no more than sixteen who every day came home no doubt smelling of dead fish and tackle and who every day woke to the sound of a rooster’s cry, asking me, first-world traveller, second-rate writer, about facebook, concerned, surely, with his ever-expanding online network. This was not the first time, nor the last, that I experienced this revelation.
I had felt it years before, traveling Southeast Asia, when I observed the bond between Soukyian, a Cambodian tuk-tuk driver, and his younger brother, Cee, who brokered the discounted ride to the firing-range, and who had come along to watch a Canadian try to fire an abandoned Russian AK-47. I listened to the two bicker about which was the more efficient route or who would get to finish the nutty-liquid treat we bought from a street vendor outside the S-21 prison camp, and, could not help but detect, in those two dusty Cambodians, a younger, sandier reflection of myself and my brother. I felt it again while walking up a mountain road in search of coffee plantations in rural Guatemala with Antonio, who was my local guide, while he spoke to me about the plot of land he had just procured, of his aspirations of farming the land and of making his fortune from the toil and providing to his family a life of security and safety. We may have lived, Antonio and I, in two very different countries, but the motivations that lived within us, the priorities which defined our forward motion, were, on some basic instinctual level, equivalent.
When I was young, and my mind was still a dry sponge gasping in the hot sun for the quenching dampness of knowledge, I would dream of wandering this great planet, of exploring its distant lands and getting to know its exotic cultures. It seemed, to a boy of such naiveté, that there was a finite number of categories of which all the people of the world must fit into and be classified thus, like species of plants to a botanist, and understood. It appeared, to his raw unsophistication, that to know the world of man would be to know the all the differences within it – for, is not diversity what man offers so exclusively to this rich and vibrant kingdom? Imagine the boy’s surprise when, as a man later in years, he finds out by way of traveling the world that to comprehend the race of man is not to be aware of what differentiates its natives, but, in fact, what unites them.
Fears, hopes, dreams, love, rage, desire – all these things and more – possess no class or colour, they know not the wealthy from the poor nor black from white and are, entirely and completely, universal. Does not the flame both the thief and beggar burn? Or the hammer bruise? Does not the blade both the winner and loser cut? Does not the presence of fright make race the beating heart within every man? Yes. All we humans, in all our moments of bigotry, our hours of bias and days of narrow-mindedness, through every discriminating glance or partial decision made, are the same. We are the same whilst we quarrel, we are the same whilst we debate and even whilst we march upon our mother earth, with the drums of war a-beating and the flags of hate a-waving, are all alike.
A storm will always come. The winds of change will blow across every plain, rustle each forest, and raise bumps upon the skin of all who know its chilled embrace. There is no ear that is deaf to the rumble of far off thunder, nor an ego immune to its shaky portent. The rains will make wet the shoulders of the clever and of the inept and waft, to and fro, in no particular direction over the scurrying crowds. North, south, east and west, the waters will rise and all of the races all over the world will seek out, when that time comes, higher ground. And all those people, all worried for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, will be all warm, all safe, all relieved within the same crowded shelter. All of man’s bridges will crumble and all his buildings will be undermined as will his be his pyramids of social standing and of ancient preference. The African and the German, who shiver both from the same damp chill, will know there is no difference between them. The Indonesian, American and Australian, all huddled together for warmth, will know that they are the same. The fathers will all hold open the doors to that shelter so that their families may enter safely before them. Mothers of different tongues will nod and share sighs of relief that their offspring is safe within arm’s reach. It is only we humans that know prejudice. Only we humans are aware of some difference between us, a difference that nature knows nothing of, a difference that fate and destiny scoff at upon their cosmic course.
It is this state of things, this very human condition, the core of everything, not the skeleton but the very marrow in the bones, this unseen current, this natural concrete which binds together the fabrics of all walks of life, that, as a writer, I yearn to tap, to harvest and to, one day, comprehend fully. It is this truth that gives reason to all life. It is this reality that levels to the ground the pillars of sand that man hath built with his intolerant hand and stood upon with weary balance. It is this fundamental depth that unifies us.
Written on the road in Northern Guatemala
Originally Published in Digital Americana Magazine
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FICTION/POETRY: A Thousand Dancing Ballerinas
July 21st, 2011The blue of the night sky. The drip, drip, drip from an ancient eaves trough. The yellow glare of cracked lights upon the worn, greedy, jumbled stones. Walls of buildings slant and slope like drunken men stumbling through drunken streets a thousand years ago. I blend in more with the streets than I do with the men. I am more rock than blood. The whole place shines, every cobbled-stone, every tumbled brick, every faded door and each and every rotted iron balustrade as though it were oiled down and ready for the show. The great big show of time. And there I sit, in the middle of time, amidst its active waters and heedless winds, amidst its hungry stare and smoky breath. There I sit smoking a cheap cigar, the peach blunts kind, blowing clouds of cheap smoke into oncoming headlights on the ancient battlefield. It winds up into the blue night sky like a thousand dancing ballerinas all dressed in vibrant grey.
The same puppy peeks his head out the small hole in the cracked hundred-year-old door. He ventures out into the dangerous streets of man. He knows nothing. I am jealous. He looks clean, and curious and awake and perfect. I roll the cigar in between my jaded finger tips. I feel the tobacco leaves crunch beneath the pressure. Cars drive by, breaking though my field of smoke like some obese runner on some historic track in some obscure memory. They drive by and scare the puppy. He runs back into his hovel with a boyish whimper. I worry for him. I wonder what kind life he can have in these penniless, worn paths. In these archaic doorways where archaic people make archaic decisions and they are happy. In these happy streets and happy rooms where nights disappear into time with no regret. I wonder what kind of life he will have here.
The same baby giggles and cries and whines and laughs and the sounds carry on the wind with my dancing ballerinas to a far off place resembling the future. A million doors line a million streets and the baby is everywhere. A thousand babies have one voice. I start to feel the heat of my cigar ember as it burns down through itself towards me. It is cheap so it burns fast. I am alone and so I suck away at it more than I need to. I suck as the baby whines and our actions become one in the sands of Latin America. I wonder what kind of life that baby can have. I wonder about the sailors and drinkers and fighters and workers and poets and paupers who smoked cigars on these light year streets light years ago and listened to that baby’s parents giggle and cry and whine and laugh. The ballerinas dance. The show goes on. The great big show of time.
The street women scampers with her crooked spine down the crooked alley screaming nothing screams to a nothing audience. No one hears but me. Maybe the puppy hears but the puppy has her figured out already. I am far from that. I have figured out my cigar, my cup of dirt red wine and my parchment shirt. Beyond that I am lost. She makes her way like some misshaped stone down the beach, rolling in the waters, bouncing, fighting, scraping the basement of the world. She does not wonder about anything because she knows everything. She knows the depths of the oceans and the heights of the heavens. She has climbed the ladders of the world with her zig zag gate. She walks with a crutch but it has no purpose. No purpose outside sympathy, delusion, food and a hat full of coins. I wonder where she got it.
The two military men with their military strut and long, shiny, backslide machine guns, walk over to me, the boy with the short cigar. The boy with the short fuse who watches the street woman with the short left leg. They smell the tobacco, the smell the fear, the ignorance, the youth. They smell with their military noses my bohemian cup filled with bohemian drink on those bohemian city streets. Drip, drip, drip from the ancient eaves trough onto the stone long eroded with garbage and rain and water and dusty steps of dusty people. The street woman gallops off into fate’s dark swallows. Fate gulps her up. I can see the bottom of my glass through the small amount of wine still left in my cup like a wise man sees the bottom of the ocean from his small tin skiff. It swashes around before his glassy eyes and he contemplates it, wonders how it came to be and how it will ever, ever come to pass. He gulps it up. The machine guns follow the crooked tread into the throws of fate and its big, wide, slobbery mouth saying ‘awe’.
I sit in front of a hulking, bombed-out church. Walls crumbling before my eyes and making the ground higher with resentment. The dust of stone blowing off into the blue night wind. Its doors are long gone, its roof is long gone, its floors are gone and its people are gone. But its memory lives and its command lives and its pulsing, cold body lives. Purple lights placed by modern man for modern tourists shine garishly upon its grand skin insultingly. The yellow moon battles the purple lights in a never ending chromatic debate. My thousand dancing ballerinas dance with a thousand more who danced throughout the sunrises and sunsets of sorry, forgotten, ageless ages. Like some tank, like some beast, like some scolding father or teacher who knows-it-all, that bombed-out church changes the night as the wind finds its way around it. A thousand ghosts rise up from the oiled, shiny, tumbled, jumbled stones to greet me and greet the puppy of youth and the screaming, contorted woman of fate. They shake my smokey hand and kiss my wine-soaked lips. A thousand ghosts with a million memories and million more concerns all parade their way down those yellow, moonlit alleys and haunt a million more thin-skinned, happy dreams.
A puddle ripples as they hover by. My eye catches it. The fuzzy puppy is gone. The bent women is gone. The confident military men are gone. It is me and the buildings of time. I dash my burning hot peach blunt missile into the ruffled spectating waters and move on beneath that blue night sky. The hiss of hot hitting cold pierces the still air like a godly arrow from some golden bow far beyond the heavens. Rubber tires rumble on those rubble stone streets. I go against the grain, blending in with those rubble stone streets back to my hovel. The drip, drip, drip and the scamper, scamper, scamper and the whines and the giggles and ghost’s cries and the peach hiss remind me of my lonely keyboard and its lonely letters waiting to be worn away with vain musings and inept observations. My fuzzy thoughts and bent memories and confident stare guide me falsely through those ruffled waters of time. Falsely towards that finish line. Those vibrant, smokey scenes of a colonial venue masterpiece will raise forever before my glassy eyes like a thousand dancing ballerinas all dressed in vibrant gray.
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