when he lived in broward

I heard about this Japanese Samurai who was neglecting his duty of guarding a sacred painting. In his neglect, the room where the painting was kept caught fire. The sight of smoke awoke the young Samurai. He dashed into the room, grabbed the painting from the wall with now furtive hands but found all exits barred by flames. Without hesitation, he ran his sword vertically down his chest, wrapped all his clothing around the painting and pressed it into the hole he made in himself. After the flames subsided, others entered the room to find what remained of the samurai’s corpse and the unharmed painting that it contained.

__________________________________________________________________


“A painting, regardless of style or method or description is a collection of color(s) on canvas that displays an image,” he thought as he paced about the downtown gala. He wanted to live and needed work. His most revered peer with a beard, named Jon, an unquestionably Kerouacian Joe who claimed Chicago, with roots big enough to take a seat on and just tall enough to catch your heal while working on a backwards walk kept telling him with persistence and posture that there’s more to being human than being in the right place.

He left the gala with a mind to bolt home, “ohp, see you,” he threw out with a waggish peace sign to the lady behind the counter near the door. Once in car, he realized that Jon was right and that he needed to get himself home to make calls to schedule or cop work (however you want to look at it), the under the table kind natural to the sons of small business contractors . Car started first go and without having to apply foot to gas pedal. He patted the old girl on her pristine dash and started for home. In the move he’d lost a charger for the zune a buddy had given him, and being that no one has zunes, or zune chargers, and that no one gives a shit to learn how to configure the thing, he was in the process of giving up on charging it and for that matter using it ever again for musical enjoyment. So he reached for cd’s and pessimistically hoped in what he’d find. He mind’s digital reader board spelled out with big high-school gymnasium bulbs- “JOHN DENVER, SHIT NO, SINATRA?, THAT FUCK, RADIOHEAD…” He broke the mind drama and slid the cd in flipping a three sided verbal coin in the car's cab- “rainbows it goes, kid a it stays, scratched out the window (other than the last clause everything rhymed, unintentional of course and silly as it was, it pleased the poet in him ever so mildly, smile cracked (size of a button)), he hit a quick drumroll on the squishy steering wheel snare, then crashed on the blinker as ‘everything in its right place’ and his new neighborhood cued simultaneously.

The song middled as he pulled into the shell-rock driveway. Slinging his canvas side-bag from the passenger seat he spotted the pack of smooths his buddy had left in the center consul which he grabbed unhesitatingly, walked a few paces toward a front porch slash over-eave and lit up. “Last for sure, “ he assured himself for all the wrong reasons- he didn’t want to flem-hack anymore or fear cancer-coughs in dehydrated sleep. He hummed and his eyes went catacomb peering up at the Norfolk pine pressing against the neck of the Australian’s higher branches in closest proxy. Power lines set horizontal stripes in the foreground, “how vogue,” he thought and squinted hard as his depth of focus kept auto-resetting on pine and power line and quickly made his mind go loopy. He tilted the neck on his shoulders slightly to exhale smoke like he’d seen a blue jay do with a bull ant. He pulled a moleskine from his front pock and jotted frivolously, “I’ve always known myself to be slightly irrational but love it like tao enlightenment when blue ants taste like Marlboro in the throats of bull jays.”

Reluctantly for sanity sake, Ryan called (he was also quitting the smokes (once for all!))

“hey,” said ryan.

“hey man, I’m smoking,” he admitted.

“good for you.”

“thanks, how you doing?”

“really good actually.”

“nice.”

“Marlboro makes this pack of snus that sells for two ninety-nine. After exercise then breakfast I threw one in and now I bet I’ll be craving free till at least one, maybe two.”

“nice.”

“but yesterday I was out of snus and bummed a red off a guy in the shop when I had a craving…”

“oh no.”

“…yeah, skoal and camel snus are either four to six bucks and these Marlboros are six-packs and more mild.”

“that’s the ticket then?”

“yup.”

“well.”

“what have you been up to this morning?” ryan asked.

“just writing a little bit…oh and, went by an art gallery,” he said.

“nice…well I better go, thanks for calling,” ryan said.

“oh sure, yeah, see you tonight then.”

“oh yeah, right, pick you up at six thirty.”

“nice, do it.”

“um…later then.”

“yeah, peace.”

He craned his neck back again taking in the playful norfolk and australian, staring as long as he could until the swaying limbs fell from focal prominence to the dark and permanence of the power lines in broward.

Catacomb’d he looked away and at a dirty chair and thought of Jon for the simple memory of what he had said for the third or second time now on his way off to a meeting, “that’s where cat sits, I mean cat’s sit.” He stayed his thoughts of Jon and Jon’s fellow human laugh which tended to bubble out of drollery like a panoply of sunken vessels resurrected.

He thought of Jon’s trip with a friend and how they’d seen Hemingway’s house, the southernmost point, and “every street in Key West” as Jon said with the start of a laugh before moving onto some other detail about riding bikes or eating pies, rather pie pieces, or drinking beers, or telling stories. And he wanted that, not the trip or the sense of adventure; he had similarly eventful trips to Key West, that wasn’t the point. He wanted his life to be true is all, like the Avett’s song, he wanted naked truths like Jon was good at telling in semi-lit living room conversations, ‘round midnight with topics such as confessionals on the rocks, he wanted what he’d seen imbuing the lives of inventors and architects, Okakura Kakuzo and Frank Lloyd Wright, in artists and friends, the Avett Bro’s and Jon, he wanted a hole in his chest to await something valuable. Perhaps more selfishly than for pride’s sake, more for possession of goodness than heroic legacy, more for purpose of admission of duty neglected (he lacked a more concise explanation) and active repentance thru coming to senses and making good on wrongs, get this though, he wanted the gospel to get all set in his irrevivably charred corpse, he wanted something like rose buds beside thistles and thorns. He wanted, minus the sword, headband, and other outlandish garb, all that he’d seen in so many angels but without these eyes that always seemed to catacomb, he wanted to be a collection of colors on canvas that displayed an image, like the samurai.

through the ember

now that the solace of the pencil tip
is all bored into
by the times
i close up
embracing the warmth of the back of my eye's lids
washing aways the footprints
the stomp of dirty shoes
on my pharisaic dormant
doormatt
temperament

but the lids are embers also
that know moving on
means maybe
moving on

and i've seen growth
once i saw past the smoke
rising
from the cinders of my ravages

i saw hope
in a younger brothers beautiful song
hope through inspecting so much history
that grandmothers
and grandfathers closest brothers
never heard
while walking in their earthy skins
but then
with newly fashioned ear canals
which knew no more of lamentations
and heard it all
and wept
because it is okay to love those still running
or pacing
while awaiting
a survival

strafing toward the east i peer
and hope with a boneless neck
atop shoulders bent boyish yet
as death-tolls and nuclear statistics
are all i can get my hands on

were i
numb on suffering overseas
less callous about real injustice
were i
seriously
forced to own the facts
that sign the dotted line of ignorant contracts

(citizenship)
i'd have no choice
but to take a machetti turned sideways
and drag it across my western swaggering
think-tank mind
and move one inch
closer to the real divides
the swinging alaskan noonday tides
while peeking through an ember
locked away from and by this skeleton

found this today, it was written by a brilliant old roommate and shoved inside an old collapsible chess set

advent
by tucker lux

milk and honey here

and not here

one who soaks all
tears,
here

and not here,
but tears can be wiped
and there are glimpses
unseen

in waterside
prayers and healings

in (sk)eyes

in lips

of a lover
like the gospel

something to dig

"...make love to me, like you know i'm better than the worst thing i ever did, go slow ya'll, i'm new to this, but i have seen nearly every city in the world from a rooftop without jumping, i have realized that the moon, it did not have to be full for us to love it, that we, we are not tragedies stranded here beneath it, that if my heart really broke, really, every time i fell from love i'd be able to offer you confetti by now, but heart's don't break ya'll, they bruise and get better, we were never tragedies, we were emergencies, you call 911, go ahead, tell them i'm having a fantastic time." -buddy wakefield