In the dreamscape there were tents.
Made of found wood and canvas tarps.
Huge, man length snakes appeared on the sand.
I wanted those scales on my body.
Black and rainbow all at the same time.
I wanted to shimmer that way.
And be renewed continuously.
Photo : Guido Mocafico
The bag was flimsy. The cheap kind shopkeepers didn’t run a mental tally on before giving out. The plastic was so thin you could see your hand through it. It was the color of mother’s milk. Inside lay a single toothbrush that despite its forlorn swaddling was still new and unused. Besides the toothbrush, the bag held only the delicate fumes of polyphenol. The man with the bag leaned against the railing of the ferry. His skin was a dark with sunlines that radiated from eyes and streaked his brow. He looked to be in his late thirties but exposure to intense light can hide a person’s age. His face straddled the line between dreamer and vagabond. Maybe he was imagining his boots striking soiling on the other end of the ferry line. I wondered if he was Moroccan, or maybe Algerian. It was hard to tell and I didn’t want to stare. Something told me that everything he owned was in that bag. He had the look of a man who had seen things that could sour. His hands were workman’s hands, thick with muscles and padded with calluses. I couldn’t help study his hands. The handle of the bag cut across his palm like a lifeline to a future that might yet be. I felt a story pulsing out of him, like a gypsy aura beating a drum. A story without a teller wanting to be told.
I’ve been reading a lot of Charles Bukowski lately. Not sure why it took till I was nearly 40 to discover this writer. In the last 6 weeks, I’ve read each of his novels in chronological order, twice. Not kidding. That’s what happens when my obsessive side kicks in. Say what you will about Bukowski, that he was a genius, drunk, womanizer, misogynist, tender-hearted bastard, whatever. For me, his writing is the embodiment of the sacred and the profane in equal measures. And isn’t that life? Really. And since my brain has been awash in a steady stream of Chinaski, I’ve written a little ode to coffee styled in my rendering of his voice for your pleasure below.
It felt like novocaine had been injected behind my eyes. I could barely keep them open. My head felt like it was squeezed by a set of invisible hands. Was this what it was to be a zombie? Waking up each morning half dead? How could life be so banally ruthless? I didn’t know. Didn’t have the answers and didn’t care. That’s just the way it was. Life before you walked the springboard and dove into your first cup of coffee.
Today I saw my face for the reality it was. Creased, and lined, and peeling around the edges like a Victorian lady whose paint had faded long ago. What had I become? Not a shadow, not an echo but a luminous crack in the facade. Now I am free to live wildly. Without worry. I can set my baggage down by the river’s edge and cross lighter, more permeable, than in my youth. This is what it means to get older. The soles of my feet lift from the ground. Only the toes remain touching. I will walk this way until I reach the next crossing, beyond the mountainous stretch of life that still lies ahead. Then I will float.
When they open the fire hydrant in the summertime with a wrench and nothing more, a torrent of water spews forth. It floods the asphalt turning it the color of a swimming pool at midnight. Once the hydrant has been opened there’s no way to close it up until the fire truck appears. This usually happens 20-30 minutes after. All you can do until then is run screaming in your shorts and tank top, barefooted through the spray. Writing can be like that. Beware of opening the stream. Once it starts flowing the ink will streak across the page like a child in rapture, soaked to the bone on a sweltering summer day.