I put on
a character
that drinks decaf and
white wine
in the blue couch of
his soon to-be old house
after eating a dinner
he himself cooked
a while ago.
The character brings
five books of American poetry to
the couch, skims them
all, remembering
the verses of the Platts, and the
cummings and the Frosts that fed
a series of younger versions of
himself, back in the wanna-be days, in
the days of poems and urban walks and
something else.
(Did those days really
end, by any
chance?)
He ends up skimming more deeply
a book of haikus
by Bashô, that he took from a
shelf while thinking about
nothing, or maybe just
not thinking, at all.
After reading seven or eight seasonal
haikus of love and barley, he
stands up and relapses into
me, searching on my
cell phone for an available
electric cool motorcycle in my
neighborhood, so that I can go
meet my friends for a
friday night drink and
maybe something more.
I take a moment to laugh
at the character that I sometimes am, in
these precious moments of solitude,
these existential breaks between
work and life
that I like to call being.
And then, as I open the
door and prepare to
leave the house, with my
American-brown denim jacket
on my shoulders, and my
almosttwentyfourhour unwashed long
hair, I open the cellphone again and
look at a somewhat psychedelic picture
of an elegant mother, sitting at a dinner
table, wearing a colorful and tropical
necklace. In my head, the
character of myself — always
the wanna-be, the urban walker,
the clumsy lover, the
youngster, and
the silly-serious
poet — just whispers, in
his best buddhist
incarnation, a small
wannabeurbancoolpoetic haiku
made up of love, wine, decaf and
a little hint of chocolate.
Then I close
him, and immediately after
that I close
the door.
Mother’s vivid colors —
beautiful night
ahead of us