the last cigar he finishedpitched
its butt from off the back porch into the yard in the yard struggled an English
Walnut tree there were also dense thatches of rosemary
now one rosemary had a huge hole
in its middle it looked like a donut and
the Walnut had to be cut down its stump
hugs the earth
Time
Time has its designs and its
uncountable ways with all things
that was a year ago
he blamed this cigar a Black ‘n
Sweet Ahmen to that
bruther Aromatic Backwoods on his daughter
while in Italy she bought him a
Cuban a Romeo Y Julieta Romeo No. 2
she thought he might enjoy it
slowly but surely this girl was
usurping his identitythe person he was before Life and Love stepped in between
what he thought he wanted to do travel and what he did if had
he been able to sidestep that beautiful train of Love that hurtled down on
him had he let it passlet her go right by him
well
had
he
they wouldnt have had this young
woman this wonderful daughter whose spirit and wanderlust had taken her
overseas ten times who possibly inherited his wanderlust DNA
he was the sonthe child at nine
years old who told his parents often When I dont live here any more
they lived in Chicago
When I dont live here any more chewed
at his guts
he was twenty before he could afford
to leave those two years from his eighteenth
birthday killed himworked him over every morningthats how badly he wanted out
but he wasnt going out stupid
and during those two years Life was
workingtrying its best at intercedinglaying its thumb on the scale like a
dishonest butcher
it wasnt beyond him to cut it
off if Life didnt lay off
then stupidly Life bought a head fake he
supposed it never learned that when tackling somebody you dont pay
attention to anything but their bellybutton
he was gone
it became glaring obvious later that
if he didnt make trips backsince he was the one who left family and friends werent going to visit him
they were all happy right where
they were
they reminded him he was the one
who had a bug crawl up his assmade him dissatisfied with the Midwest
like a bug was at fault
everyones responsible for their
decisions
so his family remained in
Chicago HAPPY as fucking clams
HAPPY as perhaps the South Sea
Giant clamshell half he had in his livingroom was until its demise
Tridacna derasa its scientific name curiously reminded him of
tabula rasa a clean slate the shell was thatscoured clean the clams existence was unknowable to him or
he to it had they met while it was alive
though what he did know was that the
shell was more than one hundred years oldmore than one hundred years earlier a
fertilized egg wafted in a shallow sea and then a nubile larva finally anchored itself to a reef it had
been a library curio in his friends parents house since the 50s
his family anchored in
Chicago some time during the late 19teens
the half shell weighed 63.4
pounds
he undressedweighed himself on
the bathroom scale then picked up the
shell and weighed himself again
6 foot 211.2
then 274.6
members of his familynotoriously
a brother and a sister tipped the scale beyond that
neither was seven feet tall nor
did they workout at a gym as he did
anchored
one could say
one could say
it was curious the things one
thought while they smoked a cigar even a
cheap one
1640, Day-between-Two-Ts, 7 11.
18
1004, Reggae Friday, 9 11.
18
Pharoah Sanders Harvest Time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86EVJ5bmB4A
