Character Study

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