The Shame of It All So this is where the years wind up? This is where it ends? The man crouching on the stool atop the stage touches the strings with delicate if resilient fingers, but the tattered Marshall on the floor beside him, the one one which his boot rests, doesn't seem to care. The Marshall likes it loud, just as the Gibson plugged into the amp does, and just as the old rocker who cradles the classic guitar to his breast does. And just like the other two, the aged amp still works fine, which it proves by ejecting the single chord that the man strummed through the “business end” of it’s speaker like a well-tuned cannon’s blast. The lonely chord reverberates through the practically empty room, an amplified clarion call of Axeman, Gibson and Marshall, but the few paired-up people in the bar are inattentive, all but one. In the harsh glow of the footlights that one who is paying attention can see where his fingerprints and sweat streaks have besmudged the guitar’s fire-burst d...
I watched it all from my spot on the bench beneath the cedar-pole awning of la Hacienda Gustamos over the course of one solitary month. During those thirty days, for lack of anything better to do, I whittled their likenesses from chunks of manzanita wood as I watched them work; the super-hard, desert-dried ironwood forcing me to make frequent pauses for blade resharpening, but by the time their construction project was completed so was mine, as I had carved out rather lifelike 3D figures of them all… boy, girl, and burro. The pair rode double into Ciudad Juarez with the boy behind, their bouncing synchronized astride the swayed back of an overloaded, yet quick-stepping burro, the burro‘s pace appearing suited to the pair’s dispositions. A bulging towsack tied to it’s rump increased the burro’s already considerable load. The day was warm in Ciudad Juarez, as always, the sky clear, as usual. The burro came to an abrupt standstill on the banks of the city’s thinly flowing river, whe...
If you do not love a sunset, then you do not have a romantic pulse. Stop writing now, and go be an engineer. For the burst at sunset is the release, the ejaculation of time, the close of a chapter, but not the book. It’s brilliance is a resolution of tensions, the sigh at the end of a job well done, the moan after many pleasures, the uncurling of the toes, the final kiss before drifting off to sleep. The sunset is the day’s vainglory attempt at immortality, “I awe, therefore I am.” It is a wondrous apparition... the grandest illusion. It is a wave endlessly rolling ‘cross the round world. It is a flagging Father Time’s response to Thomas’ heartfelt plea, “Do not go gentle into that good night... rage, rage against the dying of the light.” (Response to a writing prompt on sunsets)
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