This is Pompano Beach, Florida. It’s mise en scene or physicality plus the poet/spiritual seeker’s inner life seen or fused together. Sometimes a place can form a person as much as any other factor.
Slushy. Books with poems. Parapets. There is a shadow cast from the trees. Wind. Summer. Talk in the distance both prosaic and profound. Denim. Denim for certain. Cars. It rained before. It’s all cleared up now, someone said. The barber shop sign is winding. White red blue, right? Someone is always chartering a boat, a vessel. There are faraway places but we never really heard of them. Cutting school. Lights upon green cement and ones that illuminate the smoke shop and liquor store. But muted. Misty. We could send a post card. She has brown eyes and her ancestry belongs to places south of the equator yet she is all Western in temperament, culture, mores, politics, economics, even history these days. It’s a curious thing all of this. Enlightenment by the boulevard and boutique. Mechanical bridges. Motels. And then again the wind. Nearly always the wind. Does it come from the sea? The globalists build up the area and the affluence takes some spirit of the place away. But still the sand. Long stores. Old carpets. A vacant lot where snakes and birds live. Jeep. I see a Jeep and numerous ones keep driving through from the main road to just near the beach. They are not supposed to, it’s not really an official public access way – but all kinds of people do. And they walk there also. Everyone worships the sun one way or the other. And why not? Am I a prince or a beggar? Eastern. Ward Air. My ears pop. Other lots. Large. Security is there. They drive around in little carts and sometimes cars. They might wonder why you sit on curbsides. Maybe you have alcohol poisoning you gave yourself by drinking all the night long by restaurants that cascade with lights and benches like some kind of poems themselves onto the beach. Everyone knows sometimes the turtles follow the city lights by accident and go away from the sea when they are supposed to go to it. But the bookstores are large if you can just get up there. Where is that female? Smoking Marlboro Reds at the Mana Loa Motel just down from the Publix green. Sullen, sanguine, but still somehow sacrosanct. They have also a Fire Department there across the way. Breathe in air. Her friend’s brother works at the Ho-Jo and it’s the main place for all people. He somehow gets one of those blue chair things with an umbrella. Sand. Sun. Air. Gaiety and atmosphere of hopefulness for something in the night. One man has a bike and a dog with one eye. He is looking for pot. He says the dog sways into the curves. There is a Burger King just up the way. A hardware store. A mechanical bridge with a funny mesh-like partly see through road. A bank. A man selling things or promoting a restaurant, with banners. And banners fly off the small planes across the sea advertising bars and eateries. Wing night. This night. That afternoon. The world. But that’s in a way not the real world. The real world is the light reflecting off windows or the breeze in odd shrubs. Real life is a stone in the sun, the abandoned and solitary gazebo that is on the property of the Catholic Church and overgrown with weeds, with leaves, with vines, with time, with some kind of aura or remnant of the long dream of night and day. And the moon. But nobody much looks at the moon. Green grasses. The sound of pool pump motors. Maybe there wasn’t much but we romanticized it all. Ice cream. People walking in the night. Hurricane shutters. Severe nightmares. There will never be a chance at attainment and enlightenment and Buddha-hood with such terrible dreams in the witching hours. It must be impossible. It must all be for someone else. But I could have sworn for just a fleeting minute or two that we saw light and truth. Oh, maybe not. The world is far too heavy and thick, its people small minded, twisted, judging. Pier. Banner. Saltwater. Fish. Buckets of rain. Balconies. Anole on the screen door. The birds try and get them. The sea itself. Tennis shoes. People run or do yoga in the early morning. There is an old lady always there and just yells at people, and has only grown old and not wise.
Brian Michael Barbeito is a poet, writer, and photographer. His work appears in Fiction International and CV2 The Canadian Journal of Poetry and Critical Writing. He is the author of the prose poem chapbook Chalk Lines, (Fowl Pox Press), and the creator of the ongoing written and visual nature narrative Mosaics, Journeys through Landscapes Rural.