I refuse to let life fade my colors.
Every experience, event,
each of the souls I’ve met,
all of those feelings felt,
dye me a bit deeper—
shades and tints a bit richer.
And when I leave this world,
you’ll find traces of me
in every place you look.
Footmarks so vibrant,
even rainbows will
have something to pray for
after the storm.

The first thing I saw early this morning
when I pulled back the blue-sky curtains
was a hectic white and orange butterfly
waving in the fair sun of my garden -
between the enclosed well and the laurel tree.

On the scarlet, bright sidewalk,
two damsels strutted together;
a turquoise skirt wore the one,
a chocolate T-shirt the other.
Jubilant they were together,
for the cadence of their laughter
waved in the air as Tunisian silk.

See?
No harvest did my screen display today -
no mountain range loomed far in the distance -
all that was unraveled were a laughing sidewalk,
and a quivering sun in a small garden.

(c) LazharBouazzi, April 21, 2016; revised, August 17, 2016

He smiles kindly
and with a steady hand
dips brush into color,
decorating every inch
with precision and care.
He paints no two souls alike,
but yet leaves his distinct mark,
so bright and profound;
touched and, without question,
we’ve been bettered.
Each of us now proudly stretched,
on display for the rest of a lifetime.
A work of his art, never caged,
but free to come and go,
free to be.

Near morning
by the sea
where I tangle
with the shadows
like a cage of sad tigers
by a grave I find a rope ladder
left by a thief
as the tide steals my eyes,
prisoners of time
without a hammer
trying to drive a stake
in the ground
and this is my crime
living and dreaming.

Death can do strange things,
like time-lapse photography,
undress those quite bored, or
make a patron saint out of a fool,
turning sleek idiots into monks
more mysterious than Rasputin.

What a place to drink, the casino
death runs, nothing fancy or beautiful,
a blind man called Dark Island
taking requests on a piano with keys
worn dull as bone handled knives.

A place the lost can find work, graceless
and not made in America without a living,
all these odd jobs death can do, like art,
factory smoke blown in the eyes of women
in Senegal making overalls for Walmart.

Beating drum shooes away birds
It does not give them food

Last night
I talked to you through
a tin can and some string.
You said you were okay
and then I was okay—
okay with everything.

Okay with everything.

I said I love you in the field of honor
and she was like a colt, her name
like the moon caught in my throat,
she was water I held in my hands
like the canoe I worked through the river,
and she was a flash at two-thirty
in the morning of the suicidal knife,
and she was a fire of pine cones,
a butterfly that lit on the float of my pole,
and she was like the night herself.

A true human being, religiously and socially
This is the true education of the child in the family