Photo-essays & Prose Poem by Brian Michael Barbeito
Everything I wrote was true, because I believed in what I saw.
– Jack Kerouac
the carnival gone. the lights and vendors, the spinning wheels and electric eclectic ephemeral fairground nocturne. my love and I. she has brown hair and walks beside, equal, perceptive, a beauty and intelligent, with lives and histories from continents southern and countries northern combined. and there are loans empty and just with earth, where I can see the distance. tree. farmhouse. brick house. lands lands lands. one day they were full, and another day they shall again be. but now, liminal, low, languid. I can remember things as I walk, old things, like the vascular nurse who became an addict, and she stayed up all night talking, explaining to me about how blood and veins work, her eyes like pin-pricks from the drugs. I helped her the best I could. or a rock concert for some reason, in high school, and there must be a hundred of us and we are late and it has begun and we run through the stadium halls to catch up with the song. Osho in his memoir discourses says that thoughts are strange things. and I remember a toy plane I had long ago, practically another lifetime. a plastic horse also. drawings of mountains. and a psychic says, ‘Did you draw the mountains?’ and another says, ‘Don’t come in here on drugs,’ to which I reply truthfully, ‘I’m not and I don’t use drugs,’ and she counters, ‘Yes you are, because that’s the only time someone turns my tape recorder off without touching it,’ and I tell her to believe what she wants, knowing she is wrong. she doesn’t like me overall. but she says, ‘Your first book try won’t work, but the second is on a bookshelf, succeeds that way…’ but I don’t like her either. she has some gifts but doesn’t understand me. she says many incredibly incorrect things. there will be more in the future much better, and some just as bad,- and I’ll use my own gifts anyhow. whatever. it was a bad neighborhood maybe she had become jaded from that. so long ago. then the present. the water runs through a creek or little river, cold and clear and it sounds well and gives hope. behind it there were before yellow buttercups throwing their bright colour to the day, some kind of poem amidst all this. I am inside and outside. I am back and forth. fans whirl to block out the world. good. electronic waves and rain sounds also. what will become of all of us? what will become of all of this? the secular world is a racket, a drag, full of mundane and mediocre responsibilities yet it must be navigated. I go by transfer stations and old churches, towns I don’t understand and the urban. love. what is love? a lady glances over. she is psychic. I know this. she is one of those highly psychic people in fact that doesn’t identify it as such. she is saying something. later I walk the path and am by water. but it’s getting dark earlier. once it begins it settles in fast like a god of the sky has purposely broken a dark pen and filled the firmament w/such ink. live. love. cycle and time. I pause. a shape is in the distance. it’s a coyote. it’s looking at me. it stands on autumnal leaves that have carpeted the terrene earthy way. will I find the words, the right words? I go. it goes. our separate ways as they say. settlers and after have tried to eradicate the coyotes by many manner…fire, poison, guns, so forth. but they are too adaptable and will travel, change their diet in accordance w/what is available, even procreate moreso when their population is threatened. I am like a coyote in that I am Mercurial and ghostly, moving, changing, flowing. I am w/the autumnal hues. and I have no horse, just my feet. I’ve made it far. you have no idea. the electric lights outside of there have blinked on. for the slightest of seconds, like a dream remnant or vision, they make me to remember the carnival. beloved. food and drink. good people if a bit strange. stands. colours. delights. crafts. the sounds of rides. signs. games. transportation. scents and sights a plethora. hand in hand. dimples. I know her eyes, her gait, her aura. yes the late summer carnival that comes before the fallow fall, the almost empty autumn of our life.
