S. Preston Duncan

.. ..Ethos (A Delineated spoken word piece) by S. Preston Duncan In Ohana House there was a rubble of matches, cigarette butts and ash shadowed in the ashtray and the window played a crickets song through the water hanging in the screen that was catching headlights and the moon like strings of clear christmas lights in the summer. The melodies were subtle like the shifting of vagabond seasons in the wind and something was flashing with the percussive immediacy of a cooler breath creaking through the house on Victorian banks of wooden molding. I was standing in the serving window of rewritten history and editor cut dream s but the night turned seasons like a red moon bleaching and the hours were full of collapse like rain that smells like somewhere else. And far below cognition we recognized delusion and danced to hope it was drowning in the quiet between our words. So I am remembering family vacations and those last few weeks before I called this a war. Remembering how the sand is the color of crashing waves and slopes with the shallow curve of so many reclining chairs that pit its surface with the weight of topless sunbathing and tequila immobility, how it dips at lazy angles around sun leaning palm trees and under tangles of seaweed brushed from the ocean by delgada waves that braid sunlight in azure translations of gold. I am remembering how words, whose meanings sway in breeze swept confusion, slide like pina colada over lips understood to mimic only the shape of a shoreline intimacy with the sea. How a nightclub memory, faint like the scent of her hair in my lap where she slept in a 3 am bus and uncertain like the dream of things we never shared recedes like deep bass into the morning as I am calling this a war. So now I am standing on Belle Isle calling it peace because from here the city is nothing the river is not; currented, formless, flowing away like words in the wind and hair in the wind, a ripple of mist and melting stone. and not even the wrecking ball cranes of that demolition skyline scare the birds from their treetop dignities and the still sweet shallows of sky. The nightward clouds sometimes streaking fluorescence like oil pastels in the rain as they journey towards dusk. And halfway down 17th St. the cafe windows are playing songs of resistance and catching clouds from steam wands and slow storms as the moon, sinking somehow lower on the highway, reddens. Soon I will abandon my still life periphery and enter a wine stained scarf under cocktails and crosses, gas stations and convenience stores, the lighted and trembling electric glories; the skyline perspectives of cracked concrete corners and rainwater coins. The shadows that have huddled in abandoned doorways from the wandering children of headlights and alcoholic neon are coughing in Grace St. and wheezing between the mortal alleyways of parking lot occupations. Everything will plead through the crumpled foil of darkness, the faceless eyes and teeth starving on the bread of impoverished boulevards in the great empty hours of the nights blind empires. And this must be war because if you listen under the constant rush of traffic, muffled conversation and wind tunnel alleys, you can hear the people rattling the bars of their various prisons like windows banging in their frames from a wind disgruntled at their refusal to yield. And this is war because their families are being taken and…our families are being taken. So now the furious hands are making commands and taking demands they have tossed away their cigarette window prayers they are setting the fire escapes aflame and taking the stairs they are wrapping around homoerotic positions and discussing the juxtaposition of these cowboy hat fur coats to alligator boot dispositions. They are dressing masculinity in skirts and flirting with the homophobes just to hit 'em where it hurts they are returning the entrees and stealing dessert they are losing their temperance and tearing of dress shirts. and they are finding their families by leaving their homes and writing the poetry of the not never lonely but never alone for cultivations of culture through paint brush lens that march across canvases and run off the ends they are sleeping through Sundays and finding god at night and passing out empathy to strangers who can't quite requite and they are finding more fast food than incentives to try it and for all the dead cow gimmicks they still don't buy it but when the system gets you fat and tries to sell you a diet and you can't care that the powers that be don't want us to speak freely they just want us to be quiet, we'll protest peacefully in free speech zones, then we'll leave, and fucking riot. (Poetry, stencil art, red wine, white russians, basqiat, wilco, pablo neruda, bob dylan, coffee, revolution, bob marley, buju banton, homemade knives, meditation, the dude, my dog munkeh, the guerrilla poet insurgency.)