May Day

May Day

The street was crowded with shouts and chanting. Posters with slogans I didn’t understand moved along Main Street like thicken blood in veins too clogged with soot to notice. Faces turned to the distance and then waved aside the shoulders of police to stare into me or beyond me or through me or into cameras or maybe knowing that my two eyes saw everything as an abstract painting and they didn’t want to be abstract. The proud wrinkles shouted to be seen and be remembered for the hardship that had etched its way into flesh. No, you can not turn away, you can not cover me with cosmetics, you can not still the motion of music and feet shuffling along sidewalks that once were dirt. My dirt. Their dirt. Our dirt. The land that formed everything and out of which we grew. Before cement towers blocked the view to the sea. Before garbage covered the ashes.
The ashes. The ashes. Burning limbs from a sun that sets only once some days and twice when it feels the mood. Burning wind that torches leaves and dries the dreams of soldiers of the theater. Ashes that were baked onto the hillsides before they held mosaics of naked colors and hungry lights. Ashes that were blown from nature’s own breath and will still blow again and always even as merchants try to sell hot dogs to musicians and music sells to thin, clogged ears and ears are covered from the sound that the hands have created so that nobody realizes what is really happening. Nobody hears the clapping.
Blinded. Blinded by the brain’s efforts to see more and hear more and be more and sell more and buy more until there is no more and more has no meaning because it is less. Less. Less.
Yes the street was crowded. Yet I saw only one face. And that was enough.

May Day belongs to the following groups:

1 on 1: The Fine Art of Portraiture , All Things Poetic, Artistic, Philosophical, AW Welcome Center, California Sound and The Healing Journey Available for sale as

Greeting Cards, Matted Prints, Laminated Prints, Mounted Prints, Canvas Prints and Framed Prints