Ramblings of a Loud Pacifist Redux

The solitary storyteller works in silence
Often etching the grooves of crashing waves,
Of crushing skulls and brave felines, too.

In his consultation he delineates
The perfect impression of the story at hand
Tracing the asymptotic space between pleasure and pain.
Then with quill and ink in hand
He buzzes busily, engraving tales onto fleshy tapestry
Onto canvases, all tones and hues,
Alabaster, ebony and everything between the two.

The waiting room is filled with hopefuls
Looking to get an injection of hope, an extraction of pain
Hoping that through rigid lines and purposeful swirls
The artist can immortalize what the patient views
As worth having permanently visualized
And sometimes even their mother scandalized.

His first canvas squints and jeers and finally laughs
As the jet black medicine strokes and sticks under the skin
The continuous stabbing a sharp reminder of the loss at hand
She becomes numb to the poking,
Immune to the repeated offenses.
The insistent jabs are but mere tickles.
There is pain far greater than this.

He would much rather be inscribing
The unconventional lines of an interesting face
But at least it’s not plain, boring black lines,
No more than thick bars, traced and filled.
He grapples with what stories are worth telling,
But it is not his choice to make
He simply tells people’s stories back to them,
Lest they forget their shortcomings and victories.
In crisp lines, in well placed shadows,
In vibrant reds and blues, if they so choose.

If you folded all his frames in half
And bound them by the navel, sideways,
You’d see his life’s grand work
As the historian, the novelist, the artist.
But today his canvas sits as if he were to draw his blood
Exposing his veins, his barren skin plains.
He’s drawing a plane, but really drawing the pain
From within to the out
For the brother who just lost his first and best mate

The aircraft emerges, effortless and permanent
A grieving penance, a eulogy made brand new
By the nuances of his stencil for this particular man he once knew
And one time helped to tell his story, too.

For Rube and those of us who miss him.