Resemblance

I saw a man who looked just like Bukowski.

He sat in an old Kia Sportage wearing a

blue shirt, waiting for his wife

to come out of the grocery

store.

I looked his way twice and smiled, baffled at the resemblance with

the fellow poet.

Just the previous night, I faintly remember I saw him in a dream, for one of his books sits on my armoire. Perhaps my dreams are now taking physical form, manifesting in conscious reality.

In my dreams, I saw who I thought was my father, sitting on the baseball stands, as I called him on a cellphone. An unknown sympathetic man picked up. I apologized, but the man did not mind and he was kind. The man sitting was not my father. He was someone else, an illusion, a message from the unconscious.

I spend a lot of time now studying things my teachers failed to teach me or I failed to learn. And running through the mountain roads I call home, envisioning my future friends and I embracing the difficulties and pain of life through training.

I now train and study to become like the Hurricane, a warrior and a scholar — to earn my picture on the wall of heroes that wait for me.

The world breaks once more, in war it destabilizes, and I just happen to be alive in this moment in history, hoping to do something worthy of some remembrance before I walk amongst my fathers “in the halls of Valhalla, where the brave may live forever.”

About Matthew Rodriguez