Virtuosity

When Guy played his cello outdoors, its sound was as rich and deep as the soil the cello’s endpin sunk into, different from when he played on a stage’s plank floor, different yet from the harder sound when he played on the sidewalk downtown and simply otherworldly when he plucked and strummed it across his lap like a big bull guitar but when he stuck it like a violin under his chin, its endpin jabbed his carotid and he nearly bled out and had it not been for the man on the park bench who slapped his sandwich over the wound like a compress, Guy would not have switched to the harp, or was it the piano, he could never be sure, he knew it was something he couldn’t pick up, no wait, it was the best-of-the-line air conditioner with its infinite settings stuck in the window looking out from his bedroom over the whole of downtown.

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Name on It

Some folks are satisfied to write a book, some to have a street named after them but Jasper wants an ocean or continent, some huge mass alive with life and it’s own colors and patterns, its own time zones, its own food chain and then’s when John, Jasper’s best friend and the only one with a planetary pole named after him, has to bring Jasper to his senses so John pummels him in the neck with his bowling ball and when Jasper gets up from the gutter, he rolls a perfect strike and the first perfect game of the evening and sees his name, JASPER, everyone sees it blinking on the marquee outside on the roof and traffic on the exit coming off the interstate is congesting where the noise has become unbearable and I ask Jasper if this is what he wants and he says, well, close enough.

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Charles Springer has degrees in anthropology and is an award-winning painter. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he is widely published in print and online. His first collection of poems, Juice, was published by Regal House Publishing. A second collection of prose poems, Nowhere Now Here, was published by Radial Books. He writes from Pennsylvania. Visit him at https://www.charlesspringer.com.