Sentiment - by Jan Richard Baraceros

“Sentiment” (from the theme ‘Temporal Bliss’)

This purple gloom I'm taking whole; our favorite childhood territory. Among wolf cuts and finite doubts, I knew you—along arrows and blinding gunfire, I held you. There was a sentiment you always say: "two heads, two tails; one cursed, one hailed," ever and anon in perfect days—tints and telegraphs of your genius ways.

Oh Randy, will you come to me? I'll grab you by your ribs and walk you through the streets. Shadows of faces of people staring, they poke at you like needles through lips. Gradually, steadily—irreversibly in hurting, you crack your voice and you crack your nails and you start screaming. Spiraling like an underwater hurricane making landfall, a bitter arrest comes to shove by the call of an old teacher. Pale. Worried. And above of all, disappointedly broken by the commotion of his former student's doing. A shocking scene. 

"Call the police!" a bystander shouts, loud and cold as red is chrome. Why not call a doctor? A mother? A kinder being? Near, near the supreme beholder, a voice whispers not to listen. Somewhere among these piercing mirrors, it tells not to look, more so not to take a glance at their direction—yet you, a smiling child, are like a military man. 

Speaking of golden beams and rising days, unforgettably so, the voice was both of yours and—lukewarm and blue—of harps and angels.

Oh Randy, through trees and rails and skylines of the city; away from my neighborhood so empty of you. A temporal bliss, a momentary picture. One that even when the sun came up could not erase, and everywhere the sun went up could never faze. Yet every now and then, that summertime memory dulls—but everytime the sun comes up, that warm youth of spring comes back to life. Randy, they say I can't be helped, so could you make the time to meet beyond the grave? 

You'll bring the heads and I'll bring the tails—now a bed of flowers for the one I could not save.

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Edited by Ma. Tricia Ocho