It was near Christmas a couple years back and I was walking through Boston Common when a down-on-his-luck-street-guy came up to me looking for something. I didn’t have it so I tried walking faster. But he was big and stepped in front of my walking, which scared me, because only days before I had been jumped by four hoods in Dorchester and they kicked my ass and took all of the something I had in my pockets.

So I didn’t like people. Or people who came up to me with their hands out. Fuck off, I wanted to say, poisoned by the humiliation of being beat on and robbed by a bunch of hoods.

But this guy in Boston Common had a hook in his eye. Not literally, of course. More like a wink without blinking that I could see as he approached, which signaled the difference he felt he offered from all the other fellas out there begging for quarters. He had a hook in his eye because he was smart enough to troll the Boston Common, where plenty of students gathered, and approach them with more than a plea. He could say poetry, you know. Poetry was his hook.

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They’ve been seeing each other a week when she finds out about it. A mistake, he confesses, that’s all. He was dating this girl who he really liked; they got drunk one night, ended up at a tattoo parlor, she dared him, and he called her on the dare. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time, he tells her, and she wants to believe him, she does. But as he lies there in her bed, his tear-streaked face nearly buried into her pillow, she shakes her head at the butterfly tattooed on the small of his back. What happened afterward? she asks, and he says, She left me. She said she couldn’t believe I went through with it. I told her it was to prove my love. I mean, how many other guys, I asked, would do that for her? But she didn’t care. She left anyway. A silence passes and she keeps staring at the butterfly. In the dimness it looks real enough that, if she were to suddenly reach out, it might flutter away. Would you do this for me? she asks, and he says, Of course. You’re my world.

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Robert Swartwood has no tattoos. He blogs at www.robertswartwood.com.

Sit back and enjoy the words of Rusty Barnes as he talks to us about Diet Pepsi, terza rima, ego, and being unfashionable.

Tell us about the first story or poem you remember writing.

There are two I remember. The first one happened to me when I was oh, ten or so. By way of background, at the time my family was heavily involved in a historical reenactment group called the Ameigh Valley Irregulars (you could wear no clothing or equipment worn or used in camping that existed after 1840; tepees, lean-tos, lean-pees, flintlock firearms, lots of buckskin — those were the order of the day). In any case, my father mused at the time (he’s spent the last 50 years or so researching the Barnes family history) that it would be a great boon to his work if he could just go back in time as a silent observer, and well, observe. Somehow I got it in my head that this was worth a poem, so I wrote one, called The Buckskin Wraith. Dad has the thing somewhere still. I still cringe at the handwriting, in which every line moves closer and closer to the right margin of the page. I guess my hand just trails right, like a left-handed curveball. Even now I have to watch out for it if I’m writing by hand.

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It’s not even Christmas. Look past it, friends. The big picture: It’s January, you’re feeling overstuffed and under financed, there’s snow and it is falling in clumps from the tops of hotel awnings and storefronts and when people swipe it from their car windows. Go warm. Get warm. Think of warm words and walls with warm paint. Think of chairs, and warm bodies in chairs. Think of words spoken, bellowed, whispered, sung. Think of poets. Two poets. Warming themselves in the winter. Think of the poets you will hear. Think of an event. This event. It’s a reading. Look past Christmas, friends. The big picture: It’s January and you’re attending the U35 Reading Series at the Marliave in Boston.

Dark Sky Books author Stephen Sturgeon is reading, as is Emerson College MFA candidate Melissa Watt.

More info, HERE

Note your attendance, HERE

“Read. Now. These.”

There’s no arguing with that. We don’t know about you, but any friend of Nietzsche is a friend of ours. Enjoy.

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