Pencil in Hand # 14

Beat.

I have walked the lonely streets many a nights with only the cherry on my cheap cigarette to guide me along the darkness buried below my feet. With wet concrete, I have blended as much as I have clashed with the downpours of rain. However, tonight there are only drizzles of cloud sweat that perpetrate my solemn thoughts.

From the moment my shift ended I knew that I'd rather walk home that become once again a constraint victim of subterranean metro madness. Upon leaving, a man that I had politicked over religion 30 minutes before, on my cigarette break, smiled and said "God bless you, man" I couldn't help but smile and pat my heart. He had tried with relentless and stuttering effort to make me see the light. Little did he know that my soul was etched through a carousel of darker means. I couldn't convince him that the Bible is a great work of fiction, much like he couldn't convince me that Jesus had helped him walk again from his fatal rock climbing accident. But at least he believed in something, which is a fuck more than I could proclaim about myself.

My instinct was to cross the street, and so I did. At this point I was no longer guiding my steps. The sounds of the streets took over. The infectious rhythm became my only agency. Under some urban night constructed spell I lost my sense of purpose only to devote my soul to correspond with the beat being expectorated by the means of plastic buckets, wooden drum sticks and a genius fortified by individual drive. Questlove would have felt this dude as much as I did. My earlier smile now grew to a content grin. I made eye contact with him and he reciprocated a certain understanding only to be shared by those "who get it", as Hunter himself so appropriately put it. I could have stopped and experienced a fuller moment. Nonetheless, the beauty of it lies in the fact that my motion was forward. Infused by the drums. As I crossed him, we clicked. He quit the buckets for a bit, smacked his sticks four resonant and tempestuous times, as if to acknowledge my own damn rhythm, and continued to bang on. I felt it, man. Can you dig it?

This genius remains unknown. Nevertheless, the streets will continue to acknowledge him much more than a public ever could.

-YB?