People convinced of what they think they know. They carry their knapsack of scattered dreams smothered of routine entertainment rolled down a choked throat of opinion like a badge. What’s in it for me the dead end schemes, where’s a ditch to get sick in.

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The young kid excited to know, truth sitting on finger tips, love twisted between their eyes. It’s a sunny late winter afternoon weekend in the streets, people going nowhere relaxed and sure. I’m sittin here observing my mind bend around the day, struggling smooth along the streets, curving through possibilities, stuck on nothing for time being as it is, holding loose, flowing as water does.

When you said, “I and I, one said to the other, no man sees my face and lives”, I was dying along the side of the road, crows hovering over me like the wind. Jesus walked up to me right then and there, lit a cigarette and passed it my way, “That for me”, I questioned with my eye. “Sure is”, I saw it in his grin.

‘So you think you can get there from here’, I questioned once again. “I don’t know, there ain’t no one here from there’, the other I answered, and then forgot again.

‘So this is what it’s all about, right here in this’, some knowing crashed upon me like a wave of heavy light, flashed the truth, sure and sure and was gone.

I walked on sitting here and there with words, ‘nothing to get hung about’, saturday afternoon forever.

Jesus looked back on the way out, ” that’s natural tobacco, rolled it, grew it myself; used light”, he said.

Took his word as truth, smoked it right down. A winged one emanating gratitude flew across my mind. I gently placed the tobacco butt on the living earth, and out of the edge of the sky an Owl silently glided by and that was it. I walked on.

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Words and Images by patrick wey

Written around the winter of 2001 sittin in a 2nd cup cafe on universtity ave on a sunny saturday snow flurried afternoon in waterloo on.