I Am Santo

Fiction, poetry, music and mindscape pictures by creative artist Jason Santo

The voice, gruff and staticky, asked him the same questions as the night before and in answering them he had a moment of hesitation, a flittering thought of Daneen that reminded him of the way sunlight stung through rustling leaves when you looked up, into and through shade. He didn’t think of her much anymore; she’d been gone since Kaily was eighteen months and Alec had just started to use the potty by himself. His chest felt empty as he answered that he was still interested in the work, whatever it was, and that he agreed that he was willing to accept half payment at the start and the rest once he was done. The voice gave another location and then told him to take the phone with him and call once Simon received the tools, money and instruction there. The line went dead abruptly.

Simon drove to the next location with a lump in his chest, an uneasiness that moved from above his heart and into his throat like a carpenter level bubble. He was uneven. He thought about Daneen again, the last time he saw her as she grinned through the car window before backing out of the driveway. Simon couldn’t remember if he kissed her that day like he usually did. Even then routine ate away at memory, repetition a cancer to the awake mind. He shrugged her grin and bright eyes away as the thoughts inevitably turned sour every time, her lips sutured together in his final view of her at her wake through his tear-blurred eyes. Senselessly gone, a light stolen the way starlight was by the future. She felt light-years away now and glimmered at him from the past like an echo he hardly believed was ever real.

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These bones roll the way forgiveness does from the tongues of mothers, effortless, but with care. And the shell of potential clangs like dusty canastas, the hollow of escaped souls lingering the way the sense of a last kiss might. This path winds and welcomes, but the end rarely in sight plays to that whimsical mood of noon in Summer, when the world spills promise light golden sunshine and the air clings like a young lover’s embrace. Eyes strain for the end in sight, and the rattle of pour us lightens frames, air slipping like lust into the hollows of uncertainty. Why not? Just go, slip fingers beneath lace and find the warm wet of opportunity welcome like rapturous balm that covers but never heals. In time every scar fades to dust, every cracked support sheds pressure and purpose. And into the ground these shallow complaints sink, like dill seed searching for stalk, as if somehow the groan will win sunlight and favor. But instead the roots surrender to sharp bitterness, the tart of accumulated experience stinging eyes. Play drums on these here leavings, the deposited shell of romance and rancor. For it’s all that’s left to keep a beat with a heart lost on the road to ruin long ago.

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TIMELAPSE

Clocks spent their winding hands as if they were folded on felt, minutes wasted in an ante and the litter of this dying season trying to hide belief. No poker face here, faded bliss grows vibrant, a flashbulb churn of willingness gone like green lost to autumn. And the combat of seconds clashing now into disdainful futures has casualties on all sides, but with each lost there’s no accountability. Does anyone count each grain of sand fallen in the hourglass? The souls flit like expired leaves on the shakiest branch, the gales of whimsy, lust and adoration buoying them on air currents the way a lover’s kiss lightens steps. And yet all bets are off, time ruined by attempts to measure it. For days are prison cells and years are maximum insecurity. Bleed divine colors. There’s no moment but now to do so.

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A million fall. Swept up in moments too grand for their tenuous grip on where they’d grown, they catch gusts of passion, take flight, and inevitably tumble. Lost roots, lost security and familiarity, their descent plays against myriad others littering days with the brilliance of chance. Risk is the open heart’s bedfellow, the unregulated beating of longing in chests swelled nearly to cracking by temptation to find better ways, happier homes. Then it’s wind and chaos, the shred of normal and the fire of lust, hope on the wind despite evidence on all sides of a Season’s toll. The fall promises much, then steals everything, leaving a landscape of decay and the memory of fleeting bliss. #autumn #fall #creek #leaves #foliage #poem #poetry #writer #writing #literary_imagery1 #literary_original (at After the Fall)

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Every moment now is art. Passively letting days slip away unnoticed in the haze of disappointment and anger is yesterday’s sin. Now the world bleeds onto my canvas by the hour. And I soak it in because the knife spreading its wound wider is this pain, the intense ripping away of of my fingers from the cliff ledge. I murdered this life – no misunderstanding how this dirt collected under my nails – how my knuckles strain under the weight of my struggle, aching to the point where they’ll break before I let go. Tumbling into the unknown an inevitability, I’m preparing myself not only for death, but for the gorgeous flood days will spew on my way down. #nature #trees #fall #autumn #clouds #sky #day #bluesky #foliage #poem #poetry #writer #writing (at Final Fall)

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I’m flight. I’m leaves torn by the season’s gale, strewn on the asphalt of your path, your dream. Wasn’t it such a betrayal, the rapid dissolution of cozy afternoons into the flee for company, the mothering of your troops. You always knew the war was coming. It was divined in the passive way you looked to the sun, away from the glorious luminance that constantly endeavored to make you glow, yet failed time and again. Was it so strange that a new world would see value in what you’d taken for granted? An autumn punished by your winter of frozen touch. Enough! Let it all freeze under your hand and die. Death by both of us, the fire of my will and the chill of your indifference. And so a world will be born anew, with the combatants unleashed from their separate corners, an eternal fall stripping the world of life in gorgeous splendor. But what an extravagant end we’ll bring, filled with all the gentle catastrophe onlookers love to behold, our yellows and oranges the fire of unsettled differences; the debris of final judgement. #autumn #fall #newengland #street #leaves #foliage #tree #poem #poetry #writer #writing #literary_imagery1 #literary_original (at Battle Cries)

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Hang on. There will be harsh wind and cruel rain. Hang on because letting go will fade us like sun-stained newsprint, our story lost. Cling to me. Show nature your tenacity and weather each graceless intrusion, a sky crowded by the rolling cotton of mistakes, of misunderstanding’s webs clotting all progress, trapping joy in thunderclaps. Surrendering or enduring, falling or holding fast to the familiar, the safe. It’s so much easier to open your fist and let the wind take you, but the pain of separation won’t end. It will always be a death forced on you by inevitable change; a season never expected but impossible to avoid. #leaves #autumn #fall #tree #sunlight #sun #sky #bluesky #deadleaves #foliage #poem #poetry #writer #writing #literary_imagery1 #literary_original (at Held)

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Crisp, grey November. Flatter senses with the death of seasons, seducing with the tightened chill of truncated days. We bundle warm intentions, shoulders bunched and necks made stiff behind scarves of red, orange, brown and black. Candy love promises and chocolate prayers blessed under pumpkin candlelight, absent in the fattening of our need for comfort. This thirty can kill you, each one a frozen knife twist deeper through each layer, you’ll bleed beauty into the monochrome swallow. Each sunset carrying icicle hurt, stinging against the valance of indifferent facades, stabbing until it melts through a heart unchanged by time’s lack of forgiveness. A thousand more leaves fallen, each a regret choking gutters of hope, covering over every promise with the sloppy decay of inevitability. So she’ll march through. So she’ll murder every single moment in the deceptive still. #november #fall #autumn #newmarketnh #leaves #foliage #gray #sky #pond #poem #poetry #writer #writing #literary_imagery1 #literary_original (at Fallen)

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I could just keep driving, reminding myself of the beauty of change. But the wheels will spin here and I’ll be constant. A world will spin away, carving rings from nothing around the sun, and my role will be to behold. Counting colors, facing shaken faiths and kicking the ground that holds me down, the light sweeps up, over, past and silently our of view, the chill of the air my company to keep. #autumn #fall #foliage #newengland #leaves #colors #poem #poetry #writing #writer

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