Kusunoki Masashige

Kusunoki Masashige Prelude

Blood and sweat drip down;
Humid and hot the sun beams.
Weary from battle.

Enemies surround.
We shall deliver our steel,
Where it needs to go.

Many died for me.
Many for the Emperor.
Here at the river.

We make a stand together.
Defeated and doomed.
A great honor indeed.

The time finally,
Where we make the final gift
To our Emperor.

Of seven hundred,
Now only a few remain,
Closed eyes and calm.

Armor weighs me down.
I grip my sword loose in hand.
Blood runs down the blade.

Relaxing my thought,
I survey those around me,
Wounded and half dead.

Still brave and ready,
To do what is required,
For this final time.

I shout these last words,
“Would that I had seven lives
to give for country!”

Turn the blade around
And with the might left in me
Pierce soul and body.

---

This is a bit of an experiment I'm doing regarding form and function in prose. Here I wanted to write the entire prose piece in consecutive haiku(5 syllable, 7 syllable, 5 syllable), with each haiku forming a somewhat prose like structure. Turns out this is kind of hard to do. Originally, it was one paragraph, but it works much better parsed out into the individual haiku because as a paragraph my mind rejects something very non-prose in prose form. I would like to do a full length essay in this way, but that would require a whole lot of time. In any case, I think it turned out pretty neat.

As for the actual story of the piece, it is based on the story of Kusunoki Masashige. A more detailed description is also available.

A Song for Dying

The road stretches on for miles, its faded shades of grey blur together with black at the horizon. Darkness stretches up past the top of the windshield. There is a tunnel of pure white light directly ahead, continually moving forward, just out of grasp. The rough gravel of the road extends out like the back of a crocodile, with long wispy wild grass encroaching on either side. Insects glow inside the tunnel. They sweep past the windshield with grace, each a vector of light you can trace from the center of the tunnel. The night runs away. Repelled by the light.

I don’t notice any of this.

There are two things I do notice though: the blue LED’s of my dashboard staring back at me, and the song that is playing on my stereo. It’s a perfect song to die to.

When I was young I was invincible
I found myself not thinking twice
I never thought about no future
It's just a roll of the dice

I open my eyes. Everything is bathed in a sea of red. Nothing is moving. I choke on the dirt and dust in the air. The white light in front of the car flickers. The evergreen trees all point downward, forming a menacing grin. The engine makes dying noises, sputters and clunks. Glass everywhere. Pain everywhere. Time slows down. Silence now. Only the stereo. That song.

So if you please take this moment
Try if you can to make it last
Don't think about no future
And just forget about the past
And make it last

The white tunnel of light keeps moving forward, just ahead, not letting me get any closer. I grip the steering wheel a little tighter. The road continues to stretch out ahead of me. I take a breath. Home is just over this hill.

The next song starts playing. Shit. Not now. Not this song.

---

The song in question is Social Distortion's Reach for the Sky. There are lyrics available, as well as a MP3, in case you want to give it a listen. The basic premise of this little story is that when driving, I always imagine a specific moment that I may die. It mostly occurs when I'm driving down rural gravel roads, a prominent feature around my home, and only relates to the song on the stereo.

test drive a car

When you walk into the dealership, all the vehicles are arranged in pretty little rows. Presentation is everything. The cars are gleaming, reflecting the white light of the fluorescents above. Now, here’s where you size the cars up, analyze the lines, the places where shiny metallic body meets glass. Ignore the salesman staring at you from across the room. Just gaze into the mesmerizing beauty put together on an ugly assembly line. You look, but don’t touch, afraid to mangle the pristine surface with a fingerprint.

Okay, that’s enough. This is the car you want. You’ve seen it in magazine ads, perfectly lit and positioned to show off its hindquarters, the tail light eyes looking back at you. It’s not quite as beautiful in person, but the reality of it sitting in front of you beats an insubstantial piece of paper.

Wrap your fingers around the door handle. Slowly. The click of the handle echoes in the dealership as you pull, the weight of the door resisting, if only a little. This is the first time you’ve touched this car, you want to savor the moment. The door opens, and a beautiful artificial smell hits your nostrils. A perfect perfume designed to deliver dopamine, this scent is a product of plastics and fabric freshly made and installed in this virgin vehicle.

You shut the door to trap the scent in the car. The moment of truth: you place the palms of both hands to the steering wheel at ten and two. Then, one by one, you move your fingers down upon the steering wheel, until you have it firmly gripped, your knuckles white. You squeeze a little more before relaxing your hands, and running them along the top of the wheel, feeling the ergonomic ridges running underneath your fingers. It feels right, and nothing else matters. Looking straight ahead, past the gauges, past the dash and windshield, even past the dealership wall, you realize, “This is THE car.”

This epiphany is interrupted by a salesman’s enthusiastic voice:

“It’s a beauty, isn’t it? If you sign today I can get’cha in on 0% financing, nothing down.”

Your trance is broken, the moment lost.

You grin while replying, “You bet, but I’m going to need a test drive first.”