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.