Synopsis
Poetry
The day I met Genga, he was ten years old. He was the son of an over-the-fence parlance that I had struck up with a neighbor. We had an on and off friendship probably because of my sparse living habits and need to pursue my wandering lust. Genga, on the other hand, didn't have such reservations. When I was in town, we hit it off whenever she brought him over to my cabin for babysitting tour. Like versions of Dr. Doolittle and Tommy, we spent many hours constructing sand castles and hiking the woods. The lad always seemed destined for some kind of greatness. After four summers, I sold our cottage in Villasimius; I moved on but Genga's life continued into adolescence and the lunacy of desperation. When Mrs. Bose ran into me in a bar in Madrid, I quickly learned that Genga had become a young man who had run off the tracks. While bartering in a back alley in Nashua, New Hampshire, he sold a pound of opium to a sheriff and wound up pleading out to a five-year sentence in the State Penitentiary for Men in the State Capital. Faced with the rigidity of incarcerated life, he learned a delicate lesson. Nevertheless, only three months short of his release he suffered a setback of major proportions – aids. He died on November 15, 2004 at the age of 37. It was on a sad day in December of 2013 when I received a call from his mother who told me what had happened. When I spoke with her, she conferred with me about a batch of papers that the prison had sent her as his property. In that bundle of mismatched notes, letters and extraneous writings, she uncovered a small collection of what she thought were poems. Not knowing what she could do with them, she had decided to call me because she knew that I had published my own works. She said that she didn't know if the writings were good or bad, just that they had come from her son and that some of them seemed to carry a strange gift or essence of Genga's special energy. I told her I'd be glad to read them when I could find time. I must confess that I dawdled over it for several years before finding myself at my wits end over a conundrum while breaking ground into the hardbound world. I picked up one or two of Genga's short poems and perused them if for no other reason than I wanted something over which to rain authority. Boy, was that a statement of glibness! What I encountered was a voice that spoke as a knowing navigator of the craft. After several hours, I realized that this young man's style was so fresh and unobtrusive, not to mention, uncanny, that it behooved me to formulate his poems into the volume you now hold in your hands. I can state that I feel honored to bring Genga's words and his unusual point of view to the reading public. It is often in life that a growing soul meets hardship head on. This impact reveals a pearl inside, one that reflects a self-image on fire with the joy of righteous living and the inspiration of the unexplainable. Although it is my understanding that Genga wrote all of these poems while he was in prison, they come to you via the three known periods of his lifetime: his worldwide travels, his family life, and his time in prison. These three are interspersed with many haiku, which he injected at certain points to add increased dimension. I unleashed this collection in a pattern matching Genga's life; where he had traveled and the activities highlighting the major periods of his life. With his hard times, he adopted a less rigid stance. He began to wear a new skin showing the marks rare talent. His first few poems (the Weather section) are scented with a naiveté, but they lead to a much more mature and ripened vision proclaiming a raw and soul-rendering gravity that drew me into his world, a world in which he transformed the ugliness and crudity of his surroundings into something bordering on the sublime. I invite you now to enter into his word songs and revel in the magic of his melodies. Haan Moses
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