With Faces Filled Of Fingers

Michelangelo, who lived without a roof in the city of Seattle rain, threw back his damp blanket about 2 a.m., retrieved his shoes that pillowed his head, put them on fully one at a time, walked to the all night diner on Pike Street where he asked the all night party people who strolled or staggered the sidewalk for a few coins, got a few, bought a coffee, rapid swallowed it to scald his throat, and stepped forward into the streetlight punctured darkness to render his words on the walls of the beautiful town.

Nobody knew him.

They thought him mad.

If they thought.

They couldn’t know.

They weren’t allowed to see.

Most were asleep. Some blind.

Some both.

Night didn’t care. Night drizzled its misery and joy. Plants grew wide and tall with the rain. Drain pipes dripped odd time rhythms. People wept alone. Michelangelo walked.

A dark bank dozed, its belly full of money. Michelangelo pulled a marker from his pocket and wrote Do Not Step On Cracks in voluptuous letters the size of a beggar's hunger.

Nobody knew what he meant.

They didn’t understand.

Their priority was progress. Financial fruition.

But they obeyed. The next day, each pedestrian avoided the sidewalk cracks, as if each crack were a slumbered snake. The scene brought tears to their cheeks.

They couldn’t say why.

Couldn’t name their instinct of compliance.

Michelangelo lived in the shadows where rent money doesn’t dwell. He came from Kansas one spring when his family refused him bread. He was a loafer, they said, who didn’t know a tractor from a plow. He was a wastrel, who thought only of himself and his ambition to paint the world another shade of blue.

It may have been red.

His family didn’t care.

They didn’t know the difference.

Could only see corn and dirt.

In Seattle, Michelangelo found the walls he wanted. They were big and blank, as if made of canvas.

A city made of canvas and rain. Of opportunity and hope. Of despair and gutters that carried roofless wastrels day by day closer to an unmarked grave they called the sea.

Not Michelangelo. He went forth in the middle of the night to declare his projections. One night, near the corner of Madison and 4th, he wrote You Shall Not Petition The Lord, and the next day all the churches emptied. Ministers fled to the unemployment office.

They had no flock, no stake, no toys to fondle.

Then he wrote Love Your Brother on the wall of Harborview Medical, and the local chapter of the Aryan Nations closed its doors.

They couldn’t see any difference any more. People were people.

They pleaded forgiveness.

They volunteered to clean the beaches.

They hummed joyful hymns of slaves as they shoveled sand.

With power comes responsibility, but Michelangelo hadn’t learned that lesson yet. Back in Kansas, he had set fire to the barn when he was fifteen years old. He had been the keeper of the flame, a tradition the entire family had held for generations, and when he fumbled the torch, they called him wicked.

But it was just an accident.

Mishaps happen every day.

Flames have faith, too.

In Seattle, Michelangelo had matured, but he was still roofless, and hadn’t known the clutch of authority, even supremacy, that the world could offer in unexpected ways.

A thought. A marker. Walls of canvas. Rain that might wash your sins away.

The allure of ambition.

A promise of recognition.

Hope of another humanity.

In seven months, Michelangelo would be twenty three years on the planet, when August had rolled the dice and pushed him from the womb. His namesake had gifted the ages, and he had yet to gift himself. His power, if that’s what it was, ran on steam that rose from sidewalk grates. His talent, if one called it that, bled from his fingers onto walls. Walls sang to him in the music of rebar and concrete. Their chants rose from The Waterfront Market to Cherry Hill. Their need was his calling. And Michelangelo couldn't say no.

He couldn’t leave them empty, unfulfilled.

Couldn’t cast off his certainty.

Or still his hand in the middle of the night when he arose to make his mark.

Coffee cup down his throat, his mission in boil, on the wall of the Public Library on Madison Street, Michelangelo wrote Reject The Evidence Of Your Own Eyes, and surrounded the words with rough sketched images of people with fingers on their faces.

The next day, the city of showered streets broke itself into a thousand pieces as jaywalkers said: that is not a car, drivers said: that is not a pedestrian, and police said: that is not a crime. Ferry captains ran their boats into docks they insisted could not be. And when people tried to eat, they claimed it wasn’t food, no refunds. Dogs ran through open gates onto the streets, and rummaged through dumpsters. Rain soaked the Honorable Mayor, who refused to see the clouds.

Fingers blocked the sky.

Blindness cheered the view through fleshy bars.

Ignorance dressed itself in knowledge.

And Michelangelo witnessed what he had wrought. Ruinous yowls shook him from his daylight slumber. He lurched through the city, all roofless now, with his mouth shocked into silence, his toes clenched. Kansas was never like this.

All day the city opened its ulcers. It was never to be.

The same.

Saved.

Rebuilt.

When the sun collapsed into the sea and the islands shimmered, and night declared itself sovereign, Michelangelo moved stunned through the streets like a widower who knows he is next. He removed the marker from his pocket and wrote over and over, on wall after wall, on parking garages and theaters: Open Your Eyes To Peace. A New Day Is Here.

Back in an alley, he sat on his shoes and waited. It might be too late for this last truth to penetrate. The people might reject this evidence, too. They might continue to stumble with their vision extinct inside their godmeat. The world could flatten again.

Or they could pry their fingers from their face.

Start over.

Believe again.

Forgive.

The night marched on. A drop rolled on Michelangelo’s cheek. Clean rain or bitter tears, he couldn’t say. Maybe he had fixed his error. Maybe not. He looked to the bricks on the wall, counted them with the math of iniquities and virtues. Morning, and the sum, would come. It was out of his hands, now.