Hugo

A little piece I did for a poetry slam...

Hugo said that sometime in the middle ages the written word surpassed architecture as man’s chief means of communication with himself.  He claimed that the printing of Gutenberg’s--
What’s that?!  No, my cousin Hugo from Bayonne, motherfucker.  Of course it was Victor Hugo.  Stay with me.

He claimed that the printing of Gutenberg’s bible was the single most revolutionary event in the history of the world.
Something about “In the beginning was the word, and the word was made flesh, and the word was God.”
Do What?! No dude, I don’t know for sure if that’s exactly how he put. But it was some shit like that.

Anyway,  I gotta admit that when I was younger I didn’t think he knew what he was talking about.
I mean I read the Hunchback of Notre Dame in school and I’ve stood in the cathedral where the book was set and --
What’s that?  Yeah. You remember that summer when we were just out of high school and I went on that trip…?  We spent three days in Paris. It was cool.  Yeah I saw a woman who didn’t shave, she was kind of hot.  Dude, let me get back to my story…

So I read the book and I stood in the place, and in my mind there’s no comparison about which one was more impressive.  I mean you can read about the Gargoyles watching Esmeralda in the distance but when you stand there and look up at those bastards leaning out over the building, licking their chops, it’s fucking creepy.
Do what? No dude, of course I said gargoyles.  What’d you think I said “Gargles?”  Gargles?  Really?  Shut the fuck up.

So I thought he was being, I don’t know, pretentious or something.  I mean a guy who writes for a living… what’s he gonna think is more important, being able to write about a building or being able to build something worth writing about?  You know? It just seemed to be kind of self-important -- less about the truth and more about… I don’t know… job security.

Anyway, now that I’m a little older…
Fuck you, dude -- I’m only a little older --

All right, so now that I’m middle aged, I can see that the guy may have had a point.  I mean -- hell I spent twenty years buildings houses, and I can take you to a shitload of buildings that I’ve worked on. And they’re nice, I suppose, in their way, but somehow they don’t seem all that impressive to me anymore.  Not one of them has gargoyles.  You know?  And as for job security, please.  Really.

So anyway, the other day I was digging through my drawers and --
Oh, Christ a-mighty… I was digging through a drawer.  Grow up.

And I found a postcard that I had sent to myself inadvertently when I was on that tour.
Inadvertently -- it means accidentally.  Yes it does, look it up --  Whatever.

Yeah -- so I had actually sent it to my girlfriend at the time but I put my own address back in New Jersey down as the return, and while I was on the trip she met this other guy and one thing led to another… and she refused the postcard, had it returned to me.  I don’t know, it was kind of weird.  I don’t know why she did it.  And I really loved that girl, too.  When I got back I pined away for months. Hell she was the reason I got into construction.  Yeah I was accepted into a couple of colleges but I got a job with a builder my dad knew so I could stay home and try to win her back.  A twenty year mistake, bro.

Oh yeah, so the postcard was a picture of this place called the Fountain of the Innocents.  Yeah. It’s this really cool fountain, the oldest one in Paris.  It was built in the 1500s before mechanical pumps, so everything had to work by gravity, and work right, too, because the people in the city used it for drinking water.  It has these nymphs and tritons all over it symbolizing natural spirits that are supposed to protect the source of a spring. And they are decorated with all these swirling undulating curlicues and scrolls, you know, so that it gives a sense of flow and movement.

Yeah but evidently Miss Nancy Hinglis-Smootfield couldn’t see any of that --  Yeah that was really her name.  She was from over in Ocean County.  Remember you met her at that party that time...?  Anyway, she missed the point entirely.  Missed what was written on the other side of the postcard, too, I guess, cause she dropped me like the plague.  Or didn’t care, or didn’t see… So she left me hanging and I stayed home from school and built track houses for a living and wasted twenty years for fucking nothing.

Hmmm?  Oh, that...  Humph -- It was nothin' really.  It said:  Life is beautiful.  Wish you were here.