Buddha With Sax

A prose poem.

The kid was practically skin and bones, barely large enough to hold up the alto sax that gleamed in the humid August afternoon. The runs coming from the horn were sweet ambrosia, drawing people out from the useless shade they were hiding in, speaking to each of them in a thousand tongues. He didn't even have a case to lay on the baking sidewalk, but they didn't care; they threw coins at his feet and stuffed bills into the front pockets of his old baggy jeans DAMN that sounds good when's he gonna breathe his sweat hit the sidewalk in crystal blobs and sizzled and the crowd laughed and cried and couldn't stand to go, and I cried too, as I watched him slowly kill the song, letting the horn thump against his bones, face pointed to the sky as if he needed more of the blinding sunlight. A few people in suits picked up his change for him, he thanked them, then gently collapsed, opening an umbrella that lay beside him. a pencil-thin buddha cradling a sax. I wanted to stay and talk to him, to soak in some mystic part of him, but the buddha image wouldn't leave; I felt like a tourist about to invade a shrine, for kicks. I gave the kid a five and left him in peace.