Her writing bitch-slapped me awake. She was Phillip Marlow in a skirt. I called myself a writer and saw all the pedestrian, safe shit that flowed from me lately. Enough was enough. Her poem embarrassed me into action. Shamed me into performance. That’s what words can do. The right words. Arranged so pretty and sharp. They cut. Mightier than the sword indeed. Sugar coated shit was still shit.
Sure, I am storyteller. Have tons of stories. Started one the other day. A nice one. A good message one. Even wrote it a new way. Outline first. The nuns would like that. Fuck that. The nuns ain’t looking anymore. I am a writer and that doesn’t mean doing things the easy way. Maybe not even the right way. It means writing. Spill your guts. Vomit your soul on the page. The reader will decide if it stinks like puke or smells like chocolate fucking chip cookies. It’s their nose that you write for. Don’t blow smoke up your own ass and call it art.
Writers writing for themselves are jacking off. Impotent closet queens of denial. Limp wimps. Whatever the word for fucking useless, fill in your own blank. Don’t kid yourself. Have a gift? Bullshit. You have a delusion. Write. That’s what writers do. If nobody reads it, it died wordlessly in the forest of nothingness that is your own fear.
The story I started the other day was good. It was a nice story. I might even write it. A nice message. See beyond money. Step out of the insanity that we call life. Live clean and pure and free as jaybird with a middle finger in the air for all to see. It takes balls. It takes guts. It takes body parts. Hell, it takes hearts and minds and souls. Yours. It takes everything you have and everything you know and wraps it up, shakes it up, and rearranges it. You are just along for the ride. Yeah, it is a good story. Maybe I should write it. Maybe I should just cut to the chase and tell you to think about what is really important. Tell you that money ain’t god so wake up, heathen, and get a clue. Do all that in 50 words or less and then tell more.
Wrote a lot of poems lately. Some rhymed. The more powerful ones skipped beats. Poems got me out of my own voice box. Lines form to the right. No frontsy-backsies. Screw the lines. I’ll pay later. Write now.
Spitting out this stuff feels good. Roller coaster good. No brakes. No breaks. Leaps and bounds and twists and turns. That’s where the passion is. It ain’t watching the train go by. It’s riding the cyclone of life while eating a hot dog with all the trimmings. I don’t do hot dogs no more. They stuff them with stuff they should have thrown out. We grill them up and wave flags while we eat the garbage they feed us. Hot Dogs are the perfect American food. Pass the relish and pop open a cold one, brothers and sisters, we are on top of the world. Let the fireworks begin.
Somewhere along the way, trust fizzled. I stopped trusting. Wondered. What was right? What was wrong? The negative wrapped around me like a shiny new cloak and burned the retinas of naiveté. Tried to look away. Didn’t. Couldn’t. Saw the façade as a façade and faced it. About faced it. Two faced it. Went inside. Deep inside. The world kept right on spinning, pretty globe all aglow, its cancer denied with less and less credibility each day. Me? I am just average Joe. Nothing more. Nothing less. Just me and a few million more like me just doing the best we could to breathe and laugh and do the right things. Then the concept of right left and left me as far from right as I’d ever been. That was when the trouble began. Maybe that was the trouble ended. Too early to tell that right now. The story unfolds as I unravel. Re-look. Re-think. Re-do. Do-Re-Me. Me? Thought I was doing things right and pure and good while being just another part of the scam. If you are part of the joke, is the joke on you? Are you the joke? Who’s kidding who? I was kidding myself with a slight of hand David Copperfield and all the Artful Dodgers would envy. I fooled myself with the harlequin romance of the red, white, and blue.
Twenty-eight years in the military. Part of something proud and true and noble. Then I peeked behind the curtain. Maybe it was behind. Were the curtains opened or closed? Was I on the outside looking in or the inside looking out? Was it a show within a show? Was it all part of the show? I thought I was in the audience. Who was what side of the curtains? Was this a dream? Dream, dream, dream. All I have to do is dream. A dream come true. Wake up and see if the dream was the dream or the waking up was the dream. Time to wake up. Confess. Come clean. Rise and Shine. True Confessions? Step right up, the show’s about to begin. Step right up. ID Cards. Top Secret Clearances. Cluster bombs stocked on boats in the Indian Ocean. The best show on the Midway. Was I in that show? Whose side is whose? Was it my side that kills and threatens and soars in the face of any that doubted America dominated the world? How young was I when I joined? How old was I was I left? Left when I did not get a promotion that was mine based on time in grade, square filling, soul giving, and mass dedication. Mass dedication not enough? Here. Have some mass destruction. Let’s promote the general welfare with some general warfare. Maybe I would have made General. Would have fared better in general. Fair enough? What’s fair is fair. I was fairly clueless, part of something fairly ridiculous, and left fairly human. Left proud but walked away with my dignity intact. Looked back and saw my blindness. A stitch in time saved nine. I was in stitches.
I believed. It was from the heart of that young pledge of alleger. A heart taught by the nuns, fed by the comic books, warmed by the parades, and filled over time with the Sands of Iwo Jima. I believed. People believed in me. Stripe by stripe, I did my time. Celebrated the bars of my rank and drank in the toasts of my successes. Walked the line soberly up the staircase down into my own blindness.
Travel opened me. Germany was beer and schnitzel and thinking in other currency. It was also Dachua and the feel of evil underfoot. Hot to the touch with the burning logic of hate. England was theater for a Jersey kid that lived a million miles from the price of a Broadway ticket. It was crap food, crappier weather, and two hundred years of “where did our world go?”. Turkey was the feel of the ancient places where civilization still struggled to be civilized. The places speak, even when unheard. They screamed at me until I listened.
This is the way of the Traveler. Lessons in the going and the being there and the having been there. It is purpose and place and all the stuff we say when we feel like what we are and what we do matters. The sword of learning pierced me at the jugular as I tumbled around the planet bleeding to life. The pulse of global locomotion, my life support, changed the very life it supported. Living is much better that dying and thinking it is life.
Tumbleweeds are dead things. The thorny roll of rootless pricks across the land. Dry. Barren. Annoying. Held only in snag. Plant corpses zombied by the wind and jammed into the traffic of the living. We brake for them. Curse at them. Bob and weave around them. Crush and burn them should they gather. The tumbleweeds are heartless. They do not give. They can’t give. They don’t know how. You gotta have heart to give. Tumbleweeds don’t give. They do not receive. They are the ultimate homeless. Home is where the heart is. Tumbleweeds were something else at one time. Something with a heart. Something with a home. Rooted. Now they are the rolling dead. They are in the way. They used to just annoy me. Now they piss me off.
Fuck the tumbleweeds and their bounce of nothingness. Life is a celebration. A hurrah bansheed by the bold. Celebrated in the moonlight while cowards huddle by their puny fires and hope to hell that sound in their darkness is the wind. It is the wind, chickenshits. The wind of change that sweeps in from an angry ocean. Tumbleweeds are off the ship before anything or anyone else. Woman and children first my ass. Tumbleweeds ride out of town at even the hint of storm and roll from the thunder long before it reaches our ears. Tumbleweeds run from everything and waltz the coward cha-cha downwind. Cowardice is ugly and pricks everything it touches.
I’ve been pricked. I’ve been a prick. Pricks are a dime a dozen. A penny an inch but you better measure it yourself because pricks are short on truth and long on promises. Rub them the right way and they are yours forever. Forever measured between last time and next time. It’s all about the prick and getting ahead. Thank you, come again. Hope it was good for you cause I don’t know what the hell happened. What was I thinking? That was a lot less than expected and a bigger mess than I started with. What takes these stains out? Has to be done by hand. Should have started there rather than ruin a perfectly good night’s sleep in the first place.
Sleep is key. Vital. Life sustaining to understand the rest of the stuff. Wanna wake up? Go to sleep. Sleep is daily death. Die a little. Cry a little. Go inside and lie a little. The lies die. The bullshit stays here. Clothes wait. Schedules keep. Layaways. Getaways. Stayaways. Ain’t no ways. All stay here. It’s just you. In a whole new world. Back where you started. You bring only what’s needed. Fragments of then and when and who and what and why and what the heck. Chili fries. Teary eyes. Wishful sighs. Open thighs. All run amok. Free and unedited in your own private showing.
You are the star and the moon and the flying none. Demons of your own unconsciousness rise to face their creator and slayer, the layer. Here, you are life and death. This is your world. You’re just visiting the other one. Wake up. Get to sleep. Shhhhhhhhh. Time to dream before this is just a memory. The Bard barbed wisely about death and perchance to dream. Shuffle off the mortal coil. One show a night and occasional matinees. You snooze, you win.
