The Crow King

He stood on the bridge 

alternating his gaze 

from water to skyline

skyline to water

and then up at the clouds

his head in yes-motion.

Wherever his vision lit

he found no place 

for his head to rest

or body to nest

but if he lingered

he’d face arrest.

So the time was here

to fly, to die, to cry out 

against the cold city

with its impersonal

charity cheaply bought

and grudgingly wrought. 

He was the Crow King

freefall in full swing

wondering what death brings

if not some kind of relief

to a life too brief

living lost and alone.

***

Three Dreams, Same Scene, All She’s

At least three different times I fell into a dream of a similar setting.  Each time it culminated dramatically, I woke up, and then re-entered the setting with a slightly different scene.

The similarities lie in the fact it was a very large rectangular room, maybe twenty feet across and 40 feet long.  The outside wall w/windows was on the left from my perspective and opposite it on my right was the parallel wall with two doors that opened to a hallway.  It looked to be a very long studio apartment or two college dorm rooms with the intervening wall removed.

There was a kind of division between the two sides of the room.  On one side was my bed in a corner, but surrounding it was an office-type set up with desks, lamps, filing cabinets, etc, and a door.  The other side of the room was a kind of lounging area with a sofa and chairs surrounding a common area that had its own door to the hallway.  On the outside wall of the lounge area between the windows were some large suspended cabinets.  

***

I am lying in the bed and the lights are out.  There is someone sleeping at my back and I’m not quite sure who it is.  I slowly roll over enough to look and it is a woman with her hair almost completely gone, kind of growing in tufts like a dog with mange.  I suddenly feel like my life is in danger and the only answer is to kill this person before she kills me.  I grab her around the neck to strangle her and her malevolent yellow eyes open and then narrow as she raises a gun up from the covers and I know I am about to die and... I wake up.

I lie in bed frightened and unsure of where I am.  It slowly dawns on me that I am alive and was only dreaming.  Then I fall back asleep w/o fully awakening.

***

I am in that room again.  There has been some activity on the office side and a secretary tells me there is a patient who wants to see me even though it is in the evening and my office hours are long over.  It is a sister of a colleague and so I agree and she comes in and starts talking to me about a crisis she is in.  I am fascinated by how much she resembles her sister.  After she leaves the secretary informs me there is someone hanging out in the hallway and I realize it is a lady from our church who has been stalking me with the intent to do me harm.  I peek out the door and see her standing under what appears to be a street light.  She turns her head to look at me with a menacing glare and... I wake up.  

I am back in my bed and I listen closely to see if I can sense anything out of the ordinary in the house and then fall back to sleep.

*** 

I am in the bed in the corner of the room once again.  There is a little light trickling in through the windows but not much.  I sense something is amiss and I sit up in bed and look about the room.  I don’t see anything.  I get out of bed and as I step towards the middle of the room I realize a woman with black hair is sitting with her back to me on the border b/w the two areas nearest the windows.  I stop dead and dare not move.  She is radiating a kind of coldness and there is a faint glow in front of her from the windows that gives away her outline in the dark.  I am too terrified to move until she starts to turn her head in my direction and I bolt for the door and... I wake up.

This time I can hear the fan running in my son’s room and I seriously consider getting up and checking out the house.  Instead I get up and peek out into the hall, see nothing is amiss, go use the bathroom, and then get back into bed.  

***

Sleep comes and draws me back into that elongated room.  I want to check it out in the dark, but don’t want to walk around bumping into furniture and whatnot, so instead I float upwards with my arms and legs dangling below me.  It is something that I know is peculiar but within my control to do.  I float over the desks and then over to the lounge area where there are CPR-like mannequins littering the floor and on the furniture.  I pass over them and am near the door on that side of the room when I notice the mannequin on the couch is different.  I has a shiny white face with sharp nose and pinkish-red hair that converges back into a point.  It reminds me of the cartoon version of The Joker.  Suddenly the eyes pop open and fix me with a stare of  pure hatred.  I fall to the floor no longer able to float and tear out into the hallway.  I run down the stairs grabbing the banister at each landing to whip myself around and down to the next level until the darkness completely envelops me and I awaken in my bed relieved that it was just a dream.

I sense it must be getting close to morning but it is still too early to get up so I doze back off.

***

And did I say “three dreams”?  I guess there were more, but this last one happened twice in slightly different ways so it is hard to nail down (with dream logic and all).  What was the same was the door of one of the large hung cabinets swung open and inside was a freakishly tall woman in fetal position with thin limbs and a kind of bouffant blond hairdo.  She may have been dead or simply animated in some way that was not natural.  All I know is that when she stepped awkwardly out of the cabinet I bolted out the door and down the steps as before, but this time I made it to the street and then tried to double back up the other flight of stairs only to run into her coming down.  She had figured out my ploy and I was caught.  Those branch-like arms reached down for me and... 

I awoke one last time feeling like I had been dreaming off and on throughout the entire night revisiting that large room and being terrorized by a coterie of macabre femme fatales.


***

Letter to a Middle School Coach

Hey Coach D,

I feel I need to reach out tonight because of some concerns I have as a parent.  E is extremely frustrated tonight and I cannot say that I blame him.  He played well tonight in the few minutes he was given, but in general they are so few that there is little opportunity for him to get traction or grow as a player.  There were several opportunities to get other players in the game tonight that were missed considering our lead and it became obvious to me that things were starting to get overly sloppy as players were getting tired because they were being played too much.  

To be perfectly honest, I do not know what message is being sent or what overall goals are being met by playing J for 90 plus percent of every game to the exclusion of others.  From a development stand point I believe it is short sighted to give some players most of the time and leave others on the bench so much at this level.  I have to say that in our basketball experiences through AAU and other communities our school has a reputation for not adequately developing all its players prior to high school which frustrates the program gaining success at that higher level.

Middle school is the time to allow kids to grow and develop their skills under the pressure of game time situations.  I see other schools subbing kids in and out throughout the game much more than we do.  I do not want to see my kid’s love for the game to diminish b/c his hard work is not being rewarded or he is not being given the chance to bloom.  He was gaining confidence through AAU in the Spring and the Summer League and playing extremely well at times, but now I feel he is stalling and not being developed to his full potential which breaks my heart as his father.

I greatly appreciate the time you are spending with our kids and I respect your coaching skills and your character.  I know you cannot make everyone happy all the time in your position, but I just wanted to point out these things as it is directly impacting my son in a way that I feel is not wholly positive and I want to see him succeed.

Respectfully yours,

A

Eating Myself

The balding head

The broken nose

The trick ankle and

Love of crows

All so very ridiculous!

The numberless books

The pointless rhymes

The need to be needed

And thankless crimes.

Where should I go?

Trapped in a life

Thoughtless and cruel

Eating myself

Ego as gruel.

***

Early Morning Apocalypse

The horizon was set on fire by a tremendous fireball

ostensibly ending any possibility of life on earth as

he sat weeping in his car for the sorrow of it all,

waiting to be enveloped and utterly incinerated,

except it was the sun bursting through his car’s

windshield, blinding him on his morning commute.

***

The Joker on a Jacket

The Joker jacket was laughing at me,

gifted by a friend in a dream whose

meaning only Freud could guess at.

It was just so random and those are 

the types of dreams that provide the

best fodder for the probing analyst.

It was a gray zip-up type jacket with 

a collar and the original comic book 

Joker slanting across the front of it.

I was thrilled to get it, like I was ten 

again and arguing with my neighbor-

hood friend, “who is better, DC or...

Marvel?” I would choose Marvel but

there was no denying the draw of 

Batman and his nemesis, the Joker.  

Was it because he is “crazy” and I 

am a shrink?  A mind on the brink?

Hard to tell, but what do you think?  

***

“a land called Honalee”

It was the closest body of water to my childhood home at the southern edge of a small town in Indiana.  It could be seen from the highway that split the town in two if you were paying attention and didn’t blink, just north of the sewage treatment facility.  In retrospect, it was likely created from runoff from this facility, but to a kid it was a magical place we dubbed “Honalee” after the land of Puff the Magic Dragon.

And when I say “we” I mean myself and Ricky.  We lived two houses apart on the same road that constituted the southernmost border of Orleans, Indiana.  There were arguments about who saw it first and what it would be called.  There were always arguments between us which were mostly just attempts to shore up our insecurities or to try and assert some kind of dominance over the other.  Ricky won the naming war with “Honalee” and I had to admit I liked it.

The thing to do was create a seaworthy craft to explore the pond of Honalee even though it couldn’t have been more than twenty foot across and about thirty or forty foot long.  The idea came from finding a wooden pallet in the weeds that could serve as a raft.  The next step was to find an inner tube from a car or truck that we could inflate, the bigger the better.  When this was found and transported across the highway we lashed it to the bottom of the pallet with rope and found a long branch to navigate with, a la Huckleberry Finn.

I don’t remember who attempted to shove off first, but there was only room for one.  I am sure there was an argument about it.  I was short and skinny, Ricky less so by a good bit, so it was probably me who attempted the maiden voyage.  It was exceedingly wobbly and not a very practical craft.  I remember shoes and partial legs getting submerged from slips and missteps which, considering the source of the water, is pretty gross.  

We must have lost interest pretty soon thereafter because I do not remember any more adventures on Honalee after that.  And now that I think about it I seem to recall that Ricky’s Mom found out what was going on and explained the sewage connection, forbidding any further visits.  But for a few days there in my childhood it was something new, exciting, and full of possibilities.  For a brief moment we had created a magical place from the communal muck of our little town.

***

The Stowaway

He was a stowaway on an intergalactic freighter that had stalled just outside an arm of the Milky Way.  It was during the troubleshooting process that his hiding place was discovered and assumptions made about who had caused the problem.  He was sent out the airlock in an expired but functioning suit.  They weren’t barbarians after all.

And then the ship disappeared into the inner swirl of stars leaving him to float effortlessly in the void.  He did not know how long he had to live, but it hadn’t felt like he was really very much alive for quite some time now.  Who leaves what they know for what they don’t?  It had been a flight into the unknown, looking for something resembling hope.

He tried to orient himself towards the light of the stars swirling in numberless variations and put the blackness of space at his back.  He’d read about something like this once back on earth where people jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge invariably faced the city lights and not the blackness of an impersonal ocean.  Ancient history, but pertinent nonetheless.

His heartbeat and breathing created a kind of rhythm that was calming.  It may have been an illusion, but the stars appeared to pulse in sync to this inner music.  For the first time in his life there was nothing to worry about because there was nothing to change.  He was just a part of the whole which required no effort, only acceptance.

And there was time enough to slip into timelessness.  Oxygen depletion would be slow and relatively painless if his body could adjust to it with a gradual lessening of consciousness.  He felt its pull and did not resist.  As he opened his mouth wide for one last yawn he saw the galaxy and a billion others rush in, like inhaling the fragrance from a field of wildflowers.

A Walk in the Park

“A walk in the park” 

means something is easy

and I guess it is

my 8 year old 

daughter holding 

my hand, arms swinging

we talk about 

things that 

make us laugh

and she gathers 

what is to be gathered

from trees

along the path

*pick-pluck-pick*

and places them

carefully in the

cargo pocket

of my pants

until that night

when she falls 

off to sleep

and I find the 

forgotten foragings

still there

like a half-remembered

promise to be

good and kind.

And Off I Ran

I feel like it has been one of my major accomplishments this past year to get Elias to run Cross Country (XC) in middle school.  It is not a sport that gives immediate rewards which is what most kids seem to look for these days in our increasingly consumer driven society.  “Delayed gratification” has gone from an essential skill to be learned by the developing child to being a dirty word avoided at all co$t.  

One of my biggest regrets from my teen years is that I waited so long to discover this sport.  It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I got my first taste of competitive long distance running, all the more frustrating when I learned that I had a knack for it.  When we finished our season on a golf course in Bloomington, Indiana at Semi-State I couldn’t help but feel I’d squandered so many years not knowing the freedom and joy that can come with a long run.

If I rewind that single season of XC I alight upon the moment when I learned it was something I could be good at.  It was early in the season and we were at an invitational meet in Loogootee, Indiana.  There were well over a hundred runners in my race and I was feeling pre-meet jitters with some nausea and shaky legs.  When the gun fired to start the race I felt like I was spinning in a clothes dryer with the jumble of bodies and the smell of trampled grass all around.  The only remaining memory I have of that course is running a corridor of grass between the road and a chainlink fence.

When I crossed the finish line there looked to be a lot of people in front of me being funneled through the chute.  After having my place, time, and number recorded I was released back out into the wild as it were and found myself wandering aimlessly amongst the chaos of such a large meet.  I was looking for familiar faces and at some point my best friend’s dad found me in the crowd.  He had a huge grin and clapped me on the back, “Haney!  Great job!  Man, you really ran well today.”  I couldn’t quite place his enthusiasm until he explained I’d placed 23^rd and three of our four best runners were in the top ten.  It was a dominant showing for our team and I had somehow contributed to it as the number five guy.

This was a big confidence booster for me moving forward and I consistently ran as the “number five guy” for the rest of the season (for those not familiar with XC, the team score is determined by adding the times of your first five runners to cross the finish line).  It did have its downside, however.  I spent the rest of the season at meets hearing the opposing team’s coach yelling at his runners out on the course “This is him!  This is their number five!  Catch him!  He better not beat you!”  The first few times this happened I found it disconcerting but I quickly learned to take it as a challenge and get motivation from it.  You will NOT catch me!  And off I ran.


***

One of Us

What if God was one of us,

an infinitely older man

seriously tired of our shit?

I certainly hope not,

but I would not blame Him

one.little.bit

***

Books & the Long Goodbye

From about 10 years old to 50 years old (my current age) I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time, money, and resources on collecting books.  I imagined there was a time in the future where I would settle down in an old house full of bookshelves or wallpaper the walls with them, stacked and steadied with gravity alone like the monk cells of Skellig Michael.

I think I reached the pinnacle of my literary hoarding some time in my mid-30’s at which time I went through all the different places they were stored and lovingly counted them, taking in the musty smells and reliving memories of where I was when I acquired them.  The number was somewhere in the 900’s and I felt like God near the end of His creation who “saw all that He had made, and it was very good.”

But geez-oh-Pete, getting married, forever moving out of my parent’s habitations (to include their warehouse), and being responsible to transport this library from place to place was daunting.  As a result the magic number of 1000 books was never reached and the library began to shrink.  Each subsequent move took its toll until the most recent one this summer.

The culling process had always been a painful and deeply melancholy experience for me,  but during this last move it was almost a relief.  What remained of my library was literally cut in half with hard decisions being made as to what had to go and what I felt was not yet ready to be released back into the world.  For at least a few weeks HalfPrice Books became a frequent stop for me with boxes and boxes of books flowing forth from the back of my car, the store speakers buzzing with “Aaron, we have your offer ready at the counter.”

It seems at some point my “children” transformed from paper and ink to flesh and blood. My kids have helped me realize there are more important things in life than accumulating material things to bolster my ego (a major motivating factor if I'm honest).  They’ve needed space to grow and flourish and the books have had to give way to that.

***

Pretty Things

“Billy stayed in the wagon when it reached the slaughterhouse, sunning himself.  The others went looking for souvenirs.  Later on in life, the Tralfamadorians would advise Billy to concentrate on the happy moments of his life, and to ignore the unhappy ones —to stare only at pretty things as eternity failed to go by.  If this sort of selectivity had been possible for Billy, he might have chosen as his happiest moment his sun-drenched snooze in the back of the wagon.”     

Slaughterhouse-Five

____

Reading this paragraph in Vonnegut’s novel triggered thoughts of what such a moment might be for me in my past.  The image that came to mind was a brief moment in my undergraduate days at Indiana Wesleyan in either 1989 or 1990 before I’d dropped out to join the Army.

I was walking on a sidewalk heading East towards our campus dining facility on an exceedingly pleasant and sunny day.  I passed under the shade of a large tree that is not there anymore and when I reemerged into the sun it triggered an intense feeling that Vonnegut would famously describe as “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt” in an epitaph.

It was startling, really.  I had had so many misadventures and misfirings up to that point post-high school, feeling  listless and directionless, until that very moment when everything seemed right with the universe.  I became emotional and felt tears starting to well up in my eyes.

It was pure delusion of course.  Most likely a dopamine dump  that had flooded my synapses, but a moment nonetheless that gives one hope to keep going and see what’s around the next bend.  Maybe it’s an unforeseen blessing or maybe it’s more misery.  The important thing is that there are possibilities (forget probabilities) and opportunities that float there in the not-yet.

***

Left on Peach Fork Road

We’d spent a week on the beach: me, my wife, my daughter, and my son.  Incidentally, we’d moved to a new house the week prior to that and left it full of boxes which were mostly full.  It was a two week snapshot of extremes of stress or relaxation, but always active.

It was the drive home to Ohio where it occurred.  We were at about the eleventh hour of driving, somewhere south of Athens, and far from civilization.  I was trying to follow the signs to catch Hwy 33, but the “next right” promised by the sign proved to be premature.  

Instead of 33 we found ourselves on a country road and “in the sticks” as we would have described it growing up in southern Indiana.  My wife had been taking requests to play music on her phone and we’d just drove our way through “Carry On Wayward Son” by Kansas.

I suddenly piped up with “Look up Dueling Banjos!” as we passed a shack-of-a-house being swallowed by weeds and a pickup truck in the gravel driveway.  I was the only one who’d seen the movie or appreciated the reference, but then the banjo began to heat up.

Everyone was punchy at this point in the trip and got caught up in the manic melody.  There was  kind of buzzing sensation in the air.  As we passed a tiny house that looked like it was tiled with multicolored squares I heaved up a boisterous and piercing “YEE-HAW!” 

My 8 year old daughter burst into infectious laughter and all our recent life stressors seemed to melt away in the general hilarity that ensued.  My wife could barely breathe and I glimpsed my 14 year old son in the rearview mirror allowing himself to temporarily drop his inhibitions.

These glorious few minutes continued to build when my father-in-law texted to ask “where are you in your journey?” which was perfect, if inadvertent, comedic timing.  The Garmin indicated ‘left on Peach Fork Road’ so I half-yelled, “Tell him we’re turning left on Peach Fork Road!” 

***

Listless on Europa

Feeling listless on Europa,

Jupiter looming large in the sky.

A Ransomed traveler 

asking the what? and why?

But there is only the sound of

alien waves lapping on a lifeless shore.

A lonely moon sistering 

the Silent Planet of Lewisian lore.

***

Rolling the Rug

He was 4 when we rolled out the new rug,

the moving boxes cut and connected into a 

huge cardboard fort with many windows,

Greta looking on.

He is 14 as we roll it back up to move else-

where after a decade of growth, snickering at 

childish things found in the back of his closet,

Greta long gone.

He is ageless in my heart, whether small with

bright orange hair, or nearly adult-sized with 

his own ideas, direction, dreams, and desires.

***