He approached the city from the West
not anticipating a skyline that was absent
or at least a ghost of a line largely implied.
Particulate matter particularly mattered
as it entered his pulmonary passages
after its long journey from the North.
It was like a post-apocalyptic scenario
in the books he’d read since his youth
but now wafting into the realm of reality.
***
Atop my office filing cabinet,
remnants of an 18 year run.
Visited now only in memory,
nearly two decades of fun.
So many falls and flub-ups,
but feels like a race I’ve won.
***
***
This week it was a utility truck sitting on the street by Grant Medical Center. I passed it on my way to the car and the rust lines and runs caught my attention. I find things like this intuitively compelling and it is not until later that ideas begin to flow as to what it means to me.
This particular image is one of decay and disintegration on a vehicle that was once shiny and new rolling off the factory floor but has been “dying” ever since. As it rusts away a beautiful pattern emerges with orange and yellow streaks cascading down over months and years.
The words that came to mind were from a Neil Young album “Rust Never Sleeps”. This sent me looking for selfies in my iCloud storage and I found one of me mock shrieking in horror in a stairwell at Grant. The darkened wheel well formed a frame for this primal scream.
I have an app on my phone that I use to work with photos I’ve taken on it. I’ve become increasingly drawn towards the Double Exposure feature that allows me to put one photo on top of another and blend them. It allows for a kind of story telling by extreme juxtaposition.
The inside of the truck wheel has concentric circles that look to be shock waves moving out and away from my mouth, projecting the scream. I made that part of the image black and white. Maybe my version of Dylan Thomas’ “rage rage against the dying of the light”.
***
You are the deceiver
and I am the deceived
except the you is me
and
self-deception the sea
I am drowning in
with nary a plea.
***
It was that time
overlooking the Rhine.
Feeling so alive
at the age of 25.
Visiting a castle,
no worries or hassle.
Growing my hair long.
Feeling physically strong,
but emotionally facile.
***
The city sits at the bottom of the sea,
the water’s weight bearing down like
the world on the shoulders of Atlas
but without the benefit of being a Titan.
He was punished for leading a war
against the Olympian gods for con-
trol of the heavens and I have been
feeling pretty rebellious myself due
to the frustration of not really knowing
my place in the big scheme of things
which is not unlike drowning, honestly.
***
in all of my complexity:
some good, some bad,
a tilt towards sad
they call “melancholy”.
***
I will haunt your attic for free.
It will be really cool, you’ll see:
a fluttering sense of static,
nothing excessive or erratic.
The backstory or cause of death
won’t be particularly gruesome.
Just a guy who died (like everyone else)
you win some and lose some.
Needing a place to stay
after storing my body away,
to live yet another day, but
in a different kind of way.
All of that to say…
I will haunt your attic for free.
***
I don’t know when Kurt Vonnegut wrote “Wailing Shall Be in All Streets” but it is his harrowing account of the bombing of Dresden as someone who was there and miraculously survived. I did not know such a thing existed. Like many, I assumed his statement on that matter was exclusively laid out by way of his brilliantly mad novel “Slaughterhouse-Five”. But here is a short straightforward account that was previously unpublished in a collection of such writings put together in 2008 under the title “ARMAGEDDON IN RETROSPECT”.
Speaking of SH-5, I find it fascinating that he chose to wrestle with such a horrific experience through a pseudo-science fiction novel that may or may not be science fiction, though it is certainly a mix of fiction and nonfiction. He opened the door to others who may have had traumatic experiences that could not be approached head on but required some kind of back door or sideways approach to blunt the horror of the thing, like seeing a skilled psychoanalyst. Or maybe it is simply a more effective way to explain the unexplainable. I’ve read that Tim O’Brien cites SH-5 as an inspiration for his own wrestling with war experiences in a fiction-nonfiction hybrid.
I had my own moment as a medical officer deployed to Iraq that was a moral crisis of sorts and evaded processing for years until I finally found a way to get it out by way of a poem (and thanks to “So It Goes” journal for helping me share it with a wider audience). It is not an easy or straightforward process and tends to be ineffective or fall flat if simply recorded in a journalistic style of facts following a rigid chronology.
A friend of mine when I was in my twenties had experienced a traumatizing event as a Marine pilot-in-training when the jet he was training in crashed during take off and the pilot was killed. He wrote a short novel to process his experiences surrounding the event using elements of magical realism and attempted to get it published. He eventually self-published it and I bought a copy only to discover it was nearly unreadable in how poorly it was written and conceptualized. But at the back of the book he provided a straight forward account of the accident much like Kurt did in “Wailing Shall Be in All Streets” and it was actually pretty good. In retrospect I can only assume my friend took Slaughterhouse-Five as his inspiration, though few have the genius and persistence of a Kurt Vonnegut to pull it off.
Regardless, I think Kurt would have encouraged my friend, and myself for that matter, to keep writing and let some of that suppressed stuff burble to the surface where it can be recognized and handled (otherwise it has the potential to perpetrate mischief by creating traps and pitfalls that we continue to blindly fall into). In this way it can be ARMAGEDDON, but truly in RETROSPECT.
***
Light your light
and take a walk.
The world needs you
to shine in a line
showing the way
to the sublime where
you are growing.
Shine on knowing
you are loved
and needed like
a seed that springs
forth from the dirt
and finds a way to
bloom out of the hurt.
***
I dreamt I drove into the sun
and all my friends were there.
And not just the living ones
but those who died from despair.
We danced and sang within
the waves of a plasma flow.
Inexplicably joyful, the how
and why we did not know.
It was the mystery of existence,
a manifestation of the Divine.
No one felt they deserved it so
reciprocated by being kind.
***
Apparently tonight is my night to be the carpool person and take the girls to cheerleading practice.
I jumped into the car to the sound of my 12 year old whining she did not have “cheerleading shoes”. There is something so very specific about a middle school girl’s activities and the apparel that goes with it. There is no approximating, no equivalents or knock-offs. There is only the thing itself that is essential to have in order to not make one stand out as different or in any way off-kilter.
But I digress. We drove to her friend’s house and then headed to cheerleading practice. I was warned by my daughter to avoid playing my music at all costs and remain as silent as possible. She and her friend talked enthusiastically in the back seat and at some point their conversation moved to kids doing ill-advised things that get them into trouble. Well, I have a whole treasure chest full of such stories just waiting to be told and so I waited. And waited… until a pause in their conversation provided an opening.
“You know, I had something like that happen to me the summer before Kindergarten.”
I glanced in the rearview mirror to judge my audience and they appeared receptive so I began my tale:
***
We lived on a cul de sac and the street dead-ended into the back side of a large park. This side of the park was wooded and a source of fascination for me. I decided I was up for an adventure on this particular Saturday morning and entered the woods alone and unaccounted for. I walked through the woods and when I came out into the park proper I was a little surprised to find I’d been to this park before but from a different entrance and had not realized my neighborhood was on the other side of those woods.
[I glanced in the rearview mirror to gauge my audience and see if Anya was giving me the big-eyed “cut it out!” stare. Instead I saw smiles and so I continued…]
I couldn’t believe I’d come so far so I decided I wanted to try and go farther to see what I could see. I was scared but excited at the same time. Eventually I made it to the far side of the park that was bordered by the main road into town and I felt like I had covered several miles on my journey, though it was likely less than one. I could either go back or head into town and it was so very far back home, so why not? The day was young.
I was wearing a hoodie and before following the road into town I pulled it up over my head and put my hands in my pockets thinking I would appear bigger or maybe become invisible. I decided if anyone asked me how old I was I was going to tell them “7” because I thought that was a “big kid” well into elementary school and anything higher would be an obvious lie as small as I was.
[I heard the girls giggling behind me.]
So, I headed towards town on the gravelly side of the road and within a minute or two a police car pulled off the road in front of me. At first I thought it was just a coincidence, but then the policeman got out and walked back towards me.
“Hey son, where you headed?”
I told him I was headed into town. I imagine this probably got a smile if not a chuckle out of him and he told me I should get in the police car with him so he could take me home.
The car made a u-turn and we headed the opposite way that I had been going. It was tough trying to navigate for him because my 4 year old brain thought of each part of town as separate places that only my Dad knew how to get to by car. There was our neighborhood, the park, my school, the church, and the ice cream shop all situated in their own exclusive and disconnected geographic locations. The police officer made some suggestions based on the place he found me and the direction I was walking. At some point some things started looking familiar and then I noticed the side of our house.
“That’s it,” as I pointed to our left.
He whipped the cruiser into the side driveway which lead up to two large sliding glass doors. Inside I could see my Mom leaning back into her exercise machine we called the “jigulator”. It was an early 70’s fad weight loss contraption that had a wide cloth belt that fit around your butt and would violently shake back and forth, ostensibly to reduce fat in your backside. She was in a housecoat, hair in curlers, and reading a magazine in full view of the policeman and me.
I’ll never forget the look on her face. It registered confusion, then anger, then restraint as she came to the door to let us in. She apologized profusely and thanked the officer but when he left she had murder in her eyes.
***
At this point I explained to Anya and her friend that back then there were no video games, no cordless phones, and no computers so a lot of time was spent outdoors when the weather was nice. I also explained that TV shows for kids were only on at certain times, like directly after school or on Saturday mornings. As a result much of my young life was spent either seeking outdoor adventures or experiencing adventures through books when I learned to read. That segued into talking about books they liked and then we arrived at Anya’s friend’s house to drop her off.
It was a drive and then a walk down memory lane for me. And now that I am finishing this up it strikes me that it was literally 50 years ago. So very strange to think it could be so very long ago. I miss my kids being that age and as a parent I am thankful they were not quite so full of “adventures” as I was.
Ground to Aerial
Earth to Sky
Wire to Radio
Nerves to Eye
Beard to Face
Hair to Head
Something old
is almost dead.
18 is the year of the precipice
launch versus failure to launch
a post-apocalyptic landscape
portending survival of the fittest
moving into uncharted realms of
self-reliance, a tattered safety net
possibilities appear limitless
(which is to say: TERRIFYING)
It is the year of certain indecision
the unknown begging to be known.
***
The crow will take shelter
under any available edifice
without regard to how grand
or how humble it may be. So
says Thomas Jefferson Crow.
***
“Tranquility Base. Tranquility Base. Do you read me, over?”
[No, but I do like to read in order to feel connected. I guess that’s a joke of some sort. Maybe a pun. I’ve found this shelter pod and I am reluctant to acknowledge my presence here.]
“You are in terrible danger. Do you copy, over?”
[So much drama from those so invested in this waking world. I have given myself over to the certainty of death and the freedom from that inevitability is not so easily attained.]
“Tranquility Base. Moon Proper has been overrun. Do you require assistance, over?”
[They will eventually give up on me and that is my hope. I have accumulated so many disappointments, but now I am fully in control because I have no illusion of control.]
“This is your last chance to reply, over.”
[They are promising silence. Maybe they feel sorry for me, but I have come to terms with the surety of my physical demise while their world has shrunk to the size of a body’s border.]
“Tranquility Base. Listen. We do not want to give up on you.”
[Nobly put but naively understood. I see an impossible light breaking on the horizon to engulf me in mere moments and so I draw in a deep breath.] “This is Tranquility Base, over and out.”
***
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