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A Chapter in the life

How we start is only part of what we eventually do.

 

Physically that's easy to see. Being human, adamkind,

we see weak starts often in life.

Colts or pups born a week too soon can be loved to lives as pampered pets,

Siring toys for the enjoyment of those who can afford to fuel them,

For generations, with never a single care,

Past that initial trauma and subsequent subjugation to the will of man.

 

I don't tell horse stories, dog stories or war stories, if I can keep from it.

 

But when you want to demonstrate the purest of payback,

revenge getting the bad guy in the end,

having a horse be the hero makes behaving like an animal

more noble to the mind of vengeful man.

It's not true, revenge being noble.

That's a very old lie.

 

Law is to prevent error by disallowing failure. Law.

 

Relative to the rest of God's creatures, we, adamkind, seem dependent, weak and vulnerable next to bears being weak

a way-less long time

Than we.

We come into this world weak as a baby anything and we stay that way longer

Than any living creature.

 

I am an American, by birth.

I was not born to a political party or a family with political roots,

"I ain't no Senator's son."

Still,

I was reared drinking mythic cherry wine

sprung from George's failure to lie

Regarding his woodman's knack with a hatchet.

 

Sitting on the fence rail Abe split,

town fathers where I lived

were said to have decided the most harmonious of towns

have only gainfully employed darker folks,

while white

trash was allowed to loll around because they was

some employer's kin by marriage.

 

It all seemed pretty normal, as a child.

The loller-arounders let kids listen when they told

Their friends, who could not read, what the newspapers said.

 

One block from my house there was a vet's and hobo's flop-house clad in corrugated tin, rusted-round the nail-holes all the way to the ground and the rust had spread, so at sunset,...

I only recall the single story shed having one door.

There were always old white men sittin' on the southside of the shed. At sunset, those old men's whispy white hair

 

appeared as white flowing mare's tale clouds under

a scab-red wall held up by old men with sunset shining faces...

 

It was a big shed, a low barn, a bunkhouse,

eight or ten 4-foot tin-sheets long on the north and south

Windowless walls.

The one door was on the south side.

Once I saw an old man selling red paper buddy poppies.

He was missing both legs about half-way up his thighs.

The poppy seller rode a square board that had what I think were

Roller-skates, the key-kind, with metal wheels about a 1/2 inch wide.

Nailed to it's bottom. He had handles made from a carpenter's saw

Without it's blade. He pushed himself with those handles.

 

That looked fun, to a four-year old.

It looks different now-a-days. Knowing

Those red poppies symbolized

The after math automatics of the war to end war.

 

Who knows the poppy-sellers son? He would be old.

Does he know how his father lost his legs, but lived?

Does he bear the curse of the curse that lost his father's legs?

Does he honor his father's cause or weep at the thought?

 

Enough is enough.

My family tree branched in America, but only one great grand-parent,

Three generations back from me, was rooted in this land.

My gran'ma's ma, a Choctaw squaw,

That rhymed fine,

But it's not true. My grandma did not know her parents. She was born an orphan,

And her father and mother were likely strangers.

 

1910 in southwest Arkansas or southeast Oklahoma or northeast Texas or northwest Louisiana

And the color of her skin is all that proved my American heritage\.

 

My grandma was born poor as poor can be,

she never told me how she survived

 

To survive a 1925 or so car wreck

in eastern Arizona's white mountains.

I never asked what my grandmother knew,

nor how she came to know.

 

This is my point.

After you and I have gone into forever more,

Our great grand children may wonder

what we did or did not, since we

Are no longer around to give our account.

 

These days we can leave our story to our great grand children.

Our own children

And our grand children follow us on facebook back to before they were born.

Shall they judge us idlers wielding idle words for laughs,

or  think us knowers of all we found while seeking first the Kingdom of Heaven

In the place Jesus says it is. You know where Jesus said the Kingdom of our kind lies?

 

The double minded man is unstable in all his ways,

hence Eve and her broader bandwidth corpus colostrum

Come back later, there is a breath system upgrade evolving.

 

Such changes to the courage of the mind rolls out more slowly

to the root ideas, labouring to find sustenance,

it is a struggle being a radical idea,

we agree, but we have our part,

as do the flowers

and the spore.

Leaven the whole lump, like it or lump it.

 

The now we live in grew from far deeper roots than

the roots claimed by the

Self-identified nation through it's cartoons/representations of national desires to rally 'round the flag as if it were the fire,

those desires to herd beneath any shelter from the storm,

Your country, your incorporated allegiance

to the inventor and creator and counter of the money under

the protection of the sword and crown representative

of the flame that burns,

The namers of patriot, the rankeers of ideas

who, by their existence,

naturally, over rule you.

Such powers are granted by the individual, not the mob.

You get that?

 

The desires of the nation over rule the desires of the individuals who

Com-prize the nation.

Whose side are you on, dear reader?

 

Is the idea we believed believable?

Ex Nihilo, I don't think so because

I can't imagine how now could be

Accidental-ly.

 

When my hero wore spurs as he went from the jail office to

Miss Kitty's place, (Gunsmoke on A.M. radio)

 

What did Miss Kitty do?

I had no clue.

In my hero's world people never

Did the wrong thing

While Marshal Dillon was in Dodge.

 

So did you think Miss Kitty's place was anything other

than a culturally acceptable

reference to professional social *********** workers

under a strong, smart female CEO

with top-level links to the local cops?

All these are rhetorical questions, this being

Rhetorical if you are hearing me say this.

That means, don't nod or raise your hand or shout Amen, kin!

 

I see your answer my answer and

I know my answer, so you know my answer.

 

Step-back, 1961, USA Snapshot

Unitas, Benny Kid Perett, Mantlenmarris, the Guns of Navarone.

 

Why I recall those things, I know not.

Why I did not say I do not know, I do not know.

 

Though, pausing to think,

knowing contains the doing of it within it, you know.

What's to do?

 

Outlaws were more my heroes than cowboys, and marshals, and such

Especially the ones that had been forced out by law.

 

I grew up in a 1950's junkyard with no fence, one mile north of route 66

On the Al-Can highway to Las Vegas, 103 miles away.

My Grandpa was a blacksmith's son,

who rode a horse he broke and his pa had shod

From Texas to Arizona in 1917, at the age of 18.

 

by the time I knew him,

He was fifty, settled down, nearly, from the war.

Momma had to work, so, daytime, Granddaddy raised me.

 

Horses weren't, wrecked cars were,

the toys of my childhood.

 

Grandpa built a junkyard from cars left steam blown

on the old stage road, from before

the railroad.

The Abo Highway hain't been Route 66 for some time yet…

Hoping…

 

 

Hoping sometime to polish this bit of this book, I left myself re-minders

Hoping memory of mental realms might rewind or unwind sequentially

When trigger

Neighed.

That worked, Roy Autry and Gene Rogers were names Sue Snow's

Mormon Bishop granddaddy called me,

back when I first recall My Grandpa Caleb,

a baptist by confession,

who was,

as I recall a vodka-drinkin' jolly drunk.

While Grandma made beds in some motel,

granddaddy built boats and horse trailers

and hot rod 34 Chevies,

and he fixed this one red Indian, I could read the word on the gas tank, I knew the word Indian

and this motor cycle was proud to wear the name. I was 4.

 

A stout-strong man, no fat near any working muscle system,

he could and would

repair any broken thing,

for anybody. People called him Pop.

Pop and Mr. Levi-next-door at the Loma Vista Motel, shared a listing in the Green Book,

so broke down ******* knew where help could be found

after dark in that town.

There was a warnin'ag'in

let'n sunset there

on darker than grandma's skin.

 

My Gran'daddy's shop had two gas pumps

that were reset to begin pumping with the turn of a crank.

As soon as I could turn that crank,

I could pump gas.

I could fill up that red Indian

Motorcycle.

But "m'spokes was too short

to kick the starter."

I told my eleven year old uncle

and he told

how he would always remember learning

that saddles have no linkage

to horse brakes.

"Not knowing what you cain't do

kin *** ye kilt."

 

He grew up in the junk yard, too.

My first outlaw hero.

 

Likely, I am alive today, because

On the day I discovered I could pump gas as good as any man,

I also discovered that real motorcycles were not built for little boys.

Request permission to use this poem
Written by
kenpepiton
77 / M / Pine Valley CA
Published
Nov 20, 2018
Lines·Words
202·1.6k
Notes

This is an earlier voice which I wrote a series of thought experiments. The book is finished, most parts, some reader feedback as to interest in more, will be high value gifts from you to me, and counted so.

Tags
#seeking#truth#hope#peace#aging#veteran#christian#wisdom#death
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