You’ve got to be kidding, she said,
Having moved past nonplussed to outright incredulous.
She was, at least in retrospect, not alone,
As we were there, just the two of us,
Having walked up Bootjack Hill
Past the derelict and defunct mills,
Past the equally moribund old middle school,
All the way to the old section of the cemetery
(Rarely mown and less rarely visited,
The markers and obelisks commemorating families
Who, though the names were vaguely familiar,
Had few branches of the familial tree in the area,
And those that remained were generally not of a mind
To see how relatively prosperous and glorious
Their clans had once been.)
She was not a slave
To the disingenuous and de rigueur demureness
Called for in that time and place,
Where a failure to register
A pro forma protest at a cupped breast
Brought suspicion among one’s peers,
And any attempt to navigate
Anywhere near or beneath ones *******
Required an ostentatious and woefully insincere passing out
So the next day could be greeted with beatific and virginal smiles.
She’d not kept faith with such notions, and so here it was
(The big It, the Holy Grail of Its) being offered up on a platter,
But I hesitated, hemmed and hawed, not so much from nerves
(Though they were there, understand,
My pulse ramped up it such a manner
That it played a Babalu which Ricky Ricardo would have envied)
Nor lack of preparation, as my wallet contained a ******
That was reasonably new-ish and theoretically dependable.
It just doesn’t seem right, I stammered in protest,
It’s just wrong somehow, disrepectful mebbe.
She’d looked at me, her face a mask of beyond disgust,
And though her eyes bespoke of soliloquies and angry sonnets,
She simply spat out And these poor **** stiffs got here how?
I’d said nothing in reply, stuck in some adolescent morass
Where I was neither flip nor fly.
At which point she’d fixed me with a look
Residing in some interval between disgust and pity,
And, having ascertained there was no hope for the likes of me,
Simply grunted Oh for chrissakes, just walk me home,
You ******* country-*** bumpkin,
And we trundled unsteadily unsteadily back toward town,
Footsteps hesitant on the long, unkempt grass,
Dew-soaked now that the procession of dusk
Had reached the doorstep of night,
The quarter-lighted shadows making the stones indistinguishable
From snakes, rabbits, and other living things.

And so I walk upon this stage of life
Set before this night of a thousand eyes
Sans players and bereft of drum and fife
My given charge to sift the truth from lies,
To extract from the ore of distant past
Some kernel of what the years ahead may hold
And though I know full well the die is cast
My gestures and speeches long since foretold
And I am content with the part I play
In this warhorse my fathers have composed
Though other dramas are now underway,
Sad and hackneyed things which I had supposed
Would proceed, my presence not required.
The director demurred when I sent regrets
And so that preordained was what transpired,
This life no stroll upon the parapets.

We'd referred to it as The Avenue,
Not because it had any pretense of being
Some major thoroughfare
(Indeed it ran for no more than a half-dozen blocks
From the traffic circle at the school building,
Itself de-commissioned for some years now,
To the small bluff at the end of the village
Where buildings ended and trees and fields began,
The view, in our childlike perspective,
What we assumed belonged to the birds and angels)
But because every other roadway
Had been christened with the more plebian "street",
And as the longest and straightest pavement
It was the venue for racing bicycles, skateboards
And anything else with wheels,
(As we later discovered, much to our parents' chagrin)
And certainly we had sent any number of bugs and beetles
To their makers in our mad rush
To reach the road's crest,
And on one horrific occasion, a tiny bird,
Barely past the point of being nurtured in the nest,
Somehow became enmeshed in my spokes
To be flung unceremoniously to the roadside,
It's wings splayed out in a manner
At once almost seraphim-like, yet clearly signaling
That the hatchling in question
(Its species not fully apparent--a pigeon, perhaps,
Or a mourning dove not destined to be part of a pair)
Would never take flight.
I'd looked at it, stunned beyond word or action,
When Nicky Gesters pulled up next to me,
Whispering into my left ear, Nothing to be done, kid.
Happens all the time.  If it wasn't you, woulda been some cat.
And, bereft of any rationale of my own,
I simply nodded, riding back down the *****
Not to return to the high end of the road for some days,
And when the time comes where some errant wheel,
Something rapacious and feline, or some other tool
Of life's winds and wuthering take me to my rest,
I hope to retain sufficient grace to seek out that bird
To proffer my regrets for my all too extant humanity,
My sad and insufficient pentinence.

It’s a ******* good thing there’s no bouncers in church,
(Though your dad’s just the type who would bring in some thugs)
And the lack of an invite left me in the lurch;
All I wanted was one goodbye kiss and some hugs.
I suppose I should have laid off the Prairie Fire,
(Two parts Wild Turkey, and three parts Tabasco)
As the ***** and my broken heart served to conspire
To make the affair something of a fiasco.
It may have been short-sighted to **** in the punch,
Waving my Johnson around like King Arthur’s sword,
And I regret if it ruined the buffet lunch;
I’ve never been the type who liked to be ignored.
Your mouth opened to scream, but didn’t make a sound
(I’ll take that as a sign that you might come around.)

Life its ownself is powerful fond of the long goodbye,
The process of moving from indispensable to incidental
An incremental trip of infinitesimal steps,
But the upshot is goodbye all the same,
And once upon a time everywhere was a warm and intimate place,
A universe of mobiles and appliqué on the walls,
Somewhere where you were all the comfort and confidante ever needed,
But the world went and got bigger
And though you thought you’d stayed the same,
Fidelity being your stock in trade, you’d become a lesser thing,
Privy to the grim notion
That affection can be genuine and expendable all at once,
And now you are outbound,
Gingerly ******* a coach-class ticket
To an uncertain destination,
And you suppose all things are possible now,
But that is all part and parcel of the cold realm of the probable,
And you rest the ticket in your lap, just to the left of the heart
That is hand-stitched on your rustic gingham
(The patch a bit faded and Hershey-stained now,
And one or two of the stitches are not as tight as they should be)
Which you suppose still beats, but only faintly enough
To be just a sad and mocking thing.

And so there are things all about us,
Fine things at that:
Hills, perhaps gently rolling, perhaps ending abruptly
Courtesy of the ministrations of some indifferent glacier
Rolling in and then receding with equal diffidence,
The song of some unseen child singing inaudible lyrics,
All tinkling-bell-a-twitter,
Some grand art nouveau city tower,
Festooned with angels on the balusters, gargoyles in the cornices
And they are wondrous indeed,
All with their own histories to relate,
But imbued with the regrettable tendency
To all speak at once, with no inclination to await their turn
Leaving us flummoxed and forlorn,
Shorn of any way to glean what would be precious
From the ore of babble,
But there are those with a certain ear, a certain eye
(Though such eyes may be accompanied by lenses
Thick as the headlight on some ancient VW microbus,
Perhaps without even such limited acuity)
Who can sort such tangles, weaving them together
In such a manner where this cacophony
Becomes something greater than the sum of its parts,
New yet familiar, things we know as true,
As must be true, their presentation to us
Signaled by nothing more than a mere clearing of the throat,
The rustling of some smple garment,
And at such a moment we must proceed
All openness and open to all things
And thence govern ourselves accordingly.

The first leg of our troika was removed easily enough;

Courage is a mercurial thing, waxing and waning

As frequently as the tides--or, perhaps more accurately,

It is like the doomed cell hosting a virus,

Left a barren husk of its former self once the germ

Has gone about its business and moved on.

In any case, he has happily cast off the burden of leadership

So often and unwisely fixed upon our martial heroes,

Content to appear at parades and other events of state,

Answering the roar of the mob in an almost authentic manner

(Though just barely perceptibly less so each year),

Living testament to the notion

That it is easier to be lionized than to live as the lion.




I had convinced myself that a two-headed regime

Would be perfectly workable,

That I could be the yin to the yang

Of my erstwhile alloy colleague

(The intoxicant of power

So dulling my senses that I could believe such nonsense),

The contemplative man of thought acting as a counterweight

To the fiery man of action, the man of the blade.

I had somehow presupposed

(Such was the vastness of my delusion)

That my old brother-in-arms would defer

To the appeal of painstaking analysis and meticulous planning;

It was if I had forgotten that, provided with the genie-like largesse

Of the acquisition of anything he desired, he’d asked for a heart,

As if there wasn’t enough sturm und drang taking place

In that miniature steam boiler of a chest!

While I had buried myself in charts and task-force reports,

He had enmeshed himself in consolidating power.

When his yeomen, huge-hatted and well-armed

Came to my suite of offices to place me under arrest,

I was, at my core, not particularly surprised.




To parrot the line of so many of those who have shared a fate

Much worse than my own,

I am well treated by my caretakers-***-captors;

My living quarters are comfortable enough,

And I can read, write, and research at my leisure,

Provided I don’t attempt to transmit any of it

To the outside world. 

Beyond the boundaries of this small compound,

I am a non-person; neither my name nor image

Has appeared in the pages of the Daily Ozmapolitan

For several years now, and it is whispered

(With the full knowledge and abetment of the current elite)

That I am, in fact, gravely ill if not dead.

I could, I suppose, rage against my confinement,

Shout my grievances and pronouncements against autocracy

To the heavens, but my cottage and the outbuildings

Lie in a thickly forested place, and it has not escaped my notice

That all of these structures are built entirely from wood.

No matter, then; I am the victim, first and last,

Of my own foolishness, my own inability

To resist the nectar of power, the ambrosia of command.

I, of all people, believing the road could run both ways!