Distant Battles

There is a battle for power going on in the east.  Men in blue and gray.  Seduced by glory and the faint purple dream of gold and long-weaving tales that could twist and pull in even the most modest of girls. 
In the east the men fight, not just each other but the bugs and the cold that reaches in under their worn-out ratty wool blankets. 
Each one stinks and is darkened with grease and drops of blackened blood.  All blankets are futile attempts to stop cold or bleeding.  The rations are paltry; the young men, babyfaced and pale, hold the balled up blankets to their cavernous stomachs to blot out the noises of hunger, they press them tighter to drown out the needling pain. Older recruits warned of the hunger. It would crawl inside and start to eat and gnaw from the inside, hollowing out fingers and toes first, it would soon find the plentiful reserves of thick, purple organs. 
Just outside the camps made of canvas and dirt are the muskets and hastily made trenches, the mis-read maps that will lead to so many fallen lives on coming autumn days.
Out there in the fields and meadows and under the old trees they lay. Sometimes thousands in a week, sometimes hundreds in an hour. Too many to carry home, too many to bury in the soil and say a little prayer. They will have to be found by god, buried in snow and picked at by the animals of shadows. They will end up in the woods and meadows, spread out bit by bit by tiny squirrels and swallows.
Those gunshots are not even a faint ding on the horizon out in the yellow land of the west. This is the wasteland and the battle hymns and marches fall, losing their way between sand and stone.
In the desert and the old dusty towns there are other games to play. Gray and blue are just some of the colors, none are the desert dwellers' concern.  The wasteland is full of games, big and small and meaningless, depending on the player. Each rider and beast moves towards gold or glory or woman or the rare gem of purpose at the bottom of a deep flowing river, the great golden treasure that calls from the heart of an ever receding sea.

We Are All Going To Die

I looked at her from 20 feet away. She was crowned with a head of thick dreadlocks, held away from her face by a red ribbon. Most of the matted stalks were dark brown, as were her eyebrows, but the ones framing her olive-skinned face had streaks of platinum blond through them that ran through the locks like lightning bolts through a darkened sky. She looked thick and healthy, wearing baggy jeans and a jacket to protect her from rain that came in intervals.
Now the city park was filled with a bit of tentative sunshine, a few rays finding their way through a mass of fluffy gray clouds above. She smiled easily at the Afghan boy, his face still taught and smooth, just the hint of a beard growing on his chin. A table of packaged flat breads and jars of jalapeno spreads and humus separated them, though there was not much more, he held out his hand, offering a small sample and two rows of neat white teeth. She opened her hand, accepting his gifts.
I was twenty feet away, behind my own covered tables piled high with thick-crusted German bread and pastries. Whoever might have walked past by my booth in these moments was invisible, a ghost lacking any presence. My head was turned, slightly to the left, watching the pretty girl, smiling, wearing a thick red and white raincoat meant for mountain treks and camping. The young man in front of her, talking, both of them sharing easily for just one simple moment. It was soft, gentle, and I watched.
“She’s going to die one day.” The thought came from nowhere, it was simple and stark, so true as to be startling, yet I was not scared, I stood still, watching them both.
That pretty girl, in her later twenties, a head full of thick dreadlocks, a mind full of thoughts and a machine full of personality. I felt the hum of the market, crowded with white-tented booths and fresh oranges and vegetables. So many people, and all of us will die. The girl, the afghan guy….
And as much as they were alive in the moment, talking, breathing, she, tasting the flat bread, me, watching them, us, the entire market of vendors and customers and the people who drove by in their cars on the street just outside the park, we were all going to die one day. The thought hit me. Not just a thought, but a deep anchor that fell and hit the deepest part of me, a fact so true that I stood shocked, unable to turn away.

Crumbled Bodies

There is an orange skyline hugging the awkward angles of fallen structures; the foreseen time that the insane have warned of is here. The towers of glass and steel have taken new shape. Piles of rubble and trash rise up like little mountains. Gray mounds of crumbled concrete and steaming piles of burning wood have reconfigured the city streets. Like scavengers in a sunken ship, we pick through the debris, looking for gold and pictures in frames, anything we can use and shape anew. The dust of the orchestrated implosion is strong, and in the setting sun, everything is cloaked in a thick golden haze. Through the murky light, I look for you, for your blackened contour in the earthly clouds. Your curving shape is close, walking on the loosened train tracks, picking up bolts and small pieces of iron. The heavy metal screws designed to last centuries have been defeated. Strait lines and symmetrical patterns have deviated from the original plan and now, in defiance of blueprints and architects, they skew to the right. Loose wooden beams poke from the earth in every direction, looking more like the decaying posts of a pier battered in the salty elements than the dry as bone metal tracks. The boxcars and trains have long since disappeared from the rails. The masses have taken them as housing; stopped in their tracks, the dwellers live side by side on the thin rails and cluttered railroad yards. The solid colors that once passed mile after mile of corn fields; the dingy red, blue, yellow and green remind the little girls of the rainbows they have only heard about. The clouds have disappeared from the sky, and with them, the rain. We live in landscape of heat and dust, altered only by the fast moving gusts of wind that momentarily delight us. The lighted prisms that bent over us have no home here, they are shapes of myth and memory in the few that have stable minds. Some of them journey on, following the rambling train tracks, using them like a well lit path that turns in unlikely directions. The earth, what is left of the green and blue planet has jumbled the metal course. A better path? More natural? There is debate amongst the walkers, but still they follow the rusted metal pieces, for no better reason than to discover where they lead. In the remains of the cities, where the high rises lay in smoking piles and the street lights have all gone out, people still scream in the streets. There is no fear in their voices, but they scream to their god. Are they heard? We leave them to shout their profanities, we walk by them with sympathy, soon, perhaps, we may be like them. When our stomachs rumble and begin to cave, when our bodies have taken hold of the small kernels that remain, perhaps we will stand atop piles of rubble, naked below the waist and foaming at the mouth. Or maybe I will end up like the wandering girl, still wide eyed and smiling, the dirt on her face outlining her tender eyes like well applied makeup. She left her kinsfolk in the hills and came to us alone. But I found her in the green land, not far from where I stand, three bullets in her head, disguising what was once her mouth. I found her at daybreak as I scavenged for pine cones to warm our cement cave. She was like me once, open and oblivious to the terrors, never knowing the surety of death… that it happens, in one shape or another, that it comes. The crusted brown shapes around her face and body once flowed a bright red, hot and clear and humid. When I saw her, she was long gone and what remained was already ice cold, taken out by a passing group of dark-skinned boys. I see them in my mind, shouting from a car as she rode on with an increasing sense of dread. Just hecklers, right? Death cannot come. Now? Why would it come now? And then the sound. A shot. At her? Really? It happened fast…it happened so slow. The way death moves and time escapes perception. She lay on the earth as they came closer. She thought of her mother, high in the hills. Did she beg? Did she cry? Did her coming fate slow her mind, did every instance of her fleeting life pass through her like a pretty kaleidoscope? Did she smile, remembering the sweetness that surrounded her in a younger age? Death, approaching her from all angles, a couple of boys that forgot her face as they walked away with her bag. They destroyed her body, ripping apart her flesh like children with tools of men. I saw her cold body and covered her in dry leaves and a yellow flower plucked from a cluster of weeds. Just like the crumbled edifices that litter the small city, she lays still for the birds to pick through. A changing form, from flesh to dust, she moves as I will soon. Like her, I will someday surrender to the fate of circles that never come to a final rest.

A Brush With Real Contact

Nuuuutthhhhiiiinnnnggg eeeehhhhveeeerrrr haaaassssss haaapeeeened. I pronounced each word with extreme intent. Longer, more thorough syllables than I had ever spoken, never had I focused on the journey of sounds, so subtle and overlooked. Like the beautiful mountain I can see looming over me outside my bedroom window, yet I never really see it. I don’t notice it because its always there, there’s no novelty in its large, booming form and its shrub covered face never seems to change, so close every day, its enormity escapes me. And these words, the thousands of words I speak every day, I have never before paid attention to their short lives…from beginning to end. They are born, cease, and then are born again, every time I wiggle my tongue and shape my lips.
Even now, as I can hardly speak, my voice taken by germs, I move my mouth in the shape of their expected form. Barely a whisper, Nuuuutthhhhiiiinnnnggg eeeehhhhveeeerrrr wiiiilllllll haaapeeeen. My soft pink tongue, barely used in the past couple of days, presses against the wet roof of my mouth, in the space right behind my top teeth. A deep breath moves inside my lungs as the almost imagined sound of the "ugghh" mounts and then, the finale, my tongue finds itself between the space of my upper and lower jaw, right below my front teeth, disturbing the outward flow of air and producing a subtle hissing sound. It all ends in the back of my throat, as the thickest part of my tongue reaches up and makes soft contact with the space at the back of my mouth. I feel it all…as long as I keep noticing, as long as the tenuous thread of my attention moves seamlessly though the center of each word.
With each second of claimed attention, the light between us shifts. Sometimes, a slight haze creeps between us, in the tangible space that only my attention can bring forth in this small house. To my amazement, my absent voice is not missed. Because of its absence, I have become clearer in intent and with this, there is a space for him to come. Like a slow moving spiral, each inflection and shift of my tongue brings him closer. His two dimensional picture emanates light from behind his head. Radiant yellow lifts his image off the page and, slowly, ever so slowly, it appears that we are here, together, face to face, eye to eye, in clear contact. And then, sometimes, he retreats…then, comes forward, like a game of catch, where the ball is my attention, and maybe his. Then…waves of violet blue, mostly hazy, but distinct clouds that spring from his face. Last night, his face became a bumpy, pebbled surface, so strange, so strong, I felt myself recoil.
In my mind, I hear the words. I think them, I feel them, I imagine their shape and implications. In my mind’s eye, I see blackness…a circle of blackness like an enormous pool filled with even darker water. Is he but a drop? Is he all of them? One? Do I speak to them all now? Is it all of them that rush to my words and attention, ready to meet me as far as my body will allow? I vaguely see their forms, shapeless and as colorful as ghosts, manifest in a reality I cannot remember. With colors and light, he is not he, he is more than one. He is something else, a drop of water spat back into the eternal ocean. A breath inhaled, then exhaled, sent into the atmosphere, into a realm of colors that my eyes can see only sometimes.
I am sitting, my ass pressed into a hard wooden chair, yet I am floating, tethered, yet somewhere above this little white body. But perhaps I am here, in this garage, without a body, without this tongue that still rolls in its attempt at syllables, and as I feel the shift, I focus on the words more intently. They are my map, my guide and my ropes.
I look at this picture, at a man that is my grandfather, yet never was. A man of my DNA, a being set adrift. And within his body, within the grandfather I never knew as a man, is a being that is me. A being that is you. In the middle of the night, he told me he was leaving. In the deep hours of darkness, he woke me from sleep with a punch to my heart and I knew, in the calm certainty of the half conscious, that he had left his body. While his machine began to decompose under a thick pile of dirt, the Being hovered around us. The space above the coffin became blurry and misty and clouded my vision and swirled like heat rays off of black pavement. I traveled to be close.
And when my mind wanders, as I read the prayer…as I perpetually criticize my current life and plan my next meal, I feel him drift from me. The light between us is nothing but the florescent hue from my continuously buzzing lamp. I am talking to a photo, a photo of a man who looks slightly insane, with bulging eyes, one slightly larger than the other.
And the moment I realize my fall, the second I begin to concentrate on the movement of my tongue, on the sounds of the words, on the meaning of the sentences and his eyes staring at mine, then the being reemerges. It comes back with the force of a strong wind, like a burst of colored light that waited for me to receive its return. It is there, for me. It is here, for me. Here…yet needing my attention. Here…yet invisible until I really look. Here…yet waiting for my heart to open. Here…needing the life of my breath. Here…as a gift. You meet me where I am. You are here when I am here, absent when my mind is elsewhere. While my armor was down, weakened by coughing fits and diseased lungs, we met. We met here. The same as always. Here.