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.

Singing The War

As the music played, soft and sustaining, as the saxophone came in and out like lapping waves against the shore, as it mingled with the heart-grabbing bass and sustained rhythm which moved her to the wordless core, she closed her eyes. 
Inside where there was at first darkness, the shape of a jigsaw puzzle formed.  Hundreds of scattered pieces floated in space, some of them glinted with flecks of yellow and earth and trees blowing in the wind.  She heard a voice.
“Sing the war,” it urged. “Let it come out in sound.”
Her mouth opened and she found the root and from there she bounced up slowly gathering colors. There were large bonfires with orange flames forming great cones of sweeping embers, they scattered up into the twilight.  Looking down over the hillsides she could see half a dozen fires. 
The peasants were running. Barefoot and dressed in white, the soles of their feet almost as white as their dingy rags. They ran as a great horde down the hillside and out of view, children and thick women with bouncing breasts, young women holding their newborns in their arms. They ran leaving all they had in their piece-meal houses of wood and refuse, just a few old men thinking to grab machetes. 
She jumped up with her voice, going higher. She saw the great metal monsters of the American and Salvadoran army, huge helicopters painted a pale olive green. Men jumped from the open side of the metal birds with their guns in front of them like precious babies. Jaws locked and faces hard, they hit the ground running. They jumped onto the overgrown hillside, the whirlwind of the helicopter blades moving everything in a rush. They ran towards the jungle looking for targets. 
The sounds of her voice got louder, stronger, coming from a place of complete commitment, the story told in tone and quarter notes while the saxophone kept along, leaping like a faithful dog by her side.
And then the face of a pretty young woman, mocha skin and dark eyes and smiling for the camera.  The same girl, standing in a jungle clearing, sunlight illuminating her from behind, baggy pants and long sleeved shirt rolled up to her elbows.  She stood looking into the distance lost in thought.  The same girl, hands tied behind her back moments before the end. 
And then the singing stopped as a wave of emotion rushed forward like a giant sweeping in, coating not just her eyes, but her legs and arms and chest and back in chills and tears. She opened her eyes and looked around, seeing the same familiar collection of people and things, tables and chairs and an assortment of collected instruments on the shelves. 
No one was there to meet her eyes, no one had seen the fires or metal birds, no one had seen the girl but her.

Deer Hunter

Everything was known. The limits of the rural town punctuated in the center with smoke stacks, the babushka that walked slowly to church every afternoon, even in the snow. The tiny grocery store that was stocked and always full of etched recognizable faces. Everything was known. There wasn’t a stone he hadn’t seen, not a person he couldn’t call by name. Those friends he had known since infancy, boys he had grown up with until they were full chested men ready to serve god and their country.

He could walk the streets of the town blindfolded. He could walk from his house, down the narrow treeless drive and go down the hill, knowing exactly as he was passing the Mason’s house, walking steadily as the street sloped until the shops of downtown appeared, he could smell them, could imagine their worn shutters and screen doors. Following the street, he could walk towards the edge of town delineated by the raised train tracks that created a tiny tunnel for the semi trucks that hurtled through town towards the plant.

Every breath he took came from that air, every sip of water fell towards his sink from the mountain chain in the distance. Everything was known. His friends with their worn out jokes, the clear beer glasses and the familiar bar. The seasons shifted, colors changed from orange to white to green to yellow and then back once more. Trucks came and went, paychecks were delivered and cashed. It was a familiar rhythm of gentle movement, but everything seemed to stay the same, it was all known.

But sometimes they escaped. Filling the car with the bodies he had grown up with, bringing along their guns and cans of food, they would drive recklessly to the purple mountains, going up and up the curving slopes until the air was thinner and colder, until thousands of trees did not appear to be the same and instead looked different and new. He would walk with the only man he trusted, climbing boulders in clear silence while they tracked the signs of antlers and nibbled leaves. He saw her walking through the trees, evading him, almost. He went towards it, taking her down with one shot, because even the other bleeds.

He drove back recklessly to the known, down the dark slope towards the familiar lights of the bar. There was blinking neon sign with its comforting welcome, the pool table, the waiting frosting mugs, that smell which was so familiar he could no longer distinguish it from his own.

And then he was taken away. A big jet engine and a uniform and god and country gave him the ride. He went to where the syllables all sounded different, where bodies lay for the flies and even babies were red targets. There the familiar memories crumbled and the smell on him changed. He couldn’t walk blindfolded here, there was jungle and bombs and soaring bullets. He managed to keep his breath and mind and was eventually flown back to the known.

But when he saw the smoke stacks and roads and faces it was not the same. They were the same, but he was different. A part of the other remained in him, hollowing out the familiar and turning it into images that rubbed at his heart, touching it all the wrong way.

He drove towards the mountains again, doing what he knew, what he had always done. He brought his gun and his cans and walked slowly and quietly, just as he had always done, following the nibbled leaves and the traces of antlers.

When he saw her, a wide body and dark eyes staring back at him, he did what he always did, raising his gun. One shot, that was what he always wanted. But the other stared back at him, and this time, he saw. He had been changed and this time, there was no need to shoot.

A Death of Scattered Signifiers

The truth could never be given with a word. It could never be understood with a sentence or on the pages of this text. And maybe you wouldn’t understand, but maybe you would, and if you do, then take my hand as I reach from the grave. I started writing months ago, and what began as a rant became more, and what began as therapy became even more until I saw the dark cloud that loomed on the horizon. It wouldn’t go away when I blinked; even when I cried and cut my fists, it was always there, steady and silent, waiting for me to truly understand. It was black and hard and I knew therapy could not fix it, words could not fix it, but I tried anyway, because I had to.

They just don’t get it. You can spell it out in big words,
And little words
And black and white
And you can make it as simple as possible
And they just don’t get it.
Now they call you demented
And your wife apologizes for you
And someone wonders if you were having marital problems.
But you told them, and you used a few cuss words and your rage was palpable,
But that’s life, that’s anger at injustice, that’s red blood pumping and pumping and pumping.
And they’re calling you demented and crazed,
They’re as blind as you thought, and even spelling it out did not help.
Their eyes are gone and they just cannot see the dots and lines,
but you tried.
You wrote it.
You told them.
Your wife does not get it.
Years and years, hidden under sheets. Years of sweat and tongue and she still doesn’t understand.
And that’s what makes me sad.
You left behind a black charred body, you tried to scream, a final exclamation point in your crash,
But they just shake their heads…another lunatic.
Your sacrifice was for a point the sheep cannot see.
There will be no legions behind you,
No revolution
No violence.
Tax day is coming and the post office will be full and the stamps will carry our money away on wings,
And little will change.
Your sacrificed life will mean so little.
Your death will be a ripple in the ocean, so faint and distant it could be nothing at all.
And that’s what’s makes my heart want to bleed.
The malls are full.
The battles wage on.
The machine grinds steady.
The freeways are crowded.
The money keeps flowing.
You could not change it.
Can it be changed?

My heart has grown weary from the failures. All the fathers have crumbled. The lies are out and as I stare, I vomit and watch them grow. Children still recite the Pledge of Alliance out of synch and they still teach that Columbus discovered America even though it was refuted so long ago. They just cannot change ignorance. Young men still sign on the dotted line, believing in honor and the vision of Country. But I can see all those cracks, not one has escaped me and I cry for the innocence I once knew and I have turned hard while the lights of florescent bulbs flicker. It is all too much. They are all lies, each one of you in suits, each one of you beneath stripes and stars. How dare you speak? You white skinned, white haired, blue eyed liars. And while those men die in roadside bombs for corporations they will never know, profiting people they will never meet, I am prepared to die. The band plays behind me, and I am a patriot. I am a revolutionary in a forgotten country of words without substance. Add me to the pile if there is anything left. Follow if you can, and if you cannot, read my words.

(Text inspired by Joe Stack’s suicide note.)

The Game

They played the game as honorably as they could, as honorably as they could being men. Being men began with long organs that dangled between their legs that caused them to belch with ferocity and cry in the middle of the night while swimming in a small pool of white liquid. They played as they knew how. As men. They were beings that charged forward into the fog, with pistols at their sides and laughter from behind and ferocity that burned deep. They played as they were taught. As little boys they were divided into teams and shown how to tackle and dodge and score. They did as they knew, as they were instructed, as they were shown. They followed the long trail. The pants. The mustaches. The beards. The guns. The ferocity. The analytic. The cold. Other men had come before, and the road was well marked. It was colored in blue and black and brown. Colored with little helmets and little plastic bats and science kits. These were the things of boys. The clear indicators. They went well beyond the name and hair style. It was the rearing. The leaning through imitation. They were boys because they were raised as such. Before the plastic pistols was the suppression of tears. Sensuality hid in the closet, constantly tormented by the ape in the room. Father was watching. There was no room for softness. The moon hid because there was only room for strategy. The rules were written on the blackboard. The locker room smelled of damp clothes and fear and sweat. It was each man for himself. Attack or die. In the whirlwind of manhood, she was lost. Hidden behind the glare of the sun, she sat back watching silently, absolutely hidden. The trees held just the faintest whisper of her presence. The cloudy sky was as soft as her bosom, gentle and pillowy and smelling of wildflowers. But they were blind. All those boys were so utterly blind in their hard helmets and shoulder pads and uniforms, so blind in their hard muscular bodies and sense of importance. She was their ruler, the silent empress present in the air that they sucked, present in the woods surrounding their field, on the grass below their spiked shoes. They were the players in her kingdom, only the blind could never tell which way was up or down. Her markings covered their bodies with moles and hair and sinewy muscles. They were birthed from the folds in her great round body, suckled on her milk. But they might never remember. Theirs was the game for the moment. They were in the game of men. They played their parts to perfection, each move and line delivered flawlessly. Like blind actors on a stage, they were the men. The athletes, the boys successfully reared into manhood, so deeply enmeshed within the game that they could not see the empress on the dew, or the tip of the blackbird’s beak. They could only see the importance of their game, the game of skill and force and ferocity. She held back, silent, cloaking everything with her breath. She was just an inch away, but lost forever in the shadow of their game.

In Bondage

And yet, in another form it dwells. There are so many rocks on the shore, all from the same massive cliffs. It is gray and hard with some dark caves that hide the whispers. And he stands at the podium, a well dressed man. Lights all around. Reporters and cameras. The talk, the strings of words and punctuation that wrap around and form a concept. The pack of brilliant speech writers who so blindly follow a man. Or they follow the money, or the ideology, or the power. Those sentences, they convince the majority of young boys to pick up a pen, then hold a gun. Then run and follow and sleep and yell and smoke. And maybe they’ll come back. Maybe they won’t. Maybe just a part of them will make it back, just a small part of their brain or body. They are so young, so eager to make their claim on the world. So eager for adventure, so eager to die, to spill over and into the unknown that waits with white and yellow and red explosions. But they are slaves to the machine of bondage and slaves to the force of war and corporate power. They have been convinced. With simple words, simple phrases that reach out to them with purple tentacles that clasp onto the things they know as ideals. Those words attach themselves, they bite with venom and they stay, they linger and they pull the strings. These are the boys that will give their lives. Give their lives for a carefully devised speech, for a carefully devised strategy that requires force and brute strength. What this country wants requires taking. They need guns, steel, ammo. They must be a sacrifice, and there is a willing martyr. An army in fatigues will lay down and die so that American corporations can gain access to new markets. They will die so that America can gain more power. They will die all so that a very few, so very few, can control more. And they are the pawns, the fatigues in bondage. The young eager men who moved without choice, without freedom. They give their breath for a machine that knows no limits, love, reason. They sit and listen and march. They move in tandem with a larger force. Men behind closed doors design their fate. It was never for freedom, never for democracy. Those words are meaningless, meaningless for the men in the suites that sit behind locked doors, men who are always safe. It is others that give their lives for their simulated ideals, others that die for an idea of something, perhaps never really knowing what it is. They are in bondage. Boys who move for the strength of American power. The ones who thought, perhaps ever so faintly, that they were doing something great. But they were the bodies. Simply bodies. Bodies moving for a larger force, a larger cause that knows no human interest. It is the pursuit of power. Always more power. And power, that elusive word that seems to have no real definition. Only the traces of its movement can be seen, like a streaking cloud. Is it tangible? Can it be seen or touched or felt by those who do not have it? America, the great brutalizer. America, the great bully. America, the great weapon maker. They are asked to give their lives, to die for the accumulation of another man’s power. And they say yes, as they have nothing else left to say.

The Penis

They drive through the desert in their open green trucks. He stares into the yellow flat lands. Not a tree in sight, just the cracked earth and small gray bushes that have lost all their leaves in the drought, now they stand like skeletons naked in the sunlight. The hot air whips at his face. He squints, but he is used to it. The pain of dirt and pebbles and flying sand landing on his skin does not bother him anymore. When he was ten, he would cry when a rock scratched his skin as it flew through the air in a sandstorm, but now he just squints and tightens his jaw.
The caravan has thirty cars, each one with ten men. At fifty miles an hour, they send plumes of dry land spiraling behind them. He does not have to look, but he knows that each one of them is hard, that the bulge in their pants protrudes with eager anticipation.
They drive towards their village, the small collection of huts that is now theirs. Soon they will claim it. Each woman will soon know that she belongs to a new man. The village awaits helpless with no men, he knows, for they have slaughtered them all just ten miles away. The bodies lay dead and bloody in the sun. As their cars left the scene in no particular rush, he saw flies landing on their lips and wounds. Soon the vultures will come.
The defeated men had fought to defend their village, the men in the trucks had fought to take it, and they have emerged victorious. He shakes his head, “the fools had no chance,” he thinks.
Now they are going to take it. The women will be opened. Each one, multiple times. Their bulges are eager to take what is theirs. He looks on, expressionless.
“Those women, crouched in their tents are mine. The little girls are mine.”
He feels anger inside. He feels disgust.
“The old women are mine. The little boys are mine. They are my property, mine to use, mine to destroy.”
He wants them to understand this. He will show them. He will take them. He will put himself inside them until they all know that they are his. Each man in the caravan has won his prize. They have fought and seen spilled blood and lost comrades. They have lived for days without food and water and still they have fought, and now their new property awaits, perhaps unsuspecting, perhaps nearly dead with fear.
He will show them that they are his. With each thrust they will know. They will scream his name. And they will remember. It is his right. And tonight, he will do as he pleases.

The Quest

The quest for rightness. The quest to accumulate. It is the currency of power. The sun, the explosion, the internal censor within that seeks explosion.
We drop bombs out of rightness. Invade out of certainty. All the while, one part of the brain needs to believe. Lie after lie. Everything is absorbed like nutrients for the unconscious. We will believe anything, we are selfish. We are singular machines with the desire only to survive. This is what believes the lies. This is what understands superiority, this is what takes the fallacies of what is given. We invade. The world explodes. Machines die. How certain must one be to take gun and leave for war? How certain must someone be to arrest and shoot another?
We come, with the certainty of the sun. Never dying. Never ending. Any questions are burned up with the heat of the fire and with the burning core of delusion. The illusion is a circle, complete and impenetrable. The flag is our eye, the colors of our blindness. We quest after your blood, your resources, the trees, the air in which you breathe. We are the takers, the accumulators. We need more. Always more. We expand with your contraction, grow as you pale. Your exhale is our inhalation, our sprout, one more explosion, one more kernel of power.
Understanding is perfect, simple, believable. Force comes from the sky, from the point of a gun, from the threat of extinction. Power comes with your death, with your blood, with the repeating lie. Accumulation is our need. To grow and grow and grow. There will never be enough, not for this machine, not for this force, not for this great striving.
This is what we know. This is the west. This is the need to travel forward.
Our sun, beautiful sun, give us more so that we can take!
Power comes with the explosion, with another blast of force. The flag is the symbol of our desire. The beating wind the far-off sound of a war drum. The exploding fire our rapid hearts. Your death is our growth. Your release is our expansion.
Energy. The building. The transfer. The movement to and from.
This is our quest. We know it by other names, but this is what we seek. Like quick rapid fire…the lines move, the words change, the actions turn like dancers. New people, new lines, a new game. But the quest is always the same, we are the accumulators.
We seek your energy.
We seek your blood.

The Word: Terrorist

We all have different associations with words, depending on our culture, upbringing, religion, society, habits, memories, experience, etc.
One of the most charged words in recent years is the word "terrorist." For many in this society, we have come to immediately associate this word with middle eastern men, willing to die and kill for their religion. They are people who wish to bring down our great civilization and destroy democracy, take us "back to the Stone Age," as my father would say.
As defined by the dictionary, terrorism is the "political use of violence or intimidation."
In post 9/11 America, the collective definition of terrorism/terrorists is Islamic extremists. They are suicide bombers who wish to kill Americans.
Americans have come to associate the word "terrorist" with people from the outside. People that come from the Middle East, worship Allah, people that are different from us.
When Rosie O’Donnell asked the question: "655,000 Iraqi civilians are dead. Who are the terrorists?" there was an outcry from many Americans. So used to the meaning of terrorists as "other," they are unable to critically look at themselves, our army and our policies as terrorism.
Simply stated by definition, terrorism is the political use of violence or intimidation. By taking a step back, by de-identifying, it is clear that our policies in Iraq are political and we have used military violence. Aren’t our prisons a form of terrorism, isn’t our practice of torture on detainees terrorism?
Terrorism is simply a word…with a lot of political power. It has been used by a president and his administration to go to war, it has been used to create Big Brother legislation, it has been used as an excuse for torture in Guantanamo and other prisons. But in Iraq or Palestine, or any other part of the world, their common understanding of (the common usage of the word) terrorist is most likely completely different.
Is either usage correct or incorrect?
Or are words just empty shells to be filled with power in the service of other hidden purposes?