Two Muhammads

Do you know the saying: “No matter where you go, there you are.” If you tend to think too much, like I do from time to time, it’s not a good saying. I realize that it’s a matter of choice. One of the glass-half-empty or glass-half-full variety. To some it is a simple matter of geography: you are where you are. These are the people who sleep well at night who are not often thought of by other people during the night. 

I believe that you are free to think of the world in any way you like, to the extent which your cultural and economic biases and subjective emotional responses to objective truths confine your ability to choose anything at all. After all, it’s a free country.

The world used to be big enough that you could find a place where what you wanted to do was acceptable. You want to maybe marry a 12 year old? You go to a place where it’s not only legal, but, in our sense of the word, correct. You want to watch 14 year old boys swallow semen? Sure thing. Go to Kunar province in Afghanistan and have a ball, guilt free.

It’s the Kunar-style bar mitzvah! Every burgeoning man imbibes that which ensures the continued existence of humanity. For that we go to doctors who give us medicine, but no matter. It is to live. To pass on virility. It may be hard to accept, but it’s not intrinsically wrong. Like debased currency and so many other things that are not wrong if enough people buy in.

So we have Muhammad in two places at the same time. A headline from the Kunar Gazette: "Muhammad passes into adulthood." And one from Township Times (Saginaw, MI) "Sexual Abuse Under Taliban Described as 'Institutionalized.'"

In the United States, Muhammad develops emotional problems. He struggles to achieve intimacy. His psychologist says its because he feels like people are taking advantage of him, but is reassured that these are only the ghosts in his head. He never has a wife or a child and he dies alone in Saginaw, Michigan. A lifetime gas station attendant.

Meanwhile, back in Kunar, Muhammad marries a first cousin, builds a home, and lives to have three children. The two sons are blown apart by a hellfire missile fired from a $14,000,000 dollar helicopter after being paid $5 each to drop a mortar into a tube. There is still the daughter. Prayer beads. Life is strange and Muhammad lives to see some unexpected things.

For instance, the Americans dig a well next to his home. It affords him hours and hours of time previously spent climbing up and down the ridge to the river. He lives to see his childhood home, where his uncle now lives, support goats. A dry, unforgiving slope turned green. His daughter marries an elder’s son. Then, while he is pumping clean, drinkable water from the American-dug well, he sees his wife, his uncle, his two cousins, his daughter’s new husband, the in-laws, and his daughter swept forever from the earth as a $27,000 laser-guided Mark 82 General Purpose Bomb falls through the roof of the home and detonates. Unexpected, like a handful of flour tossed into the wind. Poof.

As compensation for the error the Americans send a U.S. Army grief counselor with $10,000 in crisp, freshly printed bills and a letter of condolence from the president of the United States.

The grief counselor is from Saginaw, MI. His name is Dick. Dick asks Muhammad, through an interpreter, if he is an elder. The man with no family says no. Dick asks if he ever performed oral sex on an elder. "No!" the man says and looks in outrage at the translator, who is about the age his youngest son would be and indeed looks like him in the eyes. His son then utters the Pashto word for the male rite of passage and the man with no family says, “Yes, I am a man, but now that your mother and sister are gone I have nothing to show for it."

Dick hands the translator a canteen and directs him to the well. “Give us a minute,” he says. Dick doesn’t speak Pashto. Stands there. The translator returns to report that there is no water. Dick frowns, supposing habits of a thousand years are tough to break. But why let a well go dry? All it requires is a few pumps a day. Dick takes his canteen off his hip and hands it to the weeping man. “There you are."

Muhammad holds his hand in front of him after the canteen has fallen, reaching for something. The slopes turning brown. He sees the faces of his sons. The water dividing into tiny rivers in the ground between his feet.

Poetry

I don’t get it!

It's supposed to be difficult.

It’s stupid!

A good poem will come just short of resisting your intelligence.

FUCK I DON'T GET IT

Keep reading.

It doesn’t make any sense.

Read it until you understand.

How will I know that I understand?

The same way you know when sex has finished.

What?

It's obvious to you, isn't it. But you can’t explain it to me, can you?

Not without being vulgar.

That's why some people write poetry.

Few people who understand poetry write it.

The majority of poetry writers are would-be poets,
who ask themselves: What is a poem?

And the answer is: Something that doesn't quite make sense.

So then they write something that doesn't quite make sense,

and the result is a lot of bad poems masquerading as good poems.

The difference is equivalent to that

between the feeling produced by internet porn

and the felt reality of human love.
Those unfamiliar with the latter

should steer clear of the former.

If you’re interested in understanding poetry,

pick a poem by a universally acclaimed poet

study it until you feel insane

and don't ever, ever give it up.

Focus, patience, and attention to detail

will make every poem laid before you seem beautiful.

Focus, patience, and attention to detail are what the poem asks for,

and unless you’re a selfish prick, you won’t feel satisfied until you’ve matched the effort of the poet.

But don't take my word for it.

People who need to be assured that they have a purpose

lead purposeless lives.

People who need to be told that there is a point to it all

rarely find a point in it all.

Because that's something you have to do yourself.

Most people don't know that the end of a poem

only occasionally comes

in the last line

of the last stanza,
and often it comes too soon.

Most people don't know how to end poems like these,

but I do.

The Voice

I had always wanted to write pretty poems

and one day they showed up.

They made no sense.

Soon they were being published.

But it wasn’t really me writing them;

A little voice in my head

would

come along

and do them for me.

The only problem was that I had to wait.

Sometimes it took weeks.

Eventually I started writing them myself.

They don't get published.

I don't submit them.
They're not exactly pretty,
but neither are you.

It’s been two months

and I'm getting better every day

at ending good things

abruptly.

Why I Love Mountains: Part II

In walking the hills around Juticalpa I have found it difficult to make myself climb over or under barbed wire fences. This is not for fear of getting hurt; the fences are short, the wire is loose, and one could easily break the posts in half. My city education has taught me that trespassing, particularly through barbed wire, is a way to be legally shot and killed. I realize now that the barbed wire is for animals, not people, but naturally, my sense of danger has translated to Honduras where the murder rate is famously high.

So, with this apprehension in mind, I walk down the bending roads toward the mountains and approached houses. To see if the land is private. To see if it is OK. Invariably, I am told that the land is not private and invariably I am told that it is OK. Me standing out front, soon the whole family is there. The little boys and girls with fingers hooked in their mouths. A grandparent hunched behind the screen window like a stuffed falcon.

Then, someone, a son or daughter says "Pass. That you go well. Straight ahead." But why is there barbed wire if the land has no owner? And how can you give me permission if you do not own the land? And if I ask them anything at all, I ask them their names. Names are like flags.

The dogs snap at me again, then I climb those fuckers and come back down covered in shit they didn't even know they owned.

One time I aimed for a solitary palm tree atop a ridge and was delighted when I found a trail break off from the barbed wire, lead up to a windy landing, and continue into the middle of a line of lush, leafy, rustling bushes that lay in the shade of the palm tree. Stepping first around a large snake hole and then into the clear air of the top, I stood in the temporary darkness of the palm tree where, no more than four feet away, a white pony jerked its head from the deep green grass and bolted across a hidden saddle, then froze, like in a film, at the base of a grassy peak that rose from where I was to a point of perfection.

That's Why I Live in a Car

Being single is like subjecting your heart to the disorienting sensation that’s common when you are sitting in a car and the adjacent car begins to drive away. At first you think you are the one rolling away so you hit the brakes and then panic and look at a thousand things at once before you realize you had it right the first time. The sickening ripple of equilibrium returns you from the accident you thought you were in, but weren’t, to where you already were.

Eventually you start the car, put it into drive, and take off like an idiot. You stop at a gas station and talk to a homeless man for an hour. His puffy jacket reminds you of going to Sears with your mother to buy winter jackets when you were a kid, and the guilt of losing them. Mom checking the tags to see if they are down or not. Those were low times.

“Hell!” the homeless man says. “You’re just like me!” and you look at him, and look around, and yell out: “fill it up!” but it’s not that type of gas station. You’re walking toward the car.

“How come none of my children ask me to live with them?” he calls after you. A flash of lightning above. You get in the car and close the door. Starts raining. You settle back, noticing the gas tank is full. Smile as the muffled voice comes through the door, remembering your favorite part of childhood camping trips was being in the tent in the rain. The safe feeling of--

“Ahhhhh! ya!” SMACK!

It’s the homeless man. Smashing his cave head against the window.

SMACK! again. The suction-cup mouth. The tongue trying to find a way out, maybe to find the teeth. “AHHHHHHHHHHHH! Where are you going!?”

“Get the fuck off my car!”

“Ahhhhhhhhh ya!”

SMACK!

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh ya!”

SMACK!

“Ahh! Ow! Ohh. Wow. Haha.”

“Serves you right!”

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh. ohhhh. Oooooo. Ok.”

Then he rears the head back, seeming, for whatever reason, triumphant.

“Ahhhhhh...”

“Hey!” you yell.

“…..ahhhhhh!”

“Hey!”

But it’s too late. He swings his solitary brain toward the glass, putting his hand out for the retractable side mirror, which retracts, and he falls, letting out a retroactive: “Ya!” He rises with a squeegee, no worse for wear, wiping the rain and blood from the window. He looks inside. Looking for a change. His face an ocean. You look into it, and at it, but..and he sees the change, and lunges for the door, which is locked, and he drops the squeegee and you drive away.

It’s fucked up. Some people have nobody.

So you drive onto a main street with lights and bars. An attractive woman is standing on the corner. You’re an OK guy so she opens the door and sits beside you and instead of telling you where to go she says thanks for the ride. And instead of asking her her name you drive without aim and pretend the car or the rain will go on forever.

“Hey,” she says, looking out the window, “is that blood?”

You look over your shoulder.

“No.”

“Well it looks like blood.”

You think, “Now what does that add to the conversation?” and then she says, “So! What do you want to do?” and you slow the car and ask, “Why do you care? Didn’t you just want to get out of the rain?”

Having been in love, you forget to tell yourself the little lies that make people want to have casual sex with you.

So then you’re parked again. Same spot. If only you could go back. That’s another thing that you forgot when you were in love: the importance of location. Single people always worried about locations. Why is that? You have nothing to do and you get finicky about time? Worried about wasting it I suppose. That’s a waste. Worrying. I'm single again and I'm loving it. That’s why I live in a car.

The Game

I had a dream about you and I
We were playing a game.

I was walking ahead of you

on a Main Street on a long hill

that always curved to the left,
so one could not see around the corners.
The goal was for us to meet.

Like most dreams

this one was full of illogical rules

and they were followed to illogical ends.
I could stop, or turn into a store
on the left side of the street,

but I could not turn back.
You were behind me somewhere,
but I couldn't see very far 
because of the curve in the street,
and I didn't know if we’d agreed

that you could stop

or turn around.

This made me anxious.

All I could do was continue living my life

and hope you were still playing the game.

Of course when I woke up I realized 
this wasn't much of a life,

nor much of a game.

I rolled out of bed for a cigarette
and sat on the balcony.
I picked up my journal
to write something down
and realized I could have left notes 
for you to find on the street.
I could have told you where to meet me,
and slept there without fear of missing you walk by.
I could have encouraged you to find me,
told you I loved you, 
and if it was too long,
I could have told you 
I quit.

Of course, I'd never know 
if you'd read what I'd written.
But it's tough to play

with someone you've hurt.