Monsters

Most of life consists of simply avoiding monsters.  Kids turn up in trash barrels and creek beds.  Wild world.  It’s when a monster walks into the room and you’re in it that the world truly makes sense.  

There’s an exception in everyone’s mind.  War’s a big monster.  And everybody’s scrambling all over it.  War has community, teams, sides.  And that’s fun.  

War’s mutable; the Taliban watch for pigeons across the valley because they fly above American soldiers looking for food.  Then they drop their mortars and shoot their machine guns into the woods below the birds.  American soldiers have planes with thermal imaging to detect body heat.  They score fatalities in huge, huge numbers: blow their bodies up so they’re not around anymore, knock off their furry little buttons when they’re not looking.   I'd have to say I’d root for the bird-watchers if asked straight-up.

Then it starts to look like us. 

Mostly it walks in plain cotton clothes into some gas station with a gun and tells everyone to lie on the floor then blackness or whatever God is real happens to them.  All the people act crazy because they want to live more.  Then the living walk in after the dead and say, “Oh my God.”  

Chasing The Well

When I was a child I was hounded by loneliness.   I needed small spaces to exist in.  Large areas left too much unaccounted for. 

Fearing then the depression of adulthood, I traveled: just once, and not the type seen in movies.  I assumed some things about ‘the well traveled man' :  for whatever reason, he has done it, and goes on to convey with acute awareness and maternal love the untraveled man’s inheritance.  You could see yourself and your face in his hands and he sees in your face the soil of the earth.

For me it happened in one moment; I decided to leave and then returned.  Two nights before I left I watched the sideways trajectory of airplanes.  The smiling face of the Italian man was gone, my coffee already drunk, cold and warm again at once. 

It’s the same thing: this verve, this giddy-up, that exposes only the anxiety of its unfulfillment, that makes me smoke a cigarette before I begin typing: the same thing that makes me wait until I’ve opened a book and digested a line before releasing my excrement. 

Some direct this anxiety towards sex or consciousness of race, or the news.  Some fight for the union.  Luddites. Some play with typewriters and scarves and hats.  Luddites. 

And what would you say to me then?  If I spit water out from the broken glass and you saw that I looked like a madman and was, and that I was not 'the well traveled man,' but a claustrophobic  an agoraphobic. Would you, in the earth that sits around me, accumulate?