crime and punishment...

I’m beside myself.
No not angry,
Beside Myself!
I pointing to I,
I try to reconnect.
I am concerned about this presence.
It being the I that I am not.
And I am thinking to myself,
This is no magic that I have conjured,
No toss of bones, no bag of tricks.
So how then does this duplicate rise to greet me?
We see through the same eyes, he and I
We see ourselves, the jack of all trades,
We see ourselves the master of disguise,
But no one seems to be in charge of this illusion.

I see a man, now old,
As once was young.

A toe-headed boy
Fretting over fate and freckles,
Bored in a big house,
Governed by Great Grandmother,
A living ghost
Forever
Flanked by Neptune’s chariot and aquarian steeds,
Galloping across an old oak dresser,
Beside her silver-handled hair brush,
And a jar of vanishing cream.

Yes, I am there,
Staring into that mirror,
Stock of Abe Lincoln,
Bean pole of a kid,
Short, split-rail thin,
Sitting now on a front porch swing.
Daisy rifle
Aimed and fired at a chattering starling,
One of a boisterous flock
Hidden in the clustered leaves
Of a nearby maple tree.

A steady hand and eye
To draw the bead,
To pop the bee bee,
To hear the squawk and startled flap of wings.

Here in rural town,
Hemmed in by Hoosier farms,
And this, in a bygone era,
With a backdrop of thick woods
And scattered cornfields,
Still talk of hunting food,
More so than week-end warriors
Shooting at everything that moves.

And in my younger vision,
The Anglo settlers carved their way into
The Indian wood.
This the casual story-line.
The Indiana history books said it was all well and good,
Manifest destiny or something along those lines,
Tippy Canoe and Tyler too!
And I had those dreams,
Those thoughts,
All so necessarily serene.
It was the only way
To put six years of west coast living,
Behind me.
There had to be something here,
For an eight-year-old boy,
So far from the city…
So far…

Can you imagine?

This was another me,
Alive in creek-bed adventure,
I would be the one…
Tracking,
Moving silently through the forest,
Adapting to survive,
Keen on knowing the lay of the land.
Being able to tell the east from the west
By the slant of the sun.
Adept in the ways of hunting.

Time and time again,
Having no real expectations,
Innocence uninterrupted,
Until reality would come crashing in.
Nefarious Others observing and judging,
Laying down the law,
And I, trying so hard to understand.

Once again, I see, as if there,
A muggy mid-day sky.
I feel the faintest summer breeze,
Tinged with just a hint of rain,
Hot with the tease of distant lightening.

And then.
As if pierced by some pointy dart,
I feel a sharp and sudden pain in my right ear!
The rifle rattles to the ground.
I’m pulled up with a surprising tug
From the boney hand
Of an old and weathered woman
Whose porch it was that I sat upon.

Who was this?
Where was I?
Having only just arrived,
By way of my father’s nomadic incoherency.
He saying that she was part Cherokee
As if that would explain away her peculiarities;
Cooking her meals on a wood-burning stove.
Working the garden down on her hands and knees.

And now she was standing,
Wagging her finger and scolding me.
“Does that hurt?”
The question more tugging than words.
“Yes, yes!” my pained reply.
“That bird has feelings too,
And don’t ya nary forget it!”
“I won’t,” I said, all teary-eyed.

One of my uncles later told me,
“Never kill what you can’t eat.
And torturing animals,
That’s never a good thing.”
I’m sure I would have remembered.

I can still see that kid
Kickin’ the ground, sulking,
Trying his best to understand.
Never quite catching the family dynamics;
Which lessons involving pain were justifiable
And which were simply cruel?
Go ask my dad…

And where there was once a boy,
Now there were two.
Always, there was the angry one
And now there was the one to do
The things you wanted him to do.

And sometimes there was a lesson,
And sometimes there was none,
And after a while it didn’t matter either way.
But in the rush to punish,
It seems one thing was forgotten,
I too,
I too felt the pain!

And so by brutal hands, was led,
This message of the welts laid on;
What was seen by others as a reasonable attempt
To re-shape my
Questionable behavior
Seemed to me far worse…

Than the curse of the blackbird
Shot by a bee bee gun.




Michael S. True
12-31-13