Last night I dared myself to look down into the abyss. Don’t ask me why but I do it from time to time. My thoughts stomp around like a herd of elephants on tiptoe. Do not wake the sleeping giant, I think. This is very important. Slip past instead, hopefully go unnoticed, like dust under a rug or the trace of vapor on a chilled window pane, a cold rain forever on the opposite side, a perpetual state of mind as impenetrable as battleship grey or suet-streaked prison walls. Makes you want to dig into the dirt, it does. Shovel out a swimming pool or a septic tank just for fun.
Once I wanted very much to fly but I did not come aerodynamically equipped. I collected feathers for many years but the rats ate them before I could assemble my rocket ship. Was it too much to ask? Use your back or use your brain seemed good advice until I learned that the damage doing both was about the same. I still feel like someone other than myself is telling me what I can and cannot do. The giant isn’t always sleeping.
Some humans touch too hard. Put dents in innocent bystanders. Drive some to drink and drug. Drive others down to the doctor’s office. Either way, the pills and bills are pretty much the same. A backhoe would have made the job a whole lot easier.
When I was five or six years old I had a cajan uncle who teased me mercilessly. Once he made fun of me for sticking my leg into a hole I had dug in his back yard. He didn’t seem to mind the hole, instead laughing out loud at how hilarious it was that I had used a body part to mark my progress.
The hole was about three feet across and three feet deep and I was on my way to China by my best reckoning. My hands had started to blister and I had paused to assess the situation, sitting on the edge of the impromptu excavation site with one leg in and one leg out.
Meanwhile, my uncle had managed to attract everyone’s attention: my parents, my two brothers and sister, aunts and uncles, various cousins and possibly a neighbor or two. He kept going on and on about how I needed to know exactly how deep this hole was and that the only way I could be certain was by sticking my leg in to measure.
This was deemed an odd behavior apparently and they ribbed me about it for the remainder of that day, (my uncle continued to relate the story for years afterward, usually concurring with my occasional visits). Needless to say, I stopped digging, overwhelmed by the impact of their collective belittlement. Apparently I should have known to bring a yard stick for the occasion.
I’ve never said this to any of them, some now dead and gone, but it only occurred to me, as of this writing, that I must have started to dig that hole in an effort to get as far away from these people as I possibly could! What is it about a leap of faith that seems so utterly foolish? If they would have left me alone I might have made a pit at least deep enough to hide in, even if I couldn’t tunnel through to a different continent altogether.
Black is black. This darkness has found me out. It is in and of this world. I have seen it in the vine-twisted tangles of a jungle at twilight, stumbling through a dense thicket of woods on a dreary October afternoon, or lurking just beneath the surface of a bottomless sea, the distance always a mystery of fathomless shifting shadows. And how those lightless possibilities have pricked me like so many needles so many times. (I, forever hating the sting but knowing full well what comes next.)
Therein lies the absurdity; a solitary comfort born of isolation, the numbing of the senses, the freezing of all things motion and emotion. This nothingness found waiting in the tar pitch walls of a subterranean cavern, in the black eye of a new moon hurricane, in a spider-occupied crawlspace under a very, very old house, or hiding, in the sanctuary of a linen closet.
Sometimes I put a smell to it; oily rags, moth balls, lingering molds, rotting wood, dead things, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt, dirt!
Tell them not to bury me – Do not bury me when I die! I was swallowed by the earth the day I was born.
I agree with Odin. I can't improve on his words. Never in my wildest dreams would I be able to write like this. But then, I don't think like this, either. Perhaps it's because I've never partaken of mind altering or mind enlightening drugs, and therefore write only from my pedantic, realistic experience.
As for the smell of it, as a child I experienced all those smells up close and personal while playing games: of salt and blood, dirt, and flowers. Newly mown hay and green peas on the vine. The stink of the outhouse and fish slime on your hands. And the smell of dirty laundry and perfumed clothes in closet hiding places. And, a wisecracking joker of an uncle who tried every trick to get me to make a fool of myself in front of everybody.
When I die I don't care what they do with me because I won't know what they're doing anyway.
This is an amazing piece, forging word and visual together into a textual-image that arrests any and all of us who have at some time in our lives only wanted to find the other side, that place where you could be who you thought you were...at least 'til you found out who you really were. (Gotta love the Zen of it all, eh?) I was particularly impressed with the juxtaposition of images and lexiconic merging you managed to make so emotional as you played out perhaps only today's iteration of personal revelation. Kudos, my friend. Kudos.
I Made My Boy Out of Poetry is a powerful literary vision of rare scope, beauty and emotional intensity composed of stories and poems that flow in and out of each other like the most lucid and articulate of dreams. These are portraits and studies of
3 WAY MIRROR is about a lost identity as experienced by a twenty-eight-year old who thinks he's Charles Randall, until strange events suggest otherwise.
