There was evil, and there was memory and who knows when you first meet either of the two. He knew he saw her standing in the woods in the dark when he was little. Her black dress…long hands…
That was when he saw the lights in the sky.
He saw her again when he was house sitting for his grandfather after his grandmother died. He could hear her long dress moving through the hall at night. Always just catching a glimpse of her entering the rooms.
The night his father died, he saw her through the window, sitting in the rocker. He knew then he had passed.
Maybe it was when he drove the long drive to his father in law to tell him he couldn’t love his daughter anymore…
He saw her then…
He kept hearing the words
Sick in the stomach
Weights around his neck
“You’re not the victim here, if you do this, it will end in destruction, you’re on a dangerous road.”
“He’s just lost. He’s lost.”
He sees her now, every night. In his door. Just like he did before…
She just stands there and then floats away. Sucking all of the light and air out of the room.
Who knows when you meet evil…
There was also a different figure
Blonde red hair
Blue eyes like stars
And fire wings
She was there when he had a seizure in a ditch
She was there, reading, when he was in the hospital, she was there always…
But lately she just smoked and made fun of his poetry…
That I’ve not had a flare so bad I was forced to stay home or go to the hospital
Or pass blood
Or any other number of things that are far too gross to go in to detail about…
I don’t have insurance right now
I can’t take medicine right now because of that…
So I’m thankful
That I’m able to keep working
Towards my goals ….
For all the good.
I’m thankful
For the mornings
I’m thankful for the beauty
I’m thankful
And if I’ve been harsh
Or volatile
Or fixed in my vision
I often feel the need to apologise
But
I think I will always be hungry
I will always be chasing
I’m not the same as
Other people I’ve known
I’m restless
And I’m at a pivotal moment in my life
Other people want to buy cars
And homes
I just want food
And to invest in something that will grow
Not buy a car….
My hope is that my future self
Will be thankful too
That my future self will be proud.
I went to Cleveland to make contacts
In six months I could be anywhere.
Making more money than I’ve ever seen.
But this morning I counted out four dollars in change to get gas.
I think it’s important to remember where you came from.
I remember working with my dad when I was six. We would get up early in the morning and go sell produce. You could smell the corn and the tomatoes and the watermelons. We cut grass and we sold tools. We did whatever we could.
I remember going to food banks and the cans had government labels on them. They were not attractive or marketable. They were blank. Bland colours.
We pretended we were soldiers and it was our rations.
I keep remembering all of these things from the past…
The bible says somethin’ about the Holy Spirit leaving the earth near the last days…how hard it is for man after that.
That’s what I thought of when I saw her…
Her face was black and not even blue, just broken and taped back together…
She couldn’t even wince from the pain of walking, she was stiff like our grandfather…and stood like a crow bar.
She was 25.
When we left the hospital, we went to get her things. From the garbage excuse of a trailer, he was supposed to be at work…
But I guess that’s how these things and men and the way of young love goes…
They’re accountable for nothing…not even an 11 dollar an hour job.
I remember her clothes had black patches of sweat and mold in them.
They smelled of cigarettes
The kitchen table was dirty from the residue.
The place smelled of that smell you only get from a broken refrigerator…
I opened it just to make sure ,
There in the center of all that rotten was last nights box of take out…
“Ugh What the hell…”
I had to find the bathroom and quick
There were holes in the wall all the way down the hall…I turned in to wash my face….
The shower was black and molded
The water was off…
I kicked the lid to the toilet open
Before I started vomiting
It hit me in the face like a train
No water
Packed full of shit
——
Why the hell did she stay here?
He kicked her around and around
——-
He came stumbling in angrier than a starved dog…
Knife in his hands
Gun in his belt
I grabbed the knife by the blade and kicked him across the room
He took off in his car, but didn’t make it far…
He wrestled for a while with the locals and kicked a few down
He drew his gun
And started cursing about my sister and how he owned her
There was a fence he had crashed into
A tamping pole or rod leaning against it
I picked it up and ran it through his foot
“Shut up for once in your life.”
He cried all the way to jail.
I kept thinking about that verse
All of her hurts
Why men do what we do
And what kind of man
Can live with that?
Maybe it’s a different kind of evil…
My father killed men in the war
And his father too
I thought about that as I set another charge on a tree.
——
He was spitting and cursin’ as we brought him down in the thicket.
“You can’n’t kill me! They’re gunna fine out ‘bout it! Yew stupid idgit! She’s MINE I will have what’s MINE!
Married before GOD and everybody ! “
“Oh I’m not going to kill you…God might…but I won’t …the wolves might…but me? I’m just going to hurt you…if you die…it’s up to a higher power than me…now the sheriff, he’s gonna think you ran again, You know, like you did my sister…when you made her run and you played your little hunting games?….you better run…”
I raised my gun…and the headlights…
He made it a few paces I guess…
The last I heard were some obscenities
Then I charged the blasts
the trees exploded around him
I thought about her and the Holy Ghost and the war and the 4th of July…
I keep moving my couch closer and pretending it doesn’t matter ….
Pictures give us words
——///
We are textured
Quilted
Struggled
Immigrants
—-///
Downsizing
Can you downsize the American dream?
We can find answers in 5g speed
We are born with a cellular plan
But we don’t know our neighbour
A pastors struggle on Monday morning
—-///
Are we red and blue state ?
Disconnected
People vote, or don’t vote, for various reasons.
One Party is the single issue party. Or the anti vax, anti mask, lower tax…don’t take my guns?
No, one party is the American dream, Reagan party, read, communicate, write, dream, love your country, write your wife love letters from across the room. You’re groomed from a young age to vote red.
The business owner. Trying to dream.
The other is college kids, millennials, like it or not, woke, sensitive to every issue, minority, apologising, how will the kids make it during this economy?
Most of us are somewhere in the middle not on the fringes…who’ve lived through a handful of economic collapses…
Most of us have lost someone to this virus…
I was talking with a nurse and she was telling me of the horror of a patient dying…of the horror that people still think this is a hoax, the fact that these patients are protected by privacy laws and this creates a gap…and we will never know…but they know…and for them…this is a nightmare…
Now, what do people vote on?
Somewhere in the middle.
We have more in common than we think.
The whole silence is violence
be woke to every single new thing ….
that’s a big tab…
the answer to winning votes and states
is not be the most liberal…
it’s connecting to the country.
We are all Americans.
Unplug from social media,
You can block and unfollow each-other all day long but these are real people with real lives and real votes and they are not going anywhere, they’re our neighbours our mothers our siblings.
what do we all have in common.
Return to the vision. Return to common sense, adulthood …
you can build a platform and a table with room for everyone.
We can’t go back…we go forward…beyond the light…or we fade into oblivion…
