In the middle of a deep clinical depression many years ago, when I would go for nights on end without good sleep, I dreamed of a deep azure blue stream bending around a log cabin in green woods with tall snow capped peaks in the background. The water was so blue, and clear, the air so pure, and there was a delicious humming in my heart as I slept. I felt it. I felt the gold glowing in my body, like an intense opiate high. I knew I was asleep, and dreaming, but I was there, in that scene, and I was achingly happy. It occurred to me as I slept that I had died, or was attempting to, and here was heaven. It was the warmest feeling that I have ever experienced, and the dream has stayed with me for decades. Many years later I dreamed of Vietnam again, after years of nothing. I remarked, that next morning, to my wife as we sipped coffee on the deck watching the sun rise, that my nightmare had been a field of charred bodies, burning in the jet fuel fire of a Chinook helicopter crash that I had witnessed so long ago. She was silent for a full minute before she asked if we should invite the neighbors over for dinner that night. I said that would be fine. I don't remember what we did the rest of that day. Some months later we were watching TV with some friends, and a particularly graphic moment of Vietnam combat was aired. My buddy’s wife just shook her head, and asked no one in particular, “can you imagine”?
I like to read fiction that is prose of the finest art. And I like to fly fish in clear green rivers. I like to share both of these things with my closest friends. Little else interests me these days, other than the safety of my family. I find this prose occassionally, but seldom have the opportunity, or inclination anymore to share it. It is my friend. I have not fished since leaving Colorado and moving to Tennessee ten years ago. The water is not the same here, and it is not about the fish.
2007-09-30
2007-08-11
The Wall
The second time I went to the Vietnam Memorial was more meaningful than the first. That initial time in 1982 was a circus. Absolute carnival atmosphere that agitated, angered me. Balloons, snacks, crowded, an absolute lack of the sober subdued holy atmosphere that I expected, and that in my mind the shrine demanded. The place was still relatively new, and it was a summer Saturday with the sun shining which encouraged the throngs to turn out, which included, unfortunately, a couple hundred guys who thought that they needed to dress up like bikers in old fatigues which were plastered with ribbons and patches, boonie hats and the obligatory granny shades. And head bands. And drooping mustaches. All carrying on with one another, hugging, power hand shaking, crocodile tears, milling around on the path directly in front of the black depths of that wall, here I am check me out. Dude. Total bull shit. I have found that for every ten guys who tell you they were in 'Nam, as many as half are lying, and when it comes to who did what, most of them were airborne ranger CIB gunslinging bad asses who stalked the jungle with cold steel resolve and by God I've earned my booze but don't talk to me too much about it because once established that I am the real deal then we just don't go there. Man. Total bull shit.Second trip was also a Saturday, many years later, in the fall, nippy with some bluster in the wind, fading color in the hardwoods. Only a couple of dozen older people paused reflectively in front of the mirrored finish of names, some hesitantly rubbing the inscriptions off onto various finishes and fabrics, almost apologetically, standing silently looking down at their work to see if some magic would appear, some who looked at the name they had sought out with a sense of bewilderment, trying to comprehend, after 30 years or more. A few guys my age, jeans, sweatshirts, light jackets, graying, thinning hair, standing off a little with arms crossed, unmoving, looking for something that they were not having any luck finding, quiet, pensive, detached.I stood awhile, also detached, eyes glazing off into the distant depths of the marble, wandered off, found a to go coffee and drifted back onto the grass to resume watch for awhile longer. I didn't seek out the names this time. I knew where they were. And I left.
Bob Flournoy
September 2001Copyrighted/ All rights reserved
FLYING OVER VIETNAM
Where are the craters, scorches, gashes and rips that I remember?
Have the reminders of our presence been so thoroughly eradicated,
new growth fertilized by the blood of a million?
Half a world away,
there will be no such scarsin the soft shifting Arabian deserts,
not even for a time,
just the ghosts of another hazy cause.
Our reminders will be still further away,
here at home,
faded wooden crosses,
green weathered bronze,
andwind shallowed stone,
names whose faces will be forgottenwith time.
©Copyright 2005 by Bob Flournoy
Where are the craters, scorches, gashes and rips that I remember?
Have the reminders of our presence been so thoroughly eradicated,
new growth fertilized by the blood of a million?
Half a world away,
there will be no such scarsin the soft shifting Arabian deserts,
not even for a time,
just the ghosts of another hazy cause.
Our reminders will be still further away,
here at home,
faded wooden crosses,
green weathered bronze,
andwind shallowed stone,
names whose faces will be forgottenwith time.
©Copyright 2005 by Bob Flournoy
I Still Remember Tony
When my father returned from Korea in the summer of 1953, I was six years old. En route to El Paso, Texas for his next duty assignment, we visited with my grandparents on their south Alabama farm for a week. While there, my grandfather, dad, and I wandered one hot day into the cotton fields that surrounded the old farm house. This was always an adventure for me, ever on the lookout for some kind of game animal to make a dash out of the bushes in our path. Some atavistic instinct was already stirring in me that responded to that kind of setting which made me aware of nature and the possibilities that it held and I longed to be able to carry my own shotgun into those fields as soon as possible. I knew that I would be a deadly shot, bringing home a bountiful and endless supply of game for the family to feast upon. But, on this day there were no rabbits to chase or deer to kick their heels in our faces. There was only the loose sandy soil of that cotton field and the heavy humid heat beating down from a pale blue summer southern sky. In a subconscious, weary gesture, my granddad stooped over and picked up a handful of drought dried dirt and let it run in a fine powder slowly through his fingers back to the ground. With a wistful smile he glanced up and said in a conversational tone that I can hear like he spoke the words yesterday, "ah, Lord....give us a little rain; just a little shower will do the trick. Amen to that," responded my dad. I think I glanced up and thought "fat chance" as I peered into the cloudless horizon, thinking of the dark walls of water that would often advance across that open expanse around us, bringing a fresh coolness to the parched air of south Alabama in August.
Thirteen years later, I met Tony Mintino when we lined up side by side on our first day of basic training at Ft. Benning in the humid furnace heat of south Georgia July. I took a hesitant dislike to him because he arrogantly proclaimed that he was from New Jersey like that was something special. Unknown to either of us at the time, we were en route to one of those quick close friendships that only the military can foster, and that endures for a lifetime. It turned out that he had studied American Literature at Columbia University with an emphasis on Faulkner. He knew everything about William Faulkner, you see, even if he had never been in the deep south until this "visit", and he pontificated loftily with a degree of Yankee self confidence on our culture and its' influences on one of our most celebrated southern sons. I responded with a personal challenge to educate my new pal and enhance his understanding of this man Faulkner, motivated by some combative perversity that was to mellow over the next eight weeks and grow into a grudging admiration for his willingness to be educated by a good old boy from down here. His open mindedness and sincere interest in my southern perspective won me over and became the basis for our friendship and my own learning experience about his particular culture and life. Our worlds were smaller in 1967, and our hearts were not as integrated as they are now; Tony may as well have been in France from his perspective. He later wrote to me that he had started a manuscript from the notes that he made from the memory of our many conversations in the field and that they would be the basis for his graduate thesis after he left the army and returned to New York. I was proud of that, although I would never see what he wrote."Tony, if you have never sat on the porch of an Alabama farmhouse that borders a dirt road twenty miles from anything at midnight in August with the bugs thick in your dripping sweat and the frogs booming from the swamp while your great grandmother spoke in barely a whisper about the union troops that had burned her house and the chaos of reconstruction that tore the land apart worse than the Civil War itself did, then you cannot know Faulkner. You cannot know a thing about the causes of the anguish and passion in the soul that wrote about the brooding pains of his native land." And so I began to talk about my own un full filled loves, passions and haunted dreams and the elusive tone of a land whose memories were slowly being washed away by the winds of time and agenda history. We talked for the eight weeks that we were together, about our lives and families, and I believe that we both came away with an understanding of the similarities that our different backgrounds bore. I found myself eager to visit the "block" where he grew up, and meet the dark eyed sister who played a part in some of his childhood stories that he would smilingly tease me with.I had grown up all over the world in a military family as my father rotated between duty assignments. Personally, the rewards of this life had been many, to include a sense of geography, cultures and the history and language associated with each relocation. My family moved eight times before my sixteenth birthday. No matter how far away we were, however, we made a trek to my grandparent's Alabama farm on an annual basis to keep a sense of place and home burning brightly in our hearts and minds. The anticipation of those visits, fueled by the memories of past trips, caused an imprint of every moment of those reunions in my brain that remains with me these many decades later. No matter where I was living, I knew that I was a southerner with ancestors and roots so deep and tangled that I was part of something proud. I liked to think Tony responded to my passion and that it touched something in his Italian blood, and maybe because it had been missing in his own life. His unselfish ability to listen caused me to reflect many years later that I should have done more listening myself, about his story and people, and that I had no monopoly on such feelings.When we got our first week end off from basic, Tony and I hitch hiked 40 miles from Ft Benning to my grandparent's farm west of Columbus, Georgia, just into Alabama where I had begun my childhood adventure. We were 20 years old, in uniform, and very proud. Who could have known the rigors of our previous weeks and the sense of superiority and accomplishment that it had instilled in our young hearts? My grandparents greeted us with warmth and food, both of which had been absent in our previous six weeks. Here was an Italian Jew sitting in the farmhouse of old southern people born before 1900, gaining their respect and love with his quiet dignity and amazement at just being there. What must my grandmother have been thinking, having seen three sons off to World War II just 23 years before? I am sure that she saw them sitting before her, once again, us having no clue what awaited us, or what she must have endured while they were gone.
Tony and I spoke once on the phone after basic, and bumped into each other in the bar of the officer's club in Ft. Benning on another occassion, quite by accident. We had both returned from our branch basic courses for paratrooper training and were feeling pretty good about those new wings on our chests, back when jump school meant something. I eventually wound up in the central highlands of Vietnam as an artillery forward observer with an infantry unit in the First Cavalry Division, and I had one note from Tony telling me that he was a platoon leader, with the 101st Airborne far to the north near the DMZ, which was very bad country. I lost contact with Tony, but I made many other friends that only come to you in the army during wartime, and my life went forward after Vietnam and the military. I thought about Tony occasionally; I thought about a lot of people whom I had known during my three years of duty, but youth drove me on with 'Nam becoming a repressed memory. My grandparents would always ask about him when I saw them before I lost them, too. My granddad would smile and ask me whatever happened to that "Eyetalian Yank".
I was visiting Birmingham, Alabama several years ago, and I ran into an old ROTC college buddy on the street in broad daylight. Like I had seen him just last week on campus, I greeted him and we caught up with each other's lives. I learned that he had served in the 101st during Tony's tour and casually asked if he recognized the name. As those things so often happen, he had served in the same rifle company with Tony, also as a platoon leader, and that is where I learned Tony's fate; killed on a hot LZ in some remote valley north of Phu Bai. Numb, and empty, I bade farewell to my old college acquaintance and wandered abstractly around my father's home town, trying come to grips with what I had just been told. I never did, and still have not. I had dealt with the deaths of many friends, but that was long ago, and this fresh news confronted me once again with the need to try and make some sense of the whole thing. There were hundreds of Mintinos in the New Jersey phone directory, and I never found his family. I left Birmingham and drove down to visit my old school, Auburn, where I took a solitary drive out to my grandparent's old place. I have done that too many times in my adult life. I think I am trying to put something in its’ proper place, to assign an order to those days, so that the memories there can be put to bed. Looking back, I can see the book in it’s entirety, I just can’t focus on the chapters, much less the words. We all die, I think, wishing that we had left things a little more in order, and I think we are mostly tired when that time finally comes, having tried to sort out the poignant places and events in our pasts so that our hearts can rest. But, those defining moments from our youth call to us across the years no matter how old we become. The old farm had changed a lot since my last visit. The fields were green with grass instead of crops, and the house had been completely redone. The orchards were gone and so was the cotton. Dismayed and even surprised that nothing was as I remembered it to be, I pulled down the little dirt road that ran beside the property. I sat and stared out across the empty fields of my grandfather's farm and I tried to focus on all of the people in my life that I had known and loved. I thought about Tony and his animated face as he watched my grandfather make buttermilk biscuits on the old iron stove. I tried to remember all of the lost faces and voices that had played parts on this small piece of land that meant so much to me, and it started to rain. I got out of the car, strangely comforted by the distant soft, crumping rumble of thunder impacting in the distance. I walked into the field that I had been in so long ago, and I turned my face into that soft sweet sky. As the rain began to soak into my skin I opened my mouth to scream into the heavens, appealing to all those whom I had lost. But instead, I just closed my eyes and started praying, out loud, trying to drown out the rising wind and wet warm drops, thanking God, finally, after all these years, for the beautiful rain in this special place that my grandfather had asked for. What else could I do.
Bob Flournoy
213 Bobby DrFranklin, Tn
37069
rwflournoy@aol.com
615-545-8159
When my father returned from Korea in the summer of 1953, I was six years old. En route to El Paso, Texas for his next duty assignment, we visited with my grandparents on their south Alabama farm for a week. While there, my grandfather, dad, and I wandered one hot day into the cotton fields that surrounded the old farm house. This was always an adventure for me, ever on the lookout for some kind of game animal to make a dash out of the bushes in our path. Some atavistic instinct was already stirring in me that responded to that kind of setting which made me aware of nature and the possibilities that it held and I longed to be able to carry my own shotgun into those fields as soon as possible. I knew that I would be a deadly shot, bringing home a bountiful and endless supply of game for the family to feast upon. But, on this day there were no rabbits to chase or deer to kick their heels in our faces. There was only the loose sandy soil of that cotton field and the heavy humid heat beating down from a pale blue summer southern sky. In a subconscious, weary gesture, my granddad stooped over and picked up a handful of drought dried dirt and let it run in a fine powder slowly through his fingers back to the ground. With a wistful smile he glanced up and said in a conversational tone that I can hear like he spoke the words yesterday, "ah, Lord....give us a little rain; just a little shower will do the trick. Amen to that," responded my dad. I think I glanced up and thought "fat chance" as I peered into the cloudless horizon, thinking of the dark walls of water that would often advance across that open expanse around us, bringing a fresh coolness to the parched air of south Alabama in August.
Thirteen years later, I met Tony Mintino when we lined up side by side on our first day of basic training at Ft. Benning in the humid furnace heat of south Georgia July. I took a hesitant dislike to him because he arrogantly proclaimed that he was from New Jersey like that was something special. Unknown to either of us at the time, we were en route to one of those quick close friendships that only the military can foster, and that endures for a lifetime. It turned out that he had studied American Literature at Columbia University with an emphasis on Faulkner. He knew everything about William Faulkner, you see, even if he had never been in the deep south until this "visit", and he pontificated loftily with a degree of Yankee self confidence on our culture and its' influences on one of our most celebrated southern sons. I responded with a personal challenge to educate my new pal and enhance his understanding of this man Faulkner, motivated by some combative perversity that was to mellow over the next eight weeks and grow into a grudging admiration for his willingness to be educated by a good old boy from down here. His open mindedness and sincere interest in my southern perspective won me over and became the basis for our friendship and my own learning experience about his particular culture and life. Our worlds were smaller in 1967, and our hearts were not as integrated as they are now; Tony may as well have been in France from his perspective. He later wrote to me that he had started a manuscript from the notes that he made from the memory of our many conversations in the field and that they would be the basis for his graduate thesis after he left the army and returned to New York. I was proud of that, although I would never see what he wrote."Tony, if you have never sat on the porch of an Alabama farmhouse that borders a dirt road twenty miles from anything at midnight in August with the bugs thick in your dripping sweat and the frogs booming from the swamp while your great grandmother spoke in barely a whisper about the union troops that had burned her house and the chaos of reconstruction that tore the land apart worse than the Civil War itself did, then you cannot know Faulkner. You cannot know a thing about the causes of the anguish and passion in the soul that wrote about the brooding pains of his native land." And so I began to talk about my own un full filled loves, passions and haunted dreams and the elusive tone of a land whose memories were slowly being washed away by the winds of time and agenda history. We talked for the eight weeks that we were together, about our lives and families, and I believe that we both came away with an understanding of the similarities that our different backgrounds bore. I found myself eager to visit the "block" where he grew up, and meet the dark eyed sister who played a part in some of his childhood stories that he would smilingly tease me with.I had grown up all over the world in a military family as my father rotated between duty assignments. Personally, the rewards of this life had been many, to include a sense of geography, cultures and the history and language associated with each relocation. My family moved eight times before my sixteenth birthday. No matter how far away we were, however, we made a trek to my grandparent's Alabama farm on an annual basis to keep a sense of place and home burning brightly in our hearts and minds. The anticipation of those visits, fueled by the memories of past trips, caused an imprint of every moment of those reunions in my brain that remains with me these many decades later. No matter where I was living, I knew that I was a southerner with ancestors and roots so deep and tangled that I was part of something proud. I liked to think Tony responded to my passion and that it touched something in his Italian blood, and maybe because it had been missing in his own life. His unselfish ability to listen caused me to reflect many years later that I should have done more listening myself, about his story and people, and that I had no monopoly on such feelings.When we got our first week end off from basic, Tony and I hitch hiked 40 miles from Ft Benning to my grandparent's farm west of Columbus, Georgia, just into Alabama where I had begun my childhood adventure. We were 20 years old, in uniform, and very proud. Who could have known the rigors of our previous weeks and the sense of superiority and accomplishment that it had instilled in our young hearts? My grandparents greeted us with warmth and food, both of which had been absent in our previous six weeks. Here was an Italian Jew sitting in the farmhouse of old southern people born before 1900, gaining their respect and love with his quiet dignity and amazement at just being there. What must my grandmother have been thinking, having seen three sons off to World War II just 23 years before? I am sure that she saw them sitting before her, once again, us having no clue what awaited us, or what she must have endured while they were gone.
Tony and I spoke once on the phone after basic, and bumped into each other in the bar of the officer's club in Ft. Benning on another occassion, quite by accident. We had both returned from our branch basic courses for paratrooper training and were feeling pretty good about those new wings on our chests, back when jump school meant something. I eventually wound up in the central highlands of Vietnam as an artillery forward observer with an infantry unit in the First Cavalry Division, and I had one note from Tony telling me that he was a platoon leader, with the 101st Airborne far to the north near the DMZ, which was very bad country. I lost contact with Tony, but I made many other friends that only come to you in the army during wartime, and my life went forward after Vietnam and the military. I thought about Tony occasionally; I thought about a lot of people whom I had known during my three years of duty, but youth drove me on with 'Nam becoming a repressed memory. My grandparents would always ask about him when I saw them before I lost them, too. My granddad would smile and ask me whatever happened to that "Eyetalian Yank".
I was visiting Birmingham, Alabama several years ago, and I ran into an old ROTC college buddy on the street in broad daylight. Like I had seen him just last week on campus, I greeted him and we caught up with each other's lives. I learned that he had served in the 101st during Tony's tour and casually asked if he recognized the name. As those things so often happen, he had served in the same rifle company with Tony, also as a platoon leader, and that is where I learned Tony's fate; killed on a hot LZ in some remote valley north of Phu Bai. Numb, and empty, I bade farewell to my old college acquaintance and wandered abstractly around my father's home town, trying come to grips with what I had just been told. I never did, and still have not. I had dealt with the deaths of many friends, but that was long ago, and this fresh news confronted me once again with the need to try and make some sense of the whole thing. There were hundreds of Mintinos in the New Jersey phone directory, and I never found his family. I left Birmingham and drove down to visit my old school, Auburn, where I took a solitary drive out to my grandparent's old place. I have done that too many times in my adult life. I think I am trying to put something in its’ proper place, to assign an order to those days, so that the memories there can be put to bed. Looking back, I can see the book in it’s entirety, I just can’t focus on the chapters, much less the words. We all die, I think, wishing that we had left things a little more in order, and I think we are mostly tired when that time finally comes, having tried to sort out the poignant places and events in our pasts so that our hearts can rest. But, those defining moments from our youth call to us across the years no matter how old we become. The old farm had changed a lot since my last visit. The fields were green with grass instead of crops, and the house had been completely redone. The orchards were gone and so was the cotton. Dismayed and even surprised that nothing was as I remembered it to be, I pulled down the little dirt road that ran beside the property. I sat and stared out across the empty fields of my grandfather's farm and I tried to focus on all of the people in my life that I had known and loved. I thought about Tony and his animated face as he watched my grandfather make buttermilk biscuits on the old iron stove. I tried to remember all of the lost faces and voices that had played parts on this small piece of land that meant so much to me, and it started to rain. I got out of the car, strangely comforted by the distant soft, crumping rumble of thunder impacting in the distance. I walked into the field that I had been in so long ago, and I turned my face into that soft sweet sky. As the rain began to soak into my skin I opened my mouth to scream into the heavens, appealing to all those whom I had lost. But instead, I just closed my eyes and started praying, out loud, trying to drown out the rising wind and wet warm drops, thanking God, finally, after all these years, for the beautiful rain in this special place that my grandfather had asked for. What else could I do.
Bob Flournoy
213 Bobby DrFranklin, Tn
37069
rwflournoy@aol.com
615-545-8159
Obituary
I am dead at 19.
The souls of my unborn children strain at the boundries of the universe
screaming for release,demanding their days in the sun.
They are pursued by the progeny of dead generations lurking in the shadows, and
swallowedby the black hole of my early death,
never to witness the star fire and comet glitz
of their own passing.
Their light will never shine.
I am dead,
and so are they.
Did they see me?
Did anyone?
Bob Flournoy
June 1972
I am dead at 19.
The souls of my unborn children strain at the boundries of the universe
screaming for release,demanding their days in the sun.
They are pursued by the progeny of dead generations lurking in the shadows, and
swallowedby the black hole of my early death,
never to witness the star fire and comet glitz
of their own passing.
Their light will never shine.
I am dead,
and so are they.
Did they see me?
Did anyone?
Bob Flournoy
June 1972
Early Lessons
....hunters move through the field and forest with impunity; they are the only ones with guns. A good hunter will sometimes position himself in a comfortable spot, blending into the environment, and wait for game. He will be aware of the moving air and which direction it carries his scent so that that very wind is his ally. If there is no wind, then he will watch the forest, looking and listening for movement against the stillness. The wind becomes the quarry's friend when it can move with the swaying grass and leaves, and disguise its' sound of travel in the background noise of the moving air. When a hunter is also being hunted by his quarry, a nemesis with a gun instead of fangs, the wind becomes his worst enemy. Millions of years of evolution tell him that those hunting him are using the wind to stalk him silently, swirling their scent, moving with the dance of the trees, careful feet muffled by the noise of the wind. Early humans would take to their caves and trees when the breezes stiffened, nervous and fearful of their silent stalkers. Jungle fighters don't move at all when the wind is up; they hunker down, watch and wait. The highest rates of suicide are in windy places. We are most at rest in the early morning when our genetic fabric is telling us that our ancestor's fanged night stalkers have retired to their dens.
Bob Flournoy
....hunters move through the field and forest with impunity; they are the only ones with guns. A good hunter will sometimes position himself in a comfortable spot, blending into the environment, and wait for game. He will be aware of the moving air and which direction it carries his scent so that that very wind is his ally. If there is no wind, then he will watch the forest, looking and listening for movement against the stillness. The wind becomes the quarry's friend when it can move with the swaying grass and leaves, and disguise its' sound of travel in the background noise of the moving air. When a hunter is also being hunted by his quarry, a nemesis with a gun instead of fangs, the wind becomes his worst enemy. Millions of years of evolution tell him that those hunting him are using the wind to stalk him silently, swirling their scent, moving with the dance of the trees, careful feet muffled by the noise of the wind. Early humans would take to their caves and trees when the breezes stiffened, nervous and fearful of their silent stalkers. Jungle fighters don't move at all when the wind is up; they hunker down, watch and wait. The highest rates of suicide are in windy places. We are most at rest in the early morning when our genetic fabric is telling us that our ancestor's fanged night stalkers have retired to their dens.
Bob Flournoy
State of Mind
When the blackness arrives, it is just there. There is no dusk or twilight, just a sudden nauseating midnight. If you've been in this place before then it scares you when it first announces its' return because you know what it has in mind for you and you don't know if it is here to stay, or if it is just going to fuck around with you for a little while. I wonder if you have to come up out of the pain at its' first glint and just rage against it. Maybe that is an initial affective anticdote; if acts of defiance prevent it from establishing a beach head, or if concessions and appeasement make the looming battle more difficult. Maybe it will just go away by itself later in the day, like a short virus, regardless of how you confront it. An extended fight might just kill me the next time. I have no heart for it, now that I know the brutality of such terror. Hell, perhaps I'll just clean the garage in a frenzy, furiously lift weights like a young man, run farther faster than my age can withstand for very long, talk too loud, and drink way to much with a forced bravado and energy, a bonfire blazing with loud drums and a spear brandished against the night. I'll paint my face and turn to the forest, my back to the flames, plain to see, screaming for a head on confrontation to kill the beast. Come on you son of a bitch, I'm right here where you can see me and I am ready for you. But the buzzard just sits there out there silently, lurking, waiting; the stink of his breath teasing the tepid air, knowing that you must come looking.
When the blackness arrives, it is just there. There is no dusk or twilight, just a sudden nauseating midnight. If you've been in this place before then it scares you when it first announces its' return because you know what it has in mind for you and you don't know if it is here to stay, or if it is just going to fuck around with you for a little while. I wonder if you have to come up out of the pain at its' first glint and just rage against it. Maybe that is an initial affective anticdote; if acts of defiance prevent it from establishing a beach head, or if concessions and appeasement make the looming battle more difficult. Maybe it will just go away by itself later in the day, like a short virus, regardless of how you confront it. An extended fight might just kill me the next time. I have no heart for it, now that I know the brutality of such terror. Hell, perhaps I'll just clean the garage in a frenzy, furiously lift weights like a young man, run farther faster than my age can withstand for very long, talk too loud, and drink way to much with a forced bravado and energy, a bonfire blazing with loud drums and a spear brandished against the night. I'll paint my face and turn to the forest, my back to the flames, plain to see, screaming for a head on confrontation to kill the beast. Come on you son of a bitch, I'm right here where you can see me and I am ready for you. But the buzzard just sits there out there silently, lurking, waiting; the stink of his breath teasing the tepid air, knowing that you must come looking.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
