Shards II

John Bennett

BELIEVE YOUR DREAMS

Trial by tribulation. A blinking existence. A white-noise hum. The chatter of machinery. Sleek yellow race cars, the buzz of it all.
Always on the brink of destruction, I inch forward like the good scout I am, the waxed message tucked away in my buckskin. One day soon I'll ride up to the castle and call down the draw bridge.
I'm in deep. What cold fire do I play with, swallow, spit back out? If I can believe my dreams, I'm on a perilous journey.

* * *

Clear vision requires silence and emptiness. The lone wolf is king of the tundra. Everything they ever taught you is wrong. The henchman has just arrived for your hanging. Soul death in the eyes of the children.
Chain me up like Houdini, watch my hair grow. Now stand back and watch this.

* * *

I stand in saffron light with closed eyes. Then the phone rings and I rush off to answer.
Outside my window hornets cling to the eaves. Tiny birds zing about with beaked worms. Nasturtiums erupt from dark soil. Mountains loom in the distance and trees bend in the wind. Mindless dogs yap at anything.
Black hawks in the sky. Clock ticks and illusion. Realization like a tidal wave, rippling over the ocean.

CONTACT IS HOW WE KNOW WE'RE ALIVE

Multiple lacerations and pin pricks of excitement. Decrees from on high. From demigods and do-gooders and dilettantes pussed up with assertions. From chaplains just in from the front line of combat, from top dogs in the Rotary Club. From the Ladies' Home Journal and the ticker-tape moguls and their Wall Street soothsayers and hitmen. Shape up or ship out reminders from some swank-joint maitre d'. A plea bargain from Boys Town, an ultimatum from the Bishop of Rome -- heavenly off-shore investments, the Mass of the Dead.
We're locked in on collision, contact is how we know we're alive. Rugby and football and world war, interstate carnage, beaten wives. Drunk driving and drive-bys, elementary-school shotguns. Industry gone berserk in the Congo, the Amazon, up high in the Rockies -- shop, shop, shop.
Peace is for pansies. Give us drill teams and frat houses. Sumo wrestlers and Mike Tyson. Bite the ears off of Jesus, cop a plea. Talk shows where we give vent to our grievance.
The face in the mirror turns its back. We shatter into a lifetime of bad luck.

CRYING OUT IN DARKNESS

I want someone to call up. I want to meet the enemy of sunshine on a back street in Morocco. I want to feel my grip locked in his. I want to rise up like a phoenix.
I want to re-visit the past, whisper advice in my ear -- "You're barking up the wrong tree! Cut your loses and move on before the meter runs out!"
But myself wouldn't listen. He thinks he's destiny's child.
I want to dial in past the phone block with a code I've kept hidden. "We interrupt this call to bring you an urgent message! Listen up now while you tell you what's what."

* * *

If you spin nothingness into nothingness with blind-bull concentration, something starts to appear -- a glimmer of light. Rising up thru the cloud bank, you look down and see you've got hold of your bootstraps. "See there!" you exclaim, but you turn away without so much as a smile.
"Father!" you cry out, and wake up drenched in sweat.

DERANGED, DYSLEXIC, DELUDED . . .

The mark of the Beast. Fork prongs in the eye. Wooden manacles on your ankles. Rusty chains around your waist, a noose around your neck. That warm moist kiss on the pulse pool of your throat that triggers rage.
The forced hand. The outspoken secret. The regrouping in the fiber of your elegant derangement, the confusion in your dyslexic mind, death's sleight-of-hand.
How many billion years can this go on? Once consciousness sows its seed, the howling nightmare never stops. It is the never-endingness that drives the cognizant insane, not the delusion that it will some day come to a halt.

DISCOVERING THE CHILD WITHIN

Forty years of hard work and they put him on the day shift. Shed the load.
Dump it. Burn the bridges. Cut the rope and fall. SOS. SOS. SOS. We have ourselves a problem here. Repeat: May Day! May Day! Come in, do you read me?
Having grabbed hold of the high-voltage wire, he commenced to jerk and spasm. He foamed at the mouth and his shoes smoked. His friends wanted to look away, but they were transfixed -- more than anything, they wished he'd explode.

* * *

800 miles away, at the apex of a grid, the city lights dimmed muddy brown. Then there was a power surge, and people picked up right where they'd left off.
Your guess is as good as mine what happened next.

FLAT-LINE REPTILIAN BRAINS

There are some things to consider. Some hardcore realities. Some devious undercurrents. Some snare drums and booby traps, some size-ten shoes booting you out the back door to where you came from in the first place.
No matter how hard you try they catch on to you. It's their one God-given talent. They've got a collective nose like a blood hound. They've got fangs like the tusks of a mastodon. Beady close-set eyes hugging a pug splash of nose. Thick pinkish lips and gray skin. Way more muscle than they've got any use for. Flat-line reptilian brains.
Who are they what are they why are they, the they/them/those guys, the paranoia/fear/hypochondria, the der/die/das of the Fatherland, the linguistic cold-blooded killers of the white lotus? That's who, that's why, that's what they are.

* * *

Street-cleaning machines scour the asphalt in close to the curb.
Decibels like the heart beat of a dragon pound in baritone waves from behind tinted windows.
Weed eaters, gas-fed mowers and jackhammers tune up the day.
America's music, shellacked with the hum of computers, white-noise TV.

* * *

You try eking a living with your squeeze box and chained monkey down on the corner in the canyons of tall buildings. Jet planes hiss into the air and land in brake-screeching fury. Armies march off to war in places that are suspiciously silent. Apache helicopters beat the air into a batter of angels, and from behind stone walls, tiny white flags start to wave. Historians dip their quills into blood.
During World War II the Japanese sent balloon bombs in gondolas on the jet stream that exploded as far east as Des Moines. Americans had rubber tanks that they used as decoys on D-Day. These are significant little-known facts. IBM made a computer as big as a house with which Hitler alphabetized his Gypsies and Jews.
Every bit of this ties together.
All options are violent.

GIVING THE PRESS WHAT THEY CAME FOR

There are things coming up roses in the high cliffs of my dreams. There are forget-me-nots strewn in my wake. There are thistles pressed deep into my skull.
I've been a florist since the day I was born. I was nursed by a Venus Fly Trap. Tulips in my dammed-up emotions. Rhododendrons in the stink of my bowels. Nasturtiums on my pillow. Cacti in my clapping mad hands. Still I stroll down Primrose Lane, cool as a cucumber.
I switched to carrots and peas and then put myself out to pasture. I began frequenting farmer's markets. I made a bundle on watermelons and then retired to Spain where they call me the Flower Man and stand me drinks when I show up in the village. Which isn't that often. I tend to stick to myself in a hut out in the desert where sand blows thru my sleep.
Last week a man from a magazine came riding up on a camel. He'd seen too many movies. Forty meters back, a respectable distance to their way of thinking, the entire media industry hovered in Apache attack helicopters. The racket was enough to wake up the dead.
I stepped out into the blazing sun draped in garlands. I just didn't care anymore. I spread my arms wide and pissed straight up a rope. A great cheer went up as they rushed in to take pictures. Before I could say Jack Robinson, the make-up man slapped me down in a chair and no less than 40 microphones were shoved in my face. It was starting.
This could be the break I've been waiting for.