Prose and Poems

I call myself arrogant but I know it’s not true. It’s hard for me to even hold a grudge for an extended period. After a while, I see both views and understand and empathize with my aggressor or assailant or betrayer or victim. The problem is, with humans, you can never really know the experience of the other. Understanding may not help. It usually doesn’t. Know yourself, know what you want, act on this, stay focused. It’s all the makings of a good consumer, it is capital culture, knowing what you want and seeking out the means to that consumption. Time is the most costly and time is what often is needed most. To slip past danger with restraint and reason. With less.

Yellowstone burnt over in ‘88. The fires razed nearly three quarters of the forest and grasslands in that already hostile environment. I arrived after that for the first time. Before I had traveled there I hadn’t really considered it a destination. A break from the cyclical dronery of suburban squalor was more on my mind than a dormant volcano. I got both. Yellowstone is a bit in spirit like eastern Canada; there’re some wild things by way of tourism but the really outstanding places require exiting the vehicle and traversing land on foot. Rivulet’s and waterways and old stone and deep pools. Yellowstone can easily find your limits and test them. For example, a trek across the pitchstone plateau requires strategic water rationing. A few wrong decisions and you could perish in a few hours or a few days, in either case, a relatively short period of time. Moments then become acute and preparations essential. There’s no glamour in it, the challenge is against your own body and its corporeal limits and by extension really, death. Because death can come in an instant or over a day or a few days in a world where your safety is not a valued concern. You are out there, alone, or maybe with a friend and pass from the world as it is comfortable and connected and fast and instead into to the vulnerability of it. So I got used to vulnerability except that political death is far more violent a death and far more slow, and lessons of the land are useless to the dumb ass brawlers of NY State. These are no metro sexual pansies on the streets, they’re beasts hunting other beasts in vast droves of unemployment. The kind that on occasion will overrun police on foot patrol in order to score a Glock. I think of this and then the quiet life of obedience or the boredom of safety or the wretched possibility of failure. So everyday a story. Most days a failure. Rip a new asshole for the Romantics. Run away, make it yours and tie it up, bound to earth like a rotten bone. Your rotten bone.

The vast majority of stories go untold. There are more I’d like to tell here and now, more of the real thing, as it happens but as it is there are good reasons for silence. And some have counseled the best of reasons. They have stories too. Still, soon, relatively soon they’ll come out from the crust like hordes of marching insects.