How much have you done?

Oh Progress? Yes, yes, I am making this. And Eminent Domain. That is right, more to come. Demand and still short supply, short straw, pick this-not your friends' nose.

Please--Puff out your chest feathers when you say Anthropocene, strut and utter, hashtag lives matter, protest and remember? Revolutions. Terror-ism. The latest pill? So many choices of cereal and drugs, how can we know what will help? What will kill it-or cure it? Sugar. Will we know things have changed? Is this thing on? Does it feel good? 

How could a woman not know they are carrying a baby? It comes as no surprise.

How could a parent walk away from their own child? They believe in their own lies.

How can anyone prefer to live in a cloud than clarity? Blurry is better. How is it better to dwell on depression and deceit? Easy Street leads to a dead end. 

How can chemicals be chosen over people? Machines over mankind? Disillusionment preferred; imagination deterred. 

Didn't they know they would forget what is real? What is real? 

How can we ignore screams from the neighbors house?

How did they not see it coming? Did they close their eyes? Mind their own business to become bankrupt again? What's new? Not regret. 

How did they not care to know? How did they feel going forward without realizing they were going back? This looks familiar....

How did they live? 

They didn't. 

Painting by Lilly Martin Spencer [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Five double you's and one H

"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."-Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

            The News Paper reads-Bob Dylan

               I think this-- 
is the wrong Dylan? The man with the words for all ages. The man with words--on pages-not on stages...rouse myself from enuch dreams must crust my eyes...

              
But what do I know, that is not my company. I own no stock in precious medals.

The shareholders have spoken. The country will now be run like a company.

By majority, the minorities must follow en mass, encompassing silence, facilitating their own resilience-

(not by inheritance) and we worry about privacy and freedom while working with none of these:

the Internet is tapped, your phone is traced in space, we may not speak in vain of things like kings, disgraced queens, leaders astray.

Corporations are icons and we are the employees, yet we shall (still) call it 'Democracy'.

By vote?

We are living in a serious time. Tyranny taunts expression and art is the only release.

Self-destruction is a constant temptation that knows our middle name and the past we 

say we have passed is always a guarantee however we remember it, it never sits as it       were

without participation, we must throw in our added effort to eliminate what we did not know then,

illuminate what we always knew, easily we annihilate our amnesia of details-the heat namely,

how close we've come to the flames, cold-blooded we are compelled to mark the moment-

significant-look at me! Crazy. Collected and coerced, alone attracted toward that which 

hungers for our hours, fueled by all that we made in fusion-resistance is futile, that is why

they smile and look the other way, there is nothing to do but start seeing fire differently,

where would we be without it?

"This is the world; the lying likeness of 

Our strips of stuff that tatter as we move

Loving and being loth;

The dream that kicks the buried from their sack

And lets their trash be honoured as the quick.

This is the world. Have faith." (IV)

Why? A brown butterfly flew into the toaster oven his morning and it was delicious

being the most important meal of the day. I am no longer hungry. 

Painting by James Guthrie [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Scenic drive

It was one of those times that shock would be a gift-a present. A time that slowed to enunciate its meaning. A moment that is more than a moment, yet thankfully, is still contained in a wincing short period of time, shorter than it takes to tell a tale, shorter than a breath taken away, one of many-only a moment in time, by definition of duration, three seconds.

Inside the adrenaline 'present', you are made inherently aware of the nowness and the predictable future simultaneously, but like running in a dream, you are unable to escape the moment you are in. We are all stuck together here, running for our lives and gaining no distance.

You must have seen the heavenly shafts of light beaming through trees, the golden glow, the dancing white light. You have witnessed the mist beading and rising from wet wood as the morning dew becomes exposed to the steamy sun and transcends into steam, thick and nearly choking you have sometime seen dust in a dance swirling in its dirty misery...I have sensed the spirit stirred from nothing but new air, like you.

As individual bodies, we were still falling together around the man whose body lay twisted and flat, lifeless in the road. See, stained glass, all in fragments, shuffled photos, squares with light and dark edges, no faces, just the red wooded, cold-blooded earth now stained with oil, an oozing puddle of inky blood on asphalt, a pile of metal pieces sneezed, plastic melted, knobs twisted, and frozen bodies, gravestones stood around the body alive and marking the spot.

Memorable moments make themselves known when they arrive. They announce themselves by silencing all else, by walking heavy and slow across our timeline, across our chest. Death is so natural, as natural as being born. We are biodegradable, most of us. We should not be baffled or afraid, there will be nothing we can do to reverse the course, to turn the clock back, to wait a moment.

This is where we are, on a two-lane narrow and snaky mountain road. Natural springs occasionally burst out of the cloddish mountain side whereby a fallen tree protrudes as if a giant archer missed his aim. Our latitude set is at thirty-six degrees, and we are approximately thirty minutes driving distance from any type of township, storefront or place with streetlamps. There are houses tucked away deep in those hills, do not think it is desolate. No Trespassing signs mean ominous things, you should not get lost in these woods; hermits and hemp farms, loaded shotguns held by shaky hands and blood hungry wolf-hybrid guard dogs nestled under trees filled with booby traps set by Vietnam Veterans and a variety of other power and fear mongrels, assorted such boogie men, convicts and ex-killers, anyone with something to hide hid there. A feral forest in the Wild West. We are facing those demons on this day. They watched us watching over this body.

It is not for us to ask why we may be meant to be in a place at a certain time, to see a stranger die before our eyes-a fellow man or woman leave their lifeless body where they last found it. It happens to all of us, we lose ourselves. As witnesses, we all looked the same. In death as empty vessels, hollow bodies, burnt out trees, shells of what they used to be, suddenly we find a stranger before us.

For 5 minutes or 100 moments, sound waves were swallowed by light waves. No cars-or bike(s) came on the road for a time. After a couple of awkward human coughs meant to clear all air, someone said something about medical school and having no service and we knew that all of us together were alone. The body had been hit or lost control while riding his motorcycle.

The Ducati motorcycle lay wedged deep in the slope of the soft crumbling cliff, its front wheel was buried near an exposed tree root, the back wheel was still spinning and the mans shoes were on. His helmet lay head side up like a bowl in a ditch, the face plate shattered. His appendages were contorted and badly broken. Two approached him while I stood frozen looking upward in between the trees to see if I could catch his spirit.

A loud whine came up in the distance, louder, closer, and then 3 motorcycles appeared around the bend in the road. All at once, laying their bikes in the road and shouting, screaming, they shouted like banging drums, throwing blame, as if an incantation of life by volume or praying for rain or dropping salt, as if any of that would help him now. There was no ceremony for time to turn around and come back, like they decided to. The ride was over. We went on our way.

No. Nothing could be done about what has been done. We were simply meant to see. We were meant to be stopped, dead in our tracks, to notice the silence, to hear these stories, to pause and take a moment to go.

Image credit By NPS Photo [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.