Category Archives: shards

July 5, 2018 · 4:15 pm

the best teacher

The Best Teacher

Honesty is the best teacher. Is that how it goes? No, it’s honesty is the best policy. What is that? A dictum? It has a nice Latin ring to it. And the word became flesh. I am who am, a watered-down Christian bleed-off from the Bhagavad Gita.

Dictum, homily, truism, adage–say something wrong and you get a glimpse into how you’ve been trained in what’s right. Say it right and the man with a pencil mustache and a top hat flips you a kipper and the spectators applaud. You’re a trained seal in a wash tub.

So what is the best teacher? Life? Start off on the wrong foot and it all comes unraveled. They don’t mean life, they mean getting stuck in society’s trenches and surviving the mortar rounds. Shell shocked with a purple heart, they play taps, doff their hats and cut your pension–another casualty of life’s lesson. Ah…black bird singing in the dead of night, take these broken wings and learn to fly.

Behind every lesson lies a secret agenda. Every teacher is a pimp for someone else’s best interests. Each breath you draw from birth to death has a diminished return. Erase the boundary between you and the black bird. Take flight. Learn to fly…

Leave a Comment

Filed under shards

Tagged as , , ,

July 4, 2018 · 2:45 pm

the black hole of consequence

The Black Hole of Consequence

Diphtheria in a ditch. Distemper on a wooden spoon. Derangement on the drawing board. If you leave at the speed of light and return, sixth-generation mutants will greet you with outstretched arms.

If you only knew what I’m yearning for, if only I did. Go ahead, call my bluff. Lay your cards and that derringer you’ve got tucked in your sock on the table.

Stir-fried emotions. A jungle of lust and panic. A stray thought about incest. She’s not the Virgin Mary and he’s not Saint Paul, in spite of what he did with the horse.

Curb your displeasure. Your diphtheria and distemper. Say no thank you to seconds. Push back the spoon.

Bare your teeth and cozy down with the horror.

Leave a Comment

Filed under shards

Tagged as , , ,

· 2:40 pm

the far side of dimension

The Far Side of Dimension

 

Time is not a dimension. Time impacts dimension and a curve gives it dance. 38-22-38 and all hell breaks loose in the math department.

Clowns, acrobats and father confessors, the three dimensions of the human condition. Songs get written, wars waged and outrageous lies blurted into love’s honey pot. Out pop the babies, waving their tiny hands in warning.

I know, I’m drifting past time’s curvature, a bad habit I picked up in a bassinet before the tubas began blasting shock waves into sweet mother’s milk. But curb your impatience and keep the hounds leashed. I’m not the enemy, or so said Adolf Eichmann when the trap door of Israel flopped open and snapped his vertebrae.

“Wer muss das bezahlen?” were the last words that echoed thru the ghost chamber of his mind, and then the stork of time dropped him down eternity’s chimney.

“Look, here’s another one, where do they all come from?” said the dimensionless mother, rocking Eichmann in her arms.

Leave a Comment

Filed under shards

Tagged as , , ,

July 3, 2018 · 10:14 am

the backlash of imagination

THE BACKLASH OF IMAGINATION

Ace inhibitor. That’s a derringer in a riverboat gambler’s pocket, used to neutralize people with aces up their sleeves. Not to be confused with beta blockers that are used to neutralize alpha personalities. 

I know these things because of voices inside my head. Disembodied voices, if you can imagine that. Actually, given the aggressive state of today’s technology, it’s plausible enough you don’t have to imagine it. There’s no need to imagine anything anymore in the fading wake of Pac Man and Walkman, the strange same-sex marriage that displaced Adam and Eve and paved the magic garden in cyberspace. 

It’s a scary world to live in if you have voices in your head. About the only sentient beings left to exchange transmissions with are small children and dogs. This hasn’t occurred to the busy little beavers who are trying to make things go faster than light–they don’t have the technology to recognize imagination; this hasn’t occurred to them either. 

Even when the earth groans and wobbles out of orbit, trailing oceans in its wake like comets’ tails as gravity relinquishes its hold, even then they will not know. They’ll think they’ve made a faulty calculation and curse the wild-card gambler who puts a single shot into their brain and ends their nonsense.

Leave a Comment

Filed under shards

Tagged as , , ,

· 9:56 am

the birth of america

THE BIRTH OF AMERICA

Lewis and Clark hightailed it across the country and back handing out presidential medallions to savages and telling them they were now the children of the Great White Father in Washington. In exchange, blind to the future, to interstates, copper mines and chain restaurants, the savages gave them horses and meat.

After the expedition was over, Clark rolled with the punches and prospered, a man of the future. But Lewis was troubled. He saw blackness under the surface of everything. Melancholia, they called it back then, what smiley-face people today call maladjustment. Mal=bad. Badly adjusted. More credit to him, I say.

He died in a roadside inn on his way to Washington to explain to the Great White Father his erratic behavior that was generating bad PR. He lay down on a buffalo robe and shot himself simultaneously with two pistols, Mafia style–one to the head, one to the heart.

Work back from there for the true story of all that we stand for.

Leave a Comment

Filed under shards

Tagged as , , ,

· 9:16 am

the best of days

THE BEST OF DAYS*

These are the best of days. While other writers my age are writing their memoirs and fussing over their collected poems, I’m pulling to the curb between window jobs and with the engine still running whipping out Shards and then driving off again. I’ve taken all that my mentors have given me and transformed it into white heat and lighting for the children of a new day dawning.

True, my teeth are bad and my hair is thinning, but my wild teenage granddaughter brags me up to her friends, and this Friday I’m driving north to the Winthrop Blues Festival for a chance to blow my harp. And I ask you–what more could a man ask for?

The object of life past a certain point is to take back the power that they stole from you when you were young.

*Written in 2009…

Leave a Comment

Filed under shards

Tagged as , , ,