1.
He was overcome by absurdity.
Laid low by lies.
Lacerated by false promise.
Everything was what it seemed to be but nothing was what it was.
Where to go with no elbow room?
2.
He didn’t go where he said he’d gone.
He didn’t go where they told him to.
He shut down his thought machine and the answers came.
He was a skip beyond transcendent, a hop beyond the puzzle.
He stabbed his first-born expectation with an icepick and disappeared into silence, leaving bedlam in his wake.
Filed under shards
They give you six months to live. How much more time is at their disposal? How did they come by it? Are they in cahoots with the War Machine? With the makers of junk food? Do they encourage high-speed collisions?
How many doctors can dance on the hood of a Cadillac? Is there room left for angels? Have they strapped God to a gurney?
Calling Dr. Kildare, Dr. Casey, Dr. Troy.
We’re at the mercy of inadequate forces.
Filed under shards
He radiated cosmic sanctity like a swarm of fireflies on a hot summer night. He rode a donkey over palm fronds down a six-lane freeway. He carried a framing hammer and a tool box full of nails wherever he went. He slept on straw. He danced like a dervish whenever he happened upon music and laughed like a lion when the night-trade ladies brushed his long hair. He had a penchant for carrying small children on his shoulders which would work against him in the long run. He favored the barter system and grew angry when someone tried to reward his labor with pieces of paper. He could snap people out of a coma with a slap of his hand.
But it wasn’t until he began advocating equal distribution of fishes and loaves and found a way to turn water into wine that they came for him. They nailed him to an oak tree festooned with yellow ribbons after turning one of his inside advisers with stock options. Then they did a turn around and proclaimed him the son of God and subjugated everyone they could get their hands on.
“He should have let sleeping dogs lie,” said his number one apostle, and rode off on horseback to negotiate terms.
Filed under shards
What if Newton had been born elsewhere, what if it had been a fig that fell from the tree instead of an apple, would the laws of gravity have turned out different and would I have had a different childhood?
I ate Fig Newtons by the box when I was a kid. I thrived on them. Fig Newtons, Campbell’s soup and Wonder Bread. My mother in those early years was shy on culinary imagination, and my father led a secret life of longing for fondue, eggs Benedict, soufflé and crepes.
One night when I was fifteen my father took me out on the track after a supper of Wonder Bread and Campbell’s soup because I had this notion I was a child of the wind. I was dreaming of a four-minute mile, and my father’s mission was to time me with a stopwatch and put an end to such nonsense. Thin as a marsh reed and undernourished, I ran a 4:45 in sneakers and blue jeans, fifteen seconds faster than my father’s best mile in high school. We drove home without speaking.
For steak and potatoes I substituted Fig Newtons. For love I substituted solitude. For learning I substituted vigilance.
The thing that I’ve sculpted over the years not even death can take from me.
Filed under shards
And then the phones went dead and the lights dimmed to brown and the overhead sprinklers came on and soaked everything. Computers crashed. Of course there was no radio and no TV and cell phones gave off blue sparks. Gasoline turned to sand, weapons of every description vaporized, and various presidents, kings and despots stood on their balconies and cried out assurances.
People drifted into the dark streets. By daybreak it was all about food and water, and by week’s end the strong ruled the lion’s share of everything.
It would be years before God worked his way back into the picture.
Filed under shards
The break pushed the skin of his leg up into a circus tent. Inside the tent dwarf clowns scampered up the high ladder to the trapeze platform and formed a human pyramid. The ring master stood below in his patten-leather boots, silk top hat and Sergeant Pepper jacket with the shiny brass buttons, his hands on his narrow hips, yelling obscenities at them.
“Come down off there, you little fuckers!” he yelled. “Quit clowning around!”
That tickled their funny bone. The top dwarf on the pyramid laughed so hard he toppled head-first into the sawdust below, and the rest of the pyramid came undone. The bottom four dwarfs managed to remain on their hands and knees, but the top two followed the first into the sawdust, and the next three jumped onto the wire, tentative at first, but then gaining confidence until they were playing leap-frog with a grace that was new to them.
The four dwarfs left on the platform sat cross-legged, their faces serious behind their greasepaint grins, and the three dwarfs who had fallen looked up in awe.
The whole circus looked up, the lion tamer and the trick horseback rider, the juggler and the contortionist and the fire eater, even the trapeze artists, the Russian and the lovely young Gypsy girl.
They pumped enough Fentanyl into the I-V to knock out a circus elephant, and his eyes rolled back in his head.
The Pakistani surgeon snapped the two pieces of bone in his leg together again, and the tent collapsed.
Filed under shards
