comment in re: Gibran's "My Countrymen"

It's difficult to express my moral and spiritual disdain for the entire American political system, from the sunsabitches in power to the civilian stooges that allow themselves to be bought and sold like beef. My gripes with the whole affair lie in a way not being addressed by any media outlet, liberal or otherwise. When trying to express my thoughts and fears, I usually end up sputtering and trying my damnedest not to sound like either a closeted believer in any sort of partisan rhetoric or just an apolitical apathist (though this latter may be closer to the truth).

Point is, politics are neither sexy nor poetic. Not to me, anyhow. Perhaps I'm just ignorant, or maybe just an idealist, but the fears and doubts I have for my country are not going to be abated by political change so readily, as it's hard to put faith into absolutely anything having to do with the bullshit they're strobing across your eyeballs. None of it feels right. In choosing not to vote, though, I fear that I am revoking my right to bitch about it, or at least to critically comment on any part of its nature. So at the very least, I wish I could at least just emote some of this feeling I have deep in my heart and my guts, this sick feeling about politics and elections and people and America moving forward into the 21st century. Emote, with no labels applied, purely from the context of a human being, born confused and concerned into a nightmare that just keeps plodding on and on, a sleepwalking nightmare that seems so easy to wake up from, yet everyone just stumbles forward. I think the real rotten spots are in our hearts or souls or consciences or whatever vague term you use for the moral abstract.

I don't know what I'm trying to say. I guess I'm just trying to give you some context for this poem. My political views are kept to myself, but everything hurts me and concerns me as much as it does everyone else in this great country. Everyone's worked about Tea Parties and mosques and elections and a dude stomping on a woman's head in Kentucky, and I guess I am too. Cuz even if I have no faith in the Thing, a lot of people do, and I'm afraid that Thing is gonna let a lot of those people down.

SF

I hate flying, and I hate airports, but it seemed such a superficial shame to waste those little blue pellets wrapped in aluminum foil on such a silly post-modern neurosis, so I opted instead to deprive myself of much-needed sleep, choosing instead to coast through the takeoffs and turbulence and landings and transfers with a narrative narcotic delirium that caused my mind to float with the same holy fluidity that I saw in the clouds out the window. It made sense, at least back then, to play on the laptop and smoke cigarettes on the porch until the sun came drowsily up, and then to pack at t-minus thirty to us climbing in the car with a steaming mug of whiskey and green tea, casually brushing aside the rotten 7 am humidity with the fuck-off Knowing that the wheels would be burning down the tarmac on an alien planet two hours in the past. Did I sleep on the plane? I can't remember; I was passed out.

And now just two nights later, I'm exhausted and still coasting on that delirium, poised with pen in hand on the tenth floor of a hotel at the gate to Chinatown, anxiously and thoughtlessly scribbling and ignoring the pleas of body and mind for that short death of slumber, hoping that writing and writing with San Francisco on my mind and in my stomach and skin will render some fat worthy of candles at 3 am Pacific on the East Bay where the fog finds every crack in your soul and settles there to fester like fungus spun from gold. No luck, I suppose, on this my last night in the most wonderful city in America, a city that expects so much. I'm shriveling under the pressure of a fine performance, walking where my father and my uncles and my heroes have all trod, and not a single song erupts from the black ink, no patterns are recognized on the wide-ruled lines, no paintings congeal between the margins. I'll succumb to that sleep that I lost in Tennessee, and I'll leave the worrisome foundation of nostalgia for a distant day, when I think back to the Bay and how this city forever and ever gently and sweetly damaged my life.

Unbuckling My Rust Belt.

I haven't been writing, I've been thinking. I've been watching America slide away from the window of a 1994 Chevrolet Astrovan, breathing firecracker smoke and trying to adjust my eyes to the full spectrum of this light we bathe in, the light we take for granted. I've been bumming smokes, I've spent days eating like a peasant, and days feasting like a king. I've drank deeply of night and all its temporary comforts, of its moist natives and their feminine suppleness, like Pittsburgh smokestacks arching erotically to the stars, swaddled in pink flesh and smokey hair. But I haven't been writing; there's no time.

There are cities in China, cities I've never heard of, that eleven million people call home. I know so little of this world around me, but I have faith in my own sensual faculties, and as long as the light is shining through my eyes I will be alive and growing. We have no other choice, lest we want to fully forfeit our humanity, an option that far too many deem wholly acceptable.

But I've felt the earth shake as the El roars by on a sultry Chicago night, and we are drunk outside of an open-late Mexican restaurant with a waitress all curves and birthmark and tan old-world (New World?) beauty. I've been too twisted to stand in the middle of Ohio, with the friendliest people nested in the most unfriendly town, and we ceremoniously carve the hot-ripe watermelon that we lugged up from Arkansas roadsides to this, its Rust Belt absolution and cannibalistic consecration. Take this, all of you, and eat from it.

We are in Rhode Island now, and I am tired and broke but hungry for more. I could walk these roads until my body was more bone than skin, until my muscles relinquished their involuntary governorship of my mobility, and I become a ghost setting fire to toll booths and sleepwalking across the murky waters of shipyards, dancing an ancestral dance on Philadelphia rooftops in the post-industrial drizzle and laughing at the totemic sterility of an old, cracked bell.

Last night I slept in a stranger's bed, curling up alongside mismatched shoes and unopened nicotine patches, with an oscillating fan ans Heinlein book my only company. It was a basement room, lightless, filthy and smelling of cat shit, but there is no disgust, no disdain for the forms Life takes as she gently leans into my embrace, hips against hips, seeking a superficial security but offering immortality in return. She may as well be Death, for I'd kiss her just the same.

Do I sound desperate?

Do I sound desperate? I'm desperately trying not to, desperately trying to figure out a way to swallow this desperation and turn it into something precious, like an alchemist of the gut, shitting gold bouillon.

Exhausted by others' gravity affecting my orbit, and irritated by the worrisome gnaw that my own gravity can push against your axis as well, affecting yaw and pitch and leaving your wax wings melting as your heavenly body is suddenly much too close to that ruthless sun. I'm not going to worry about it any longer. We've all been given the same options, the same chances, the same devices, and we are our own responsibility. I have total faith in the human race and their ability to overcome all adversity and transgression, no matter how petty or pulverizing (despite everyone's daily attempts to sway my judgment otherwise), and if you allow yourself to be defeated by nothing but imagination and emotionalism, it's no one's fault but your own. Come on now, we can get through this together or alone. I think I may be addressing no one but myself.

It feels like I'm decorating a turtle shell, like hanging posters inside of a fallout shelter, paying no heed to the horrors that will propel me to seek shelter within but instead looking forward to the day it will finally be my home to call a home. And I will sit, silent and alone, and watch the nuclear glow seep around the door stop, and the first breath I take will be the first breath I take, reborn, and the last breath I take, stillborn, and I will exist in that singular breath for a beautiful, infinite, and tranquil moment of first and final liberation.

Untouchable.

I am wholly, utterly, inarguably replaceable. Please don't think for a second that this is a cry for attention, or some sort of desperate prosaic plea for pity. Quite the opposite, admire me. Look how I phosphoresce in the dark. Am I not a proud, strong lizard, clinging to the Tree with all the knowledge that I glean from its bark? Do I not lap from its sap, drawn from beneath the earth and cycling lonely towards the heavens? Is this sap not now the only fluid in my veins? Regardless, I am replaceable, just as you are replaceable, and in this acknowledgment I am untouchable.

I am wholly and utterly replaceable, but I am not ashamed to admit it. I admit insignificance, I admit to my being eventually swallowed whole and digested and shat unto the stars. And in embracing my quantum negation of being, in embracing my interchangeableness, I am untouchable and immortal. I consume love and I rail fear into my damaged nostrils. They have similar effects, they are borne from the same bosom. And they are both negligible, only passive side effects of our selfish human condition. Ignore them and move on. The hangover from these drugs, the dopesickness from a brain cooking itself in the juices of its own passionate cries of self-importance, is enough to bring the proudest men to their knees. These tremors will fade with time, leaving only a grinning, proud skeleton that retains its ambulatory nature and ghost-dances all over the bones of those who put stock into the ephemeral.

I am utterly replaceable and find strength in this realization, strength that they will shudder before, they who feign to ignore their own similitude with every oyster and whale that has ever quivered up from the depths of time. How awesome the mollusk who knows enough to crack open his own brutal and ugly carapace, indiscernible from his weak and fleshy neighbors through the subjective eyes of the gods, and who rends his own guts to pieces to find that pearl and exploit its strengths.

I'm still angry, Lord knows, but I'm learning to soften the blows. I should learn to put anger aside, but I've yet to find a more efficient fuel. I will not let myself be driven mad by what I feel is missing from my life. I will not relinquish those reins to you. This anger is mine, and it is in clear and righteous definition. It is a healthy rage that liberates. I deny every law and right and preconceived notion given unto me since birth. They are naught but the shackles our parents have left for us in their will, baubles found discarded on the same well-worn paths that we have followed since the dawn of man. I will rewrite myself, and I will burn your books. I am a shark in bloody, bloody water. I will keep swimming forward and never look elsewhere with any romantic hindsight, if only to forget how bad I still hurt, if only to deny myself the realization that the only blood in the water is my own. This world is not my home, and I am untouchable.

I dub thee Solitude.

I choose inconvenience, always. It's just past 3 am, obviously. It always is. What better time to try to wring some coherence out of my head, dripping like spent jism and curling like smoke from my calloused ears. My heart is aching in a new and comforting manner, stretching and contorting itself, trying to learn some new language, the better to speak to my brain and my feet and set me straight on the Divine Path.

The boy can't go home if he ain't got a home to go back to. The boy can't talk to his friends when he knows they won't recognize him, when the very thought of having to face them and hide the blood on his hands causes him anxiety. And what then, what when they see the blood's just dripping from where they pulled the fucking nails out. And won't he be labelled a traitor if he lets slip that he has no real interest in their interests anymore, shows no concern for their concerns, save the fulfilling feeling of bitter ache and torment that their very appearance conjures in his sick little armadillo heart, that delicious irony that slips like lemon juice and bourbon down his tired throat, pickles his diseased liver, and fuels the raging pale fire behind his eyes, the fire he hopes to focus into laser-like accuracy and potency someday. And he'll just mow 'em down, pierce them straight through with a crystalline death that smells like cedar berries and feels like deja vu. Maybe that's what gets him off; the inconvenience of life, poor timing, and the resentment that follows him around like a kicked dog. He and the dog are the same, and they are all too proud for a shaggy animal with nothing to show for their trials but a couple cracked ribs and a long list of transgressions and indiscretions.

And I left and nothing's changed but these sky-blue lenses. They're focusing, cutting right through the mirror and writing my history across my tongue. Be still, my heart. Leaving is for cowards and feet. You and me and our brain are strong, we are brave, and we are warriors. We shall cover our loneliness with chain mail and knight it. I dub thee Solitude, a righteous avenger. Hold thy head tall, thy back straight. We can only march forward, on and away.

Exist in the Tape Hiss.

I'm on the rehab diet; cigarettes and Diet Coke. I fear the handfuls of antacids I consume will soon be in league with the Diet Coke and all of its excitotoxins and pseudocoses, causing me to piss gravel. Also, because of this rotten awful toothache (Dostoevsky's toothache, Burns' toothache), I've been chewing whole aspirin. It works, though, so none but Gawd may judge me now.

Rolled out of town like a sad little hurricane, burning oil and squinting into the perplexing haze of flashback shadow and last-gasp winter storm bullshit. Immediate anxiety on the road, worrying my eyes were going to be brimming with semen-colored pond scum, worried that the tires were unfairly and inappropriately imbalanced, worried that I'd be thrown to the violent mercy of the slushy gray accumulation that lolled slick and sickly along Highway 60. The lines on the road ceased making any reasonable sense, sometimes all the lights and white looking like a Picasso painting, no perception of depth or content.

Stopped at a wonderful little gas station (Lee's? Luke's?) just a few moments out of town to collect myself, satiate my need for more Diet Coke, and to check tire pressure. The gauge I borrowed from the friendly woman behind the counter didn't work worth a shit, leading only to me kneeling in the muddy ice and accidentally letting a few pounds of air out of two tires before realizing my folly. Back into the store, where in addition to all the usual useless refreshments and snacks and roadside bric-a-brac and distractions, they had several shelves of used books, a box of records, and about two flea market booths' worth of weird glass sculptures, vaguely offensive little busts of Chinese fisherman, hand-painted flower pots, and other items of interest and note. I carefully combed through it all, idly chit-chatting with the cashier and sipping Diet Coke. Back in the car, I took out my contacts and, feeling refreshed and subdued, found a cassette copy of Born in the USA that blasted me forth, eastward, where the temperature immediately began to rise on the dashboard thermometer, and where the sleezy winter nonsense began to subtly turn to nothing but a cold spring rain. The clouds parting, I became one with the night, one with the machine.

Passing under an overpass, hearing the pause in the rain on roof and windshield, coinciding with the pause between Springsteen songs. That's where I want to exist; in the tape hiss, a noiseless progress, a hurricane's eye, the arclight. Driving with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the tape deck. Dreaming of driving with one hand on the tape deck and the other on your leg. Earth-movers looming along the road, silent giants in the early night, gave way to Mark Twain Nat'l Forest, where the road dried and I was able to safely zoom like a flying saucer, brights bright, whipping the machine around fantastic corners.

Another gas station, looking for the tasteless bathroom graffiti I've grown to love. Another can of Diet Coke, another fifteen minutes spent wandering around staring at the inane trinkets arranged haphazardly on pale tan metal shelves. The people less friendly here, an angry little woman vacuuming the rugs looks at me like I'm a dog, out of bounds. The gas station was enormous, though, and doubled as a grocery store, as well as hosting a surplus of practical and agrarian hardware and hunting supplies. Funny I've never noticed this place before, sprawling out in the low Ozark mountains, somewhere near Van Buren, big and well-lit as it is. Maybe it existed but for a night, to appear on the hazy hallucinatory roadside as some neutral oasis, offering neither solace nor contempt. They had, set up on a rickety table with folding legs, a display of frightening rabbit statues, Easter candy, and a few busts of Jesus lugging His cross around.

Outside of Sikeston, west, about fifteen miles, I came upon a red Chevy pick-up with a tail-light out. I saw him make for the shoulder three or four times, discounting the first two as accidents, and then watched him wander towards the median at high speeds, only to jerk back and straddle the two lanes for a while. Deciding he was probably drunk, or a Cro-Magnon unwittingly shoved behind the take-no-prisoner controls of a beat-up Chevy, or possibly both, I hung back, unwilling to pass him for fear of a tragic double-vision lane change that would send me and my machine splintered and sobbing, in pieces, into the ditch. Another truck, followed by a little silver anchovy of a sports car, passed to the right of him, and I lost a few heartbeats as the drunk swerved within inches of both, causing panicky acceleration and a collision narrowly avoided by jerky adrenaline maneuvering. I debated with myself for several minutes about calling the law enforcement, generally disapproving of their involvement in any matters pertaining to my own cause, but finally relented, feeling a naughty sort of exhilaration as I punched 9-1-1 into my cell phone. After talking to the Sikeston emergency folks, and then being transferred to the Highway Patrol, I hung up the phone and decided to tag the drunk driver, feeling a sort of sick fascination at the thought of witnessing those sly pigwolves responding to my own demands, as a free citizen and patriot of this great You Ess of Ay, and watching them slink up behind him and slash at his tendons and go for the throat, as is their wont. After following him for fifteen more minutes, he still wandering all over the roadway, sliding in the dusty shoulder and coming nail-bitingly close to another few vehicles who dared pass, we passed through Sikeston, beyond Sikeston, past at least two police vehicles going the opposite direction. He made for the I-55 exit towards Memphis with a sickening lurch, and disappeared. I called the police again, but they responded with general ambivalence, had no record of my first call, and offered to transfer me to the Highway Patrol once more. I told them to forget it, and resumed my faithlessness in American roadway justice. Why nab drunk good-ol boys in well-worn American rigs when there are all those doped-up longhairs and You-Ain't-From-'Round-Here-Boys, craving our white woman flesh, true degenerates whose supple arms are begging to be bent behind their backs.

Another gas station stop in Kentucky, spent every last dollar I had to put a few more gallons in the tank, muttered a silent prayer (silent muttering?) that I'd make it home with the slightly-more-than-half tank of gas. Kentucky is lovely at night, all Speed Zones and farmland and cafes and convenience stores still named after real people. I listened to as much of a Sartre audiotape that I could bear and, quietly accepting the evening's lessons, bore down towards I-24 and Tennessee and home, putting each cigarette off as long as I could, and enjoying each as much as I ever will. Tennessee met me with the smell of wild onions, lovely and warm in the air, though it may have just been a ripe landfill.