For Sean (...)

The alchemist, she knew that each of us had a thousand and some adventures at our fingertips, moving through earth and cities between our toes, the coming of stories that we raise up toward, growing in strands with each armory wall of our big, beating hearts that we hold scapegoat against.  She knew everyone possessed this vitality, but the story was true, in fact, that some enjoyed a direct line to that life spark more than others.  She herself was always at its epicenter - sometimes it seethed inside her, and she felt her blood boiling over its own borders.  She wanted to scream at those moments, when the rest of them sat, weary eyed and dullard-like.  She grew sick of sitting among the dead, so she set out, like she always did, whether down her street to the water’s edge, over the mountains to the place where the sky leered down at lovers in the river, across the oceans to the other, more rounded civilizations and their inhabitants, the same and also different.  With each climb, lick of morning dew and erstwhile angular maneuvering -- without work, without accomplishment, without routine -- she strode.  You can’t mix the same old chemicals together and create something new; it just doesn’t work that way, physically or otherwise, as the alchemist will tell you.  She wanted to record these journeys and speak them as a story – but, it never came out like that.  Only in poem form, or in some kind of memoir or jumble of imagery - never as she walked, or made her way could she tell someone else’s story, at least how it was told to her, in the present moment.  The sun glistened hopelessly in a platter of offerings in reverse, threading its way into and behind her, as the world laughed, and couldn’t tell you why.  She found solace there, beneath a shallow bend of sky, and on soft, drunken grass.  She would finally try to tell a story.

Once upon a time, there was a man.  He was always a boy, but also ever a man.  There was a sense of protection about him, as he tried his best in public life to remind everyone around how much he cared, how much he wanted to listen, and he played his part very well.  It wasn’t a part to him, but it was.  He spent his days crunching numbers, but had a poet’s heart.  Sometimes he did not himself know or believe in this.  His sense of protection didn’t make you feel protected, at least not when you were around him in the outlying provinces of work.  His eye was always turned elsewhere, just behind him or to the side, and you got the feeling he was planning twenty different modes of distraction while he sat there, talking to you, while he slept, while he drank himself towards that sleep.  You did feel utterly protected, though, when his words came through, with the unfettered voice, and when his actuality was misshapen, bent, twisted; you know, like Himself without the veils he normally kept as gunman just beneath his eyes- he was then natural, and wonderfully awkward.  Large brained, magnificent ploughman’s hands, crystal clear and Awkward.  He craved this awkwardness, and then pretended it didn’t exist.  He did this with a lot of things.  He had rules and regulations about his person, from his choice of drunkenness to the rituals with which he would offer his attentions, to the manner of clothing he would wear, and he was all about secrets, but may not have seen them as so.  Secret lives, secret imaginations, secret roles he played out or thought he could, should, might and didn’t, shuffling around so much of himself in shards that like an overused slot machine, when his number came up, to the one worth the jackpot, he couldn’t draw upon it anymore.  He had suppressed it so far down and away, in the backs of abandoned lots, and tucked into notated pages, in the corners of his mind where he flirted with all sorts of things, and then didn’t.  He couldn’t come up for air, because his limbs were held down by the might of his own personal army.  It seemed like it had been that way for a very long time.  There were other times for him.  Perhaps other places, people.  He looked *happy* once, but even he couldn’t say when that was, or how.  He let the one in charge choose his skill set (the one interested in survival always does) and set out the rules to that game too.  However, he had often let himself be laid out bare, at one time.  He liked to use the word “unmanned”, but really he was most a man in those very same moments.  Eyes gone liquid and azure, the courage to ask for help, the knowledge to step back and breathe in, admitting to the one in charge that he wasn’t cut out for this.  

At other times, it was like a government compound, or that of a cult’s, where you couldn’t see the guru in charge, the one calling the shots.  When he would erase the awkward half (the same one who wrote poems and twisted dreams and righteous indignations, dirty stories which were born of every part of who he was, which would allow him to just jettison himself out of his seat and into the sky, then find he couldn’t stay there) he was then locked inside of himself, invisible to the crowd.  He would then sometimes walk back and forth in a criss-cross fashion along the dirt road just at the foot of the great mountain, pretending like he was going some place, but just walking back and forth, occasionally looking up at the moon, and wondering from what elements she was fashioned.  His heart spoke lucidly with the care of someone believing in what they created, building piece by piece and with the great willingness to let the whole thing unravel at his feet.  He craved the chaos, and often would interject into the crowd’s hushed achy noise with a hard, and pointed jab at their thick airs, then retreating back again.  He craved it, but like those long moonlit walks, he would stumble, often on purpose, often after too many drinks, just so he could think about what was up there, from the safety of where he was; with the so-called reality in front of him, protecting him against the freedom to be all things at once.  It was like a light switch.  He required perfect, or rather perfectly imperfect conditions, to work, to create, to want, to engage, to love, and to dream.

When he did allow himself to be in the right place, as he would term it, the dreams would follow stunningly.  Foul toothed, loose lipped, angry and boisterous, individualistic and carefree, a punk song strummed on the lightest feather of an angel’s harp (missing a string or two).  He could write about anything – ANYTHING.  He would often not finish; that was his poet’s quicksand and the man, the hero, that was his flaw.  But it wasn’t a flaw, as flaws go, really.  It was simply a lack of courage.  It wasn’t that actually, either.  It was hard to pinpoint.  The courage was there.  He could conquer new frontiers and take a nap in the grasses that he helped to colour in, with the ease of a newborn who had just crossed over as a wise old sage from the last life.  A shot, feeling like soft eternity.  But he did not trust in it.  He could not let himself be guided by it, not for very long anyway.  He fought certain battles within, costumed and charactered epics and sometimes simple downtrodden tales that zipped across the black night, looking for that huge hissing in us all, that black hole which most were afraid to encounter.  He wanted to stay up with it ‘til dawn, talk it out, get it drunk and take it to bed.  Problem was, sometimes he couldn’t remember why he had set out, come the morning after. The remnants of mud on the bottoms of his boots and dead fireflies who took sleep in his hair would bother him all day long, as he tried to remember, but by high noon the stains gone, the fire of the flies buried again in his heart chambers with care.  The bibles telling of his journeys would blanket him in sleep, but he wouldn’t have the time or the belief to always be their scribe.  

Time is beating by him, and he is still a hero, but does not admit to seeing his own face yet, though it is there all the same.  Between the mirror and our perception of it, there are always secrets within secrets.  One day, perhaps soon, his absolute want of freedom and the knowing of what it truly means, and how everything we lose by it is also that which makes us great, these things will form like a brand new earth in him, yet still marked with the inescapable memories of all that has gone before.  The fall, the walk, the words and the numbers, and he will make use of every inch of what he has been and perhaps, if the constellations align in just the right manner, if the light from each eclipse hits him just so, and he realizes that the place he is in is not born of chaos but of a life lived on purpose and to whose end he can conquer, wrapped in a white flag- he can then sacrifice, or be born again, from a drunkard shadow double burning drum beats in his ear…perhaps then, not the real, but the ultimate hero – in the form of a man living out his days as himself, no matter where he happens to be, will flick the switch in the back of his head, wired within the name of his star in a straight electrical route up and over to his heaven, and experience in every moment, both utterly aware and absent of mind, the great privilege of his lifetime, in being who he is.

M. Lucia