Post Apocalypse

A week ago today this country suffered a loss so tragic, so utterly senseless, so universally painful, that it will NEVER be erased from our collective memory. The massacre of twenty children and seven adults on a bright December day in 2012 was as life altering for this country as any apocalypse might have been.

For a week now, we've seen the seemingly endless photographs of the children and teachers who lost their lives. Those twenty-six photographs stretch out impossibly to infinity in one's mind. We have listened to arguments for and against gun control, we have watched as sales of guns and, God save us, bullet proof back-packs soar. We have endured endless media personalities shoving microphones and cameras in tormented faces, just trying to get that one definitive sound bite or image. We have not been able to turn our eyes away from this trainwreck, not even for a moment.

It is time we stop looking back, and look forward as a country to what the real cause of this tragedy is and was and will be if we don't fix it. Like old Ebenezer, we need to be dragged kicking and screaming in our nightcaps into the past, present and future of this country's problem with acknowledging, accepting and treating mental illness and personality disorders.

The shooter at Sandy Hook had problems. He had deep seated issues that his mother had a difficult time discussing with friends and family and perhaps facing herself. And, please, this is not meant to place blame with her, it is just to point out that we have always, and are still, hiding our mentally ill like they are somehow shameful reflections on us as parents, and on a larger scale, our society.

My own family struggles with mental illness. Suicide has wrapped its ugly black grip around us, and every Christmas for the past several years we have all had to struggle through what the consequences of one person's act has done to us as a group.

Until we can come together as a society and throw back the curtain of shame we instinctively shroud our mentally ill citizens in, we will continue to be shocked and devastated by acts of desperate violence like those that took place last week.

It isn't guns, or gun laws...it is facing up to the fact that some of us need help and/or need to be institutionalized. That it isn't shameful...it is just a fact.

Trying my hand at poetry

The smell is the thing,
the kitchen looks like you just stepped away for a minute--
counter dusted with flour,
twin, thick, shiny, braids of eggbread
left to cool...now cold.
Dried herbs hang over cast iron stove,
and a bakers rack filled to overflowing with
muffin tins, bundt cake pans, recipe boxes,
and crumpled in the space between the flour and sugar canisters
is that old stained apron you always wore.

On a wide sun-drenched sill over the soapstone sink
are containers of spring bulbs you forced into life;
perky paperwhites,bright yellow and red tulips,and
heavy-headed grape hyacinth that nod on their slender green stalks like dopers.

The kitchen table, small and round,
is strewn with bills, two packs of parliaments,
one pack of nicorette gum,
and two opened and empty boxes of
dramamine lean against
the white ceramic of a potted red poinsietta.

Beyond the kitchen in the livingroom is
a small blue spruce you
cut down with your own hands in the woods behind the barn,
and then decorated with red and green plaid bows,
and white tipped pine cones,
and your last surviving glass ornaments from that other life and time.

The livingroom walls are a collage of family photographs
taken a lifetime ago when you were still you--before
the depression
before
the manic,
frantic,
frenzied flight from the faces in the pictures.
It is as if you love them more this way;
suspended,
seperated by glass,
unable to touch you.
You, who once could not let an hour go by without kissing your daughter's hair.

The bedroom door is open and a poster of Rosie the Riveter,
her denim clad bicep flexed above the slogan:
"WE CAN DO IT" hangs over your bed.
The night table closest to the door is littered with cigarette butts,
and ashes from an overturned glass ashtray.
A small tin pot with a half melted black plastic handle rests
among the debris.
On the opposite night stand is a copy of Jack Keruoac's
The Town and The City,
an empty fifth of vodka, and two amber plastic prescription bottles, their white caps
missing.

The bed has not been stripped.
The stain you left there is visible even from behind the yellow caution tape.
The smell is the thing.
Not the sick-room smell of someone who is clinging to life but dying anyway.
No, this smell is sweet, thick, strange.
It fills my nose and my mouth
and for days after that day
I will taste that smell in the back of my throat.

PTSD

Back then your purple heart pumped
boozy, coke-crazed blood
through your veins
into your hands
until they clenched into fists
that hit
that hurt me.

Back then you were a
machete swinging dick with
Nam infused fits
of fright and
sweat-soaked
nights of flashbacks.

Back then I ducked and dodged
and stayed sober
when you would not.
Your purple heart
left purple marks on me
forever.

Now here you are again
that by-passed heart
skipping beats when you see my face.
Every breath you take is exhaled
with honey,
baby,
sweetie.

Now your open hands reach
toward my face
to caress my crepe-paper cheek
and they beg forgiveness.

But even now
I have to fight the urge
to flinch.

Another work in progress... there may be something here

The fort was an architectural triumph for twelve year old boys. Suspended fifteen feet in the air between the V of a massive oak tree, it boasted not one, but two rooms, each with its own lookout window. The mismatched lumber used for its construction had been pilfered from various yards and barns. The nails, and hinges for the lookouts and trap door had been shop-lifted (practically a nail at a time) from Holden’s Tru-Value. Old man Holden would not notice the missing items until his year-end inventory, by then he’d have no way of knowing who the thief was.
Johnny McIntyre, the self-appointed leader of the “big kids”, had made it known around the neighborhood that the fort was off limits to all but his rag-tag group of friends. Johnny was the brains of the group. He designed the plans for the fort, and oversaw its construction. He was a rough boy with an incongruous grace and ease about him that the other boys found impossible to duplicate, and the girls found impossible to resist. His prowess on the ball fields, in games of War, on his bike, and especially with the ladies, was legendary. No one on Baker Hill had more cache than Johnny.
The muscle, Mark Williams, was a towering brawny boy with a hank of white- blond hair cropped close to his block-like head. He was an intellectual wasteland, but his loyalty to Johnny was boundless and as a result he became Johnny’s right- hand man. In matters that required physical conflict, or threat of the same, Mark’s value was immeasurable. Everyone was afraid of him.
A handful of boys from the other side of Baker Hill filled out the group and provided Johnny with enough disciples to be considered a leader. They fell in behind Johnny and Mark like little soldiers and nodded agreement with Johnny’s decrees without discussion or dissent.
The only oddball in this little gang was Bobby Davis. He was a tall gangly kid with glasses, buck teeth and bad skin. His family was relatively new to Baker Hill and the subject of much gossip by all the kids and their parents. There were four Davis children, and two Davis dogs. It was a close contest as to which of these six was the most vicious. The Davis parents won that title, however; they were rude, loud and cruel, and the Davis children transferred the abuse they received to the dogs and to others who were weaker than they were. The dogs responded by charging and biting anyone foolish enough to pass by the house when they were unleashed.
Bobby Davis was a sociopath, given to secretly torturing small animals and molesting his sister. He was included by Johnny as a way of controlling him. Bobby idolized Johnny. Johnny despised Bobby; for no other reason than the kid just seemed off to him. Johnny did not really want Bobby around, but he knew enough about friends and enemies to keep them both close.
The fort was the talk of the Hill. The older girls whispered about going there with Johnny or Mark. They hinted at bases being got to in one room, while Johnny’s minions kept watch for intruders from the other. Younger boys from Baker Hill, like Jim Blake, coveted the fort for the status it represented. At nine, he was too young to be part of Johnny’s gang, but Jim was the unspoken leader of his own small group of boys. Like Johnny, Jim had way about him that drew people to him naturally. Jim and Johnny were cut from the same mold, both good-looking boys with brains and charm. Jim had a handicap that Johnny did not, however; Jim had me.

Starting From Scratch...Again.

It has been just over a year since I have even thought about this blog. I was reminded of it a couple of days ago when my step-daughter's Facebook profile disappeared.
"Where did you go?" I texted her (because who talks nowadays?).
"Needed a break," she replied. "You can follow me on Flickr or Twitter."
"What the hell is Flickr?" I replied, my fingers flying. And who, by the way, did she think she was...Charlie Sheen?
"It is my blog." she answered.
"I have a blog," I typed.
But do I really have a blog? I mean bloggers blog don't they?
My screen saver on my laptop is a scrolling, rolling script that chastises me each and every day with "WRITER'S WRITE." It undulates and winks in and out of view like a letter tongue stuck out in the face my silent, painful, blocked voice.
If writer's write, then it would follow that bloggers must blog.
Since writing fiction seems to be beyond my ability at the moment, I will flex this unused muscle between my ears with blogging...a poor substitute for fiction but even the most strident work-out fanatic would have to agree that some exercise is better than a vegetative state.

You shoulda been there

Of all the days that you will miss over the next 30 years you would have been alive, this is one that was not to be missed by a mother. What were you thinking? Sometimes my anger at what you did eclipses how much I miss you.