Two Recent Conversations, in Poetry
Dedicated to L and S
To say
I have lived a needlepoint life–
with a morality drawn from a pixelated yarn quote in green and white on a sunny wall
“Just be kind”
–
would be a discredit to the old women who stitch the sayings
Because theirs is an bitterly-won code, and mine is not.
I sat with a friend who wrangled his sobriety from a ditch
Modern Hercules adorned with the skin of the Nemean lion
Like the Marines
(Earned, Never Given)
Told him that I stayed on the path because I was scared, not because I was good.
How convenient it is to agree with the rules if you’re incapable of breaking them.
But the sun sets on the child’s play of noon, and these long shadows suddenly snap and bristle
I feel teeth around my ankle
As I go back home to a building long since gone
So I stood in front of a room, and disagreed that darkness is foreign.
Told them about Aleksandr’s line of good and evil
running through the human heart
“I am a dog that can bite you, but I don’t” I snarled, my teeth suddenly fangs
dripping
as they sat and stared.
(Oh what a party trick that I keep trying , even after two pretty girls flipped out on me, never wanting to consider the abyss in the mirror. But don’t you want to? So it doesn’t consume you? And the world, because it will if we’re not careful.)
We read Bukowski and talked about Solzhenitsyn and Havel and I told them that once I held an old man down for his own good because I was following orders, and it was the easiest thing in the world, and I now know exactly how bad things happen in the world, and I’m watching myself like a hawk so I don’t become part of that.
“I’m trying to say what I know to be true.”
And then something happened, as if the air turned clear
Dangerous as nature, a cold front on a mountaintop
real.
“Huh, I guess most bad things do happen because people are ‘following orders’” a gentleman said.
We talked some more, in subdued tones, sitting
riveted, and then went home, changed, because we all knew
the Truth
Is no longer
an
Abstraction.