this Quiet man

I’ve heard this one before. Several times before.

She rehearses every detail like speaking the facts will fix the issue. It happened when she was young. She is an adult.

Now, the incident is done but it isn’t over. She repeats herself as if to warn her self not to forget. However, she can’t forget.

Maybe the message isn’t for her.

Why is she always repeating herself?

I think the clothes know more than the fabric can tell.

The fine character of the silk and lace refuses to hold anything tightly. Like sweat suspended from the tip of a nose--always on the verge of falling--her clothing wants her.

The color of peach was made for her skin.

Smooth and cool, her skin smirks knowing it is wanted. Intentionally inducing a tactile inquisition, I cannot let go...can not let go.

A soft brown. 

Like a sand that swallows I know the way to escape but that’s not what I want--escape.

Voluptuous. Her body is delicate; fragile and capable. Enveloping: it captures. The flesh of her stomach compliments the flesh of her breasts. The folds in her skin are the expression of gratitude. Her thighs whisper an eloquent song punctuated with two cheeks.

Gentle.

Doodling...

What if

God said God doesn’t exist.

They hung Mary Turner by her ankles, inverted and disoriented over the border between two jurisdictions, suspended in time and space. They covered her in gasoline to prepare her body to be burned. The fire, burning away her clothes, exposed her flesh to the wanton gaze of hatred, allowing it to see a pregnant belly eight months full of possibility. A nameless villain emerged from the crowd and, using a knife, cut the unborn baby from her belly, prematurely exposing the baby to the Georgian air of 1918. Unlike the Christ, who was greeted with gifts of wealth and praise from a few wise men, a multitude of ignorance greeted Mary’s baby with intentions less admirable: a heinous, unconscionable violence vehemently opposed to black life. 

The unborn baby was stomped to death. 

Hanging there fully exposed, Mary Turner, a twenty year-old widow, was executed by firing squad—a blighted brigade of citizens who mistook murder for employment. Hours later, Mary was buried not far from where she was lynched for publically protesting the lynching of her husband. Just one among many in a “rampage” of lynching’s, Mary’s husband was summarily executed by a terroristic mob of white citizens galvanized by the refusal of black Americans to acquiesce to the de facto slavery of debt peonage made possible by the glorified injustice of the criminal justice system. This is history, contrary to fiction.

His finger tips were black. 

They had bandaged his hands and given him the all clear to leave the hospital, free to roam the streets again. I would imagine it to be a terrifying sense of freedom. Not the kind that leaves you capable of growth and possibility. Rather, a sense of freedom that abandons you, leaving you increasingly aware of your smallness in a world that only seems to expand. Like groping in the dark for a wall you know will give you direction but, somehow (you can’t figure out how;why), it keeps escaping you. 

To know this freedom is to wander a world filled with an agonizing wonder. Not the Disney kind of wonder, but the Stephen King kind, where you can’t be sure of where the fright will come from, but you know its coming.

When he approached me on the street--wearing all of the formal regalia of vagrancy--he was slow to speak, his voice recalcitrant in his throat. He identified himself with a name and a tattoo. His name he stated hurriedly as if he knew it was insignificant. The tattoo was the identifier that he thought most important for our meeting. 

A permanent symbol on his neck meant to memorialize, commemorate, and demonstrate his unwavering commitment to military service--Semper Fi--, his marker highlighted the irony of a life commitment to a project that was never meant to protect people, just property.

The bandages on his left hand fully concealed the appendage. His right hand, oddly wrapped, exposed three of his finger and a thumb. I’d never seen fingers so black up close like that. On tv, sure. In museums where mummy’s fingers, toes, or noses were protected for our benefit, sure. But seeing it in real time and space, right here before my eyes...The whiteness of his fingernails proved the fingers to be human in fact not fiction.

“Did you go to the hospital?!” Why did I ask that...

“I went to ------, they bandaged me up.”

I felt silly for asking. The clean bandages and gauze already made that abundantly clear. What proved to be clear instead was that I was incapable of offering any real help. A man who’d purportedly protected the country from threats foreign and domestic will likely lose the fingers he used in service to me, and I’m standing here asking him if he’d done what is blatantly obvious. And he takes it because he has to--you know, beggars can’t be choosers. He needs someone to look out for him and he’s forced to settle for Captain Obvious.

I want to forget his fingers, but I can’t. They haunt me. A gross inquietude. I was happy before I saw his fingers. I want to forget his fingers, but I can’t. If I forget his fingers will I forget him? It seems the last thing he needs is to be forgotten.

“Thank you for stopping”, he said. The gratitude for my attention suggested a sincerity of his need for a limit to his freedom. He didn’t want to be forgotten. 

Freedom isn’t free they say. He took up arms for freedom and it left him exposed to a cold that consumed his flesh. Amidst a thriving metropolis his struggle for freedom left him exposed, vulnerable, and unprotected. 

I’ve always envied the charm of others. People whom they say have, “personality.”

Those who woo with silk smooth strings of pearl laden parables placed gently around the neck of the one who hears, enchanting them to lend their ear just a little...while...longer. The ability to craft fast sailing ships with words that carry hearers to a far away land called homily, where full audiences are captive to the tempestuous waves of one’s visceral irruptions of seductive charm. 

You see, I’m a lame. The duck who rides the waves and doesn't care to give a truck the chance to run it over. The highways and byways, where the traffic of impressionable persons never seems to cease, was never home for me. Never a place where I found comfort. 

I instead prefer the waves of others. 

I enjoy the sound and the song of the seance that brings life to dead bones in valleys left dry by the fleeting chants of yesterday’s revival. But, the gift of making the dead rise up and walk was not imbued in these lips. Instead, I was given the lame one’s gift. I was given something far more subtle, far less suasive. 

Patience is not personality. Patience is not the charisma that gets them standing on their feet! Patience is the power to keep them walking past you. The power to propose they never see you and to do it without words. Charisma is the flame that draws the flies and keeps them fixed with hearts strangely warmed! Patience is not. Patience is very cold, and seldom draws one. 

One person alone.

But, when one does come. When patience has captured her sole, her loan of borrowed time absolves and time is given pause like cougars set to pounce.

You see, that’s what patience is: borrowed time. My “ability” to wait is little more than your ability to tolerate my unwillingness to effuse; emote; evoke any sense of relatable humanity. And once your curiosity gives in to my unwillingness (if it ever does), well, the waves greet us, calling us back once again to swing and sway. Only, this time, we’re not alone. 

Sex is divine. 

More than loving, more than holy, more than anything we can truly make relatable through words. Which is the point, exactly. That’s what sex is: The realization of one’s limits and the limits of oneself.

Sex is confrontation.

To engage in sex is to surrender to the desire to consume and to be consumed. It is an acquiescence to; the relinquishing of one’s body to an appetite seeking only to devour, knowing that it will not be destroyed. The taste of your partner leaves you wanting more… 

Leaves you wanting to be wanted. 

Sex is flirting with the disaster of losing oneself within the body of another. It is reaching into the furthest corners of your flesh and hoping to find another there–a world not yet explored. It is finding joy in knowing that far enough is not too far, and hoping that too far is beyond you. It is begging your partner to trespass into you and to find pleasure there.

It is agreeing to be used.

Without agreement, it is the evil of perversion; profaning the divine; denying the sacred. To forsake consent is to violate the yearning that makes the impossible possible. It is to negate the existence of the other’s limit; completely deny that it ever existed; that the person ever was. We cannot realize our own limits if we do not have someone to show us where they are.

Sex is consensual.

What do we do in a society that hates the truth?

How do we move forward in a country that feigns interest in demonstrable truths, while preferring elusive fantasies?

Our culture is perverse. When approaching naked truth we shrink back, avert our eyes and plead God’s mercy in pious indignation. Comfort remains distant until the truth is covered up and made decent, allowing us to once again dance in the reign of ignorance. 

We are fools and we love it. We find ways to eschew enlightenment. We are craftsmen of deceit. Artisans of fantastic fictions amplified by emptied echoes altering yesterday’s yearnings for accountability. We are masters of illusion. So skilled we have made ourselves believe that slight of hand is a wizard’s work.

Magic.

We are lost behind the curtain drawn to signal to the world that the show has ended. Can we be free from this curse?

The forefathers left us scratching our heads over a trick they called Democracy in a nation founded on genocide, slavery, and caste. The ancestors were not deceived. Conjurers and priestesses, miracles were old hat and the truth of the impossible enlivened their dreams. 

We are awake at the intersection of lifeworlds, as Dr. Fluker might say, and seeking to maintain step with the light. I beg you to journey on. The truth is there and we will know it. Freedom will be it’s right hand and Peace the sword it grasps.

What do we do in a society that hates the truth?

Oscar Wilde wrote a wonderful tale about a young man possessed by his imagination. He was captured by and enraptured with the unfathomable power of his beauty. He came to relish the admiration of others. Admiration that afforded him a saintly aura unblemished by his disregard for common, popular conceptions of morality. He was a terror born from a people’s deepest desires and visions of themselves. He was the embodiment of society’s deep-seated fears and anxieties. The fruit of their vanity.

An old man took control of a country through an antiquated political lever meant to equalize the power of slave holding states with that of the industrialized north. He is a man wrinkled and worn, with a distant and dysfunctional relationship with the truth such that “alternative facts” are used to do the heavy lifting of convincing a nation to believe his repeated attempts to declare himself popular. He was 3 million votes less popular than his female counterpart. 3 million votes he would have us believe were proffered by immigrants who voted illegally, despite the fact that there is no evidence for such a claim. In fact, the only evidence the people of the United States truly seek is what he refuses to bring to light. His tax documents are the ghosts that haunt his chamber door, ominously threatening to expose his ties with a growing international threat, and his proven disregard for the working class . 

He has a similar disregard for facts. The orange hue of his skin betrays any sense of comfort he might have with the truth. Despite his professed desire to give the country back to the people, he has once again surrendered the country to the interests of a very rich few. His cabinet picks make clear his affinity for Goldman Sachs and the interests of Wall Street. His administration is a collection of billionaires as unfamiliar with public service as he is with the Geneva Convention. He has confused a love for the democratic project of the US with xenophobia and given over his strategy to neo-nazis and white supremacists. Beneath his oddly coiffured hair is a startling inability to recognize the danger of a relationship with a Russian czar that sees him as an open door into US politics. Despite constant advice from his intelligence community, he refuses to concede that the election was influenced by a foreign power. His country is vulnerable and he is more concerned with inauguration attendance than security. He wouldn’t recognize an attack on his “beloved” country if it came to his personal twitter account. If willful ignorance in the face of intelligence is the epitome of a fool, we have one running our country.