It’s funny what things don’t matter when your cousins are both sick and begging to see you down in Georgia sometime next week. The world could crash and burn tomorrow—either by three separate world wars compacted together, or the housing market collapsing on our heads, or both. I try not to let so many things bother me, but you can only handle so much before the pressure builds up in your skull and your ears begin to bleed a little bit. Some of the hard-knocked modernist poets understand this concept; I don’t normally like to align myself with them too much out of principle.
That’s how I introduced myself to my new group of friends who are also writers, who are opposed to war and to environmental ruin. We all gathered around the ash can outside of the school building, a quasi-collective of fellow poets, short story writers, essayists and comic book scribblers, who between the 17 of us have not published a single word. None of that seemed to matter to the lot of them; my new friends were quick to remind me that to see yourself printed up, schlepped together in between cardboard covers with white wash pages all uniform in a row, wedged in with other pipe dreams of the bookstore shelf was to be the worst form of suicide brought upon your head at the corporate level. I didn’t get any of their jargon to begin with, but I figured if I stayed long enough some of their blue poetics would sink into my smoke-infused skull and recreate the dead circuits of my brain.
After all, we were all set on making art that would change the minds of those who held every ounce of power in the world.
At 19-years-old, I doubt I knew all that much, but what I knew, I knew well, and I possessed enough passions within me to dam up the south side of the Atlantic if I wanted. Besides that, I held in my hands a stack of notebooks scribbled with poems of varied quality, and my art started to garner a political bent. With the housing bubble leaving many out of their homes and jobs and savings, and some of my own family counted among the victims of the fall of the almighty dollar, I stood ready to stick my neck and my writing arm out for the cause.
“Don’t you think postmodernism is dead?” this one beefcake named Brett asked me. He was standing dangerously close to this small half-shell of a girl named Charity who wrote villanelles. He said, while he first introduced himself, that he mostly delved in cultural criticism, though from the look of him I doubt he could even spell the words that he uttered so carelessly as he was breathing.
“Isn’t the modern consumerist culture ripping apart every artistic sensibility we’ve ever hoped to achieve?” Brett continued. Good god, but this knuckle-dragging mouth breather would not shut up. He just continued babbling on while his grubby, meaty paw inched ever closer to the young lady he was intimidating, as though the predator thought his prey would be allured by such asinine tactics.
“Yes sir, I guess,” I muttered, my hands dug into my denim jacket like an urban cowboy propped up against the barstool—which was where I wanted to position myself if I wasn’t so set on changing my image in order to be artistically and politically aware. “I mostly just want to get people listening when I write out a piece or two. My daddy always said…”
“Your daddy don’t mean squat around here,” barked this middle aged creep named Mike, splendidly horrid in aviator shades colored yellow and a wrinkled set of Desert Storm-era fatigues he must have ripped off of somebody the day after the skirmishes had begun. “It ain’t about what your pedigree is, it’s about what you bring to the table. Are you a main course soldier, or do you muddle about with the three-bean casserole; it’s all about how you work that angle, ya dig me?”
I told him that I did and let it lie with that. With the yellow tint to his shades I couldn’t get a clear impression of his silk-print eyes, and so long as he talked his steaming pile I felt the urge to continue tiptoeing along the fields to keep from setting off a land mine.
“So what is it that you write again?” asked Charity. She managed to get out of Brett’s parasitic clutches and began gravitating ever closer to me. Her exaggerated, almond shaped emerald eyes lit up the moment she came within my sphere, and I began to wonder why I even bothered to join in with this group of misfits who don’t do anything but speak volumes about what they want to do next year.
“I mostly write small town stories, with the occasional free verse poem,” I declared, drinking my can of Vanilla Coke and wishing I had some extra cigarettes. “I don’t typically feel the need to venture too far beyond the duck pond when I write; I see enough buildings burn down within walking distance of my own back porch, and they always say to write what you know…”
“There you go again, citing what other people say,” Mike chimed in, coughing deeply into his hand and scratching his pocket for another Camel menthol. “Don’t you know a damned thing for yourself?”
And there it was: a herd of sheep led by the king of fools, thinking they had the entirety of truth grasped firmly across their collective bosom. The wolf stood at the door in sheep’s clothing, and the grandmother looked a tasty treat. I couldn’t feign much interest in wearing my little red hood out in the forest any time soon to see my fate if I stayed any longer with these imbeciles.
“Well it’s been a blast gang,” I said as peacefully as I could make it, “but I better head out and see how my family’s doing.” I did my best to disengage myself from the unit without causing too much of a stir.
“You think you know so much about what’s at stake,” Brett said snarling. He was inching up on Charity again; this really was beginning to get ridiculous. “You don’t know a thing, and the god of the arts would not look kindly on you friend. Just look around at the world falling to drunken ruin, and tell me this: what readers will want to call you master when you try and give them some answers to the problems of the universe?”
“Neither be ye called masters,” I said, “for one is your master, even Christ.”
“Oh and what great leader came up with that?” Brett asked, no sense of irony in his Neanderthal voice with a touch of nasal congestion.
“My daddy always referred to him as King Jimmy,” I snorted; and with that I turned to Charity. “I’m heading over to the Barnes & Noble with some other friends I’ve got and look for some new books and talk about what’s really wrong with the world. You’re more than welcome to come along if you want.”
Charity took one look at Brett’s oblong face, and her decision made itself. “Let’s get out of here already!” She raced ahead of me on the sidewalk, and a smile crept along my face as I peaced-out the homeboys and headed to broader lights and better sights.
Come morning, I would have to deal with my sick cousins and Georgia on my mind, but this time I would come out okay. Nobody could take my spirit, and God as my witness, I stood immune from turning into one of those frauds who used art to make themselves out to be more than what they are.
Now tell me, what’s ailing you America?
