In the Palace of Remembered Light

 

It's not the words that matter, not the stories or the poems.

 

Listen.

 

All energy is used, and then there's nothing. I approach the page with my hands on fire. I read what I've written with my tongue cut out.

 

This is the century, and we've abandoned rules. Children starve so that the war may be fought. The dead are counted carefully, and are labeled. "Good". "Bad". "Accidental".

 

And there was a goal at some point, but we've lost it. There was reason for this bloodshed, a need for these words.

 

There was the woman in my bed who said she had to leave. Said her husband would be home soon. And we had talked for hours, and I couldn't remember anything we'd said. I missed my children, but knew I would still end up yelling at them.

 

And she showered, then got dressed. Said she'd call, then she drove away, and it was snowing. It was grey, the lawns all brown, the houses dirty white, and the air smelled of gasoline and burning. I could still taste her.

 

It was energy spent on going nowhere. It was all of the reasons my wife had for leaving. Said she wasn't happy. Said she'd met someone else, and it wasn't her words that mattered. It was her actions.

 

It was the fact that I'd already stopped loving her.

 

And so I approach the page with my eyes gouged out I stand on the edge of a vast desert. What I believe in is my father's fear. A thousand miles away from home when he decided to stop drinking, and he ended up strapped to a hospital bed with blood running down his cheeks. Ended up screaming at people who weren't there, and it was my mother who flew down to drive him home.

 

It was my sister and her boyfriend who started the fire while they were gone.

 

And these things happen, and you think that they're the stories. You think they matter, that they have beginnings and endings, but it's a lie.

 

You can't pick up the paper with your hands cut off. You can't win a war against people who are willing to sacrifice their own children.

 

Look at the rape camps. The amputee camps. The world is full of human atrocities.

 

And so who is it that decides which wars we'll fight? How big a factor is profit in these decisions?

 

Don't kid yourself when you answer.

 

Don't believe that your answers will matter.

 

Look at Pollock, at the energy that went into what he made. Look at what was left.

 

And I was 21 when my grandfather killed himself. I was 27 when Cobain put the gun to his head. And there was a woman, a minister's wife, who disappeared Was found a week later wrapped in a dirty blanket and thrown from a bridge onto some railroad tracks seventy miles north of here.

 

I was working the day the dishwasher found her dress in the dumpster behind the restaurant I was hung over and sore. Had spent the night in a motel room with three other guys and two girls. Couldn't remember either of the girls' names, but I thought I'd fucked them both. I thought most of it had been filmed.

 

And the trucker was found, and he was sentenced, and then a fourteen month old baby was killed in the shithole town I'd grown up in. Was locked in his room by the babysitter, and the thermostat was put up to eighty five, and he was left there for two days.

 

And did I mention my own children? Two boys, six and three, and I'm terrified of all the things I can't protect them from. Flyers arrive in the mail, two or three a week, mug shots of recently paroled child molesters mailed out by the police department, and I think to myself Why aren't we killing these people? Why aren't we shipping them off to die in our wars?

 

And my six year old comes home with bruises on his arms and a story about being hit by a bully on the bus. And I want to find this little fucker and choke him to death. I want to burn his house to the ground with his parents still inside. And two weeks later he and my son are best friends, but he still needs to pay. I still need an eye for an eye.

 

This is how the poems are written. This is how the stories are told. Everything starts with a rush of anger and ends in fear. The words are laid down in blood, then the pages are burned Nothing is left but the hands that commit the acts. Nothing is left but the people who survive.

 

None of it was ever meant to be fair.