Articles, Tales and Reflections
Introduction
All too often authors write for reasons other than communicating, whether to interest an agent or publisher, to garner a reputation or simply to make money. Although it is notoriously difficult to do the latter since making art simply to answer a creative call, pursue a passion for a particular form or, as I said, to communicate is not as dependably rewarded as, say, getting a job making, selling and promoting widgets.
Nowadays, with internet media doing a world-class job promoting gossip, slander, etc., the idea of communicating artistically or philosophically simply to do so seems, the media addicts would suggest, outdated. Maybe so or, perhaps, it is ahead of the curve, ahead of its time, ahead of the wave, as it always has been.
Not to say these small contributions attain that status, but at least they endeavor to do so. Communicate, that is. Sometimes philosophically, even artistically, though it is up to you, the reader, to decide. As for the popular, lowest-common-denominator view, why not start with diversity or political correctness? Or the taking of important principles of social change and turning them into pablum for the popularity-seekers.
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Some Verse, Considering the Times
A seemingly universal uncertainty in those facing social change while eyeing the one who claims to lead it reflects the nature of uncertainty. Namely, is he really who he says he is? Should I believe in reality, my own eyes and ears, in the facts? And what if he reveals them?
The Brother
I am the opaque messenger
I speak the lies you wish to hear
I am the one you waited for
The perfect Brother of the Spear.
I know so well these shaded lanes,
This empty land of fallen grace,
Prevarications I amass,
I twist, I lie, then I debase,
Intransigent
I´m slow not fast.
I make the hatred
Last and last.
On the other hand, if the one who would lead manages to avoid accountability, the facts, even reality, then all that remains are the words emanating from the same source. This requires the listener to think, a task fact-rejecters detest.
The Redemption-less
There are no slips
You cannot recover from,
No posture others will admit
Was sweaty plotted.
That the pain you caused
Was meant.
Those were innocent mistakes,
As though you tripped,
Hands in the air,
Charm extended,
Gotten gains hidden behind
Your back.
Still, those who succumb would be getting what they ostensibly deserve, were others not to be forced to succumb as well. Alas, those who actually think know who the “succumbers” are. Would that the fact made a difference.
The Righteous Right
Who knows little but to act
Who is white when folks stop by.
Who are boys in cornfield jeans
Who just taunts with seamy cries?
Who to stomp? Whose out-stretched palms?
Who but dogs would bark their songs.
We disdain their hues, aghast,
We know might is right at last.
What, our sweaty seatpants scream,
What but truth will now emerge?
What are we but barren pasts?
What remains: our flag-draped surge.
What´s the reason we will last,
What but guns will hold things fast?
We have broadcasts. They know that
We know truth. The earth is flat.
When our churchfronts start the fire,
When we say it´s all for good.
When our no-think paves the way,
When we will not be withstood.
When they claim our stars and stripes,
When those brownies say they´re white,
We will wring their lying necks.
We have wire, arrive at night.
The Three Smug Pigs and The Reasonable Wolf
Three little pigs, neighbors in name only, lived in adjacent houses constructed of dramatically different building materials. In a case where unbridled competition has unexpected consequences, they were visited one day by a wandering wolf, tired of the isolation that accompanies lupine stereotyping. Despite his previous experience with pigs, he approached a straw house on the edge of town, resolving that if he were rejected there, he´d offer an option to one of them though they´d never offered one to him.
The first home built of straw belonged to an ecologically-minded pig who never tired of reminding his neighbors to build with local materials. A laudable idea, the pig emphasized the point with garish signs in olive and lime, containing such admonitions as, “Forget Style–Remember the Green.” His neighbors, proud of their sensibly-colored homes, kept their curtains pulled toward his side of Pig Town.
When the wolf arrived, his reaction was the same as theirs. But so tired of the life of an isolate was he that he knocked at the door, willing to overlook that the place was God-awful ugly and housed a tasty pig. He was summarily rebuffed. Alas, unbeknownst to the pig inside, the wolf was an opera fan and had developed his lungs to the point he seldom needed to use his claws. The pig responded to the wolf’s reasonable admonition concerning selfishness with a string of invective, so the wolf huffed and puffed at mere warm-up strength and blasted the straw house into oblivion.
The pig’s neighbor was happy to give him shelter as evidence of the superiority of his own home. Constructed of every conceivable variety of imported wood, it was a paean to everything the straw-loving pig detested. Unfortunately, he detested being eaten even more. The wood-loving pig was warming into his praise of imported goods when the wolf arrived, feeling a bit less patient than before. He was rebuffed by this pig, too, since he considered wolves uncouth and wouldn’t dream of letting one into his home. Despite the resultant diatribe, the wolf gave the pigs ample warning before flattening the place with an Aria from La Traviata.
The two pigs beat feet to the red brick home of the village’s richest resident, a lover of cement and re-bar. He allowed the escapees inside, reminding them that they were safe because he had used all manufactured materials. When the wolf arrived, now fed up with pigs, he presented them with a quick warning, endured their mocking laughter long enough to warm up, then he blasted the place with a combination of Carmen and Rigoletto. But nothing happened. Except the pigs’ mocking voices could be heard all the way to the forest.
The wolf, a soul with some perspective, knew there would always be another day. He lay down on the wide, double-deep sidewalk, warmed by the sun, prepared to take a nap before moving on to elephant town where he was sure he´d receive a more circumspect response. He was nodding toward the door, looking much like a lawn decoration of a German Shepard, when it flew open to “You are insensitive to your effect on nature” and “There isn’t a stick of wood in this concrete mausoleum” followed by, “I knew I’d have to evict you or be bored to death by your provincial notions.”
The wolf watched the three little pigs exit, all of them apparently mistaking him for the aforementioned lawn decoration as they waved their hooves at each other self-righteously.
Then he ate them.
Jack Rabbit and the Last Jalopy
Jack cleared the staggered slats of the old fence and landed in the sage. It was late afternoon and the high desert sun bounced off the mountains behind in rusts and golds that matched his fur.
The fence, of course, was in the same state of disrepair it had been when he and his sisters practice-jumped it long before. No better, but no worse. The high desert will do that. Preserve things, that is. The fence stood, riddled with holes, and had since the days of the cattle herds ended. But Jack always bounded over its weathered wood to land on the plateau, anyway. It made him feel like a bunny again.
Jack came his way often. For, more than memories, the fence and what lay beyond it provided him safety should a coyote be close behind. But today the desert was clear and he was going nowhere in particular, a particular nowhere that was one of his favorites. Not only were the ranches thereabouts few and far between, they all had well-stocked gardens and owners that didn’t mind losing a sprout or two.
‘That is what I like most about Santa Fe,’ Jack thought as he bounced down the secret jackrabbit trail, ‘live and let live.’
Below the plateau, the first lights of the city were lit, though the sun still sat on the hilltops. Jack zipped through the scrub-brush and down the path, invisible to anyone without a jackrabbit’s memory for geography. For he was headed home. One of them, at least. As much of a home as a free spirit like Jack ever has. Though, the truth was, Jack had learned in his travels something few ever know. More than memories, more than friendship, more even than family, home is any place where the heart is warmed and the head is at peace.
For Jack it was the rusted jalopy behind the Red Desert Diner. With its comfy cubbyholes under its ragged seats and its thunderstorm-proof trunk and flattened roof that narrowed the window openings, making them just right for a jackrabbit and just wrong for a coyote, the jalopy had seen generations of jackrabbits come and go and come again. It was Jack’s favorite stopover spot, and Big Joe Jimenez, the Red Desert’s owner, was always good for a bunch of leftover greens. So when Jack cleared the hedge guarding the new asphalt mountain road, he was stunned. Not by the dump trucks that roared by in front of him, but by the pile of dirt and cement that sat where the Red Desert used to be.
Jack didn’t need to look to know that the jalopy was gone. A jackrabbit survives by his quickness and his wit, and it was plain enough what had happened. But Jack bounded across the road anyway since he had to know for certain.
Sure enough, the old rusted jalopy was gone. Of no use to anyone but twenty generations of Jack’s friends and neighbors, not to mention fifty years of stray dogs and cats that found its protection when they needed it most, nor generation after generation of Jimenez children, whose imagination had made it everything from a spaceship to an island, the jalopy was gone.
Jack Rabbit came to a stop.
A real stop, not a momentary pause before he launched in a new direction, nor a short rest to grab a nap, but a complete stop. It wasn’t because Jack could not believe what he saw. Though he was only a jackrabbit, his brain was working fine. And it wasn’t because there had been no warning. Jack had seen the signs–the new strips of asphalt, the boxy new places that the humans called homes, the huge new fields of parking cement and, everywhere, the cars.
No, it was Jack’s heart that stopped. His eyes watered, his ears drooped and his famous grey whiskers wilted. Gone was the Red Desert Diner, gone was the Jackrabbit Jalopy, and gone with them was a way of life.
Jack turned south. For jackrabbits do not stay still for long in strange places, and where he was now, a place that had been his home, was strange indeed. He was about to bound off the hill of cement and head toward Las Cruces when a red and green light, well to the west and on the very outskirts of town, caught his eye. Its shape seemed familiar and on a hunch–for jackrabbits often survive on a hunch–he turned west instead.
The closer Jack got, the clearer the light became. Atop a new building built of old juniper wood and surrounded by a dirt lot was a giant neon cactus with a red sombrero. The Red Desert Diner had been reborn. And though Jack did not need to look, he did. He rounded it and there, behind the new diner, as New Mexican as the old, was the Jackrabbit Jalopy beside a garbage can filled with crushed tomatoes and wilted lettuce.
That was the day when Jack Rabbit’s head rested, at peace and at home on the back seat of the old jalopy, when his heart was warmed for good.
For Big Joe Jimenez had not forgot.
Three for Today
The Liar
His hands rise up to meet the rain like he brings light, like he´s sunshine.
His fingers point, his arms reach wide, though he´s a blight and lacks a spine.
He says he´s right, he claims he´s strong.
He starts a fight, like he´s been wronged.
He sneers his sneer, says it´s in style. His hiss, he hides inside the wind.
His snarl´s concealed within a smile. He growls a growl, claims it´s a grin.
He says his finger stopped the rain, discounting what you saw and heard.
He points it at your naive brain, impales and leaves without a word.
The Poser
He seems hardcore real,
Every gesture lets you know you can relax.
He conveys an image, eyes indications,
Offers distractions comforting the mind.
Then his status spreads
And you find you never knew
What he wanted
Or who he was.
The Insight
It is not what you imagined
When you finally see light,
So swift the illumination
Before the opening shuts.
Monotonous, then,
The passage of time,
Pretending you did not claim
You knew what was to come.
From: The Spirit of Spain Joy may be in the eye of the beholder, too. THE LIVING CAFÉ Men and women, and the world, ricochets inside the scraper heights, entrapped in steel, encased in glass, inundated by all that builds, that markets, that is newly known. In Spain, they sit on sand and sun, launch into philosophy and song, Flamenco palmas clapping, with a clutch of friends, toasting the air in afternoon cafés with a vino, cerveza, a bocadillo, as they warm to the joyful Spanish soil. To know a work of art is to feel, not see, an essence. EL DOS DE MAYO One Second of May a valiant peasantry a straw-shod Spanish crowd pulled down the vanguard of Napolean, a turbaned Marmaluke, as he raised a crescent sword above them. Inheritors prepare bus tours, sales displays, relying now on Goya´s shrieking vision to infuse the blood, as it does the Prado, with the living spirit of Spain. Every life has an age and an agelessness. AFTERNOON A terrace afternoon along the boulevard as a third-floor piso dweller leans on his terrace-rail, gazing through the treetops at the avenue below, while caminantes stroll by on paseo, packages in hand. Across the calle, resting on an iron balcony, a white-haired couple peruses this parade. A milk truck stops. A taxi beeps. A bird bounces in time to its tin-whistle song and lands two floors below. They note the dweller in return and seem content. Hours pass, the sun quiets, the avenue stills. The dweller is alone, still stealing a peek. Opposite, the darkened balcony is but an empty eye, a hollow just across the way. Then, in the shadows, a white head moves.