A Hostage Crisis

I smoked a cigar and quoted an old Civil War general beneath a tree: Lick ’em tomorrow, though.  But what, when, how is tomorrow?  I pulled every punch thinking that this shadowboxing will become something bareknuckled and bloody in the melee of tomorrow, and now I don’t know how to fight.  My world was a silver platter, and now I don’t have a knife or fork or fucking chopsticks and I’ve forgotten how to open my mouth and eat.  To speak.  To kiss or scream.  Just tight-lipped insincerity and hummed paper tiger hope.

The classes left to my dwindling college career are exercises in pretension, of fools dispensing encouragement and praise in anticipation of someone masturbating their egos in turn.  Ideas of talent have been relegated to just that: ideas.  I was talented, and then I was talented at being talented, and now I was talented once.  I drank a warm beer and considered the words of a little-known songwriter: I didn’t want to move, i just wanted to survive.  And I knew we were both lying when we considered it, but I couldn’t stop myself from believing it.  Even so, I’m dreaming of quelques arpents de neige, a place where a witty saying truly will prove nothing.

There’s little now that isn’t cumbersome, burdensome, or bothersome.  How old is the average boy when he learns to man up?  And what teaches him–nature or necessity?  Entitlement or guilt?  I have shied away from the foreign and chalked it up to an elemental predilection towards survival.  You’d best greet life on its own terms, ’cause I ain’t so sure it’ll come lending your demands a friendly ear.  Life’s terms are like those given police by criminals in a hostage crisis.  And if I’m a hostage, I’m the criminal that bound my hands and gagged my mouth, even if I’m still trying to catch a glimpse of whoever put the gun to my head.

These pissant complaints are a kitten’s mewling.

A madman on the catwalk!
Careful steps as floodlights fall
Upon the actors…props?…actors
Playing possum on the stage.
A red silk curtain for a royal shroud;
Lighter still, you lunatic,
Lest your feet should speak aloud,
And betray you, the perpetrator,
To the vast and credulous crowd.