That’s Not My Fault

Some of us don’t live in the political world where each word is calibrated for optimal benefit.  “No, that’s not my fault,” is very popular.  I used to live like that, but I got tired.  Today I drive emotions, the old models.  I can’t trade for something newer, since cancer spots the frame and there’s too much iron in my blood. 

When you get to the country where all the women have black hair, that’s where you want to stop.

I was sitting on the edge of the water and from time to time I’d pull her in and we’d make love and later we’d go to different places while Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence sounded.  We’d think how vampires were drinking our blood.  It made sense at the time and she was from Atlanta.  We’d been in grad school for a year and every Thursday afternoon we’d hit the happy hours for free food and cheap drinks, then we’d go back to her place and drink and jump up and down, some sort of tribal dance, maybe Dinka, I can’t remember, and it would go like that until Sunday morning when I’d drive back to my place and start studying math for the proverbial test.    

Dead people.

Peter and I used to go down to the field below the hospital and dance with the mostly naked tribes and clans.  On any given Sunday there might be six or seven thousand there, jumping around or line dancing, singing and clapping, rolling in the dirt and grass, popping up to kick their feet skyward like a bird taking flight.  Most of them would be dead soon enough. When I watch internet dance videos of young people in L.A. or London, they remind me of thousands of refugees dancing on a terrible ground and they are dying there, slowly with breaths, as some war rages nearby. 

This is the same sort of image I’d get when the girl from Atlanta and I would dance in her apartment.  

I think she loved me, but that wasn’t good enough and I’d tell her she wasn’t ready for me yet.  Maybe in a few years depending upon how much pain waited for her.  I’d speak low when we’d wake up and it was always somewhere around three in the morning and I’d tell her the only way we could be together is if she would agree to come with me without a plan and we’d go all over the world, working as we went along, but she’d have to get ready for some war and being sick for significant periods and we’d have to rely on Third World medicine and hospitals and the kindness of others. 

The world.  Chaos and violence and fear.  As a Peter once ask me before falling asleep, do you think we’ll wake up?  I didn’t reply, because I was unsure and then I fell asleep and we lay there in our tent until the movement of thousands of people outside woke us.

We had a breakfast of Cheetos that day and then it all started again and again and again and then one day we just left all of them there.

Lost, sitting without faces.