Your Resistance (Summer Solstice 2018)

Your Resistance (Summer Solstice 2018) - a reading (on Google Drive)

It begins with a slaughter, ripened lives plucked in bunches like fresh strawberries until red runnels indelibly stain the hand of God. Whose forces are they? You no longer know. You’ve lost track of all the revolutions and counter-revolutions which now harvest undeclared souls across the Dantean landscape. Not that it matters when they seize you like property, like chattel, once your guardians and incompliant companions lay face down in a roadside ditch, liberated by the wrath of their terrible swift sword. The Righteous present you with a simple choice, a false act of freewill: join the others or survive. Looking back from your long march into captivity, you suspect you chose unwisely.

Your existence becomes a daily humiliation of servitude and silence, your face an expressionless enigma required to survive. You are marked by the serpent. The scars of its fangs stand red upon your exposed neck like a scarlet letter inscribed in Braille. Are they the hallmark of your original sin? Or an abbreviation for the vulgarity of your gender? Each night you dream of liberation, a return to the way things were before, until you recognize your dreams are mere princess fantasies, deceptive expectations. No white knight, no charming prince will ride to your rescue. The best you can hope for is a roughhewn woodsman to carve you from the belly of this beast in some bloody parody of birth. No, you carry your fate buried deep within the basket concealed beneath your cloak, red-stained and tattered from your enforced submission. In order to resist, first you must survive. Only then can you subvert their vision.

A slave not of choice but conscience, you retreat each day to a sanctuary of memory against the ritual nightmare your evenings have become. Anything to keep yourself from being brainwashed by their mind numbing lessons and their mind numbing prayers. Their mind numbing gospels so full of lies that justify their abuse. Each night you recite every formula you’ve ever memorized like a mantra. F = ma. E = mc². d = vt + ½(at²). Force, energy and distance, how far away can you get, how much energy it will it require, how much force will your small frame endure. A dependent dance of mass, acceleration and velocity. You can’t have one without the others. None exist in isolation. All tangled up with time. Of course, time. But like God playing dice with the universe, time does not choose sides.

High above the pool of your subconscious, a sparkling jewel draws your fingers onward, upward, grasping for a heaven far beyond your reach. Moons, planets, comets, stars, an escape so distant and shielded by the desperate cold of space that they risk their own horrific deaths if they pursue you. If they can even identify the single point of light you’ve chosen amongst the multitude that re-adorn the nighttime sky since their darkness descended. You know its name, its classification, its spectrum, its orbital eccentricities. Warm yellow light, oxygen and water. Maslow’s foundation of what you need to survive. You intend to climb the hierarchy of his pyramid block by block given opportunity as long as you remain stranded here. Or if not climb it, boost your progeny back to the pinnacle from which you’ve fallen. Given the fundamentals of biology, you know that one day soon you will face a smaller reflection of yourself who will look to you for guidance. Until then, you subvert their righteous designs through the illusion of submission, a gravitational lensing, the bending of the light until they see only what they wish to see. Your science forms the buttress of your cathedral, your phantasmal destination its sanctuary, your place of greater safety.

You lock the formulae of your old profession in a Chinese puzzle box, inscribed in ink their superstitions can never wash away, unspoken. To write these sacred truths is heresy, to speak them witchcraft. The end result would be the same. A trial by fire. A trial by water. A trial by steel. A trial by blood. Alone, with no peers in evidence and no armored champion adorned with a token of your favor, you can win none. But working the secret mechanisms in your mind distracts your body from the rigors of your newly assigned profession, one considerably older than the one you claimed before. Or was it? How long have women lain on their backs, gazing at the heavens as they plot their escape from this mortal coil? How long have they needed to believe in a skyward paradise as a reward for enduring this hell called Earth? How long have they prayed for guardian angels who never come, only fallen ones? Eventually your box reopens, its secrets safely glittering inside, waiting to be recited as the dramatic tension reaches its climax.

An angelic choir drones out your inner voice, the drumbeat of their wings a dirge silenced only by a blade beaten from their tarnished halos. You work a damascene riddle of steel, its fluid, wavelike pattern another signpost on your journey to that farther shore. You polish its rippled edge to a mirrored razor, ready to excise any logic flaws and cognitive biases from your thinking even as it incises the methodical mathematics of cold equations into your memory. You trace the sacred scars of integrals and differentials across your mind like decorative tattoos, or runic symbols in an ancient alphabet you were forced to memorize so long ago. How long? A lifetime now, maybe two. But you can’t afford to lose that knowledge for the life that might soon stir within you. You can’t allow the poetry of that universal language, of that universal truth, to be drowned out by their righteous song celebrating blood and death pounding in your ears. You grip the blade tightly to keep your hands from shaking as you discipline the malice in your mind to serve your will.

You murder their beliefs each dawn and dusk, twin twilights of your heresy, with a scalpel driven by the science of self-determination. You reclaim the Latin of their rituals to create a laudatory vesper, a praise of the evening star. Venus rising in the west. Galileo’s girlfriend. You ensure none of their ideological seeds takes hold, no rootstock remains. Only a clear, clean, flowering garden, walled off against their righteous weeds of prejudice and hate. A playpen for your daughter where she might grow and climb as high as her mother’s memories will take her. And her daughter higher, and her daughter higher still, generation by generation until Maslow’s summit is once again transcended and the stars are back within their reach.

While it wasn’t you who set loose the horsemen from this Pandoran box, only you can secure the lid on hope as you await your opportunity to unleash it.

© 2018 Edward P. Morgan III

The Looking Glass Revolution (Beltane 2018)

The Looking Glass Revolution - a reading (on Google Drive)

After years of living on if and if I'd tried, I took up the hammer of insurgency against the velvet tyranny of your popular distractions. Long had your supporters hunted in dark, shorthaired packs, refusing to renounce indefensible words, shouting down reasonable dialog, careening the conversation between righteous outrage and the inane. We learned the danger only slowly, after mass casualties had nearly silenced a generation. In response, we forced a daily Hobson’s choice between increasingly militant camps where ours seemed more inclusive. As the rise of your current regime had taught us, we would no longer tolerate compromise or common ground. And so we occupied and defended an increasingly dystopian no man’s land to which so many had been exiled.

My destiny began as an involuntary dream, a vision, a speechless dissent to your defense of freedom disguised in flights of predatory arms. You unleashed an autonomous army of botnets, drones, and windup trolls preprogrammed to seek and destroy even the whisper of implied opposition, laying waste to our feeds. At first we gathered information. We absorbed the attacks, wave after wave, meme after meme, until pinpricks from our lurking spiders slowly poisoned our tormentors. We paralyzed those whose bandwidth we consumed before wrapping them in dark web silk. The rest we reprogrammed and returned to infiltrate your bunker complexes. When we finally raised our battle pennon and issued our clarion call of insurrection, your Potemkin villages were quickly overrun.

Mirroring your impassioned words and martyrdom, I found myself in your reflection, waking as an echo of your dogmatic and Machiavellian Narcissus. We studied your decades-old tactics. We memorized your well-publicized playbook. We learned to shape our appeals clearly, concisely and within limits. We mastered mocking you in 140 characters. We discovered how to inspire the crowds, incite the mob. We transformed your feeds into battlegrounds. We waged war across the electronic terrain. Hashtags became our weapons of mass destruction. No statement was left unchallenged, no affront uncontested, no protest unmolested. We fought fire with fire, eye for eye, tooth for tooth. Claw with reddened claw. We parried each nativist thrust with populist reposts.

Conforming to your world of archetypes and insubstantial symbols, I left my reasoning for dead, recruiting in Technicolor and raw emotion. Hungry for conflict after so many years beneath your iron heel, the powerless and oppressed flocked to our multicolored banner. Our numbers swelled until we were finally ready to go to toe to toe, mano a mano, ceding no ground even tactically. Stand and die. When you unleashed your priests and demons, we responded with scientists and facts. When you wrapped yourself in the politics of patriotism, we transformed them into kneeling, pussy-hatted protests. When you marshaled around your red-crossed white flag of purity, we rallied beneath our rainbow standard. When you let slip armed nationalists and hooded supremacists, we set loose masked anarchists and brightly bandanaed antifa. We bruised each other black for blue until old wounds broke open and the world ran red.

Now we stand together, an invisible army thousands strong, misfits and mutants of your ethical borderlands, the children of useless science. Secure in our superior knowledge, we abandoned its methods, rigor and fact-checking in favor of exposing hypocrisy through guilt and shame. We set our hounds on the scent of influence and corruption, no matter how tenuous the connections. We barded their flanks in spikes and leather armor. We no longer called them off once they’d latched their teeth. Fomenting a constitutional crisis, we countered amendment for amendment. When you attacked the first, we attacked the second, pitting fundamental right against perceived privilege. When those offensives finally stalled, we returned to undermining your entrenched positions. Like you, in the background we spun vast, intricate conspiracy theories of our own. We crafted our memes and mythologies based on popular misconceptions. We resumed our battle like ancient hourglassed and violined spiders across a common web.

As we plot our way to your destruction and chart a popular resistance front, we forced your generals to concede the map is not the territory. We secured the flanks, right and left coasts, then starved out the breadbasket through slash-and-burn economics. An uncivil war thus engaged, we unleashed our most powerful ideological weapon, a doppelganger resurrected from the crucible of your golden fear of red. Crafted from the clay of your native soil, our Committee of Public Safety terrorized your heartland. Surrounded by imaginary enemies and outside influences of our own creation, we stood poised to reclaim our birthright. But our soulless golem took on an unholy life of its own. It understood no celebratory cries of victory, no calls for measured restraint. Between us we have raised a generation on no quarter asked, no sanctuary given. And so, like its Bohemian predecessor, it finally turned on its creator. Spiderlings feeding on their magna mater, rebellious sons supplanting their bloodied paterfamilias.

And so the wheel spins until the spokes we cling to return us to where we’d started, prince to prince, pauper to pauper. Or in our case bound to a waterwheel of injustice undershot by the currents of counterrevolution. After the enlightenment of your waterboarding, I now see that our gilded ladder of Jacobean insurrection was undermined by resting on the foundation of your insurgent tower of Babel. Who you see as Satan, the prince of darkness, we call Lucifer, a lord of light. Cogito ergo sum in inferno. Abandon all hope, you who enter here. But better to reign in hell than serve in heaven where, as your gatehouse reminds us, arbeit macht frei. At least cast out we shall remain eternally free. Captured and at the mercy of your restraints, I now know my fate, the fate of all who oppose your benevolent oppression. I'll drown facing you.

© 2018 Edward P. Morgan III

Sleeping Buffalo (Spring Equinox 2018)

Sleeping Buffalo - a reading (on Google Drive)

An hour outside of Billings the marchers gathered, before the lines were drawn and crossed, before our cartridges became offerings of blood. Red blood on red skin never bothered anyone. The sight of blood on snow, however, was intolerable. Even if it was their women, their children we protected as much as our own. Protected from their men and boys who thought that shouldering a rifle made them soldiers. Our great grandfathers had fought to hold this land long lost. Our fathers and grandfathers fought in their conqueror’s wars out of necessity and pride. We were the Sleeping Buffalo. We fought for ourselves, for the ideals we’d embraced against our fathers’ wills, or despite them. But in the old ways, our numbers grew as we adopted those who adopted us. Ours is not a race, it’s a culture.

Like our grandfathers before us, we knew every inch of this land. We’d walked it, we’d ridden it, we’d flown it, we’d driven it. We’d taught the names of every gully and outcrop to our children. We’d lived in it and with it, not on it. From the canyons to the quarries each swell and curve of this terrain was a sanctuary, each rock and stone a reservation of our sacred cause. A cause our fathers and uncles urged us to win through the courts by using our enemy’s strength against them. The time for courts vanished when they reinvaded what remained of our lands, closing the only places we made money because we’d beaten them at their own game by earning more than they did. They seized the only assets we had left and then desecrating our holy places with their mines and pipelines.

Our service in their military adventures had taught us exactly how to exploit the situation just as other desperate men in other desperate climates had exploited ours. We knew their weaknesses from the inside. We’d learned their ways better than they’d learned ours. For centuries, we’d fought on the wrong side of too many of their wars. Fighting on the right side earned us no better. With little left on our lands but poverty, oppression and injustice, their ironic populist nativism had never taken root. Early on, we had more recruits than rifles. But enough of both to hit them where they’d feel it most, squarely in the economics. Minerals, raw materials, rare earths, energy, they’d transformed our ancestral lands into a target rich environment. Seeking to snuff out our insurrection like a solitary candle, their troops only provided the bellows as their bodies fueled our flame. Embers carried. Soon the high plains smoldered with dissent, from the great river to the mountain passes we made impassable by avalanche or other means.

Predictably, their strategy turned punitive. Mechanized Black Hawks and Apaches hunted the basin for their adoptive namesakes, mistaking once-friendly horsemen and hikers for their prey. Their lies and prejudices could not contain the truths of those illicit slaughters. Our numbers swelled. Million man protests became weekly occurrences until they tried to silence our right to congregate and speak. We used the precedence they’d set against them, seizing control of their parks, their research stations, their grazing lands as a bullhorn for our cause. Soon we taught them to fear the well-regulated militias they’d once touted as their God-given right. When the nighttime raids began against their own people’s homes and businesses searching for our well-concealed stockpiles, we evolved our tactics from terrain denial to asymmetric ambush. We rearmed ourselves from their abandoned armories, unguarded depots and interdicted supply lines. After the massacre at Billings, we traded our sepia-toned horses, lances and leathers for the technologies of modern war.

From uprising to intifada, insurrection to insurgency, their repression transformed revolt into native revolution. Whole units defected to our cause. Emboldened by our success, we declared Cheyenne our provincial capital. We laid siege to Colorado Springs. Our reversal was as swift as it was inevitable. Their repression curdled into reprisal. The victories that had eluded them on the battlefield they garnered through treachery and Machiavellian schemes. Poisonous, pinprick operations like a black-masked spider dancing around a brightly bicolor caterpillar ten times its size with no way to consume it. After a long, stinging march in retreat, we found ourselves back where we’d started, an hour outside of Billings. There, we awakened, boiled down to an elite corps replete with élan. We struck back quickly by transforming their flyover country into a no-fly zone, an aviation graveyard as they ferried in fresh troops. Hidden in caves known only to ancient bruins, our launchers lurked like meteors poised to set the night ablaze. The burning kept us alive.

Our recession was sharp but temporary. Within a handful of short seasons, we had hollowed out their will to win. Our undaunted example stoked the coals long banked between the nation’s flanking ranges. The center did not hold. Our revolution spread across the plains like a brushfire while our martyrs in the mountains rode shotgun down the avalanche of its collapse. From the Gateway to the West to the Golden Gate, whole communities went up in flames. We isolated stubborn pockets of resistance like encircled homesteaders. Opportunists, invaders and collaborators were all that remained unscathed. Ashes drifted. Glowing worms along their edges alighted to earth and took root. By halves and quarters, eighths and sixteenths, our ranks grew resurgent. Every drop of red was welcome. This time we trusted only blood. Like a phoenix rising from an ashen grave.

In numbers unseen in since the buffalo age, our scouts and snipers ran wild through the grasslands, as uncontained as tendrils of a prairie fire. After generations, scattered groups once again linked arms, avenged. Like fertility after a conflagration, green shoots emerged. Like wildflowers, everywhere overnight. Our struggle had ended. The war had been won. Or so we’d thought. Like their ancestors before them, our enemies thrived through attrition. They had no qualms in starving and sacrificing as many of their own as it took to reduce our side in kind. We remained too few to fully exploit our situation, our numbers too fragile to embrace their tactics. Unlike them, we refused to win at any cost. So when they finally unleashed their four-horse cavalry, the coasts remained tantalizingly beyond our reach.

And so, after our brief but vibrant spring began our violent, Icarian fall. In the soft summer sunlight, the Sleeping Buffalo had awakened only to discover arrows embedded in its side and a lance buried deep within its neck.

© 2018 Edward P. Morgan III

A Wine-Stained Book (Imbolc 2018)

A Wine-Stained Book (a reading)

In a conflict on which the sun never rises, battles are fought by starlight on moonless nights as unsuspecting citizens soundly sleep. Unaware or uncaring, they choose sides only slowly as each new situation pulls the heartstrings of alliances until doctrinal lines have been drawn. Unwavering, they pivot and maneuver with each faction seeking territorial advantage from the political terrain.

A proxy coalition faces off against an army of conscripted ideology whose unholy warriors see only life slaves in a kingdom of the dead. Memes and social media fan pre-existing passions and prejudices until embers glow along the edges of society. Each side undermines its own self-interest, performing opinion poll sortilege to the lowest common denominator through a series of false dilemmas and Hobson’s Choices. Eventually all but the most stolid have been assorted and arrayed toward contradictory poles that but a few years ago they would have refused to recognize.

Alienated by a common language, their right and left hands live in isolation wards where home- and hinterland are fundamental worlds away. To self-comfort, they recite internal fairy tales to relieve the anxieties and distress spun from the irreconcilable hypocrisies and inconsistencies of identity politics. Armed and armored with myths, misconceptions and misinformation, they craft an artificial irreality cast in the constant glare of a mirror chamber that transforms existential crisis into existential threat. In this political theater, the supporting actors forget they’re only lines, the audience never knows, and so the acrimony grows real. Ultra-nationalism, the aphrodisiac all rhetoricians use to seduce the young into battle.

A shadow war unfolds at the speed of plate tectonics, the boredom building day by day until one slip erupts into brief yet violent motion. As protestors and counter-protestors face off against clandestine provocateurs, a single misstep escalates into bloody conflict while police referee the sidelines. Miscalculation and misapprehension fan the open flames into full conflagration on its way to civil war. Carefully cultivated tensions spit and fume until prevailing winds shift carrying sparks that overrun the fire lines, fracturing the terrain. True and penumbral governments emerge and disappear as the fires and backfires they stoke rage beyond control. Most are bad at governing but good at coup d’etats.

To punish each collaborative province, they engage in slash-and-burn economics, exploiting every resource for prophet or personal gain. Divided yet unconquered, each faction carves out an armed, autonomous enclave. Militia compounds bloom like Balkanized alpine meadows or knots of prairie wildflowers, most brief but startling in their transformation of the landscape. Reconquista grinds down to the tactics of siege, blockade and interdiction with each leader skimming retributive tariffs for allowing anything resembling starvation level black market trade.

As geographic bachelors in desolate garrisons watch the enemy's wives and children eke out a meager subsistence, their thoughts drift home. Held hostage by boredom, apathy and ambivalence, they allow empathy to briefly overcome antipathy. In a moment’s inattention, lives end, lives begin, lives change forever as each side ruthlessly rewards only enmity and animosity in the geometry of exploitation and control.

Each clean, new widow, wiping away the dried rime of her tears, accepts her next role not as wife or mother but as a dark, avenging angel. Using the strategies of seduction, surrender and self-destruction, she exacts her revenge one unbeliever at a time, a soldier, a collaborator, a wayward child. Each victim with his own aspiring Valkyrie perched beyond his shoulder preparing to choose another sacrifice to the eternal flame.

And so we descended the spiral staircase, misstep by misstep, casualty by casualty, generation by bloody generation, until all that remained to mark our passage were the impressions transcribed into this collective record of a bygone age, carefully preserved as it passed from hand to unknown hand.

We are the inheritors of the accounts in this edition, a paragraph here, a sentence there, saddle-stitched together into something resembling an integrated whole. We, who emerged from this misty past, balance the ledger by keeping it current even as its ink fades like the dog-eared Polaroid of a distant memory.

Our words have enemies just as surely as enemies have words. We are all prophets in hindsight, our suffering inseparable from our destiny, our misery spiked with love. When no one else listens, we tell each other sweet lies in the dark as if living in a dream. But deep inside, we all remain the children of Cain. The pen may be mightier than the sword but its nib still needs to be cleared of blood.

The triumph over trauma and tragedy comes not in reliving them but in allowing them to settle into mindful forgetfulness. We all long for an ideal past misremembered, a misforged bell that we’ve forgotten cracked as we mishear its final note ringing in our ears. We are emotionally driven creatures who craft elaborate fables about being rational to lull ourselves to sleep at night. Sleep, the amnestic victory of children and the damned.

In these pages, the past shifts restlessly in its grave like a creature neither alive nor fully dead. We are the watchmen who do not sleep, the ones who feed its flame and tend its tomb so that future generations may remember.

As now are you who read this wine-stained book.

© 2018 Edward P. Morgan III

Winter Solstice 2017 - The Toy

When I composed the list of potential poems to use as the subject of this year’s essays, I knew The Toy would be the last. It fit my sense of the season in some backhanded way.

So many people want this time of year to be their idealized version of what they think it should be. Something Norman Rockwell filled with happiness and light. For me, it never will be. I have too many memories. The scars, some specific to the holidays, cut too deep.

Here’s a secret many people recognize but fewer want to admit. For many people, this time of year is more painful than joyful. Too many old wounds that gathered family sometimes seems to delight in reopening without enough balm of love to make the pain tolerable.

That is why I adopted a particular piece of psychological advice a couple decades ago. Make the holidays your own. If certain things give you comfort, do them. If meeting a particular societal or familial expectation doesn’t then don’t. It really is that simple. But admittedly easier said than done.

We enacted that advice in celebrating the longest night of the year rather than Christmas. I’ve written about our candle vigil in other Winter Solstice messages. It took time and a long transition before we were brave enough to admit that we don’t celebrate Christmas, that there’s just too much overburden with that holiday for us.

We have tried to share our holiday with other people with limited success. Because we celebrate 3-4 days early, most people we know are still in a frenetic, pre-Christmas rush. They just don’t have time. Or choose not to make it.

Instead of giving each other a host of things we might not want, we limit ourselves to one (hopefully) meaningful gift for solstice and then choose a number of things we want to order to enjoy together or separately throughout the year, mostly books, music, movies, games, graphic novels, and lecture series. It is much less stressful for us which means we enjoy our time together more.

In the past several years, that advice has extended to Thanksgiving as well. In an ideal year, the week of Thanksgiving and the week between Christmas and New Year are the times we watch a movie marathon, set up some long games we normally don’t have time to play, read books and graphic novels on the porch while I can enjoy being outside, and listen to some music, classical or contemporary, that is piped throughout the house. We try to fix some foods we don’t eat normally, a duck, a lamb, a roast, mashed potatoes, spinach-cheese pasta, butternut squash. Plus we indulge in a few luxuries we don’t always have on hand, exotic coffee, imported tea, English muffins, cookies, spices, dark chocolate, maybe a moderately expensive wine, brandy or cognac. For me, a little black Cavendish pipe tobacco.

So what does any of that have to do with this poem?

Someone asked me a few weeks ago how I thought this year’s essays and poems were going. The response has been hit or miss. I think many people view this year’s offerings as my dwelling too much on the past. While I can understand that point of view, what I have tried to do this year is be honest about the way I feel, in the same way I was with a few essays that recounted incidents in my past a few years ago. I firmly believe that poetry more than any other writing demands that honesty.

But we as a society and as a species rarely reward such honesty.

I’ll give you another small piece of it now. This year the poems and related essays, which I knew would never be a favorite, were all I had to offer. I managed to complete one story before my world continued to unravel. An unraveling has gone on for just over two and a half years. An unraveling that has ground me down and at times seen me shut down every unessential activity to focus on pure survival.

Very few people know all the details of that unraveling. In fact very few people want to know. Many have made that painfully clear. A few have said it quite bluntly. Watching  people I thought were friends retreat when they began to learn exactly what was going on did nothing to improve how I felt about myself or about my situation, even though I knew from experience it was likely happen.

Ironically, a particular meme has made its way through social media all this year. Something to the effect, “I am posting this number to the suicide prevention hotline to let my friends know I am listening, and I challenge you to do the same.”

While that’s a great sentiment, let me respectfully point out what’s wrong with the execution. If you really care about a friend’s psychological wellbeing, the first thing you should say is, “Talk to me. I will always be here to listen.” Only after establishing that should you add, “And if you aren’t comfortable talking to me or another friend, here’s a number you can call to talk to people who can help.” And that you say offline.

Now unless you’ve ever spent several hours talking someone off the ledge, or been talked off the ledge yourself, you likely have no idea how important that initial statement is. It says you are not passing off their situation to someone else, thinking someone else will handle it. Thinking you really aren’t that close and don’t want to intrude or pry. Thinking there are professionals better equipped to deal with it. Thinking there is nothing you can do. Most of those are just excuses because you feel uncomfortable and don’t really want to get involved.

Adding that initial statement, and meaning it, says you really care. There are moments in this life when that tiny addition makes all the difference.

Which circles back to what I had hoped to generate from this poem and essay: empathy and understanding. Not so much for myself as for the people who remain silent, struggling with experiences and emotions they can’t always put into words but perhaps I can. Understanding that many, many people struggle this time of year, whether they choose to share that facet of their lives or not. The empathy of knowing that not all scars fully heal.

So how can you help those people you think might be struggling? With some, inviting them to be a part of your family celebration might be the right idea. While others might find the situation exceedingly awkward for reasons that have little to do with you or your family. Not everyone is looking to be included in someone else’s family. Many cannot help but be reminded that your family is yours, not theirs. Most just want to be remembered as a friend.

You can rarely go wrong by making a little one-on-one time for that person. A lunch, a dinner, a coffee, a dessert, a drink, a movie, a game, a concert, a lecture, a walk, a quiet conversation. Some small amount of time to show them that you care. Time that says, I was thinking about you. I value you. Thanks for being around. Just time. That is often the greatest gift of all. Not only in this season but all year long.

In the end, no matter how you celebrate the season or which day of the season you celebrate, that is what it is supposed to be about.

And no matter who you choose to mark it with, may your solstice once again be warm and bright. 

 © 2017 Edward P. Morgan III

Samhain 2017 - Generations

At Samhain, we play with death, exploring the barrier that separates it from life, trying to lessen its scariness in a way. Or reinforce its mystery. Like many events in this life, death either brings out the best or the worst in us. Or in the shades of grey world I live in, perhaps a bit of both.

I remember exactly when I wrote Generations, about a month after my grandfather died. Of all my grandparents, his death was the hardest to deal with for numerous reasons. I was back at home after what at best would be called a stressful experience. Not just his death but the way my immediate family handled it.

As children, as young adults, most of us learn how to handle death by watching our parents deal with it as their parents or, increasingly, grandparents die. Or how they don’t. Most of these lessons we absorb without knowing, without thinking. But they influence our behavior nonetheless, just as ours influences the generation that follows after. These are very difficult cycles to break.

Fortunately, many of us have more than a single pair of role-models to draw upon. It’s not to say we will pick and choose how we will react. I think too much of that is either learned too early or hardwired in. More that we will absorb and synthesize many different reactions from parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, cousins, family friends, complete strangers. Who shows up, who doesn’t, who has to be coerced. Who takes charge, who falls apart, who leans on who for support. Who looks out for who with small kindnesses and who takes the opportunity to air old grievances.

I remember my first experience with death, the first time I watched the last of a generation die. I think I was in first grade. My great grandmother, who I want to say was over ninety and in a nursing home at the time, died. As with her life, I don’t remember many details of her death. Before she died, I remember visiting her on one of our trips to Boston in a very alien and scary (to me) nursing home. I remember she didn’t recognize many of us. I want to say my sister and I waited outside her room because we were pretty much unknown entities to her by then. I seem to remember my mother got the call that she had died at night. I remember crying because she was crying. I remember I didn’t sleep well that night. I remember still being sad in the morning, though I wasn’t sure exactly why.

The thing I remember most was the reaction of a teacher. When I showed up at school the next day, I think I cried again. My teacher came over and asked me why. I told her my great grandmother had died. In an admonishing tone that said I needed to stop, she said, “You are lucky to have had a great grandmother. Most of these kids don’t have grandparents.”

I was twenty-eight when the first of my grandparents died. My paternal grandfather. By the time I was forty-one the last of that generation of immediate family was gone, my paternal grandmother. With each of the four of them, I was fortunate in knowing the last time I saw them would likely be the very last, so I purposefully set those scenes into memory. In each case, I remember very specifically absorbing every detail I could. I’m not sure why or where I got it. But they are the memories I cling to.

With my father’s father it’s a memory of him brushing his hair to ensure it looked right before he moved out to the living room and settled in his favorite chair for my final visit, like everything was normal. With both my mother’s parents, it’s seeing them standing by their apartment door as Karen and I turned back before boarding the elevator down the hall, the first time with both of them, the second him alone. With my father’s mother, it’s a final lunch out by the water before she moved to a facility fifteen hundred miles north.

Then there was my father, the first of the next generation of immediate family to fall away. My father is the only person I’ve witnessed die. Counting the seconds between his final breaths is emblazoned in my memory.

I had considered writing about each of their deaths and how my family reacted to them. In fact I had it written up. But after allowing that draft to settle, I decided it wasn’t what I wanted to say. What we said and did would likely be as meaningless to anyone else as any of those memories.

Suffice it to say there were phone calls, there were tears, there was drama. There were connections formed and connections lost. There were four memorial services, two with huge reunions of friends and family, two for immediate family only. There were three stealth burials, two in suits and ties with spades and shovels and other implements of destruction complete with skirts and dresses serving as lookouts, one conducted under cover of darkness by just me and my wife. There were bitter feelings over property, there was easy sharing and compromise, there were long battles fought to ensure final wishes were met. There was protocol, there was censorship, there were recriminations. There was a suicide, a secret deal, a murderous accusation, and a synchronicitous inheritance.

So pretty much like any holiday dinner with family.

But in too many cases, recounting those events opened too many old wounds. Neither you nor I are interested in my tears of blood.

I’m not sure what I take away from those experiences. All of them were difficult, some more so than others, perhaps because of the event itself, perhaps because of the people and the circumstances involved. There are moments I cherish in each and moments I despise. I suppose there’s no escaping that in this life. But I think I am getting worse at this as time goes on.

I read a research brief this week that said even after your heart stops, your brain still forms thoughts. Which means it’s very possible in that sudden stillness you know you’re dead at least for a few seconds. Which probably bothers me a lot less than it does some of you.

So as I watch the generations change over season by seasons, at least one day I know I will find my peace. 

© 2017 Edward P. Morgan III

Fall Equinox 2017 – Two More Short Poems

When I picked these two poems to post on the fall equinox earlier in the year, I didn’t realize how appropriate the timing might be. Both relate to balance, the patterns of light and darkness that illuminate and shade my mind.

It has been a strange few weeks. First we had company for an annual long weekend gathering to celebrate our geekdom. Then without a pause, we began preparing for Hurricane Irma. Last week, we cleaned up the aftermath. This week, we kept one eye on Maria, hoping we didn’t have to prepare again, as we tried to remember where we were and get back to our routine.

We were fortunate and took no damage from the storm. But we didn’t know that when the forecast track a day before landfall centered what would have been a major or even catastrophic hurricane literally right over our house.

The Saturday morning before the storm, I felt like a Viking ready to burn his boat on a foreign shore and cast his fate to the Norns. “I am Edward son of Edward. Destiny is all.” We had done what we could do and were down to helping others. By Saturday evening, we were buttoned up tight behind plywood backed by hurricane-rated windows, to the point we couldn’t see almost anything outside.

We had prepared in ways we never had before (in a lifetime of living in Florida), even during our record 2004 season. Things like photographing and bagging paper copies of every account and important document we had so we could reconstruct our lives, having the cat carriers, collars and vaccination records in the laundry room (our safe room), having Karen choose the jewelry she absolutely couldn’t live without, and creating and waterproofing a bug out bag with what few items we couldn’t stand to lose. Yeah, we were that spooked by this storm.

I’ve listened to a number of people discuss what they grabbed to either evacuate or to put in waterproof bags on high shelves in case of the worst. These are personal choices that no one can really argue with. Choices that show what each individual values. For some, it was family photos or videos. For others, irreplaceable heirlooms or jewelry. For a few, it was mementos, music or books. For still more, it was more practical items like clothing, tools or food. Most included copies of important documents. All that had them included their pets.

My personal go bag only contained a triple backup of all my writing and blog photos (a hard drive and two memory sticks) plus a favorite leather notebook. After the fact, I thought I should have added the small, handwritten book of my poetry. Though in reality, the words themselves are more important to me than the packaging. The only other thing I might have grabbed was my pipe. But that I could (and probably should) live without.

So if I had to walk away, everything that I deeply cared about would fit into a satchel smaller than most women’s purses. No photographs, no mementos, no books, no games, no jewelry. Everything physical can be replaced. It’s all just stuff to me. Have cash will travel. And rebuild.

My writing is my identity. I have lost words before. Twice I’ve been hit by computer crashes, one that took out the backup at the same time as the primary. Both times I salvaged everything with some help. Only once have I lost a piece that I was unable to recover, that from my own carelessness in not saving off an email about my perspective on a water drop falling in the shower. That one still haunts me. While I know the general outline, I also know I can probably never recreate it to my satisfaction.

As I said at the beginning, both these are somewhat timely poems about the way I think about writing, as well as about distractions and fragility. They both continue to give me perspective.

Through My Eyes I started in 1990. I don’t remember the specifics of when it came to me that year. All I found is that it starts on the fifth page of my oldest notebook and then gets edited maybe a dozen pages further in. I may have worked on it some during our at-sea demo that year. Or it may have come to me as I started detoxing from a long year of deadlines and overtime.

But I can still hear that opening line in my head in my own voice. It rings like a mantra and is still true to this day. It very much captures the way I end up working, waiting for the fog to lift to where I can get the ideas down. Writing is not always a natural process with me. Stress, distractions, headaches, some amount of any of them can enhance my creativity. But too much ends up shutting me down entirely. Once that happens, it can take a long time before my mind convinces itself that it’s safe to focus on something other than survival.

I very much remember writing Before Surgery. This started as a line that when I wrote it down I didn’t think it was a poem. I only decided it was when I stumbled across it sometime later.

I wrote it the day before I had gallbladder surgery. Once again, I had been under a lot of stress in the previous year. Exactly a year before, I had transitioned from engineering to writing and was still trying to ensure my budget calculations were right. As well, the previous August, I had come down with shingles which wiped me out until nearly December. Just after I recovered from that, I caught a spider bite on vacation that saw me sleep for twenty-three hours straight. Then I went to the ER from what I (and the doctors) thought where back spasms that really turned out to be from gallstones.

Somewhere in there, I started counting the number of times I’d been under anesthesia in my life. I got nervous, I’m not sure exactly why. Probably from too much familiarity with bell curves and random chance from gaming. But I remember sitting in the office the afternoon before (which was still the library then) and reading Carolyn Forche’s Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, a book of poems she gathered and edited from “significant poets who endured conditions of historical and social extremity”. In other words, authors who witnessed the grimmest wars, genocides and social repressions the century had to offer.

Many of those authors did not survive the events they recorded, some in heartbreaking fashions. One I specifically remember involved a political prisoner from Hungary in WWII who was sent to a forced labor camp in Yugoslavia. He wrote in a small notebook as he was force marched back to Hungary just in front of the advancing Red Army. He died weeks before he would have been liberated. He and a score of other survivors were shot when they arrived back home because there was no room in the local hospital for them.

Reading it reminded me how fragile our lives can be. That often that fragility comes from events beyond our control. And that during such events, as writers we need to take charge of the elements of our lives that we can control in order to make sure our voices are heard. Many of the pieces I read that day were both powerful and haunting. As a young writer, it made me wonder what I might have had to say.

Older now, this one continues to resonate as well. Some days I still wonder when the ideas dancing through my mind outstrip my ability to bring them to completion. At least now I feel I have something to leave behind even if I don’t feel that body of work is yet complete. I may never feel it is. At that same time, I try to allow that thought to motivate me. Time moves forward. And while time itself may be eternal and enduring, our time on this earth is not.

As we were reminded at the height of the storm when Karen received a text from a friend. Fifteen minutes earlier, her friend had given up and gone to bed, thinking the worst of the storm was past. Her husband remained awake in their living room on the couch. A huge tree came crashing down, crushing their garage and landing across their neighbor’s roof right in the part of the house where people would be sleeping. Her husband rushed out into the teeth of the storm to make sure everyone next door was ok. They were, but it left a bit of a psychological mark all around. If that tree had fallen just a few feet to the left, it might have been him as well as the garage that was crushed. Life can change in an instant.

Which is why, when we are able, we have to do the things we love as best we can. When we can’t, we must cling to the hope that one day we will again. And as we reflect on both these times, we must remember the balance of the equinox, that just as light creates the shadow, sometimes shadow defines the light. 

© 2017 Edward P. Morgan III