Bag of Bones

Bag of bones,

sack of guts,

is skin all

that contains what is

inside?

Worm food or

Soylent Green.

Ashes to ashes,

dust to dust,

from the earth we came

and to the earth we return,

bones and guts and

ashes and dirt

all wrapped in

skin.

Where are the muscles,

the tendons,

the strength?

People are more

than jiggling sagging bags

waiting to burst

and rot.

The prompt for this week was to write a poem that constantly noticed what was inside things, and this is what came out of that prompt and my head. I've been in a bit of a mood lately.

The Bouquet

         Someone had sent her flowers. They sat now, arranged in her best vase, brightening the breakfast nook. She hadn’t sat at that table for almost a year. She never went into her breakfast nook anymore. But that table is where bouquets had always been put, and that is where she found this bouquet waiting for her. It was where bouquets belonged.

There were roses, and daisies, and Baby’s Breath, and carnations, and other flowers whose names she did not remember. It was a beautiful bouquet, big and showy, and it must have been expensive. There was a small card that had come with the bouquet, but she had not opened it. She was afraid to read it, afraid of who it might be from, and sad because of who it could not be from.

But he was the only person to ever buy her bouquets. He had made sure to get her a big bouquet for their anniversary every year, it would be waiting there on the breakfast table in the morning when she got up, leaving him still asleep in their bedroom. And it was their anniversary, or would have been if he had not left her here, alone. Almost a year ago, now. She had held his hand until he was gone. He had said that he would always love her, that their love was eternal. And today there was a bouquet.

Midwinter Naptime

Outside, silence.

No birds.

No cars.

No dogs barking.

Mute snow drifting

to muffle the world.

Everything stops.

Frozen outside.

Inside music and

warmth.

Fake fireplace on

the TV.

Music playing.

Dog below the TV.

Dreaming

of a real fireplace.

Cats dozing,

draped over comfy chairbacks.

Midwinter naptime.

Cathy's Cafe

Cars climbing up to Cathy’s Café

Sitting on top of Cabbage Crest.

Slick slippery sliding snow-smothered

damp-frozen mist-hung snake-slither road.

Big-rig semi-haulin’ 4-wheel grindin’

stud-crunching chains-clinkin’ trucks,

Cadillacs and Cameros and piece-of-crap junkers

All chugging up to the neon halogen glow

HOT SOUP and COLD BEER and FRESH BISCUITS.

Rough-scrabble sardine-tight parking lot,

Gravel-packed ice-gelled concrete

Crunch-slip-slide into the bar,

Hot and dark and bright white under booth lights

Beer over here!

Hey honey you need warmed up?

Disneyland On My Mind

"All the birds sing words and the flowers bloom,

In the Tiki Tiki Tiki Tiki Tiki Room."

A wonderful world of color and song,

In the Tiki Room things never go wrong.

A pineapple whip helps wing you away,

To lands of joy with no troubles all day.

Outside the park it is dry and hot,

Inside the park people laugh a lot.

Out in the world people hate a fear,

Inside the park there is love and cheer.

Nowhere else in the world is there such a wonderful place,

With so much magic packed into such a very small space.

Disneyland is a place where magic’s awhirl,

Where everyone welcomes each boy and each girl.

Disneyland is a dream made real

By the heart hope and love

of one man, and a mouse.

Why Lance Armstrong Had to be Brought Down

Lance Armstrong has been stripped of his medals for alleged use of performance enhancing drugs. A decade ago. From 1999 to 2012 he was a hero, the best cyclist in the sport, an inspiration to millions across the globe. He created a foundation that has done wonderful things to aid cancer research, and help cancer victims and survivors. He was an American icon. But America cannot have heroes. We cannot have great men. We have not been able to allow ourselves to have people who were smarter than us, stronger than us, better than us at anything, for generations. If such a man does come along, we may cheer and applaud him for a time, but eventually we grow jealous and must find a way to tear him down. He must become as small and petty and flawed as we are.

Of course every man and woman has flaws, especially those who gain fame. We are humans; we are flawed. There was a time when such flaws were understood to be there, but were not sought out, were not thrown into the spotlight in order to shame an otherwise great person. Instead those aspects of a person that were admirable and commendable were highlighted. This was not to coddle the ego of the individual, but to allow that individual to be inspirational to a nation. No man is a saint, and even historians are getting into the dirt digging idea and proving that the saints were no saints in their everyday lives.

But why can we not allow an individual who inspired us, who we all said at one point or another was the greatest among us in his or her specialty, why can we not allow that person to remain an inspiration? Why do we as a society insist on dragging our greatest back down into the mud we wallow in?

It took nearly a decade for “investigators” to “discover” evidence that Lance Armstrong had doped, although they were digging for it the whole time. He had passed every single drug test he was given for the seven years he was leader of the Tour de France. But now we say that those test results are still pristine (because of course no one has been trying, by hook or by crook, to prove that Lance doped). And of course with “new testing methods” these investigators can show that the test samples from a decade ago are still viable, untainted, untampered, and pristine, to prove that Lance was doping years ago.

The testimony from former teammates is also going unchallenged. But then, they were all threatened with lengthy suspensions unless they provided damning testimony against one particular man. That is not in the least bit a suspicious, threatening, coercive move by the “investigators.” And here I thought that those who were seeking truth and fairness did not threaten and coerce people. I thought that was the mob, or certain governments in history that were less concerned with truth than with spectacle and vengeance.

And vengeance against who? A man who inspired us, lifted up a nation, inspired couch potatoes and cancer survivors alike to get up and take control of their lives by exercising and caring about their bodies. How dare he. We are a nation who would rather have a “C” student as our leader than a Rhodes Scholar, because we enjoy having someone as ignorant and bigoted as we are lead us. We cannot allow athletes to remain great, we have to find a weak spot and knock them down. We cannot allow ourselves to believe in a person who is flawed, and all people are flawed. So we have to find those flaws, expose them, let those flaws obliterate everything great that our former hero did that we loved, and then rejoice that we have proved to ourselves that they are just as base and petty and vile as we are.

The defaming of Lance Armstrong was not about truth, or justice, or fairness. It was about our own selfish need to not have anyone be that much better than we are. How dare he have inspired us. How dare he be a hero.