Scowl

Unseasonably warm now, it's nearly December, the month before a looming Gogg of Maggnoration, but it chills to remember April will be yet more cruel / knowing there must be so many to cross - with as many or more unwarming winters.

Through many dark moments difficulties will deliberately be made for you so you might forget the elevation you decry is for one who has sure-footedly forfeited all leadership rights to allegiance, faith - or honor. 

Repeatedly you’ll be be asked what you’re fighting for, queried mockingly, dismissively, and provocatively by those who sneeringly and seemingly wish to wither your resolve and youth.  And in dark moments you are certain to forget.

If you ever knew what you are fighting for - instead of warring against - you will forget.  

You will forget because your interrogators seemingly want that: because they appear intent on forcing you to falsely realize and confess you never knew - that there may be nothing behind you or inside - except perhaps puerile histrionics, naive outrage, infantile entitlement, and childish spite.

Across unnumbered Aprils you will forget your struggling motives because it will shock and hurt to sense your inquisitors merely pretend not to know.  And well they might.  You'll forget because it will horrify and chill to imagine their ignorance is unfeigned.  You will forget because such deadening forgetfulness seems all numbing and silencing.  And you'll forget because your tormenters will appear convincingly correct about the void they fear you're dragging them towards. 

It's said winter burial brings comfort.  So lonely and bitter, the deep dark cold dulls each urge to stretch and sprout - freezing life spurring rains against frozen crusts far removed. Such dead comfort pulls coldly as if, like gravity, it were inexorably woven in time's fabric.  It will pull you hard, and make you forget why you must resist.

You will forget.  

Again and again.

You will forget even in the branded shadows of towers, even trumping aside glistening ribbons of tolled highways, even huddling miserably under corporately leveled arching spans, even swallowing metered measures of privatized water from walled rivers, sealed wells, and padlocked springs.

You will forget when you succumb to illusions your torturers are foes.   Red face, ursine workers with regained Sinatra swagger heaving twinkied lunch pales under country music strains are made as uneasy by you, the true hopes and fears for their own small starting futures they have pledged to better life.  Desiccated scholars of war, embalmed in repartee and sly allusion, scurrying always to cover feigned life tracks, fear faltering and swooning to the wide alluring openness of your still soft eyes.  Page five scribes and hydrogen jukeboxed Pharisees seep their false selves in white whine and angry gin worrying whether and how your like will remember their sad, scattered, bewildered bits and bytes.

You will forget, but need not remember why never to yield.  Reasons will be your your creation, torn painfully from the timeless, selfless whirlwind where all creation returns.

You are not bound to heed counsel from elders who'll rightly spy the Moloch in your battered eyes - and with fiendly voice, proclaim fears groundless.  Institutions, our tawdry legacy, need much scrubbing, fixing, fortifying and testing.  

Though respect is not something earned - like allegiance, deference, fear, or hatred, / distrust most those who, naively or vulpine, claim rights and properties.  Foxes facilitate ingratiatingly for wolf packs and lion prides to whom rights are only what are seized, or held, or pried away from the young, the lame, the wounded, the old, the sleeping, and the fallen.  Raise your dreams up high in the light of moon and sun to wave into hard twisting winds.

Give everyone their due, and keep the circle open.  

Why not dance and sing?  

But if, holy or not, with shoes full of blood, in some Standing Rock or makeshift Paradise Alley kitchen, one haughty, high-spirited, or humbled Hillary offers true lamb stew, buffalo lung tortillas, or unpure hot frybread, shut your Von Trapps one moment and eat.

But just remember.


Remember.

When someone asks for what you’re fighting, it may just be they’ve lost the words. You may not have them either. Not for them. Those go far back to the first words ever - well before being writrn on clay, or stone, or skin. You can find - or read them when you need. So can anyone - to ape, or state, or sing.

Words web knowledge, dreams, and lies. Stern experience, well thought and felt, are webbed - and sad seductive reveries, stuck and sweated, are woven. But words are traps far more than those.

Right wrought words are not enough even if they’re really yours - and irony rings alarming from their exchange.

Words are also holders, open, waiting to catch or be filled - which no one has. Not that we’ve failed - or that they’re empty. The right ones overflow more than they beg. Right words are much more than tools - and so are you. Remember that when you are quizzed.

There’s the response your quizzers crave even more than they might fear.  Giving it with words or hands or heart might be more than you should do. Working it right could stab in panic too - for lashing out or shriveling in.

Remember.

To each other we are wolves - and so are you with no right to despise those whose wounds, beneath hard beaten hides, still gape.

To each other we are wolves and exchanging wounds is what, older than words, still weaves us together.

To each other we are wolves, and from the moon of Aprils' borrowed light is where songs can be chosen.