Friday Night at the VFW

The spirit has gone out of me. Life is good and I am happy. My torment isn’t over, its just over for now, and I don’t have anything to pull myself through. Writings been like the blues, and I sing them to get over them. I used to swing a pen like a weapon, but the wars over and now I just debate diplomats over tea and scones. I rue an image that has me swapping stories at the VA Hospital. Only the reservists survive in my line of work, and the guys that really know combat bite the dust, its part of the job, it comes with the territory.

Still I can’t help it though. I was born to write and when I think back to the times when I was as crazed as Gloucester in the rainstorm, with my hair on end and the sweat on my palms racing against all physical limits of speed, writing like the story would die if I took my time; when I’d bathe in the salty whaling graveyards of New Bedford and stare back at my grandfathers yellow house, with its chipping paint and its roman pillars, and the stone rock jetties that sectioned off the lower south end, I want to pour it out of me, as if these imagines are a source of the breath in my lungs. They give me and make me what I am, and its something I can’t ever get enough of. The tore down the old playground behind Bennett school, and it can only live on in pictures, but pictures can’t tell you how the world looked from those tires and planks and how you remember a school with no chimney having a billowing black cloud coming from those imaginary bricks, when the leaves changed color and you were fine in hooded sweatshirts and your cheeks were numb but you refused a hat.

There’s no picture that knows what a trip down 44 smelled like when you were late and you wanted to be early because on the other end was the only thing you really wanted. They mocked the discipline when I was at UMass as a monk-like pact of poverty but the world still needs writers because the intangible will die without us. All I can do now is pray I speak of the passion well enough to sound the rallying cry; that the young and lamentable can feel the stories inside of them. Until I have a reason to paint again, I’ll stick to politics. Someday the ghosts will come back to haunt me and when they do I promise I’ll give you the best of what’s killing me.