Overheard at Table 2: The Variant

The Variant

Watching a tv series, the actress
reminds me of you: same quirk of the lips into
wry smile, same tweak of the eyes, same  fierce intelligence,
same drive to complete her mission, all those things
I saw from you when we worked together, at that job
that ground us all down eventually.

Then I realize I have not spoken to you in over two years,
and I wonder if you were still at that job,
how your kids are doing, if
you are still married to that jerk of a husband you were
always complaining about.

"Do you think she's pretty?" my wife, sitting beside me on the couch,
asks me.

"Semi sorta," I lie.

MR

2021-0707

Overheard at Table 4: What Happened to the Muse?

What Happened to the Muse?

"I used to be your Muse," she says,
"What happened?  What happened to all the 
poems and stories you wrote for me?"

My mind flips through the pages of days and months and years:
the first chapters was all the mystery of learning each other, the
fascinating movement of your body, your hands, your lips, your eyes,
and the plays we saw together, the walks in the park, and then

flip ahead a few chapters and they are filled mostly with
you pushing me to find new jobs with better pay because the
kids needed braces or the house needed a new roof or we 
needed a new house, and saving for the kids college, and 
me getting my MBA (to keep on getting that new job) and 
all the meetings at Church to try to teach us to be a better couple and
your questioning why I am not living up to the ideal of the Christian
husband, and after 15 years why don't I know where the dishes go and
why don't I remember that you don't like sausage on your pizza and 
why am I always so passive aggressive about what restaurant we should go to,
why don't I just pick one for godsakes?! and inevitably there is the
"she's MY daughter and if I want to give her money to go on a trip then I will
and you can't say shit about it and I don't give a fuck WHAT you say because you
are always so controlling about the money and how much money do we have anyway?"

and no, I really don't know what happened to the Muse.
I think she may have been misplaced in some cupboard, maybe a few houses back,
because I really never bothered to learn where to put her.

MR

2021-0708

Overheard at Table 3: Poem "Four Shots"

Four Shots

Four shots ring out:
pop! pop! pop! pop!
Black body slumps against chainlink fence.
White hand switches back on
    the bodycam.




MR
2021-0702

Overheard at Table 1: This Fourth of July

This Fourth of July I cannot bring myself to even a modicum of pride.  Everything about this day has just been left miserable, like a rotten taste of eating crab cakes that had been left out the fridge for days and then reheated and swallowed.  And it's not because of just the Conservatives having usurped the flag to make Patriotism some sort of litmus test to see who can hate the gays the most, and it's not just because the Liberals and their "wokeness" make me want to paint Thomas Jefferson as a demonic murderer, but mostly it's because no one seems to be able to look at the birth of this country with a discerning eye.

History is complicated. Because history is made of people, and people are complicated, and many complicated people doing many complicated things makes history something that lays itself wide open to vast interpretation, especially when the quality of the human mind wants to distill everything down to the length of a tweet or a pithy phrase that fits nicely on a bumper sticker.

It is the facility of thought and the shallowness of thinking of my fellow Americans that has made me unable to be proud of this country on this day.  245 years old and this is what we have produced: a bunch of screaming harpies who cogitate like toddlers fighting over the ice cream that has spilled on the floor?

We are a sad sad lot, if we are this incapable of seeing ourselves and our past in anything other than, "They were HEROES!" or "They were GENOCIDAL SLAVE OWNERS!"

Because they were both.  At the same time.

And they were also so much more than that.  

And just because each person has dug themselves into their own little ideological playpen does not negate the fact that the people who started this country were so much more than anything we can imagine, because we are so stagnant in our "good/bad" mode of thought.

 

Overheard at Booth 3: Not my Sin

just as our history is not our destiny,

we should not be held responsible for the sins of those who have long died.

What do they have to us?

A shade of skin?

That is nothing.

I have no relation to them.

yes, I will admit that I have benefitted from the world they left behind,

but what I do or do not do for the benefit of others is my blessing or my sin, 

not them, no.

i do not accept their sin.

Overheard at Table 1: Boxes

Boxes

We draw lines 
Around ourselves,
Boxes.

Box ourselves in,
Like cats, drawn

To boxes.

Then we draw lines
Around others.
We say, “These are your
Boxes. You
Stay there, in your boxes.”

And then we each
Stare at each 
Other, separated
By our boxes, 

And we proclaim

EQUALITY!



MR
2021-0702

Overheard at Table 2: Inheritance

We have all inherited a world that was created by those who came before us.

We can spend out time beating each other up over who did what to whom, 

or we can work together so that our descendants won't have to do the same.