We Are the Future Factory

18 July, 2009

I am going camping in the woods by some water.
There will be fishing, but not by me.
I suppose there will be some filleting of fish, but, again, not by me.
Fishing makes me struggle uncomfortably with my conscience.
I will eat the fish, though.
I am good at contradictory behaviour.

I keep thinking about that dog with his head through an on-purpose hole in the fence
who barked and barked at us as though he were vicious,
but someone had put large, wooden flower petals around the hole,
which made his head look like the centre of a flower.
The fence made him a prisoner.
The hole in the fence made the state of his confinement seem more humane.
The flower petals rendered his tough-guy posturing comic.
None of that made any essential difference.
He was just a dog barking in a yard.
We were just on the side of the fence that made it seem funny.

When my parents were children,
television and magazines told them to dream about outer space
and the wild frontier and the way of the future.
When I was a child,
the future was almost now and sat small
beneath the hulking stature of the nuclear bomb and dread viruses borne by love.
Now, armed with the gadgets we dream about,
the future is a bleak process of making babies and making money.
What was once far away in outer space,
then close and terrifying to the touch,
is now the internal machinery of the mind.
We are the future factory grinding out consumption.
Nothing else matters.

The Bog at the End of the World

8 July, 2009

I left the rented cabin in a borrowed car.
Every interaction was an entreaty to behave accordingly,
and I could feel myself going mad.
That morning, a chunk of hair had fallen out at my temple.

I packed and made excuses
and stopped at all my favourite spots on the way out of town:
the breakwater from which I was never brave enough to dive,
the small square of knotted tree roots
where I sat to watch the birds freewheel in a secluded inlet,
the glacial chunk of rock that park employees had greased over
to keep kids from climbing.

I did it once,
despite broken fingernails, a bloodied knee, and stained clothing.
I still grit my teeth remembering the sound of my nails on that stone.
I stood on top, fists on hips, expecting my relatives to see,
but my eyes followed their backs disappearing around a pine.

I drove out down the old highway,
the one my father's parents drove in on when he was a kid,
and ignored the fear of surprise elk and the claustrophobic proximity of the trees,
until a sharp twist in the road took me
to the only place I've ever been sure that I'll die right there every time.

I stopped the car and stood next to the front tire,
listening to the engine parts click in the heat,
and lit a cigarette.
This place would never have me for more than a couple of minutes,
so I sopped up what I could, trying to breathe in the heady marsh
while I slapped flies away from my calves.

That was when I caught sight of a the moose staring at me.
He was at a distance, but I could feel his bullet-hole eyes
casing me from just back of some bullrushes
that were all busted open and shedding their stuffing.
I waited for my heart to stop right then.
There was no point to another breath.

His indifference to me, the marsh's indifference to either of us,
the whole damn void of a nature so full of everything
but heartless enough to steal my breath,
took me away from myself,
and my soul felt sharp as steel.
There was no point to any other thing.

I breathed deep the heavy breeze,
while the moose stared and stared,
until the heat from the car burned my feet
and I remembered the keys.