What’s a memory that comes back again and again,
and won’t ever leave, as if pinned to your skin?
There is no past, because time is disordered
so that a moment from long ago can ride with you
loud as a cab driver forced to take the bus.
Worse, what if a memory holds a message
and you spend a lifetime telling it to shut up?
How amazing are we evolved if killer trouble
can be left a squawking bird in the sacred now?
We carry our real cowardice without a problem.
It’s something we learned to do to live this long.
How many of our best young people die of truth,
and we bury them knowing what killed them,
smug in the manner we can give way in our spines,
to one day reach a ripe old age, all lies gone
slowly silent, as the kids stop listening anyway.
Day 1 of the war I’d never truly fight.
Mostly, I just forgot. Forgetting became a way of life.
Reborn as Pancho Villa back in third grade one morning
beneath my desk in a duck-and-cover drill.
Mrs. Montgomery explained this is what we’ll do when the atom bomb
blows up our neighborhood, then we’ll wait for our parents to pick us up.
Bandoleers grew crisscross down my chest the more I worked it out.
That’s a lie! Pistols appeared on both hips as I pictured the death and chaos
out on the street at the bottom of a mushroom cloud, and the radiation
they said hits you after the blast, then your skin falls off. Carbine in my hand!
I knew the school would be rubble, and I’d have to peel my way up
out of the bricks then make my own way home, or to safety somewhere.
Not one freeway was going to be passable. My Mom had three kids at home
to take care of if they were still alive, or already roiling in radiation sickness.
Dad said we’ll head to the mountains where maybe the air was still clean.
It was all a lie.
Mrs. Montgomery was lying to us. She knew she was lying.
She knew there was no point to any of this. The nuns that ran the school
ordered the lie, because the government told them to lie about it all.
And the danger would never end. We were going to make more bombs.
There was no one honest enough to stop it. The hell with that! I’ll stop it!
Eventually, it was recess, and Pancho Villa disappeared. But a darkness
got injected into me that would only ever leave if I went to war, a rebel
from the simplest truth: We’re going to use those bombs one day.
Is forgetting one of the things we all do like a club rule?
Do we forget the big lies, or did we always expect them?
Game players who know this one rule can’t be broken?
Your parents will lie. Your teachers. Your government.
Your priests. Your bosses. The TV news announcers.
Is it that none of us could survive if we were to live in truth,
like it’s the greatest single poison on the planet?
Chrome Press 