The Tales We Tell

[Erthona]

.
We were lilies unbound,
running up and down
the ally past the gallon coffee can
of bacon drippin’s my mother left
for the 'colored' garbage man
cause his wife knew how to use’em!
We told tales of plans, and conquered foes
right up ‘til high school graduation,
each, less reflective of reality than the last.

The best tale was told to us by the valedictorian,
outlining how we would change the world.
Tarzan in the ally fighting evil,
cut closer to the bone
than did that commencement speech
of puffed-up overweening teenage pride,
that was several orders of magnitude in error
greater than any story that faintly reflected
the collective human agreement of existence,
at least in terms of the actual impact we
would have on the world.

The greatest impact of any among us,
was during the last summer when
Adam Gibson, and his motorcycle
arrived at a brick wall
traveling at eighty miles per hour:
proving that Richard Bach was
really only a writer of fiction
and not a reluctant messiah
writing his autobiography.

Yet, even such sharp edges of facts
could not cut into the
fabric of fabricated fluff
that surrounded and insulated us
from pragmatic concerns that
might impinge upon us
and shake us from our
dogmatic slumber as we slept upon the bed
of the total conceit of being all-knowing.
After all, we had cut our teeth on
ignoring the atrocities that
Uncle Walter paraded across
our TV screen each evening
while we consumed copious
amounts of gall bladder pluggin',
artery clogging fried chicken,
and mashed potatoes breast stroking
in a butter and gravy pool
of slowly congealing cholesterol.
If we could ignore body bags by the dozens
and treat MIA bracelets with
as little seriousness as any other fad,
we would have no problem
ignoring the reality that our future impact on
the world at large was based solely on
delusional, ego-centric teenage posturing,
and had no more chance of occurring
than did the USSR have of becoming
a legitimate and stable democracy
before KGB cronyism reasserted itself
and sent the country back into
the totalitarian restrictiveness
with which most of the population
felt comfortable.

This provincial amorality play that we found ourselves in,
of homecoming floats, football games, the prom,
ignoring the fear of the draft and Vietnam,
was acted out again and again, ad nauseam,
from small town middle class burg to burg,
where never was heard a dissenting word!
But if impacting the world means
filling body bags by the thousands,
then by God we did out part!

–Erthona