[size=l]
The first rumor was
He ran past security
Then an explosion.

Sirens, fire trucks
Riffled police scan from the roofs
This delayed thousands.

Release him to us
Wished the waylaid travelers
Of the terrorist.

Delayed travelers
Even the flight attendants
Will become Nazis.

Contemplating death
And dismemberment for the
Type A who was rushed.

Was he running late
For his flight, trying to catch
His ride back to home?

But the rumors changed.
“He had a gun� said someone
Who missed her flight home.

“He had blue jeans and
A white shirt and his flashlight
Blue up and killed five.�

CNN later
Retracted the explosions.
There was airport rage.

Everyone was calm
Except the Hawaii-bound.
Just missed their plane.

“It’s against the law
To reopen a plane door
Once the door is closed.�

“Good-by Hawaii�
Their eyes said but in their hearts
They were poised to kill.

You can always tell
Traumatized travelers by
How we want to help.

You offer help to
Anyone for anything
“Need help with your bags?�

“The snacks are good here.�
“You can’t beat their chicken wraps.�
“I know someone there!�

“Isn’t it awful?�
“These delays are a nuisance.�
“Terrorists are mean!�

Once you actually
Get your boarding pass, you’re free.
Everyone is cool.

The world seems aligned.
You stop trying to be nice.
You’ve got what you want.

No bags, clearance to
The departing ate to home.
Cats, wash loads, sleep, work.

Did it make the news –
The non-existent flashlight
That never blew up?

What did that guy say
To the FBI agents
On why he ran by?

“He always was a
Little eccentric� they’d say
At family clans.

Once he’s out of jail
Forty-five years from today
LA flashlight scare.
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Santa Monica.
It’s like Elmwood strip amped up
And you can charge it.
~

“We should stop charging!
We’re living like royalty
Before the homeless.
~
What you left behind
Emerges unconsciously
During vacation.
~
They offer masters
To anorexic women
In California.

With image achieved
With dog walkers, nannies hired
Achievement still evades.
~
Spit-polished Beamers
Agile stock portfolios
Surf’s Up! Just do it!
~
I could lean just right
Hang ten and shoot the curl now
California dreams
~
Wet-suited surfers
Programmers’ ones and zeros
Rink and mall rats chill.
~
Main sail in the wind
Surfboard on the wave’s slick rim
Don’t control, just steer.

Writing Haiku in
church – the mind is terrible
a thing to waste now.

Yet they’re sincere folk
Focused on something other
Than their boss at work

Than the Chemlawn man
Who guarantees nice green grass
And controling weeds.

Unselfconscious kids
Skip down the aisle for kids talk
More adults should skip.

Skip into work, right?
Judged as “emotionally gone�
“Challenged� call HR?

Perhaps a breakdown?
Putting in too many hours?
Neuro short-circuits, hum!

Or maybe she hears
a different drummer’s beat to
which she now dances?

Perhaps our striving
needs redirection toward a
simpler child-like life

The present matters.
Those you’re with have smiles,
Dance to the music!

This carousel turns
for only a little while.
Feel the wind right now.

It doesn’t matter
if you “succeed� in your goals.
Love your dance partners.

Unconditional
love. They’re doing the best they
can. The ride ends soon.

They don’t know it but
at least they’re tapping their feet.
Still, they’re beautiful.

By some quirk of the elections of a “developed� nation, you find yourself Commander and Chief of the Armed Forces of the most powerful nation on earth. You so wanted to depose a dictator of an extremely small country rich in oil that you cranked up the most powerful PR spin machine so that you could talk all of the truly elected leaders of the nation into a first-strike preemptive war on the basis of evidence of WMD.

Now that the nation has removed its sanction from the Iraq war, you’ve got another Viet Nam on your hands. You faintly remember that there have been more suicides of surviving soldiers of Viet Nam than there were casualties during the war. It doesn’t sit well with soldiers when the country they came from judges the “theater� they were in as wrong, so a lot of veterans can’t live with that and end their life. Plus some do-gooder out-of-the-main-stream Liberals have pointed out that for every person you kill in a war, you automatically make 18 enemies out of their survivors. Still you can’t figure out why your little war has made your country the most hated one on the planet. It must be “the Liberal Media.�

Grim, but you sort of forget those sort of things because it’s an election year and you’ve got to prove to your electorate that you don’t flip-flop on decisions. “Resolve� your speech writers told you to call it. But you’re faced with a decision.

1.    You take the most powerful military force and all of its killing technology into that holy shrine cemetery and destroy every life that breathes.

2.    You tell the soldiers to back off and let them alone. You send food and water into the cemetery. Through trusted and revered holy leaders, you arrange to sit with those who oppose you and listen to their claims. You work intently to determine if there are any areas of common agreement that would benefit the people of Iraq and hasten the withdraw of your troops from their land.

You choose option #1 because winning by violence, in the name of conquering those designated as the “evil doers� is everything and this is an election year. Anything short of that would be deemed as “weak� and against the values of the NRA.

Halburton VP
Killing husbands and dads too
You be sure to vote

I wasn’t the only one who fell asleep. Anyone, in those days, who found themselves listening to Paul rag on and on with his lawyerly court room metaphors about how somebody had to be excruciatingly tortured, just to make up for the fact that we’re all made with some defects. Really!. Who wouldn’t fall asleep. I mean if you had to listen to more than twenty minutes of this fundamentalistic angry ranting about a Punitive Deity Who had to be violently appeased as part of the design of creation. And then having his followers call him SAINT Paul.

What really frosts my ass is that I was sitting in a window on the third floor, thinking about this chick I had just met, and how I was going to ask her to come see my new invention – an ox cart turned into a Jerusalem passenger carrier. I was the one who invented the metro bus but people forgot that too. In fact, people forgot a lot of things. Like the fact that when I fell asleep during this long dirge of Paul’s about how the first human was created with some sort of innate defect. Shit, why didn’t the Deity just scrap Adam and begin again with the improved Eve model?.

“Get a life!� I was thinking of saying back to the Saint, right before I nodded off. Because it’s not like THE Saint had even a miraculous chance of getting a date himself that night. And I had a pretty good chance on talking this brown haired honey into seeing my new bus, . . . “camelbus� I was going to call it.

But down I went. I even saw the light at the end of the tunnel. I was the first one in history to see it but nobody remembered that either. When I cam to, Paul looked as surprised as was when I woke up and saw him hovering over me as I opened my eyes.

He never missed a beat. He lifted me up, a little, off the ground, as if he knew exactly when I’d fully open my eyes. He proudly announced to the crowd around us, “Of course he’s all right. He’s alive!� raising his hands up above him within perfect rhythm of an unheard melody only he could hear.

The crowd around us roared in awe. Everyone else left me behind and followed THE Saint back out to the side yard to hear the rest of his twenty point theologically studded lecture on the universality of how fucked up the Creator had made people. Like maybe we are that clueless to believe to believe in such a capricious Being Who would absolutely demand the agonizing death of Someone – just to appease a rule that allegedly stated that if anyone does anything wrong, someone’s got to be tortured to death to make it right. “Propitiation� THE Saint said as he coined another word that came to be the rallying cry for Republicans for the next two thousand years. “It’s cruel to be kind in just the right measure� someone else put it once in a song. I can just picture Mary Mag and the other Marry skipping down the dusty Damascus road singing, “My boy friend’s back and there’s gonna’ be trouble.�

Meanwhile, nobody wrote anything about how I came back from the dead. Never a mention of my vision of the light at the end of the tunnel either.

For several centuries, I worked the side shows with the carneys. Small traveling circuses, mostly. I’d climb to the top of a tree or poll and fall splat on the ground. Resurrect myself and please the crowds. When the circus owners aged or died of syphilis, I’d move on to some other show, living at the periphery of life. I usually outlived everyone around me. Death sucks big time, especially if everyone you fall in love with ends up turning into a dried up sack of skin and bones and croaks. You end up getting very Buddhist. You turn Vegan, for a few centuries, but eventually give it up for endless hot-fudge sundaes and pork rinds because it doesn’t really matter if you can’t die. So through time, I invented the fourteen diets and went on and off them, selling diet books under different author’s names.

My bus idea eventually sold and I made enough money so I d
id
n’t have to work the carnivals. Someone who found out about me made a movie, inventing a family of people like me and calling it Tuck Everlasting. But they never stopped to ask why old Dr. Luke never wrote more than Acts 20:9 and 10 about me falling asleep and becoming alive again. Two fucking verses. What made Lazarus’ story more remarkable? Was it because he didn’t fall asleep during some boring religious talk?

Well here I’m blogging, two thousand years later. Don’t fall asleep. Only a few of us can come back again.

. . . Eutychus