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Board Administrator Username: mjm Post Number: 3647 Registered: 11-1998 |
Honorable Mention Epitaph for Some Idiots I Have Been Jim Doss after Adrian C. Louis 1. The Redneck Ancestral birthrights blossomed into Budweiser friendships. From the bumpers of pickup trucks, we lifted cold ones in celebration of the hunt as the sun nudged its way above oak and cypress, and shotguns lay open, angled like T-squares across tattooed arms. My rifle spoke its definition of all that was straight and true. On the ground before us, the buck’s eyes became convex mirrors reflecting my pain and its numbness like twin sons born to different mothers. This death for sport and trophy kept laughing and slapping the back of the good old boy inside me. Long may he rest in peace. 2. The Stud In this unholy book of semen, I wrote my tales of a thousand-and-one nights, like Scheherazade, unable to outwit that wicked sultan of my own libido who bound me in silk ropes woven from my desires. He laid traps for me around each corner, in every darkened bar where the fragrance of department store perfume and whiskied cigarette breath mingled with honky-tonk music. I spun fiction upon fiction to keep my hope of escape alive. 3. The Traveler Air carried me back and forth across the continent, a jet stream of planes, long-haul trucks, freight trains, and mercy rides as I roamed from city to city like a fire in search of new kindling. Anything that became dear flamed into ash at my touch. Piles of cinders collected around me, swirled in the breezes I created hotfooting it out of town with a gypsy bundle slung over my shoulder. 4. The Romantic I wielded my guitar like a sword to fight off daemons and dragons to save fair maidens in distress, my Dulcineas. Cloaked in the melodies of Dylan, Cohen and Lightfoot, I charged through the bars and coffeehouses of my hometown with three chord songs rolling off my tongue and fingers. Zombied flower children, who sought salvation in a buzz of pills and alcohol, clapped and cheered as I jousted windmills my own gusts of hot air could not topple. 5. The Lackadaisical Poet My words carried only the death weight of their thoughts. They fell like empty husks to the wind-blown ground, light as a breeze of hummingbird wings, but sweet with the sugar-water they must drink to stay alive. I skipped them casually as stones across a dark lake, watched the ripples fade back into a mirror that reflected nothing— not sky, or clouds, or snow-capped mountains, or even my ego staring back fondly at its own image. 6. The Failed Academic Library stacks surrounded me with motes of dust. Thick walls of isolation encased this dream world of ideas. The world’s best minds bound in leather and cardboard transmitted thoughts that could only be received by the most sensitive antennae. Esoteric brick upon esoteric brick rose skyward like an offering of prayers to gods long dead. I calmly dreamed up my own Helen and waited for the Greeks to arrive inside their Trojan horse and sack this temple with new myths. 7. The Soft-Hearted Executive Pinstripes imprisoned me between columns of numbers and the telephone. Voices from hell flowed across an abyss of wires screeching for quotas to be met, product X must be moved immediately or person Y will be sacked. Budgets shrank like sweaters around me in the hot water mantra of do more with less. Everyday it was the Ides of March. With knives flashing from above or below, I was prepared to utter my: “Et tu, Brute?” 8. The Treasure Hunter At the sound of the alarm clock, I rise to bury the dead inside me without ceremony, hymn or regret, without tears or handshakes. The past slips back into the past like a fin sliding beneath water where it can prowl the depths unseen and unfettered. My eyes see bones everywhere— in the milk I pour into my coffee, the grizzled face that stares back from the shaving mirror— a shipwreck of bones covered with barnacles and sand, littered with pot shards, wine bottles, gold coins, cutlery, and cannon balls waiting to be explored and exploited. |
