The Storms of Fall
For a sweet, precious short time I slept. In my head once again I was a child, happy and healthy, the dear precious love of my father and mother. I felt something tickle my feet and it stirred me. I went into the half-dream state, and my stomach tightened. I could smell the cold and the damp, the rot and the filth around me. I looked down as I shook my leg, feeling almost nothing but seeing a rat make off with one of my trench-rotted black, dead toes. I kicked at him but didn't care anymore. It was 1915 and that day I was going into battle. My hands were shaking from the lack of strong drink and the need for proper nutrition. I forced myself awake and slid out of my hammock onto the dirty wet floor of the earthen cave that myself and a dozen others called home. I had slept only two hours in three days but it was an eternity of bliss compared to the reality of death, lice, human excrement and vomit, rats, mice, gas, and bombardment we faced day after day. I had volunteered for this, for love of country and glory. That morning I stood ready to storm the enemy fortifications as the rain beat down on us, mixed with wet snow. The weather was deplorable, but soon the winter would come and be worse. I couldn't even remember the last time my feet were dry and I struggled under the weight of my equipment as ten thousand men prepared to meet their maker. The whistle blew, and I scrambled to the top, slipping several times. Beside me, a dear friend was shot in the face and fell back dead. I had grown so jaded I felt nothing. I marched into the murderous machine guns and blasting mortars wondering which bullet would claim my life. I moved on past mounds of dead and dying, grown men screaming for their mothers, some begging either for help or the bullet in my rifle that could end their pain. The enemy artillery began, and I sought safety in a shell crater, only the rain had filled it with mud and the enemy machine guns had claimed others who have tried to use the crater's safety. The blood mixed with the filth and the indentation of earth was rife with the smell of death. I tried to get my hundred pound gear off to free myself, but it was too late. I drowned that day; my final gasps spent choking on mud blood and human shit and piss. My In the next moments I was sent to face eternal torture and suffering for taking up arms against my fellow man. I had volunteered. I had volunteered.
Four Walls To Hold Us Forever
The walls have ears
Yes they have known my fears
All of my pain
Over the years
And they have also heard
My heart sing like a morning bird
The joys and the love
Sent from heaven above
The time my daughter and I cried
When sweet loving Grampa died
And how over the years
We kept his memory alive
The walls have listened
As the sweat on my lover and I glistened
As we conceived our little one
A new life just begun
They have lived and loved with us
Even when I lost my lover's trust
And now as I close the door
To return no more
My daughter off to a distant shore
I will miss this place to my very core
A family lived here and shared
Starved, feasted, and cared
And the wall still have ears
Though as we leave they shed no tears
They remain a living part of all of us
Ashes to rainbows and dust to rust
Come To Me
Grip my hand and know I have substance
Hear me and know I have thoughts
Look into my eyes and understand I have a heart
And yes, a soul.
We are separate you and I, different beings
Though we share many things
Longings for companions and a mate
Love for our children and elders
Desire for a place to rest ourselves
A small microcosm of family
Hold not one being above another
One soul better than the other
Let us make our own works
Afterwards feast together as friends
Free to choose, independent
As all beings should be
Some Never Learn
It wasn't my decision to live in this place. In fact, the first day I got here I wanted to leave. There was this guy in my house, and he liked to speak his mind, just let anything out. He would yell things at the TV set that didn't make any sense, like "Nile over!" or "Six point three five-mile isle!" Then there was Leonard. He was the filthiest person I ever met. Quite often I would be in the kitchen sitting and reading or having a coffee and a cigarette, and he would walk past me, pee in the toilet without closing the door, then walk back to his room—all while only wearing a shirt, no pants. The worst part of it was that he would leave a trail of drips behind him when he left the bathroom.
It wasn't so bad to live there; I had a lot of time on my own, and the stress level was non-existent. The rent payments came directly from my disability benefits, and they even did our grocery shopping. It was a charity outfit for people who had recently left the mental hospital, so you had to figure on some people being a bit quirky.
The guy who was the biggest problem in the whole place was the one who shouted at the TV set; Geoff was his name. Sometimes we would be sitting at the table, and he would spout off to people about how they should get their dentures fixed or that they were too fat or anything that popped into his head. After a while, I decided to have fun with the whole situation, and I did things like one time I put a coffee can I made into a piggy bank on the main table in the house where we had our meals. I wrote on the can, Geoff McCue's lobotomy fund. I got a lot of pats on the back for it and thought it was pretty funny until one guy donated $5 to the fund thinking it was serious.
I got to know most of the guys in the home pretty well, there was Reg, who had been a cook, he could make some fancy meals and treats for us. There was Greg, who loved movies and would do anything to go to more of them. Greg had this incredible sense of humor; he was able to mimic any actor or even people we knew. Times were good in Alberta back when I lived in that place, a few guys were even able to afford a vehicle, many of them had their disability incomes supplemented by their parents. I was a wreck when I got there, ready to make friends with anyone to ease the loneliness and pain of having been in the hospital for six long months. It was a bad habit, but I seemed to gravitate towards liars. I didn't think much of treating them with a bit of respect and believing what they had to say, or at least letting on I believed them.
Once we had gone out to a new Star Wars Movie and we were talking about how much we enjoyed it outside the theater after and some guy came up to me and told me George Lucas was his Uncle. I knew it was likely impossible, a million to one shot of being true, but I sat and listened to him.
Liars are funny people. It seems there are as many kinds of them as there are regular people. I knew this one guy, Brian, who would make up the most outrageous things. The weird part of it was that somehow he would start to believe his lies. I remember him telling me once that he had been a patient at Alberta Hospital and had beat up one of the guys that worked at the group home a few years before while he was working at the Psychiatric Hospital. I knew this later to be a lie because he called up and was asking the same guy if he remembered being beaten up by him and he came to me asking who that crazy person was that he had never met who called up and asked for me.
Perhaps one of the reasons, other than that I didn't have many friends, that I would listen to what these liars said and make like I believed them is because I wanted their lies to be true. I wanted to be around people who were rich or secretly famous. Brian once told his neighbor he had so many shares in a major company that they totaled $15 Billion, and he needed a forklift to move them around. This one got to me because the guy lived in a subsidized apartment of less than 500 square feet and constantly had to come over and borrow my computer because he didn't have one.
The worst liar, though, of all them was my roommate. I liked the guy; I might even say in a platonic way I loved the guy because he truly was a kind person and seemed to dedicate all of his energies and a lot of his money to helping others. The problem was that he was always trying to make himself out to be suave and debonair and well to do, and more than what he was. I suppose his parents did have some money, his dad, who was a great guy, was an accountant who worked hard enough to retire in his 40's but his son John was some piece of work.
I think it would be helpful to start off by describing John's hair. I am hoping people who read this remember the way girls used to gel up and ’swoop' their hair up and over their foreheads back in the 80's? The 'swoop' look was the style in which John did his hair, tons of hairspray, so much it looked like his hair was a helmet. People made fun of him but in years, I've never seen his hair in any different way. He says that he's afraid that people will forget him, in fact, he says he's terrified of this. Sometimes if we're in a store and a cute young woman looks at him he'll point at his hair and say he's a stand-up comedian and that he wears his hair like that as part of his act. The problem is that no one has ever seen him tell a joke other than in private, and criticizing people we know in common.
For a long time, John would talk about his Uncle Delbert. Apparently he was a Marine Corps Veteran, and John would tell us that his Uncle would do things when he got drunk like get himself arrested going to apartment buildings, saying he was a doctor, and offering women free breast exams. But the stories got worse than that. John often told us that Delbert and his Vietnam War buddies would get together at a cabin and play a game of ’Let's see who can toss their dentures farther across the lake." After doing this, they would get John to retrieve them from the muddy waters. The stories went on. His Uncle had been married six times apparently. Another time John told us Delbert had gotten into an argument with a woman, and said that if she were his wife she would feed him poison and he replied by saying that if she were his wife he would take it.
Finally, one day I had enough. John had told me for the two-hundredth time about how Delbert had died of some poor lifestyle choices, and it happened that John's dad came over. "Mr. Clark," I asked, "Is Uncle Delbert your brother or your wife's?" Hoping to get an answer that could lead me to some more fact checking.
"Oh no, John, you've been telling stories again!" His dad said with a smile and a teasing voice. I couldn't believe it; John had structured an entire life, an entire character, six ex-wives and even an untimely death all invented in detail. I felt a little bad for exposing the lie; I could have just let him have his harmless fun. He looked sad when I exposed his machinations.
In a week or so I felt a little better. We had a new staff member come to the group home, and he told John he seemed like an intelligent guy and asked if he was working. John replied with, "I work at the Center For Newcomers teaching English as a Second Language." Someone spoke up after he said this about how he had been saying this for ten years and no one had ever seen him go there. I was a bit curious about this myself because he never leaves the house much unless he's with someone, he likely has a mild case of agoraphobia. "Oh, I'm on call." He said in reply, not a trace of regret, remorse or even a crack in his poker face. Listening to this was excruciating for me to sit still and say nothing about, but I managed to contain myself. It bugged me that John had made himself out to be both a teacher and a man of great charitable efforts. Some people never learn I guess. I just wonder if it is them or me that never learns. John never mentioned Uncle Delbert again, but I found myself feeling a little more jaded, a little less innocent after that. So few people in this world think their words mean anything.