Author: Fletch

Categories
Poetry

ADOLESCENT (2002)

Note: I got the first line of this, and the rest just seem to follow.

Youth like a storm in his hands
Waiting to crash upon the world
In a burst of something new
And never seen
But storms are mercurial;
It turns this way and that
It climbs his spine
And shakes the fences of his head

Raw
Power
Confusion
Head full of lightning
Cigarettes alcohol and weed
Gotta feel
More
Less
Something, anything, nothing

Stand on the rooftops and scream
HALLELUJAH!!
God is reborn in the hands of sixteen

Categories
Poetry

THE TRAVELS OF THE MOON BEAR (1991)

Note: This is a poem I wrote just out of high school, while I was attending Washtenaw Community College. It was meant as a children’s story.

In the inky cricket hours
The Moon Bear comes to me
Through my window, next to my bed
He beckons with his eyes,
Eyes of forever and magic
I scratch his nose, rub his ears,
Climb onto his back
I grasp the nape, feeling the coarse hairs
And we are off, riding the night
Through the swirling slumber of others
Past the moon, beyond the stars
To another place, one that is nowhere
Angels come to us, to pay homage to the Moon Bear
Stories and gifts of wonder they carry to us

I felt his muscles ripple beneath me
As we rode a forest of tall trees
Trees high and proud, beautiful and cruel
The boughs parted for us, making a path
Until we came to a meadow clearing
Green and alive, tinged with the scent
Of tiny yellow flowers that grew there.
The Moon Bear lay down and slept
While the Lord of the Wood,
A powerful old oak with a madman’s eyes
And a voice both like a running stream and a child’s laugh
Told the tale of a young prince
And the sword-maiden who saved him
Deep in the bowels of the Earth,
In the realm of the Soul Spoiler
The story was part song, drifting on the air like sunshine
With no beginning or end
Picked up in the middle
And left going, like life
Loathe I was to leave that field and the Lord’s tales
But the Moon Bear calls, and I must go

<P>Deep beneath the mountains lofty peaks we rode,
Into the depths where you can smell the Earth’s blood
In darkness so complete no light could ever master it
To the halls of the trolls, where the Iron King holds sway
Sitting high on a throne of skulls of many beasts and men
Stained dark with the blood of their former owners
Whose cries seem to linger in the shadows.
In his hand he held a scepter of black granite
With a burning gem set in the end
The kind told a tale of misery and pain
Of sorrow and the misfortunes of men
While he laughed mightily
Sweat came down my cheek
And my throat grew tight
When he finished, he looked to me
‘Tell your tale, boy,’ was his command.
I fumbled to protest, but he pointed his scepter at me
The gem grasped my mind, and pulled the story out
Words gushed forth
Blood from a wound that cannot be bandaged,
And I wove my tale, the tale of a girl
One I had never known, one I was mad with longing for
The King sneered a smile that made me shudder,
Threw me a heart of green stone on a leather strip
A gift for a fool’s telling,
Then bid me hasten from his domain.
I could hear his stone laughter bellowing from behind
Echoing like voices in a lunatic’s head
As again I rode the Moon Bear, strangely sad to leave that dark palace.

We ride the Valley of Damnation,
Surrounded by horrors unimaginable
Wind yowls by, invisible swords rending at the flesh,
Carrying with it something more
The infinite torment of wasted souls scream
Aching to taste the sweet of my life
Grasping, gnashing at their own pain
Though utter despair lusts for me on all sides
I fear not, because the Moon Bear protects me
The demons rail, but stay back, terrified of Him.

<P>We ascend, the valley of shadow behind
On, on, on we rode
Ever onward, ever upward
On, on, on
Til I could feel the soft air of heaven all around
Dawn is just winking into view,
Burning joy to light the shades of menĂ­s lives
We come to my home, my bed
And I slide from the Moon Bears back
He licks me on the cheek,
Growls a gruff goodbye
And is gone, not disappearing, but as if he was never there.
Sunlight streams into my room and I wake
Finding a heart of green stone around my neck.

Categories
Political

We Should Not Legislate Morality with ‘Drug Wars’

Note: This is a column I wrote while working at the ‘Eastern Echo,’ Eastern Michigan University’s student newspaper. I believe it was 1991, and I was still learning. Still am, of course.

Ok, boys and girls, lets talk about drugs. I’m not talking about run of the mill mundane stuff like aspirin and Ibuprofin. No, I’m talking about pot, uppers, downers, acid, laughers, screamers, shrooms and coke– the big boys. A subject this huge can’t be done justice in one article, so we’ll be making many trips down hallucination lane.
Fasten your seat belts.
There are a few laws I’ll never understand, among them the ones concerning seat belts, motorcycle helmets, and drugs.
As near as I can see, each of these is a case in which the government legislates away the public’s right to make choices for themselves simply because people making these choices may hurt themselves.
True, if you get in a car accident not wearing a seatbelt, there is a high degree of probability that you will become one bloody hunk of meat that will need a closed casket. But it’s your meat.
The same is true with drugs. A lifetime of heavy drug use can lead to various health problems, depending on how much, where and what you cram into your body.
Too much of some drugs, and it’s coffin time– a little crying by choice relatives and dump the body in the ground.
As far as I can see, you made the conscious decision to do drugs, knowing that death could follow. Why should this be any concern of the government? Who owns our bodies, anyway?
Rather than wasting billions and billions of tax dollars on fighting a largely ineffective “Drug War,” why not spend the money on education, informing the public of what drugs might do to them.
Then, if people decide to do drugs, they can abuse their bodies without the ability to cop-out and say they “had no idea what would happen.” The rest of the money could then be spent on programs to help people who want to get clean off drugs.
Before anyone gets all up in arms, le me just say that I am not talking about drunk driving laws. That crosses out of my original premise, which is that you’re only hurting yourself. If you swerve across the center lane and obliterate a family of four, dog and all, then you’ve hurt someone else.
It is time we re-examine who we let control our lives and why. The Constitution guarantees the right to the pursuit of happiness, but this is denied through some subsequent laws.
As an end note, let’s look at two legal cases. In Troy, Linda Conflitti was convicted of poisoning her teacher with LSD. Whether she is guilty of not is irrelevant, at least, it is for this column. As the facts currently lie, she dropped a hit of LSD into her teacher’s coffee, which he subsequently drank.
The teacher has yet to return to school, but is instead is on medical leave in Florida, claiming the experience of the drug was,”
just too horrible.”
I would not accuse the man of being a worthless leach sucking every ounce of sympathy out of this that he could, but I know people who have done acid two or three times a week and suffered no such ill effects. In fact, I know of no case where a person doing a single hit of acid was incapacitated for over a year.
Ms. Confliti faces up to four years in prison for this crime. If she is guilty, it is just that she pay, because it wasn’t her body and mind she was playing with. However, on the same day the news broke of her conviction, I saw an item about a Florida couple who had left their video camera running, thereby catching their babysitter viciously abusing their eight month old child with a  wooden spoon. This woman received the maximum sentence: four months. All I can see here is twisted justice and degenerate morals.