My dying America

There was a kid at my high school that would sprint through the hallways
to his next class.
He would hold onto the straps of his Jansport backpack
with a fevered grip as he weaved in between my awkward peers.
He was enthusiastic; glad to be alive, to say the least.
When I think about how kids poked fun at him,
I realize people have acted in stranger ways.

What people do in private is

tenfold more peculiar
tenfold more revealing
tenfold more depressing
than what is vulnerable, open,
splayed across a public corridor.

I went to a party on the eve before the New Year 2009
carrying a cold front similar to an idea carried just before the end of the world.
A few years back
from the New Year 1999 when Y2K was a banking bomb shelter
and a round of M16 bullets away.

The same children that
joked and
pranked and
gossiped and
stank of the reek fanning outward from
dead & decaying catholic suburbia
were still children
just like me.

We grow up in middle class bliss.
Life does not give us lemons.
It gives us watermelons, mangos, papayas and pomegranate,
so we make juice and spill all of it
over oak remodeled floors.
We are carefully laying the grounds for our own foreclosures.

One of the clean-cut guys who popped his collar and who played varsity sports
was coked out at the party in question,
and everything really came full circle.
It wasn't the fact of his sweating out
a Miami Beach circa 1985 neon fantasy,
that made me feel grave and laugh darkly
but the things he said to himself when everybody was asleep.
He thought nobody was listening.

When I finally closed my eyes around 6AM that morning,
I was drunk
off the apathy that comes with forgetting the weeks and months before
a particular type of departure from life.

It felt so much like Tony Soprano falling asleep curled up next to an assault rifle,
and like Bobby Baccalieri being shot to death by two of Phil Leotardo's hit men
while looking at a model train set in a toy store.

Truly,

this
is
the
end
of
the
rope.

If I could take all of the mornings spent at Sunday school
and then add them to all of the Wednesday evenings spent at Religious Education
and then multiply them by the days where I was indoctrinated of God's glory,

their total would not equal a fraction of the moments I have spent
wanting to slip through the cracks in the floor.

Their end product
could not come close to the agony of being guilty;
for feeling so awful
while living well.

And when I remember it all,
I wish I could take the nerdy innocence
and happiness
beheld by the boy
who went STRAIGHT
from point A
to point B.

Listen closely to this mob gathering.
I want to explain how it feels to be jailed in the biceps of Goliath
when the story doesn’t go how it should, and David is having the air
squeezed out of his lungs by behemoth hands.
Everybody wants David to win,
including me.

They are screaming in horror
that the tradition of the underdog is being suffocated by an abomination.
After it is finished, Goliath in all of his childlike stupidity
feels bad for mauling David and throws himself off a cliff.

"What a waste," somebody in the crowd says, "All of that for nothing."

So the saying goes – home is where the hate is,
but I do the same things in private that others do.
The executioner is always his own biggest critic.

So when those that have always told me,
"you can achieve greatness"
ask me what I will do with my life,
all I will be able to manage is honesty.

"I hope I learn enough in college to fill up my guns with ammunition
before I go from town to town of my dying America
trying to find the jackals that I hold accountable for all of this
disorientation,
because I, myself,
am not strong enough
to own up to it."

If we could all understand
why
the priest that our whole community loves has not one, but two silver flasks,

why
man's best friend usually wants to die alone under a porch, or any place that is dark,

why
the wealthy banker has a collection of hundreds of dolls in his lavish bedroom,

and why the privileged can be so goddamned heartbroken,

I think we would have some answers
or maybe just
no questions.

With good reason,
Atlas would shake his head, gently earthquaking the world
resting on his shoulders,
and laugh at our sickness.

My dying America,
many times I have sat with you in your hospital room,
only to read you all of the books that you do not like
while you slowly make your way to a place
where better things await.