A CONVENIENT FICTION

1
It starts when you’re always afraid.
You tell yourself: I’m a young cowgirl, or cowboy, or someone, somewhere, within, in between.

You are home, home on the range, where the children choose a game whose rules turn out to be malleable, arbitrary and capricious, made to be broken, to be won until you’re tired of winning.
By any means, through any meanness, unto meaninglessness, to the victors go the moment, momentum.

You never lose stamina, until proven guilty, and even then, made opaque by immunity.
Written on parchment frayed, crumbling, stained by water, blood.

What have you done to the Earth.
The end.

That was quick.
So much for that.

2
So much so to speak.
I read the news today, oh boy, girl, someone, I tell you this: Freedom has been weaponized, turned into just another word for aggression.

The pundits and autocrats say must as though saying will make it so.
The drivers know red means stop only if they have to and green means go only if they want to, if you prevent or force them.

Enforce them; otherwise the rules are suggestions, amusements.
Thus the personal is political, and each person is both dictator and soldier.

Make me, take me, break me, try me, try.
I rule.

3
When the rain comes, they run, and it feels like coagulating.
True to life is a convenient fiction, as is an oral history.

A rhetorical question is another matter, from another mother.
Lover, if you want more life, be like yeast on the rise.

How lucky we are to be so pure and law-abiding, comfortably numbing, knowing we need no regulation or oversight because everything we do is best.
The others, the outsiders, must be stopped from doing anything, such as being here, on the range, abandoned, embedded.

The thing about fiction is how much baggage it can carry, like roped or strapped appendages across the back of a four-legged protagonist.
The burden, even unto agony, may be in the mind of the receiver, a clothesline to hang your dirty laundry on.

Some say you have an obligation, a moral imperative, to tell a good story.
Some say that and then die, leaving the living to decide what they want, can use.

Maybe delivering an experience suffices.
Musicians, magicians, and grifters might agree.

4
Like three-card monte or the shell game, narrative lives in the intervals, interstices.
Whisper about the issue among yourselves, or make it explicitly a problem, a conflict.

Two perspectives reifie, hardened into battle shields and battering rams.
Yet the more that’s made explicit, the more that must be kept in reserve.

Picture an iceberg but with consciousness, a deeper understanding, collective, if impulses can be collected.
What you need might arrive unexpectedly in terms of timing and source.

Call it a third-act transformative performance: a patch of sky, a patch of eye, cloth to cover your outlook, so your thought-dreams can’t be seen.
Keep your head up so you know what’s what.

Keep your mouth shut except to say what’s necessary.
Quoth the ancient Greek, Mediocrites, who pioneered representative democracy.