jonberger

I wanna have a heretic’s death.
Making claims that are profane ’til my very last breath.
Smashing idols in the heterodox well out of my depth
and then punished by the Man with a heretic’s death!
Oh yeah…
Oh yeah…

I wanna get locked away for doing wrong against the Establishment.
I wanna be kept down – but not for long!
I wanna be an angry young man; embittered, but full of wide hope!
I wanna be the spanner in the works. The thing that fucks it all up!

I wanna get to die at the hands of the Man.
Suffering for my art is my very first command.
Being crushed for my beliefs is exactly my plan
so long as I end up dead at the hands of the Man.
Oh yeah…
Oh yeah…

You can’t beat City Hall. Everybody knows that. But it’s important to fight City Hall.
It’s important to lose to City Hall. Everybody needs that on their CV.
My CV is currently sparse in the iconoclastic department
so I need to spruce it up a tad. Maybe two tads. First, I gotta first do some harm.

Now I need to make sure I get hurt.
Fuck around and find out that I wear a hairshirt.
Play around in parks and end up eating dirt.
Make sure whatever happens that I’m heretic hurt.
Oh yeah…
Oh yeah…

The light in Hero’s window went out
so the light in Hero’s lover’s eyes would follow.
He couldn’t get to her
without the night light as guidance
so Leander (the lover in question)
soon drowned.

Hero, one smart cookie,
figured this out and,
finding one good tragedy deserves another,
jumped out her tower window
to crash in the waters below.

The story ends
with no survivors
but a nameless witness
left to tell the tale
going forward to later generations
and maybe give people
a different kind of sense
as to what a hero could be.

I knew it was going
in my mid-twenties
and started to back against walls
so nobody would see me
from behind
to see my bald spot.
There was little to see
at first
but wanted no one to know.

My father had a huge absence of follicles
and his brother’s head was similar.
I knew what was coming for me
so on some July Fourth
I got ahead of it
and cut it all off.

I stayed isolated for the weekend
so no one would know
the troubles I was seeing.
I hoped that by the weekend’s end
everything would have grown back
bushier than ever.
Somehow
that plan failed to develop as expected.

My head remains shorn.
When I let it grow out,
less and less of it appears
so the cutting was a fine idea
back when I started
decades past.

My hair feels nothing
when blades separate it from me.
I feel liberated, clean.

The hair death
is always an opportunity
for me to be renewed.

I don’t talk about this much
but I figured I could hold on
long enough not to predecease my Mom;
I had that much in me.

It’s not like anything was killing me
but Dad had experienced heart issues
and my weight led my doctor to believe
that I would follow suit.
I had diabetes and I didn’t seem to have the will
to change behavior to fix things.

I wasn’t changing much of anything.
The jobs I could scrounge
were by the grace of friends
who knew I was capable of more
than what my resume showed
but I had trouble sending out resumes in the first place
so work grew sporadic,
so insurance was expensive
so life was promising to be
a continuing tunnel-vision
of a downward spiral.

I could help my mother enjoy her declining years,
be they ten or twenty,
I decided.
There’d be an inheritance after that,
from Dad’s pension and Mom’s investments.
I’d be able to live a little
and go into Shake Shack shock,
if I wanted.

The idea of getting healthy
just seemed beyond imagination.
Really, it’s the pills that changed my outlook.

I got drugged up
and got thinner enough
to imagine a life much after Mom.
I can live now
for a long long time.

It’s just so unfortunate
that civilization
has only about two hours more herself.

I didn’t always understand my upstairs neighbor Dottie.
She often talked a lot of nonsense.
We lived next to each other for maybe fifteen years
and ten of them, she couldn’t get my name right.
Jon is not a hard name to recall.
I put a placard up in the hall
to provide a context clue.
Eventually she got it right.

A lot of things Dottie said to me
didn’t make a lot of sense,
but for a lot of the time I knew her,
she wasn’t terribly healthy.
Near the end,
she was kind of fevered.

I wasn’t there when they took her to the hospital
so I don’t know what she said
but who was she talking to then?
Her ghost husband?
Her ghost sons?
Her ghost siblings?

She was days away from past tense,
one foot in the grave.
Was my neighbor already listening
to the afterworld?

Or was she just hopped up on pain meds?
I wasn’t there.
Don’t know.

I am working to free myself of things I didn’t used to say
but despite considering myself
a forthright kind of guy
there are so many things
that I didn’t used to say
and there are SO MANY THINGS
that I still don’t say.

I have a therapist
that is not enough in my confidence
which is pretty stupid
because what am I paying him for?

And I decided decades ago
that having a best friend
was risky
because there were different contices
for different relationships
so maybe there was a Best Friend of the West Side
and a Best Friend at Work
and so on and so forth
so who do I talk to
when I need
to get it off
my hairy chest?

Oh!
I should mention
that I thought that Contices
was a word
(the plural of Context).
It’s not. I looked it up
(several times, really).

I don’t always get words right.
Usually
I just reinvent the language
to fit my needs
but in this case
I’m just willing
to let contices
go.

Soon
there may be other truths
coming down the pike.

I used to be concerned about heart death.
My father and grandfather had bum tickers
and my blossoming weight promised me problems
in that vicinity as well.

I take medications to protect me
from such issues
and I think I may be safely squared away
from that particular quadrant.

Now what worries me most
is the loss of wits.
Brain death is on my mind
as slowly, surely
I lose things
that were once dear.

Keys, names, stories,
things are disappearing
over and again
and if I recover them
I do not know it.

Heart death?
When was that ever my problem?
Brain death!
That’s the thing!
Get it out of here,
or I’ll, I’ll…
what?!

I am not so concerned with the heat death
of the universe
as I am
with the heat death
of me
as it is so
very cold
and I
have neglected
to wear my good coat.

My mother has sometimes expressed pride
at my street corner generosity
to the indigent
which is strange
because I give selectively
and in relatively small quantities.

Still, it seems to be more than she gives,
which is also strange
because she is far more generous
than I.
Perhaps it is because she is friendlier
so she gives more in the context of relationships
while I give to strangers
since I just know fewer people.

Anyway
I give dollar bills
to darker skinned people
because white folks get enough already.
Usually, if there’s a pet involved, I’ll pass them by,
since they’re just making more trouble for themself
and their animal friend by that marriage of inconvenience
and I want to have no part of it.

My mother
chooses not to give on the street.
I guess I’ll ask her why
at some point in the future.

The facts do not support this story
and there is a certain dream logic to it
so while I surely remember it happening,
it may have only been a nightmare.

Dad was driving us home.
That my mother and father were together
means I was less than ten.
It was very late on a winding road
at night.

Before us was a stopped police car,
lights flashing.
Dad, inquisitive, got the story.
“A jogger had an accident.
Got run off the road.
At least it was painless.”

I don’t know why oncoming traffic
had to be stopped for this.
Maybe there was a teachable moment
to be found.
We drove on.

Not long after
our headlights caught a woman
floudering from a house
off the side of the road.
We slowed, stopped, and spoke.
“I’m worried about my husband,”
she said, “He left to jog
too long ago.”

“Ooh!” I called out, eight-year-old excited,
“Maybe he’s the dead guy!”
The woman blanched.
My mother dashed out of the car,
hugging in crisis control.
My dad soon followed them into the house.
I don’t know who explained to me my…
faux pas
but it was there I first learned how impolite it is
to shout out the death of a loved one
when you haven’t been properly introduced first.

My parents comforted the possible widow
while I
stayed outside
in the night
to think about what I had done.

I guess now is the right time
to mention the child’s bow and arrow set
we’d bought earlier
which I hadn’t had time to master.

I hadn’t heard of Hammurabi
but somehow had an intrinsic understanding
of an Eye for an Eye
and decided that since I
had made her husband dead
in the woman’s eyes
it was my responsibility
to take his place
so I pointed the arrow at myself
aimed the bow backwards
pulled the bowstring away from me
and waited for someone to come out

to stop me from doing anything rash.

“What are you doing?” Mom said.
I blathered out the best explanation I could
of my self-harming rationale
through creative tears
and was told nothing was my fault,
that sometimes accidents will happen,
and we just needed to wait with this woman
until we got proper word
of who had been hurt.

And that’s all I remember.
It seems that’s when the story stops having a me component
so my memories kind of fizzle.
If any of it is true
I think it’s pretty fascinating
but my mother has no recollection of this at all.

She’s getting forgetful, though.
My story must be dead on
and everything happened
exactly as I’ve told it.