Hemingway’s Shotgun

Angel heads are telling tales and scaring bland children into nightmares where the unknown, unseen, screaming madman is a terror and not an expression of faith twisted by the paradigm you so well derided. If you could see and hear what we hear and see it wouldn’t endear you to the America that you chastised for its prude identity, rather you’d be a relic lauded for shaping a time that has gone by and on your shelf sit with sycophantic children high with lapping up your drool and spit, would you have anything else to expound? Or, would they have beaten you down to no longer howl, but, in your disillusion, drown?

The radical became mainstream and marketed with flow charts and yearly means that fill the heads of children undone by television, video game, and the six-day-work-week-latch-key-life and whereas you were in the streets scribbling madness onto shards of mirror in which you saw America, today they look into the screen and see nothing but IM messenger shorthand blings and blogs and would you even know what that means?

The spirit of the borderline case who might have been locked up if it were not for a the undercover yearning of the middle class to break into the world you made real, raw, and let them feel free, at least through verse, as you shifted souls with like minded ilk, but you would be hard pressed now to find the kind of mind that could be so free-wheeling and bold, it’s all homogenised, it’s a t-shirt, it’s all so old.

Burn it, burn it, burn it all I would hear you scream and let the ashes remind us of what had been, the son of the socialist mother who saw a future in a land that had once had opportunity close at hand but has since shut down the free-thought shop and opted for the safer, mundane, little-minded plot of a declining empire whose swapped its God and shall flame whilst the president struggles to play the fiddle.

 It’s not the same, the people spending life in different ways and you looking up from the grave, can you hear, hear the melancholy of the masses as they pass the days buying this and selling seconds to bosses who are counting on the bonus and excesses of the minions, it’s not working, no one is howling, everyone is ducking heads and suckling meagre mores as they blend into the bland, the America you knew, is no more.

(Dave Oprava is an ex-pat writer and poet who landed in Wales. He writes, because he is scared of what will happen if he doesn’t. Follow him, if you dare at davidoprava.com)