IN THIS SURREAL CITY

A revised version of something I wrote several years ago.

　

IN THIS SURREAL CITY

Narrative Verse By Willys Watson

　

PROLOGUE

1.

Eliot viewed his from the safety of his tower

as critics raved with orgasmic and elitist praise.

Twain embellished his on a lessor scale, endearing

populists to the virtues of a more simple life,

while Dickens understood his as kindred spirits would.

And so each laid claim to

their own unreal cities.

But irony, through fate’s absurdist hand, dogged the days

of Nathanael West as he functioned below the line,

living, breathing and bleeding the temper of his times.

If postmortem fame comforts the soul of the man who

expires obscurely should he return to tell us so?

At least he got it right

in our unreal city.

　

　

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS

FROM THE VIEW LOOKING UP

2.

The setting sun back lights the skyline in amber hues,

casting a haloed glow around the Capitol dome.

Stop and go on the One O One, rich and poor head home.

While a flatbed truck hauls three twelve foot tall cartoon bears

a Porsche demands attention, a Ford Focus seeks none.

Just a typical day

in my surreal city:

this mired metropolis, this cultural chameleon, that

serves us illusions as truth in unequal portions.

3.

So, how can we not mock

a city so foolish

as to squander a once grand and noble profession,

trading art and integrity for a third Rolls-Royce,

by convincing the world the puppet is more worthy

of our attention than the play, or the mannequin

on the runway is a significant second choice?

Though the curious tourist and the vicarious

faithful still flood the shrines it is to pay homage to

a self-fading legacy, now greatly diminished

by sanctified thievery and droll redundancy

where the only thing paramount is the bottom line.

Thank God there are a few

visionary mavericks

who eschew the celebrity dribble to address

the Wallace Beerys of the world found in all of us:

these cinematic saints maintaining it’s life support

by injecting impassioned and inspired transfusions

as momentary reprieves from aesthetic decay.

4.

Still, the business of show

is just part of the whole.

Beyond the gilded face

the world recognizes,

before the accolades, behind the pretensions and

below the glamor are stories without disguises.

5.

Fitzgerald once said ‘The rich are different from you and I’

and this rates a qualified truth, not an absolute.

Honest money earned usually remembers it’s roots

and fair profit from hard work deserves reward, so wealth

itself is not some great sin that will implode the soul.

From twenty years of life in this city I’ve witnessed

kindness and compassion in high echelons, from small

gestures to grander intentions, from no strings attached

favors to no names attached, but heartfelt, donations:

glimpses of a world where receivers become givers.

I’ve worked for or with some

who live these ideals and

those who deserve praise are

often those who seek none.

Yet, the noblesse obliged

are sadly not the norm:

upstaged by arrogance

and sins of ungoverned

greed or waste or social

insensitivities.

6.

On the boulevard where honest transactions are made

she offers and he buys, while somewhere up in Bel Air

a once young trophy wife sheds silent tears and wonders

if the trade of her heart for a safe haven was fair:

and scavengers get rich from these never-ending games.

The resemblance of love

answers to many names,

but bartered affection

produces few winners.

7.

As a hungry child in Carson chews on stale biscuits

off Mulholland Drive an under attended affair

embarrasses the guests and causes the hosts despair.

Enough food to feed a regiment is duly tossed

as the high profile couple review vanity’s loss.

Ominous misusage

extracts a harsher fee

when such excess expands

what defines our sinners.

8.

Abundance does not always instill social esteem,

so appearances often supersede assurance.

Like the fable of the king who wore no clothes, all too

many succumb to the manipulating few who

dictate what to wear, how to live, even when to care.

This insider joke allows faux fashions to flourish

in a world where who you really are isn’t nearly

as important as what a few think you should revere.

From your body to your car to what hangs on your wall

the arts you’ll embrace are what they can get away with.

But because some rakes claim three colored splotches on a

stretched canvas is worth forty mil doesn’t make it so.

Though sanity’s birthright

is independent thought

very few have the nerve

to call the king unclothed.

9.

In Calabases, where hipocracy is worn as

a social statement, they legally poison the air

driving a thousand monster SUVs at a time.

Beyond deserving grace, they project a concerned face,

making lighting a cigarette on their streets a crime.

Though one frivolous trip

to the market pollutes

more than a hundred smokes,

do they know they’re the joke?

Deeming themselves immune to their own manufactured

blight allows transferring the guilt: a favored ploy that

lets them sleep well at night

in quasi-liberal peace.

10.

On the Hollywood Freeway I’ve seen the black Bentley

many times: the driver being thirty-something blond:

texting on her cell phone, often fussing with her hair,

not wanting driving to interfere with her jaded

sense of purpose: an accident waiting to happen.

Friday morning found her rear-ending the car of an

older man, his car (his life?) not worth one-tenth her own.

While the gawkers slowed traffic to a crawl we saw her

sitting on the shoulder, yapping on the phone, primping

her hair. So, did she care? The stretcher was not her own.

To some, laws of physics

are mere inconvenience,

laws of the road are for

the less entitled mass.

11.

In a checkout line one night in Sherman Oaks I saw

a mother, with two kids in toll, pay for her groceries.

Distracted, she missed her purse, dropping several twenties

on the floor. As they headed outside a well-dressed man

in front of me slipped the bills into his vest pocket.

If took the chastising

of both the clerk and I

to shame him out the door,

her money to return.

To some, a forced conscience

is one step short of hell.

12.

Last fall I received an urgent plea from a record

producer in Brentwood, the sale of his house at hand.

He wanted to disguise the rampant termite damage,

wanted traces of evidence patched and painted out.

I declined the offer and said find another man.

Physical camouflage

may deceive the eye but

moral infestations

are not disguised that well.

13.

Late one evening in a Beverly Hills parking lot

I saw a Rolls back into the side of a parked car.

This girl, a woman in gender only, got out of

her Rolls just long enough to determine there were no

important witnesses, then nonchalantly drove off.

To this type doing the

right thing is laughable

and moral consequence

only applies when the

circumstance demands it,

only applies when caught.

14.

Called for jury duty, we were canvassed, then informed

the case involved a dentist versus a physician.

Both attorneys claimed their clients were too successful,

too prominent, to grace the court with an appearance

and by proxies their testimonies would be declared.

Because jury duty will not pay the bills of the

less prominent, less successful self-employed, I raised

my humble hand and asked the esteemed judge to let me

simply take their transcripts with me to read at work and

return verdict by proxy: a breakthrough precedence.

His Honor, unamused,

dismissed me from duty.

When the laws of the land

grant some an upper hand

exemptions from fair time are too often extended

to those who should be grateful the system protects them.

　

15.

One Sunday morning I got a call from a distraught

broker’s wife frantically bemoaning her stressful life.

The swimming pool drains were clogged, flooding onto the lawn.

Her son’s birthday party was coming up and without

a perfect estate her reputation was at stake.

On my drive to her house

I listened to news of

the great Tsunami that

drowned nations in it’s wake.

To some perspective fades

beyond their own small world

where the cherished concept

of karma is foreign.

16.

Choosing to ignore nature’s warnings, the absurdly

affluent erect their mansions on hostile terrain.

When havoc is unleashed by drought, wildfire and then rain,

the nation morns the plight of our pseudo royalty:

while forgetting the rest of us who must pay the tab

with services rendered

to sustain their folly.

17.

And here in the heart of this infamous earthquake belt

houses built on hillsides are still supported on stilts.

What part of this city’s

history, or sound logic

or plain common sense, don’t

some people understand?

18.

During droughts, when water turns to gold, the status quo

demands that the country club golf course greens remain green.

Perverse priorities command that the bungalows

in Burbank should sacrifice yards to dust, and they must,

or face the wrath of the liquified monopoly:

while somewhere in Hades

the incarnations of

Nero and Antoinette

nod understandingly.

19.

Should any of us care about the diluted standards

some of our more atrociously indulgent endorse?

Of course not, unless it

affects us directly.

But here rests the problem:

it inevitably does.

20.

The unwritten rule, when times get tough, is to avoid

a conscience when sticking the middle class with the bill:

when raising our taxes, lowering theirs, when stripping

our schools, not theirs, when punishing us all with higher

fees and serving both young and aging the bitter pill.

And with the mandate of

the easily deceived

empowering the greed,

is it any wonder

the modern formula for sustaining legal theft,

graft simplified, has exceeded expectations by

pretending to embrace our values, distorting facts,

diverting attention, browbeating objections through

media mouthpieces, then securing the plunder?

21.

And what else, besides greed,

incubates the tough times?

No sane, hard working farmer would turn the keys to his

chicken coop over to a wolf, yet symbolically

this is what happens with diminished regulations.

Letting the soulless self govern without the safeguards

imposed by law seems insane to all but the clueless.

Yet this foolish city

produced a president

who convinced enough to

put their trust in the wolves.

And the depletion of

stock still comes as a shock?

22.

When times get tough, during

each cycle of madness

in these self-inflicted recessions, sacrifices

must be made - as long as its not by one of their own.

By not suspending obsessions for a fourth chateau,

they’ll lower product quality and raise their prices,

dismiss faithful employees, blame unions when they can

and expect, and receive,

handouts paid for by us:

the government decree

of inverse charity.

And to help turn these tricks

they keep sympathetic

officials on their pricks

when they’re shifting the blame.

23.

But skewed justifications won’t sustain a nation

when corporate welfare is championed by officials bought

and unbridled greed is sending the jobs overseas.

As a long history of failed cultures bare witness still

futures are gambled without a healthy middle class:

a plague that guarantees

weakened democracies.

24.

Its not that the wealthy are different from you and I,

its just that what a few decide, for better or worse,

intensely magnified,

affects millions of lives.

As was prophesied by

the poet Newbury:

right now the future is

not what it used to be.

25.

Still. if the future is salvageable then it’s fate

rests within the minority of ethical men

with the conscience, the wisdom and testicles to steer

free enterprise back towards the more noble ideals of

fair profit, just wages, sound products and honest trade.

Moral men with money,

the rarest of all breeds?

Real heros of commerce

in a world of mad greed?

To these all I will add

is bless them, bless them all.

　

　

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS

FROM THE VIEW LOOKING IN

　

26.

Between the higher tier and the lower rung there beats

the heart of this city: a diverse, compelling mix

of citizens: princes and pawns, dreamers and schemers,

climbers and sinkers, doers and watchers, complex and

clueless: some devout, some enlightened, some unconvinced:

destined by fate to keep

society afloat,

living within the world

of life outside the moat.

As varied as they are,

three distinct styles emerge:

There are the ambitious and always upwardly bound,

or those clinging to the walls of a downward spiral.

In the bulk of the center a large core can be found,

those contented or conceding, each staking a claim

to their versions of the American Dream abridged.

27.

The human condition, democratically disposed,

affords virtues and vices, retreatments and rewards,

fundamental follies,

impassioned projections,

consuming obsessions

and noble achievements

to each and all, designed

to appease every mind.

28.

And the mind is transformed

through the simplest of acts:

a stranger’s friendly smile, family picnics in the park,

young lovers holding hands, old friends sharing memories,

neighbors helping neighbors despite language barriers,

time spend with the elderly or with children with needs,

even the thoughtfulness of not littering the streets.

And common good survives

even pragmatic times.

But good deeds don’t attract

the good press they deserve

so writers address the

fallacies in the rest.

29.

On Melrose the wannabes arrive to strike poses,

fighting for space with the ultra cool: in their right clothes,

with their right look: cutting-edge hair, tattoos and metal:

wanting so hard to seem different, without much effect,

as they mingle with a cloned multitude of their own.

The wannabes, bless them all, have much purer motives:

they just want a foot in the door, their own chance to prove

they can act, they can sing,

they can write or direct.

To them attention might

provide an actual key.

30.

With attitude addictions vanity’s price comes high:

like when they discolor their skin with a branding iron

in the holy name of cool: pronouncing how unique

they are to be tattooed now just like everyone else:

unwilling to comprehend unique comes from within

or cool is in the act of being one of a kind

and one of a kind requires being true to oneself.

31.

Along Sunset Boulevard chain store coffee houses

swell with image hounds sipping their overpriced candy

flavored mocha or their designer bottled water.

Proprietors understand the values some place on

pretense and jack their prices according to demand:

while the ghosts of Bogart

and Bukowski deadpan

the tragic manning-down

of fabled imagery.

Though there are still a few

Mom and Pop coffee shops,

places where reflections

and atmosphere are free,

these survive mainly by

offered sincerity:

a rare treasure in a

city driven by trends.

32.

From the coffee, cars, clothes, books and fabricated looks

to what they eat or watch or listen to, in this world

where the pilgrimage of the followers never ends,

where even household pets are chosen by fashion trends,

the only real trendsetters are those that follow none.

Still, to most saying so

creates more trauma than

the fear of being snubbed

by the rest of the herd.

33.

At a news stand in Studio City thin young girls

with pretty faces browse the countless new issues of

magazines that preach the same gospel, validated

by a billion dollar business: a woman’s stature

in life is determined by her physical facade.

Conditioned by decades

of the same fable told,

and demanded by men

of a similar mode,

these girls, barely women,

are convinced what they read

will help them adjust and

improve their own net worth.

While books that actually

broaden the mind, complete

the whole, go virtually

unnoticed or unread.

And somewhere up in heaven a million tears are shed

lamenting bright futures surrendered to Princess Land.

34.

Competing for shelf space here, as with all the news stands

across the land, are a magnitude of testaments

to a crass religion:

the Celebrity Cult.

Born of this city, it’s

dogma globally spreads

it’s mission to dispel

our own significance.

Although Nathanael West forewarned us, some seventy

years ago, not to embrace fantasy land debris,

most ignore warnings that living vicariously

can hinder personal growth and undermine self worth,

derail untapped potentials and individual dreams.

I’ve known so many who can tell you which actors date

each other, which ones break up and which ones tell the lies.

Yet they can’t tell you who

wins a Nobel Peace Prize?

Why nurture religions that benefit a chosen

few when a life fully lived would be it’s own reward?

If as much effort were

put into completing

ourselves, this cult would face

it’s well-deserved demise.

35.

In this benign city,

this City Of Angels,

one export I’m proud of

is our tolerance where

belief systems are as varied as the land itself:

a culture where even non-believers will concede

the true miracle is in how we all co-exist.

If this town has a liberal heart, as conservatives

across the country claim, this is it’s badge of honor.

In a near perfect world

freedom means what it means:

applied to natural faith

this should translate to mean

pure religion offers comfort, hope and peace of mind.

It does not retaliate when scrutinized, or starve

it’s own people to feed some god’s ego, or inflict

countless suffering and death disguised as holy war.

Pure religion rejects none and encompasses all.

Without fundamental

sects entrenched, demanding

conversion or judgement,

in a near perfect world

compassioned souls agree

each perceives differently.

36.

In this city where so few judge others by their skin,

where old-school prejudices receives wide-scale contempt,

we’ve still developed an iconic and eccentric

value system where too many base personal worth

in our culture on each one’s standard of living:

the area of town we live in, whether we rent

or buy, what car we drive to and from what job we have.

In a less perfect world

select enlightenment

adds it’s own color but

subtracts true character.

From Silver Lake to Lawndale, from Santa Monica

to North Ridge, snobbery by location, vocation,

even transportation,

is our embarrassment.

37.

Common phenomenons

are more difficult to

comprehend sometimes than

the random oddity:

　

like the transformation that turns fairly decent types

into careless, insensitive freaks behind the wheel,

from blatant contempt for the handicapped while stealing

their parking space to endangering lives with reckless

lane changes, from distracted driving while writing or

masturbating the phone to speeding through red lights and

school zones: thoughtless vanities without sane excuses.

In this sprawling landscape

that birthed a car culture,

when gadgets and self-love

replace basic respect

contagious disrespect

will wreak innocent lives.

38.

The games we all play keep our minds sharp, our spirits young.

But what of those who equate obsessions with glory?

Across this city and throughout the land villains fall

and heros are crowned by the thousands day after day.

These champions of justice, mostly boys or placated men,

defeat evil and right wrongs while facing deadly harm:

all from the safety of their sofas, desk chairs or dorm,

where worthy crusades are acted out with game boy toys

and real life adventures are exchanged for childish shrills.

Dubious achievements

require minimal risk,

yet a true hero’s heart

simply can’t be store bought.

If we got off our a*s and climbed a mountain or two

or improved conditions in some improvised local,

ran a marathon or joined a softball team or picked

a worthy charity and volunteered to give time,

　

reaching Level Sevens

or saving some cartoon

princess from pretend doom

would seem so meaningless.

39.

Although the work I do

keeps me physically fit,

when I need my spirits lifted I’ll ride my Huffy

on the bicycle path through Balboa Park, content

to share the space with kindred travelers: fellow bikers,

joggers, skaters and hikers, each exercising their

own concept of health on nature’s juvenated time.

Varity respects

every physical style,

and throughout the park are hundreds of golfers, soccer

teams, tennis matches and even fringe rugby players.

40.

But a day in the park

won’t detract from the fact

that the health conscience are becoming minorities

in a town peopled by increasing obesity.

And who must take the blame

for this city’s weight gain?

Social acceptance edged on by rotund talk show hosts?

Gross profits from food chains pushing artery cloggers?

Stores charging consumers more for their healthier brands?

The lowering of personal standards or perhaps

the infusion of cultures with unhealthy diets?

Or maybe too many

have become life watchers?

　

41.

Or perhaps, just perhaps,

a great many have quit

trying to live up to the impossibly grandiose

standards rammed into our psyches by image machines?

Five in a hundred are born with the genes that allow

the human vessel to remain essentially thin.

Yet the pushers of starlets and fashion flakes imply

real beauty is regulated to their percentile:

a superficial persistence too many accept.

But true beauty is without height to weight restrictions,

without complexion meters or eyes, hair, nose ratios.

True beauty encompasses the ninety-five percent:

the hearts, souls and minds encased within our flawed facades.

Still, those rebelling need

to always understand

our body’s maintenance

should be for our health’s sake.

Whatever it’s design,

they’re our temples for life.

 

42.

An exception to the rule that honors exercise:

in this city, in a perversely ironic way,

we have a sub-culture that exercises nightly,

although hardly morally or legally grounded.

Dogs hike their legs to mark their turf or leave messages

on walls for their canine friends, and spreaders of graffiti

do much the same: the difference being canines have no

motives not designed by nature, while taggers emit

a plaintive cry for attention not rightfully earned,

proclaiming to themselves, and the world, that they doubt

they’ll receive recognition in a less primal way.

Some claim to be artists,

and they are when the bar

is lowered down enough

to include every breed.

But if true skill levels exist and the message has

artistic substance worth expressing then shouldn’t it

deserve to thrive on a surface that won’t be painted

over the next day? Or a surface where their kindest

critic won’t be some like-minded mutt hiking his leg?

43.

Although insecurity and insincerity

tarnishes face value, self-expression is priceless:

from quite subtleties to

more substantial moments,

as priceless as our own

individual stories,

our haphazardly or

orchestrated musings.

44.

And what of the grounding core, the less flamboyantly

expressive center that ensures stability’s grace?

Those enabling freedoms

to be diversely spread?

The shopkeepers and teachers, nurses and programmers,

the truck drivers and mechanics, clerks, cops and bakers

and every house builder,

buyer and homemaker?

Most tend to be earnest, hardworking women and men:

paying bills, saving too little while spending too much,

sometimes stretched to the limit but still discovering

milder diversions to ease the stress: these co-workers,

neighbors, associates and friends with varied lifestyles

and the common dream of

comfortable, fulfilled lives.

To these all I will add

is bless them, bless them all.

　

　

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS

FROM THE VIEW LOOKING OUT

　

45.

What circumstance of fate,

besides birth, would dictate

the roles each of us will

find ourselves cast into?

Is it about choice, chance

or the merging of both

that causes some to sink,

some to tread, some to rise?

46.

In my case I relinquished a known commodity,

a sixty-hour work week, with it’s requisite pay,

it’s perks and stock options, when I moved here to L.A.:

exchanging the standard path for an unknown future

that afforded me time to focus on my painting.

But what of the far less

idealistically crazed

souls who aren’t seduced by

the fickle, reckless muse?

47.

When I moved into Hollywood my new neighborhood

was the classical melting pot of distinct cultures:

the type of environment so often portrayed in film

or on stage or in literature, much like the storied

boroughs of New York, the starting point of the first wave.

And yet ironically the Hollywood of filmdom,

historically anointed the world’s story teller,

mostly ignores the heritage in it’s own back yard:

occasional exceptions tend to stereotype

the poor, lampoon the middle, aggrandize the elite.

48.

Arriving home from work I greeted neighbors of mine

doing the same: a scene recognized in many lands.

My neighbors across the street were a bright young couple.

She worked in the film business. He was a programmer.

The family they some day would have would be born into

an educated work ethic that should ensure them

of a greater than average chance towards a fulfilled life.

My neighbors a few houses over were an oddly

animated couple. She taught school and he was a

contractor, both with intriguing, eccentric hobbies.

Next door to them was a widower who lovingly

maintained the garden that his late wife cherished so much.

 

My neighbors to the left were immigrants from back east,

a couple who’s time was precious because they embraced

a working formula: a quick snack, then the husband

was off to business school, the wife to her English class:

each understanding the efforts a future requires.

My neighbors to the right were immigrants from the south

and I watched the young mother pleading with the landlord

not to post an eviction notice on their door, while

her husband polished his new chrome rims out on the street

and the kids were pacified in front of a big screen.

49.

The known formula for

a more secure life is

as old as the ages

and not cryptic to learn,

and yet in this stressed out city a few will perceive

it as natural progression while many just regress.

50.

Although I’ve become a lousy businessman in my

later years, an idealist who can’t figure out how

to earn money from art without aggressive, shameless

self-promotion, I’ve lived and observed life long enough

to comprehend why many of our poor stay that way.

And it hasn’t taken

some governmentally

sanctioned social study

to validate the cause.

51.

Domestic and imported generations driven

by instant gratifications seldom build nations

or enhance the chances

to personally thrive.

Incurring heavy debt while living beyond fragile

incomes, buying trinkets instead of educations,

clinging to failed traditions without learning newer

vocations, producing too many children they can’t

provide a good home for: all are indicators of

a probable life in

recycled poverty.

Though poverty itself is not a social sin the

failure to grasp a chance to rise above it could be.

52.

With immigrants, if the lessons still haven’t been learned

then changing countries won’t guarantee a better world.

Foresight not earned en mass,

before the exodus,

does not translate well to

new geographic bliss.

53.

Not all old traditions deserve to be continued:

not if a culture’s diet induces poorer health

and obesity, not if true knowledge rates lower

priorities than jargon, not if it’s religions

humble the masses, allowing the tyrants to reign,

not if it restricts women’s potentials to the role

of obedient and second-class baby makers.

If old world traditions

don’t offer new world hopes

they should be abandoned

or greatly modified.

In free societies

freedom means what it means

and freedom’s greatest gift

is the freedom to change.

54.

What altering of fate

seems not to resonate

with gang bangers or street urchins, with outsiders or

hustlers, with those of undefined hope to those with low

expectations, with those trying to rise while being

held back to those not even trying: these sectors of

sub-cultures that populate the quagmire mix within?

Do ingrained perceptions

of pre-assumed failings

create social stigmas

deemed unsurmountable

 

when courting the razor’s

edge throughout this city?

55.

When a volatile mass can generate enough force,

the age old adage that there is more strength in numbers

generally holds itself to be true when applied to

collations of repressed groups challenging oppression,

unjust laws, social cruelties: all adversities.

But what of sub-cultures that inbreed defeat as they

create a suppressive atmosphere among their own?

Street thugs inflict more devastation within the realm

of their own cultures than many governments could do:

intimidating those trying to rise above while

symbolically enslaving the neighborhoods they rule.

And who should take the blame

for keeping themselves chained:

the heartless few or the

many who don’t unite?

56.

Like roaches scurrying for the safety of the dark

when a switch is turned on, any sub-culture that can’t

survive exposed to light

is an infestation

that victimizes both

the city and itself.

Yet below the surface

self-denial still breeds.

57.

Having fought in and lived through wars myself, overseas

and then back here in the heartland, another hard truth,

lived firsthand, I’ve learned from my experience is this:

a gun in hand does not turn a boy into a man

nor does courage found only in numbers make you one.

It takes more courage to

live life honestly, more

guts to do the right thing,

than to run with the pack.

Sadly, some types settle

for much less than courage.

58.

Throughout history many

have tried to glamorize

the rapscallions, the rogues, the ruffians and felons,

from the corporate criminal to the soulless dealer.

And our own film, gaming

and music industries

often exemplify

those blurring perceptions

of villains and victims:

feeding subconscious needs

to justify their deeds

and alleviate guilts.

Guthrie once said ‘Some men steal with a six-gun, others

with a pen,’ yet all are morally castrated men:

eunuchs without scruples,

undeserving of praise.

Real men don’t cheat the poor,

stifle the young, abuse

the aging or inflict

pain on the innocent.

59.

The heros we champion say more about our chances

to rise than many of us may ever realize.

In my younger years I played football, baseball and boxed,

and my childhood heros ran the gauntlet from Ali

to Tarkenton, Mantle, Mays, Banks, Hayes and Robinson.

Though still a lifetime sports fan, I came to understand

that pro jocks, great or not so, were just entertainers.

Somewhere in early maturity heros became

crusaders, reformers, thinkers and educators:

men and women who strived

for all an equal chance.

If we spent as much time

improving the future

as we do watching grown

men play ball, imagine!

Imagine us all as

a hero to someone.

60.

One of humanities’s grander attributes, dwelling

within the noble regions of it’s collective soul,

is the humane desire, often bordering on need,

to aid the unfortunate who can not help themselves.

But what of those who can, but won’t, help themselves ascend?

Is passive existence

an expectation of

a far better life in

some celestial world?

If so, why would flocks of

sheep bother crying wolf?

Or do they not know that

we all reap what we sow?

61.

And what of those on the

lower rungs, those without

illicit intent or

apathetic stupor?

The ones looking for work, not handouts, and earning what

they can honestly, the ones learning a needed trade,

the ones filling our classrooms with high expectations,

the ones forgoing false comforts to ensure their own

children might have a fighting chance for a better life?

To these all I will add

is bless them, bless them all.

　

　

EPILOGUE        

　

62.

What compels an old warrior, a self-taught, wiry fart

without reputed credentials and general acclaim

to comprise a tome of

questionable merit:

an effort most likely

few will bother to read?

You might as well ask why

Ives composed or Gauguin

painted or West still wrote.

Instead, I’ll ask you this:

In a city grotesquely saturated with mass

media frenzied hype that awards empowering

attention to excess, from the opulent to the

fraudulent, from the ignoble to the zealous, from

the flamboyantly frivolous to the scandalous,

can unflaunted kindness

and decency be heard?

If we knew the city

we lived in would we find

that basic goodwill is

in the majority?