REPTILE
REPTILE WISDOM ZOMBIES ON THE LAWN
Barry Hurts film critic calls Sleeping Giant a visceral
portrait of the ugliness that is growing up Think about it
untold tragedies dot the horizon Or don’t think about it
that is because they do 4 recent deaths by their own hands
5 by slow decay in our small circle alone
Legendary author Jim Harrison warned us: Nobody can be
helped by anybody He of death by no determined cause at 78
just last week Jim had a great been passed the secret face While
Barry Hurts may have had a childhood of unquiet desperation ugly
+perhaps dank
But there are still those among us who can conjure scenes sans
lysergic acid diethylamide of: whistling cardshark uncles a man
named after The Stork who brings popcorn+Mars bars to unruly
children +vomiting dogs +1 rabbit who escaped the idyll not
unscathed Rarebit for fatfoxy in backyard
Children kept from vicissitudes except for the internecine warfare
of groundhogs who nearly ate smallest brother Father took him to a
psychiatrist Truth will not set you free Childhood memories tainted
dreamscapes Cardshark uncle molester of the pretty +un-pretty
Still there was a horse named Tex +a giant’s cabin in the Laurentian
Mountains by a Precambrian lake! (how does water not fall off a
mountain?) Cardshark uncle sat near wood stove Lake was a moss
gunked marsh Water too obscene+green to fall off of mountain
But no drive UP has ever been filled with such naked lust for life
We large apes are creatures who lie down on pallets of all shapes +
sizes Lock our doors +windows +leave our bodies through small ego-
cides for 6-8hrs. nightly There we live with ardent abandon Uncles
morph into duckbilled platy-pie with longish ropes for wrangling
Last night my husband’s water broke +the skeleton of a 1.1 metre
tall individual would be found the next day in the Liang Bua cave
Homo floresiensis the Hobbit of apes And there under your own
bed under the loose floorboard rests the bones of the child you
never were
__
Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness
And they live by what they hear Such people become crazy
or they become legend. Jim Harrison RIP
Spring 2016
