Dementia Pugilistica

Pounding away with aching fists,

   he stands before a

taped and tattered heavy bag,

   and there mid-flurry,

thinks to himself,

  "I    will die    fighting."

And this somehow

   brings him comfort.

That his knuckles flash forth

to slam into bag

is not so much an effort to

send them out from innermost being,

but rather that the bag  pulls them in.

As if his fists were lumps of iron

and there at the bag's core

exists an irresistible magnet.

There an invite to hate, and

what is he    if not unleashed?

To damage.

To be   destructive.

This was never about

   the act of creation,

for to create would imply

   the intent to benefit others;

that others might flourish

from the fruit of his efforts.

   But no.

That is not him.

He was always one to

tear things down;

to    rip things up;

to    knock things over.

To sling axe and drop a tree

was always preferred to

the sink of nail;

the rise of wood;

the sheen of polished grain.

That which brings the rage.

For what is the application of varnish

  if not submission

to some excepted ideal?

What is the ultimate act of survival

if not a smashed and splintered chair?

Everything as tinder for the flame.

"I will die fighting."

And such becomes his mantra.

A repeat petit mal of the soul.

A daily validation for self-immolation. 

The wrapping of hands.

The donning of gloves.

The dip of a vasalined head

as it ducks beneath rope

into a four-squared ring.

The Ring.

The ring of the bell and its

blissful invite to execution.

Death in convenient segments,

each defined end to end

by some siren peel of steel. 

"I will die fighting."

Getting hit    while giving it.

This was his modus operandi.

This his subtle strategy.

He was not a boxer.   No.

Nothing so senseless as sport.

Forever stepping to his demise,

everything he threw

was meant to bring

the end of the world.

And instead

it brought him constellations;

collapsing galaxies;

a Milky Way maelstrom of ill-lumination

swirling away    just before

his punch-drunk eyes.

Concussed.

The bruise to the brain.

Its momentary blackout.

Synapses in mass, all reset to zero.

And yet...      And yet the ability to

step forward when asked to.

To have your name ready

when the question comes.

This was his one    true    talent.

Eleven times seven equals seventy-seven.

Sure.

He acknowledged that there were others

who could compute this by

merely using their minds,

but how did this compare to

being able to correctly state your name

   at the end of an eight-count?

No one cheers when some

certified accountant

puts the books in black,

yet there three foot above concrete,

where blood oozes forth upon canvas

   to mingle with the past,

what is he if not someone to look up to?

A Journeyman.  

   A tomato can.

      An also ran.

A professional palooka.

"I will die fighting."

Of course its important

   to have goals.

"Say!

   Saw you fight last night!

Ya didn't go down 'til the final round.

Yep. You sure can take a punch.

One    hell of a brawl!"

And ever the fighting cock,

he raises hands and assumes a stance—

though the only pose

they ever wanted from him

was best defined as

white outline upon asphalt.

And he says, "Thanks. Thanks.

   It means a lot."

Then finishes off with his catchphrase:

"I will die fighting!"

And everyone chuckles.

He,        such a character.

Just what character can you attribute

  to a punching bag?

One of so many suspended from chain.

One of many   with layer upon layer of

  duct tape wrapped about it.

There dragging out the abuse

'til the day its guts

spill out upon floor.

And what is the character

of this bag before him now?

This bag which   exists

if only to absorb a certain rage.

And he who stands before it,

seeing in it…    himself.

He who has known such hate.

Such hate as to make fists ache.

Yet what would it be to

deny enduring pain,

if not to give in

to a certain    death?

©2012 Jack Hubbell

 

   Counting Coup

There was a lot of death

and   dying up there,

and if I   remember correctly,

it gave me a bit of a thrill.

Of course there were the good guys

   and   the bad.

Both of which were in that process

   of dying unto death.

And I knew I was supposed to be

cheering for one side to

prevail over the other

but in truth,

I was somewhat indifferent.

It was the death; the dying.

Yea, and okay, the living as well.

That flux   in between.

We had yet to progress to post mortem

but that’s not to say that

the exact instant of death

can’t have a stench unto itself.

From where I was standing,

the expected smell of death

was mostly non-existent.

Rather, this death

smelled more like stale beer.

Fifty plus years of spilt pilsner

which had saturated those

rotting floorboards upon which I stood.

My father was awfully fond

   of that pool-hall.

Perhaps fonder still of the bar in the back.

Fond of those men

who shared his fondness.

There across from this bar and

upon the not too distant wall

   hung a painting.

A crude hunk of art which was

taller than I was at that age

and three times that measure wide.

And I stood on that barroom floor,

yet also stood within that painting.

But if you asked whether

I stood with the good guys or the bad,

I’m not sure I could tell you.

There were Americans in that painting

and I figure they had to be the good guys,

but then, isn’t that always the case?

There were Injuns… Indians.

   Native Americans.

Yes, Americans in that painting.

“The only good Injun      is a dead Injun.”

Now who was the American

who first came up with

that    delightful phrase?

Very likely the same asshole who

stands dead center of that painting.

Dead center.

                      Dead center.

Right where he was supposed to be.

American.

Canadian.

Back in the Fall of 1967,

Canadian actor Wayne Maunder

was hired to portray

a character of infamy

in a prime time television show

   called        “Custer”.

And I as a child was mesmerized.

And I as an adult remain    mesmerized.

You see,

because George Armstrong Custer

   was portrayed as a hero.

Long-haired hippy Custer circa late Sixties

had his finger on all the issues of the day.

“Let’s sit around the camp-fire,

pass a well-packed peace pipe.

Yo Yo Yo, lite that thing up.

George.        Yellow Hair.

Whassup wit dat bogart, dude?”

So you had actor Fess Parker

   as Daniel Boone

and Wayne Maunder

   as Custer.

Both upstanding righteous guys.

Righteous.      Righteous Hell.

In that TV show,

Custer was friends with Crazy Horse.

They hung out.

Smoke a bowl or two.

Passed that bottle of Mad Dog

   without wiping off the lip.

Yea, a TV show’s rewrite of history

that surely brought

   a rancid rise of vomit

      to the entire Lakota Nation.

But there as a child,

standing beneath Custer’s Last Stand

   at the Little Big Horn,

I didn’t see the racism.

Held no comprehension

of the decades of genocide

that led those Lakota braves

to their final moment of payback.

And where that painting was

supposed to project the final moments

of one of America’s greatest heros,

for me it was no more than a still frame

   from a damn good snuff film.

Well… snuff painting perhaps.

Indeed, I as a child got to re-enact

Custer’s brutal death over and over again.

And my memory of this     pleases me.

As a youth, I suppose I

took the side of the Native American

   a little too often.

The “Noble   Savage.”

And just what   does that   mean?

Are we to assume that the Lakota,

or the Cherokee,

or the Mohawk, the Apache,

or any of the other

original indigenous nations

ever considered the term “Noble Savage”

   as endearing?

Osama Bin Ladin dies

and a nation of Americans

bust out their doors,

look up to the sky and

do a little victory dance.

George Armstrong Custer dies

and a nation of other Americans

   do exactly the same.

Noble Americans.

Mobile Americans.

Third-World Americans

force marched and

sequestered away in their

Third-World isolation.

As that same child,

a trip with my father

once took us in proximity

to an Indian reservation.

Descendents of those same warriors

who counted coup on Custer.

Those noble Indians

standing proud beneath their

regal war bonnets.

That.

I wanted to see that.

I expressed so to my father,

and with a glint in his eye,

he agreed to take me to them.

Diverging from our course,

my father steered us

towards that reservation,

and as we traveled into the past,

I scanned the crests

of each and every adjacent hill

in search of feathered silhouette.

And yet we never actually

made it to the reservation.

Instead, my father drove us to a town

   there on the edge.

And there he pulled up in front of a bar.

And there father and son

pass from blazing sunlight

into the dim inky darkness

   of the bar’s interior.

And as eyes strain to adjust,

my father makes a

small flourish with his hand

and says,

“There.

There are your Indians.”

And I turn from the

whiteness of his gleaming smile

to the squalor of that saloon.

Before me I see

my precious Indians

collapsed upon the bar,

sprawled about

the assorted tables.

Passed out and

bodily strewn across the floor.

“There.   

There     are your Indians.”

And I hear my father chuckle.

He finding mirth

in the destruction of

my naïve illusion.

Would that I might have gathered up

those assorted Native Americans

and taken them in mass

to a certain bar that prides itself

   of Custer’s Last Stand.

To usher them all down to the lone man

sitting drunk at the end of the bar.

“There,” I’d say.

“There’s my father.

There’s your White Man.

There’s your Custer.

He in his own

dying unto death

   Last Stand.

Do with him

what you will.”

c 2011 Jack Hubbell

 Dark Warrants

Ralph was afraid of the dark.

This goes without saying for

as soon as the lights went out,

he was up, through the door

  and gone.

He, a grown man-

so many years my senior.

I, a boy, still sitting there,

acknowledging the unmistakable

absence of illumination.

The foibled failure of photons

  to rain, chicane and

      flood a room with light.

And hey,    I'm okay with that.

So what's up with Ralph?

How can two share a windowless room,

one man see nothing more

than the lack of light,

   and the other,

absolute     terror?

To see nothing but darkness...

To see darkness.

Not darkness as mere absence of light,

but darkness as some tangible substance.

That of such heavy enveloping presence

as to suffocate both mind, body, and soul.

And I'm almost certain

this has to do with love or

  some lack thereof.

Ralph had been to Viet Nam.

And this was when Viet Nam

  became     Viet Nam.  

Sure, I suppose those people

  and    that nation existed

sometime prior to the 1960s,

but    not for us.

Prior to the 60s,

it was some sprawling jungle

that took up the space

between India and Japan.

This before that period we

decided to administer

tough-love by way of    napalm.

And yes, this has to do with love

  or some lack thereof.

Ralph was there in Saigon not as soldier

   but civilian contractor.

One of those greasy cogs in our

mechanized machine du war amour.

And there, one night in a dark alley,

Ralph had a gun put in his face,

and   he    did not    love it.

Every effort

his American brethren had done

to win hearts and minds

by way of jacketed lumps o' lead,

had somehow tarnished an

otherwise amiable back-alley romance.

Looking for love in all the wrong places.

The American foreign policy

   in a nutshell.

Of course every wrong place sells

   some sort of love if you're

        willing to pay the price.

Not that that's really love.

Not that Ralph was looking for true love.

Rather just some salacious

pseudo-swoon and

spoon at the moon, plastic

made-in-the-orient version

  of the real deal.

Flesh to flesh without all that

valentine heart and

monogamy o' mind crap.

Someone to fulfill his needs.

If not love, then some surrogate of love.

I.e. "Me love you long time."

Or, that is, until Ralph tells you

  ya gotta go.

And this has to do with love,

or the lack thereof.

For two weeks straight

Ralph sat in the hotel's bar

and never ventured out the front door.

And there came a point

when the Vietnamese bartender

  asked him why.

Seems Ralph feared for his life.

Seems someone out there

  wanted to kill him.

Seems his jilted ex-girlfriend

had put out a hit on him.

Seems her un-dying love for him

still had some dying in there

and she was ever so willing to share.

"Me no love you long time, no more."

And the dark outside

got a little bit darker.

Heads or tails.

Love or hate.

How can you toss a coin

called "adoration"   

up into the air, have it

there land in the street

and come up "murder"?

Grabbing a towel,

the bartender commences to

wiping the length

of the counter before him

and without looking up states,

"You know,

the answer to your problem is easy."

"How's that?"

replies an attentive Ralph.

And here, the bartender

looks him in the eye

and bluntly states,

"You hire someone to kill her."

"Kill her?!"

exclaims a bewildered Ralph.

"Well," continues the bartender.

"You put out a contract on her life,

   with the stipulation

that if you die,   she dies."

And the way Ralph tells it,

it didn't cost too much.

In fact, it seemed

rather a bargain.

It was shortly after this

that the girlfriend

let it be known to Ralph

that she had cancelled her hit.

This with the understanding that

Ralph cancel his as well.

'Cause you know,

it would sorta suck if

Ralph accidentally got

run over by a bus.

What with money

having changed hands,

  and a contract being

      a contract.

And all of this...

All of this has to do with

that thing called "love"

or the lack thereof.

Oh, I find myself

pondering the benefits

of instilling

a Mafioso mindset

into our myriad  

interpersonal relationships.

For with this,

we might actually have

a little extra incentive to

be civil with one another.

I love you ‘til death do us part.

Truly

dark thoughts

indeed.

c 2012 Jack Hubbell

24TH STREET, OMAHA, CIRCA 2012

DREAM HOUSE

   Dream House

Barbara

   Millicent

      Roberts

has not a leg to stand on, so

   there she lies,

at yet another curb of

her oh so concrete life with

face down to the gutter.

And there in a box by her side,

you will find

a swim suit,

  a ball gown,

     a wedding dress.

And some would like to think

that this was all a woman

   would ever need,

and of course there might be

   some    truth in that.

But then again,

such an assumption

could be part of    the problem.

It was shortly after

she hooked up with Ken

that the fateful accident occurred.

As a couple, she and Ken

were once seen by many

as the ultimate of romance;

the pinnacle   of amour.

At least by      girls anyway.

Odd then that she

never took Ken's

last name of   Carson.

Oh, not that she didn't want to get married,

for indeed it seemed that she and Ken

were perpetually on the verge

  of wedding bliss.

So why not take the man’s name?

I mean, it wasn't like many

knew of her as Barbara Millicent Roberts.

No, in those uber-chic days

of glamour and haute couture,

one's nom de plume was best kept

at its most basic guttural utterance.

Cher, Bono, Madonna...

I guess you know

you have arrived

when the world knows you

by your trademark self-simple-syllabic

  Fabio fabrication.

Ah, fame.

The limelight.

That freeze frame turn

at the end of the catwalk,

with a barrage of searing strobes

irradiating your skin.

Lock that pose,

vogue a la mode,

   and then

with a twist of the hip,

   it's gone.

      All gone.

Without   a leg   to stand on.

The way the little girl tells it,

Barbie lost her leg in a

drunk driving accident.

An intoxicated Ken

there at the wheel of Barbie's car,

plowing into some bridge abutment 

   and there sending

a once perfect paradigm 

through the windshield.

At least that's one version of the story.

The little girl's

older brother   tells another.

That in a drunken stupor,

Barbie once spent the night on the lawn,

only to wake to the brutal fact that

the family dog had

chewed off one of her legs.

Well, okay.

One extreme trauma,

relative     to another.

Misfortune.

Misadventure.

Mistaken.

Mislaid plans.

That Ken's face

was marred from that accident,

   or alternatively,

given a malicious full-face tattoo

by a certain malcontent brother

with a felt tip pen...

I mean, was it really any wonder

that Ken had taken to drinking so heavily?

And let's face it.

No matter how much he drank,

he was never going to be

a     man's man.

His parent company "Mattel"

had pretty much seen to that.

Emasculation humiliation

at his very moment of creation.

Anatomically incorrect,

he loses that precious pair of cajones

he never had in the first place.

And he loses his job.

And he finds an unforgiving bridge pylon.

And she loses her leg.

And she will not    walk again.

And she will not    ever forgive.

And the two of them

   fabricate stories

in a vain effort

to survive each other—

to at least survive

the end of their dream.

Yes well, Barbie did have her dream house,

and I suppose if there was any

concrete consistency

to cling to in this

"Made by Mattel" existence,

it would be that Barbie would

   always

have her dream house.

Food, clothing and... shelter.

Pink plastic    and pastel perfection.

A paragon parcel of paradise

purveyed and pooped forth

for her pleasured perusal.

Your pleasured perusal. 

Yes,

its everything you ever wanted.

Her dream house.

Your dream house.

Our dream house.

Everything you ever wanted.

And of course there’s no doubt

that we can afford it.

That is, right up until that

moment we actually can't.

And a home

   becomes a house

       becomes

a vacant cavity.

And things left behind

   end up at the curb.

A plastic doll with a missing leg.

Another with blackened face.

Someone's precious dream house

as seen through the tears

of a little girl

as she gazes back

through a

fractured

   rearview

      mirror.

Ó2012 Jack Hubbell