...Precipice...

I really don’t mean to alarm 

but listen, 

back when I was a kid, 

we had this thing called “Death”. 

Indeed, if you 

simply bothered to look about, 

you’d notice hundreds of lifeforms 

perpetually transitioning 

to a life less life less life. 

For some of us, 

said plethora de la mort proved 

rather disconcerting.

Perhaps it was 

a given proviso that 

the perpetual death of a 

billion unseen microbes be 

conveniently rendered invisible. 

This surely an element of trauma 

we self-centric sightless souls 

have conveniently chosen  

to spare ourselves. 

And for this biologic presence of  

such mortal maggot gravitas,  

our blinkered sobriety

remains glaringly consistent. 

Best o’ my recollection, 

this somewhat persistent 

presence of Death rode rampant 

right up until the Fall of 1978. 

Indeed, until the close of that year, 

the E. Coli in my lower bowels 

had experienced fairly consistent 

   bacterial genocide, 

and this benefited not only I 

but the whole of humanity as well. 

The conveyor belt o’ carnage which we

came to know of as “The Vietnam War” 

had only recently come to pass 

and it therewith seemed 

a fortuitous moment 

to join the US military. 

And on that day of induction, 

both I and a multitude 

of militant men to be 

were mustered in one large lobby, 

there to await that mannish moment 

when other grown men of grit  

would gaze upon our 

assorted naked physiques 

in an attempt to ascertain 

whether we moot musketeers 

were partial to martial 

and spartan enough 

in carnal constitution, 

to possess the proper 

pyro-technique  

and steel shanked jingo flint 

to therewith spew stars 

from our spit-shined spangled dangles. 

We wanton warriors of lethal lust, 

there arrayed in chairs about 

the squall of a single television set 

bellowing Saturday morning cartoons. 

Queue a barrage o’ bongos 

for up there on that beaming screen 

was none other than “Jonny Quest”. 

And quite unlike my own mundane morass, 

Jonny lived an exhilarating existence 

of constant danger and intrigue. 

So much so that his father 

assigned him his own 

personal bodyguard. 

The guard’s name was “Race Bannon”, 

and if you threatened Jonny’s precious life, 

Race would happily take yours. 

Race was cool that way, and hey!, 

what’s not to like about a cartoon character 

that always has an assault rifle 

just within arm’s reach? 

And indeed up there on that screen, 

Jonny was currently threatened by 

   a gaggle of ghastly goons. 

Indeed, there Race grits and grabs 

his flagellated phallus… er… no… rather 

Race grabs his assault rifle and… but wait. 

The screen suddenly does a jump-cut, 

and all those goons are oddly sprawled 

about on the grisly ground. 

Incongruous.  

What has just happened?

Enforced sap   nap time? 

Bullet born forlorn and 

gun-porn unduly scorned?

Violence vilely violated? 

No testicular depletion of Bannon’s 

raunchy thirty-round magazine? 

Forsooth, those goons had all surely died 

but someone up in cartoon heaven 

had decided that we wee tykes 

need now be spared 

a certain cartoon reality. 

Moments later and “Wile E. Coyote” 

is chasing a particular bird down a 

particular mountain road 

when he finds himself suspended mid-air 

just off the edge of a massive precipice. 

And a magical second later,  

he drops, plummets, plunges. 

He falls and falls and falls to a 

most certain cartoon death and yet… 

He does not hit the ground. 

There is no tiny 

puff     of      dust.

And one would surely surmise 

that on this late date in 1978, 

someone had censored death 

not only from all cartoons, 

but the whole 

of existence 

in general. 

That all of us being inducted into 

the military that day 

would never ever die. 

Yet in truth, I knew better. 

Indeed later that day 

I stepped off a dire precipice of 

mine own unique making, 

and like Wile E. Coyote, 

I’ve hung here mid-air 

for what amounts to 

one complete lifetime. 

I ever aware 

of that mortal moment 

my feet will come to drop, 

delivering unto me 

a preordained destiny: 

my death 

in a puff

of dust. 

Ó2019 Jack David Hubbell