Our Extraordinary Rendition
He wore women’s underwear on his head.
No…
No. Perhaps I should qualify that statement.
He was made to wear
women’s underwear on his head.
No. Again,
I don’t think I’m giving you the full picture.
You see,
this isn’t a fraternity prank we are talking about here.
When you are performing a little college hazing,
you don’t have the
International Red Cross step in to critique your method.

Ah well. Boys will be boys.
Let them have their fun.
Hey, but girls wanna’ have fun too, right?
Nothing like having a girl dip her fingers
in something crimson and then
walk over and touch a guy.
Yes. Girls will be girls.

But again.
I don’t think you understand the situation just yet.
That man wearing the panties… ?
That man with the smear of red across his face… ?
He isn’t smiling.
And just when does erotic contact
equate to existential torture, hum?

This may not be America,
but it is us as Americans.
Ah yes.
America.
And you’d like to utter that with a
swelling of pride in your chest.
We are what the rest of the world aspires to.
We are the epitome of justice.
Liberty. Freedom.
Freedom. Liberty.
Somebody’s mantra.



And what was it
the Commander of Quantanamo,
Major General
Geoffrey Miller said?
“You have to have full control.
No mistake about who’s in charge.
You have to treat these detainees
like dogs.”
Just before he made these remarks,
a man in Kabul was stripped naked,
chained in a cell,
and left to freeze to death.
Just after these remarks,
a man in Abu Ghraib is shackled
with his arms at such an
extreme angle behind his back
that his ribs fracture from the stress
and he drowns from the
flooding of his own inner bodily fluids.
Oh well. Boys will be boys.

Anybody know someone
who died on Nine Eleven?
If you or that person had a chance
to pull on those shackles,
distort those arms in their sockets,
fracture those ribs
and cause those lungs
to fill with fluid,
would you?

At what degree of separation
from the actual act of terrorism
does this man you hate have to be
before he no longer qualifies for pain?
And how much pain
can you inflict
before you
no longer qualify
to be American?
How about a show of hands.
Who here will raise their arm
for a chance to raise his?

©05 Jack Hubbell

Words of Prey
It is Sunday
and birds of prey are feeding.
That which is ripped asunder
beneath the talons of a raptor
has died a grisly death
and it somehow seems inappropriate
for such to have transpired
on a day which many deem
the Sabbath.

That the Sabbath be on Sunday
rather depends on your orientation of faith.
Yes, it’s Sunday if the name Jesus
has some special significance.
And yet it could be Saturday
should you favor the name
Abraham, or Friday if
Mohammed holds sway.

The feathered predator,
which at this moment is devouring
some other variant of God’s creation,
cares not as to whether this is
Sunday, Saturday or Friday.
Nor any other day for that matter.
Each and every day is the same
when it comes to survival.

And as you open the Good Book to
Jonah 1:17,
there outside your window,
the robin gets its proverbial worm.

Should I ask you to visualize this event,
a curtain lifts
and some Disneyesque animation
rolls before your eyes.

But no... Not so fast.
I’m not going to let this be
easy for you.
Bad things happen when you
as a creature
are ingested and pass
into the belly of another.
Though swallowed whole,
that worm has not been given
a respite where it kicks back
and talks to its creator.

Bad…
Very bad things
are happening to that worm
and as you sit there,
cocooned in that insular world of
the Good Book,
I want you to ponder the existence of
enzymatic acid.
How every day of the week,
certain creatures swallow other creatures
and while doing so,
do not pause to contemplate the
sequence of the day.

No. They exist in a reality whereby
the Sabbath is just another passing
from dawn to dusk and beyond.
Indeed, nothing more than
a recurrent ordeal
where lesser and larger
step into the light
and pray to stay alive.

©06 Jack Hubbell

Baraka
Beyond this mere corporeal existence…
This passage of time encased in a
flimsy sheath of skin,
there comes a moment when you
hope to experience the sensation of
something other than
the surge of fluid through your veins.

You masticate.
You copulate.
You defecate.
These things are given.
These things you expect.

Wading out of the ocean’s surf
like the primordial beast of ancestry,
that to which you’ve evolved
gives in to every sensory perception.

You experience the sense of touch as
rivulets of ocean flow down your spine.
The smell of brine through your nostrils.
The taste of salt over your lips.
The vision of a conch shell
there exposed in the receding tide.
The sound of…
And oh yes,
this is special…
The sound of the surf as it crashes on sand
and slithers away.
And this is a sound that stays with you
long after you’ve crawled up the beach,
gone bipedal
and headed inland.

Time may pass and with it
a multitude of sounds will vie for your attention.
Yet there will always be that serenade of the ocean.
And what resonation is deeper than this?
What sound vaster?

“Baraka.”
Let me utter that again.
“Baraka.”
Let me define it for you.
Baraka:
A transcendental sense of sound
that is unheard aurally,
yet you intuit its existence.
The odor of the holy.
The fragrance of the divine.
A sense of that from
beyond your corporeal being—
and yet not.
That of something extrinsic to experience
which you perceive to exist and yet…
let’s face it.
You will never be able to grasp this sense
for this is not a sense you can
hold in your hand.
Or is it?

There from a musty shelf of memories,
you pull down that conch shell
and place it to your ear.
There you hear that long forgotten
surf of amphibian ancestry.
And there in your primitive mind,
you discern nothing less than
divinity.
Behold Baraka!

And yet…
And yet there’s a chance that
all of this
is illusion.
That that which you attribute to
a mystical realm
might in fact be a misinterpretation of
that which exists in the here and now.
That what you are experiencing
as you hold that shell to your ear
is simply the reverb and
acoustic amplification of a sound
which emits from your inner ear.
Yes. An aural manifestation of
that inner you.
That coursing of blood through your veins.
As close to divinity as you’ll get.

Indeed,
if you’re looking for Baraka,
you’ve found it.

And yes,
precisely what you have found,

is you.

©06 Jack Hubbell

She Sans Spark
What was he to her
but darkness?
Opaque nothingness.
It was as if the mirror
reflection of his eyes had been removed
with nothing left behind but the
jet black felt backing.
Yes, light traveled in,
but never outward.
Indeed, if you stood before him,
you felt as if you were being absorbed.
There on the far side of his eye sockets,
mighty stars had collapsed to black holes;
his dense gravity sucking in
all reflective surfaces to the point
you’d find every bit of sparkle,
every glistening surface…
everything you’d ever found radiant about yourself…
dwindle away.

Indeed,
everything that passed before his eyes
grew dull, dingy, lifeless.
And this was who she was now…
This was who she’d become.

So why did she remain?
If she was truly nothing,
why was she not shed?
why was she not cast off?
why was she not discarded?
Perhaps there,
deep within her,
a small spark still remained.
Some aspect of
inner incandescence
he had failed to locate, absorb and obliterate.
Perhaps that singular spark
was the one remaining thing he granted her,
for without it,
how could he define himself?
To be dark one must be relative
to that which is light,
and he would grant her that tiny existence
if only to prove his own.

And what if she herself should choose to
snuff out that final spark?
What if, by her own hand,
all light
ceased to be?

Ah, but there are alternatives.
Instead, what if she simply chose to turn away?
To look anywhere else but at him?
To turn into the wind;
open all vents to the soul.
Embrace the wind and blow out the old cinders.
Bring that spark to a glowing ember.
stoke the hearth of a diminished heart;
incite the flame raging at her core.
Reclaim the torch,
irradiate outward and
burn away the darkness.

Becoming a beacon of self import,
she would move through the night,
a shower of sparks trailing behind her;
a wake of illumination, and she
feeling the impending glow of supreme supernova,
whilst darkness remains nothing but
a long forgotten shadow.

©05 Jack Hubbell

Sure Security (England)
When young
it seemed
as if he
was at the center of a world
which would forever go on
revolving about him.
Wherever he looked
the light was shining brightly
and mortality was always
far, far away.
As he grew older
and proceeded through his years,
the world swelled in its vastness.
Soon he was on the edge,
far from the center.
A center which would always seem to be
somewhere else.

For him, now,
there was only darkness.
For him
the light would never return…
there would be nothing to penetrate
all the blackness
which had become of his life.
His
would be life on the peripheral.
His
would be houses on the horizon.
His
would be a day of continuous dusk.
No matter how brightly the sun shone,
his world
would be an obsidian world.

He sat in front of a large luminescent rectangle
and a thousand phosphorescent dots
lay reflected in his eyes.
This was how the light reached him now;
transmitted from the center
via a tinsel coated hanger.

It would seem this week
the center was located somewhere in Texas,
US of A.
This was a place
where "real" people
had "real" problems.
Oh, nothing like paying gas bills;
nothing like coping…
nothing like
the dole.
"They"
were fighting assassins
and corporate takeovers.
"They"
were about oil rights
and the fall fashions.
There was never a fear of being made
redundant.
No,
our cathode hero makes others redundant.
The dialogue this episode:
"Shut that factory down!"
and the hero
fades
to a Caribbean isle.


He,
in his darkened room,
watches this.
He holds a pint of ale up
and watches the light
from the rectangle
distort amidst the glass, fluid and silt.
He (a mere aberration in the script)
has been written off.
His esteem;
his manhood;
his feeling of worth;
his life in the script…
his life as a tragic character the author
never thought worthy of development.

"Reality!",
he wants to bellow;
"Not a fictional multitude.
Reality is one
over two thousand,
and two thousand 'ones'
out of work!"

He looks up
to catch the flickering,
diverted glance of his wife as
she pretends to look past him.
Her eyes focus
on the darkness beyond the window.
His,
from a shielded angle,
upon her.
He perceives a softness in her eyes
and a faint smile forming across her lips.
Something twists inside him,
for he doesn't know
if he can stand the thought
of what she might be thinking.
He knows,
one day,
he will strike her again;
for the smile
and not the lack of it.

Here,
in the shadows,
lie casualties

For now,
the coolness of the glass against his forehead.
For now,
the psuedo-introspection of the light
as seen through a strong glass of ale.

Yes,
there's sure security
here
in this dark
and forgotten
industrial town.

©86 JDH

Babaloo
Desi was in prime before your time.
By ‘before your time’,
I mean exactly that.
Before your time.
This time in which you are meant to shine.
Your prime time.
And just what is it you’ve achieved compared to Desi?

Desi?
Desi could sing the words “Babaloo”,
beat a conga drum in accompaniment,
and convey a wild abandon that…
well… made women giddy.
Made ‘em
pa-show-nut!

See…
He had that big ol’ conga drum attached to a harness
and it would be just in front of his hips…
you know… right there.
And he would beat on his drum.
Wale on that sucker.
Flail his conga and yell
“babaloo!”
And women?...
Well women found this entertaining.
Go figure.

Of course this was a time before electric guitars.
Long before Hard Rock and
young men making fools of themselves playing
‘air guitar’.
Was there ever a time when young men played
‘air conga’?
Like… you know…
Hands at their crotch,
beating the hell outta some
imaginary object.
Say if I, at this moment,
did an homage to Desi
and commenced a little ‘air conga’ action,
would you get it?
I mean… would…
Would you be impressed?

Lucy was.
Not with me that is.
No. I wasn’t even born yet.
Didn’t have a conga to beat as it were.
No. Lucy saw Desi beat his conga once
whilst babalooing
and she…
she fell in love.

Lucy got herself a TV show
and put Desi on it.
Now bear in mind that Desi was a Cuban
but this was back before it was decreed that
we hate Cubans for being Cuban.
Still…
He had that brown skin.
Then again,
he had that huge conga and
knew how to use it and
ahem… was passionate about it, so…
So we as a nation let Lucy’s husband
be her TV husband as well.

And Desi?
Desi was in prime time.
Prime time TV.
Six odd years of it.
Unfortunately,
he went from being the man to being
Lucy’s husband.
“Who’s that?”
“Who’s that?! Why, that’s Lucy’s husband!”
Desi was living in a man’s man’s man’s world
but it wouldn’t be
no sorta prime time
without the loving of a particular woman.

Ah yes.
But there at the end of the Fifties,
Desi’s uncontained babalooing
got the better of him.
Lucy gave her hot conga man the boot.
Lo, but in Desi’s lifetime,
he saw his existence shift from
nothingness to prime time
and back to nothingness again.

Well no.
That’s not necessarily true.
For some fifty odd years, Desi
has been singing “babaloo” in reruns.
And me?
Ah, that “babaloo.”

Why,
now I pay homage to Desi almost every night.
Yes, in honor of Desi,
I whip my conga out
and beat forth a ferocious rhythm.
Unfortunately my
prime time doesn’t last too long.
Just like poor ol’ Desi,
it comes and it goes.
A quick
orgasmic spasm in this
babalooey spew of eternity.

©05 Jack Hubbell

Cooties
This much was certain.
She had cooties,
and because of it,
no one would sit next to her.

Now if you asked them what cooties were,
well…
that was sorta hard to define, but…
they weren’t stupid.
They knew that if
you had cooties it was bad
and by golly, Sherry
had allot of cooties.

Oh yea… and she was mentally retarded too.
I figure it’s fairly important
to let that be known.

I suppose that, for them,
cooties kind of came hand in hand with
mental retardation.
I’m not exactly sure
how they came by such logic,
but I think this
would be a good place to
define the word ‘stupid’.
It might just be instructive.

Was it stupid for me to not know that
mental retardation and cooties went together,
or adversely,
stupid for some
to make that connection
a little too easily?

Was Sherry a girl of special needs?
Well yes, of course.
And here we should define
“special needs”.

Other than Sherry,
there were the special needs of
everyone else on that bus.
They needed the other;
the outsider;
the lesser;
the substandard.

The most ultimate of that
which they were not.
And what with the presence of Sherry,
it was pretty easy to score high on the
bell curve of intellect.

And so… okay.
Maybe I can understand the
need for Sherry’s existence in this
ever expanding universe;
on this spinning Earth;
on this one particular traveling bus.
People want to be seen as smart
and how can you ascertain
level of intelligence
without some lower benchmark to base it on?

So if I put you on the spot…
If just now I asked you to
define mental retardation, could you
do that for me?


Substandard intelligence
relative to what?
Did Sherry possess that which was
substandard compared to say…
the family dog?
Was Sherry smarter than
the smartest dog that ever existed?
Well yes. That’s obvious.
And yet Sherry could not and would
never be able to do calculus;
never understand complex astrophysics;
never comprehend quantum mechanics.
But then… What the fuck?
Neither can I.
So Sherry and I have this in common, and
though both of us know how to tie shoelaces,
we will never master higher math, so...
I guess graded on the bell curve,
the both of us fall into
the lesser class of mental retardation.

Having said that,
I didn’t always have
cooties.
Not yet anyway.

But of course there was that one day,
so many years ago,
when I climbed onto the bus,
made my way down the aisle,
and of all those empty seats,
took the one
next to Sherry.



And from the back of the bus
there came an imediate chant:
“Jack’s got cooties!
Jack’s got cooties!”

Yes. Perhaps I did, but
let’s just call it what it was.
An inoculation.

You see,
it could be that cooties
are very much like a virus
and once you’re exposed to them,
you’re inoculated from further infection.
A lifetime inoculation
not against being retarded, but rather,
against that which existed
at the back of the bus.

Something of which even I of
limited mental capacity,
could easily define not as that of
superior intelligence,
but rather that which fell
under the simple nomenclature of
“absolute idiots”.

©06 Jack Hubbell

Diatryma
In prehistoric times,
I would have been dead already.
If I had not died, then
I would have been
pretty ancient by now, but no,
I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have made it.

You see,
it would have been one of those
survival of the fittest things,
and let’s face it:
if the survival of the human race
had depended upon the sperm
stumbling about in this man’s gonads,
then we’d likely see
Cro-Mags and Neanderthals
lumbering about the local shopping mall with
all the other mouth breathers
(…now, come to think about it…).
Okay… Well,
them what congregate in shopping malls?
I’m not sure whether we can blame evolution
or intelligent design on that one.
Anyway…
I digress.
We were talking Homo-Jack-Idiot,
lesser sub-species of the illustrious Homo Sapien,
somewhat circa sixty thousand years BC.
It was rough back then.
Let me give you an example:
You could not get a fried Twinkie or a
strawberry banana smoothie to save your life.
And a few fried Twinkies
might have been all I needed to stay alive.

No. Back in the day of Mastodon ploppy pies,
you had to get your own food, and no,
not get your food as in
a short stroll across the food court.
Now it is true that somebody
had come up with the idea of
vending machines but
we’d yet to devise coins
so we had nothing to drop in the slots.

Again, you had to get your
own food,
and of course,
before you could get it,
you had to see it.

You’d see a Diatryma,
a giant carnivorous ostrich-like bird.
You’d yell out, “Hey look! A Diatryma,
a giant carnivorous ostrich-like bird!
Let’s go get it!”
But okay, here’s the problem: I
can’t see for shit!
Frickin’ blind I am.
Oh, you can’t tell, cuz
I’ve deceived you.
See, I wear contacts.
At this moment,
I could see a Diatryma,
a giant carnivorous ostrich-like bird.
But back in the day
(caveman times),
I wouldn’t have been able to see nothin’.

Okay. Let’s say there was this cave girl.
We’ll call her Veronica.
I’d say, “Hey Veronica!
Can I pass just a few million
spermatozoa along to you?”
(You know.
Just a simple attempt to propagate those
Homo-Jack-Idiot genes).
And Veronica?
Oh, she would respond,
“Now why should I like, mate with you?
Could you like, see and go get me a
Diatryma, you know, like one of those
giant carnivorous ostrich-like birds,
if I like, asked you to?
You… You?
You are like
so not mating with me!”

Gahhh! What a bitch.
It’s always big birds with these cave women!

So, you see,
this is how it was.
Any dude who brought a big bird into a woman’s cave
got his sperm where it was supposed to be.
And me, the blind Homo-Jack-Idiot sub-species?
Well, there I was,
outside that nice warm cave.
Totally dejected.

Yes, standing there quite oblivious
when one of the other cavemen yells,
“Jack! There’s a saber tooth tiger
right behind you!”
And I’d say,
“Um…Where?”
“Right there!
Right there! He’s…
ouch!”

And such would have been my fate.
A monster pussy eating me
as opposed to
vice versa.

©05 Jack Hubbell

Dan Doesn’t Know
Dan doesn’t know the meaning of the word “Porn”,
and this makes his mom happy.
She smiles. He smiles.
They smile at each other.
He smiles at me, and…
and somehow his smile is ever so slightly different than
when he was smiling at his mother.
Yes, his right eyebrow rises ever so,
and just what is he communicating at this precise moment?

I do not doubt that Dan knows what “sex” is.
I mean, everybody knows what sex is, right?
How about a show of hands?
Sex everybody?
As the Brits would say:
“A bit of the ol’ in out, in out.”
Intercourse.
Biological reproduction.

Okay. Okay.
We acknowledge that it exists.
Having done so, have we
past over into the realm of porn yet?
Okay then, so, women
have breasts.
Having openly admitted this phenomenon exists
does not necessarily qualify my remark as
pornographic, but
if I make an aesthetic judgment and state,
“Hey! Nice boobies!”,
have I passed over the threshold and into porn-dom?
A matter of aesthetics?
Porn?
Assessing quality of sexual appearance?
Porn?

If I say a woman has nice child bearing hips,
is that porn or simply observing that
she has attributes conducive to
safely ejecting newborns?
Breasts advantageous to suckling—good.
Breasts attached to a woman running down the beach—bad.
Damn it! It’s just a matter of
thinking about it too much.
If you don’t think about sex,
you’re perfectly okay.
If you think about it too much,
you’re a freakin’ pervert.
Naivety.
Naivety.
Naivety.
One must remain naïve. And…
well…
was there ever a time when
one can imagine that I was naïve?

Oh, we have to go way back in time.
A time when I was younger than Dan
(let’s say, Eight? Nine?).
Yes, it was around this time that a certain
visual initiation transpired.

There in my home town,
so very long ago,
some of the older boys informed those of us younger
that they had something very special to share with us.
But…
And they were very strict about this…
This something was of the utmost secrecy,
and under pain of death,
we could tell no one.

We went to this large tin storage structure
and there, up a ladder and
wedged behind one of the support beams,
one of the boys produced an old Prince Alpert tobacco tin.
Opening it, he pulled out an ancient
multi-folded sheet of paper.
In reality, it was just a magazine clipping,
and once unfolded,
there placed in our trembling hands
lay a black and white image of…
a woman’s nether regions!

The picture?
We are talking extreme close-up.
Extreme.
We are not talking erotic.
Not even pornographic.
We are talking
gynecological.

There was nothing sexy here.
For us young boys,
it was like looking at an alien life-form.
We were mesmerized and yet
repulsed at the same time.
In hindsight, I figure if that photo had been of
a woman portrayed full figure and naked,
a few of us young boys might have achieved a
state of arousal,
but as it was,
the tattered clipping was passed boy to boy,
with each emitting a resounding
“Gosh!” as he slipped into shock.


So, Dan…
There you have it.
Your mother is right to protect you, and yet…
when it comes right down to it,
there are worse things than porn.
As a young man,
there are traumatic experiences out there awaiting you.

Beware Dan.
There will come that time when
that girl you are so intimate with will test your
total emotional commitment
by sending you into a pharmacy to buy a box of
tampons.
At that moment,
all that innocence your mom tried so hard to
preserve in you will be flushed away and lost.
And you?
You will finally be a man, or…
something somewhat close to that.

©05 Jack Hubbell