"This country has tried to be great and it has failed. I want to make this country small, embarrassed, slightly befuddled. I want this country to hum to itself as it cleans its glasses. " Sparrow, my brother....


Sunday morning guttertalk; a joke yet no fun, no fun....this is some of the truth.

Yes sir?
Oh, yes, church, God....
So?
What do you want?
How much drink? an awful lot, I think...hmmm....
I’ve had 88 straight whiskies...I think that’s the record, those maybe Dylan Thomas lass words....
God? It know me, I think; we’ve met, but It’s kinda busy, It may not ‘member me....ah, look!
Half my clothes are smeared with puke...the rest are entirely mud-tinged.
And I seem to have painted my underwear in the colour of my cat’s eyes.
Oh, shit, sorry! Drooling a bit....
No, don’t go! Stay, there, little God-buddy! Put down tha disstase,
stay a moment and, hear, hear my story, hear apostasy, my ‘lil kind....
See, I left from Lagos after being hopped out in a UN chopper with a dozen more 9mm. stars in the Lexan than when I’d given the pilot about $800 US to not see me crouched in the back. West Africa no longer had airports. My Peace Corps parents, when I signed up, told me wisdom would be found in the bush and I found nothing but horror. I saw dozens of men with hands, arms, genitals, cut off, women raped to death and raped again, hundreds of children dead of starvation a thousand meters from a palace, these are the mere speakable horrors, there are others, you can’t remember them, you cannot remember to look for wisdom. I remembered, one night, shocked awake from no good dream by the sound of screaming, a crash, a shot, the body falling, footsteps quickly to my door, the bursting-in, the guns in my face, the soldiers ripping through the room, just taking things, the command to take off my underwear, the evil excited laughter, the pistol aimed the trigger pulled, the howling, as they left me shit dripping down my legs my penis balls not the target my bible King James now holey...why had I come here? for wisdom. Yes. No. Wisdom. What dripping crap indeed.

I left the next day, left the babies dying and I’ve been drunk in semi-rural North Carolina for three years. No one gets killed around here except pigs and road animals and domestic disputants.
But I miss being a witness. No one should be as insignificant as most people are. No one should die as unseen as most people do -goddamn you, if you say one motherfucking word about the marketplace of ideas I’ll rip out your stupid little pump. Yes....
The people to whom these things happen mean nothing, to their murderers, to the world, not even to each other, after a while. Try it...having men around who can do anything to you and frequently do...the morals expire numbly. If I had stayed, if I had seen more atrocity, yes you condescending shitglob, atrocity is the word, a hideous perversion of anything human; one more murdered thing...I might have joined in. Can you understand that, you fucking sober god-sucking bastard? that just seeing some things without dying makes you hurtled irretrievably? And the murder itself no longer the point, or even worth noting....
God has tested us all, you in your safe suburb, others in the chaos of Africa, everyone, everyone, everywhere. And there is no winner, no head of the class, no direction to face, only things to try to turn away from.

“Being an artist” said Kurosawa, having seen Nagasaki, “means never to avert one’s eyes.” I looked, and saw some of what there is of the worst of man, saw so much that I stopped noticing the mere misery of the children. Stopped caring for my children, let them die, let them, die, you, fuck! You shit! Let the babies, the babies die, each one taking another scrap of my soul! God? fucking God?! the fucking Devil?! surely They’ve nothing worse?

Drunk? Yes. Yes. You’re goddamned right. Yes....
And fuck you, citizen, and fuck, fuck, FUck!! your useless Gods...the children are dead, I have green underwear and no soul....
Fuck off. Fuck the fuck off. If you speak another word to me I shall beat you.
Fuck off...goodbye...
God bless, you, you fucking....
And tomorrow!; tomorrow you goddammned blandness of an evil little thing you’ll still be ugly
and I’ll still be drunk, the children still dying, and my heart still withered leather....