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enjoy this writing from CEE in the free 2013 PDF file chapbook: Royal Dano’s Death Scene ‘tis of Thee (click on the front cover image or the title text to download the free PDF file)				You can also order this as a 2013 6" x 9" perfect-bound paperback ISBN# book! Click on the cover spread for the book Royal Dano’s Death Scene ‘tis of Thee

BARS

CEE

“Heeey!” blurts The Cultured Reader, as he recoils. “What’s this “BARS”
business? 'STARS’ and 'BARS’? Don’t you mean 'STRIPES’? And, using a Civil
War movie as a jumping-off point...are you trying to slip in some sort of Confederate sympathy, here? Is this in fact, literary sedition?”
#SIGH#
No, nonfriend, it just worked on a number of levels, that’s all...like my 7th grade Science teacher’s lecture utilizing the word “can”: “...you drink your soda, out of a 'can’... someone in the schoolyard gets mad at you, knocks you on your 'can’...the police arrest you, and they throw you in the 'can’....” (there was a lot more in a similar vein).
Likewise, “bars”. If Confederate it be, what is ye olde CSA, today? Our most
famous Lost Cause. Wouldn’t that sum up the general, man-in-the-street
consensus of our red, white and blue experiment, at this juncture, Dana? A lost cause?
And, if “bars” meaning “beer joints”, well, maybe we’re drinking to forget we’re
lost. In deepening shadows, down on your luck, maybe that’s the only viable
choice remaining.
If the “bars” denote a prison, well, to further Vonnegut, if you thought the story
of your life—or your country—had been told, and the rest of it consisted of
watching the caterers stack chairs, what I refer to in another poem as “a
sentimental journey to Blind Chaos”... well, maybe that emptiness is nothing but
more loss. Like losing a keepsake, a family heirloom or special snapshot. A
classic death scene, in a forgotten film. Losing any and all of our talismen, which
could have served as “how to”.
BARS. A past, gone. A past run from, ignored, distorted. A past, battened down
and shut up fast. A resonant, moppet-eyed ghost on silver nitrate, of Amerika
Past. Babbling itself to death.
I wish it was still out there. That scene. Royal Dano. In a trunk, in some CEO’s
attic, or in some psycho fan’s. In a vault at Warner, perhaps, mislabeled, “Top Hat (Ginger breaks a heel, other outtakes)”. Intact on a reel some centenarian shows neighbor kids. The Tattered Man, rattling off word salads, walking in tighter and tighter circles, until he simply falls to the Earth. And, it can just be over, now. For us as well, sort of. Looking at the Dead, at every dead hope or wish, we can stop, too. End, ourselves, perhaps...because, yeah, okay, we don’t really wanta die...but, we wanta rest.
All arguments being equal in the cyclotron, Doctor Manhattan of WATCHMEN
fame, calls it best: “Nothing ever ends.” No. That’s what’s crushing. Nothing does.
No surcease for the suffering, no 7th Cavalry, either. “THE END” doesn’t appear
in the air, and we don’t then sleep into a starless void wherein exists only
possibility. There are no quick fixes. We get up the next day to earn our bread,
or to wish for it. Hoping, like some sucker in Vegas watching the wheel. Dreaming, like Charlie in the Box, about next year.
Heraldry, the romance of The State, the swell of one’s bosom in response to
symbolism, is a 2-part epoxy of panacea. I for one believe in it. Most strongly.
Joe Citizen. Impassioned. Old School. I act on it, all the time. But, as the Amish farmer told Barney Miller, “’Don’t make the walk no shorter.”
                                                                                        —CEE, 8/8/11

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