What it all comes down to is the deaths of babies. Look around you. Either the ground has been poisoned or the sky is filled with falling bombs. The women are raped and butchered and the groundwater tastes like their flesh. This isn’t fiction. Look it up.
The men exist only to kill or be killed. Stand in between and the decision is made for you.
Wake up on Easter Sunday with a gun to your head, with your hands tied to the bumper of a pick-up truck by a fifteen foot length of chain. How many miles will you have to be dragged before your skin is torn away from your bones?
What you need to understand is that this is a love story.
She said she wanted to see the ocean, but we never did. She said her father had died when she was six. Said her brother was blind, but he was right there in the room when we were fucking. He saw everything.
Was hanging out down by the river with a bunch of his friends when a starving dog approached, and they beat it to death with whatever they could find. Dug its eyes out with a pocket knife. Tied a dirty length of rope around its neck and dragged it to the park. Hung it from a basketball hoop.
And I was up north when this happened, in the House of the Dying Man, only he’d been dying for six years now, and the house was actually a double wide trailer. The bones of Christ were piled on the kitchen table, and we sat around them discussing the taste of pussy. I could feel my hands begin to itch when his daughter walked by. Drank until I was on my hands and knees throwing up beside the gravel road that led to the two-lane highway that would take me back home.
And it looked warm from inside the house on Sunday afternoon, but the sunlight was a lie. The back yards felt like concrete, the shadows tasted like salt and grit. I stepped outside into the gasoline air, into the stench of burning oil, and I couldn’t remember my children’s names. I’d been asleep too long, had nothing to show for 35 years of living. Owed my sister over twenty thousand dollars, but still needed more. Had stopped answering the phone, but there were a hundred million others in all of those locked and shuttered houses, and all of them were ringing, and all of the news was bad.
The war was in its third year. Was out of anyone’s control, and so what was the point of protesting? You waved good-bye to a hundred soldiers, you identified the ones that came home in body bags, then you waved good-bye to a hundred more. You watched the news or you surfed Internet porn. You looked for faces you knew.
And how many of these women had parents, and how many had children? How many of the children were dead? This was the point. This was the actual question, but they were licking cum off their tits, they were taking anonymous cocks up their asses, in their mouths, and so they couldn’t answer. They couldn’t leave until they were paid. They couldn’t sit down without some degree of pain until the bruises had healed.
It was an obvious story, and then it had reached its end, and none of us were in love.
