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Poetry || SubmissionsPoems By Rich FurmanBiding our time At a cemetery where the dead of the revolution no longer rest. The long years, worms, and lost fables have eroded the essentials of their lives. We compare the stones: Italian marble monoliths with heroic epitaphs, beside book-sized rounded stones warn into blank anonymity. Stinking into despairing mud, side by side, the heroes and the cowards, the righteous and the whores, the ones who carried the flag up the hill, with those who hit the bottle beyond the outhouse. All equalized by the decay, the eternal, and that which we cannot know. We rest our backs on smooth stones, dig our hands though the grass, pull up black ash earth and slithering bugs. They wait with the stones, as we bide our time. Watch out below The trees covered with green vines formed ladder steps of jungle dreams. You climb to the roof of the jungle, the ceiling of the universe, it seemed. Each careful stop taking you out of yourself, into the void you have forgotten. Parrots bright flapping emeralds fly by as common as pigeons, monkeys with lions roars as often as city dogs. The tops of the palms form a bushy horizon extending forever. There are no desk jobs up here no fast food burgers or styrofoam flavored coffee. No artificial flavored life or add water and mix existence. No need for thought or fantasy. The call of humans below imploring me to descend sounds insane. The siren of reason casts death hand long shadows masking the face of what really is. At one with the mountain Black umbrellas functioning as trees by day dot the sky of Volcan Acatenango The mother we shall die return to shortly cart wheeling down six inch trail mud bruise blood covering what once must have been skin Did you know that Central America froze ten thousand feet about sanity? Searching for answers that now will be found on green volcano cliffs that mark the end survival a dream as icicles form to the hair stalactites of our own drool Methuselah's beard riddles of revolution found The mind bends like a willow stunted like the bonsai terror and mumbling Zen koans of becoming one with the mountain blood soaked hands wipe away soiled self with a un-ripened corn husk. Five hours of fantasies of death composing tombstone epitaphs my oneness with the mountain it's gawking dark birds that mock our every step its torturous biting vines that beckon the legs to quit to join its endless center. Arriving at the bottom bend down kiss the earth like Odysseus returning humble from defeat walk down empty road with legs like bloody red plantains bending each step. Three more hours three men approach machetes glimmer form their hips the beginning the end not certain broken insane sleepless tortured Spanish. Drag us gently to our hotel a concrete floor two burlap sacs the smell of the slaughterhouse wafting though the glassless windows. Two hours of sleep and an orange glow ignites the face stumble to the bus back to Antigua a miserable old witch doctor whose magic potion makes you blind. Bill You wanted to kill your girlfriend. She fled your demands and anxieties, and having to blow you in the bathroom at parties just so you could relax around her friends. You were always a bit uptight. I talked you out of it on the fading green sofa, my slobbering dogs on each side, you quivering in rageful sobs as they drank your tears, swallowing your sadness and failure. Hard to think about murder when a hundred and twenty pound bulldog flips on his back like some post-nuclear snorting shark and demands his belly rubbed. Bill, I am sorry I did not pay the parking tickets on time. I never was good at such things. I still am not, so who am I to say what is and is not a banishable crime. Remember the other dog Bill? Her spastic body knocking out how many ideations of your suicide? She is dying. Lymphoma. We are dying too, but just don't have confirmed seating assignments. I guess none of this matters now, but somehow, I want to think it does. The Fence Why did Mrs. Finch, our first grade teacher assemble us at her home? To mobilize young outcastes? Was I a loser like you? I shudder now recalling years I would cry for no solid reason. Now, I know enough to at least rationalize. Thinking back, we formed and fried triangle shaped burgers, threw discoordinated Frisbees, teaching our hands to obey our brains. Those struggles connecting us, linked us together for twenty years, our friendship a fence which I opened to show you what, life? You, locked for years behind your own Beverly Hills Berlin wall, a cell lined with velvet Elvises, rows of pristine records, virginity and masturbating into a terrycloth towel on your water bed. I recall your Nicaraguan maid begging you: just grab life and take it Matt. But you were weak. Like when you strained for that one pull up with all of us coaxing your chin upward. We stared into each other's eyes for that second before you surrendered. Perhaps nothing I gave you was useful either. I am sorry that we are no longer friends, but mostly that you may never open that fence for anyone else. Rich Furman, PhD, is an assistant professor in the School of Social Work at Colorado State University. His poetry has been published or is soon to be published in Hawai'i Review, Black Bear Review, Red Rock Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Penn Review, Free Lunch, Colere, Pearl, The Journal of Poetry Therapy, Free Lunch, Impetus, Poetry Motel, and his poetry has been described as 'neither street nor beat nor meat nor academic, but an emotionally evocative mix of styles that can be brutally imagistic or powerfully terse.' His scholarly writing is concerned with social work ethics, international social work, friendship, social work theory, social work practice and the uses of poetry in social work and research. Today's Situation
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