this would have been two men walking at night,
and one of them would have looked like me.
the other one would have looked like he could
hurt the one who looked like me, except
he would have looked even bigger than that,
and he would have said, aren’t you scared?
the one who looked like me would have said—
would have lit a jumpy cigarette with
a wavering match and would have said—
would have blown some smoke out, squinted, tossed his
head and said—yeah, i’m scared. i’m always scared.
sometimes i’m screaming into my knuckles,
pants-wetting scared. other times i’m just
a nice, smooth, mellow scared, like unsalted
butter of fear. the big one would have said,
what kind of scared are you right now?
and the one who looked like me would have said,
right now i’m a kind of a rainbow scared, all
different colors.
sounds pretty, the big one
would have said. you got a pot of gold at
the end of that? and the one who looked like
me would have said, yeah, and would have taken
a deep drag off his cigarette.
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
a quarter-moon is overhead tonight, rushing westwards over rainish clouds,
pulling at our eyes and dreams and giving pale reminder of the time when we were
little more than scum, clinging to the shoreline’s rocks while that same moon now
overhead tugged at the salt-sea waters enwombing us, or rather at our somewhat slimy
distant ancestors, forcing what we would by great eventuality become to gasp
and grasp and grow out of our sheltering mother sea, the tidal moon marooning
us at the bare beginnings of a dry-land life that has come to have certain attractions,
such as this evening’s quarter-moon and scooting clouds, and such as what some small
family branch of that ancient scum grew up to be, that being the we who built
our ships to sail a different and quite hostile kind of sea, to reach at last one day
that moon whose own slow dance has called us into life and its contemplations.
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“It’s a foundational requirement to train on civil unrest, civil disturbance, civil disobedience nationwide. We train for that in the National Guard.” – Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, “Interview of General William Walker, December 13, 2021”