I think, often, that the idea of "ethics" becomes lost in the midst of conflict. All my life, I have considered myself an ethical person. As I have grown older, I have found myself questioning if I ever really knew what "ethical" meant, or what having morals means. When the nameless, faceless soldier on the television becomes the civilian that you love, who has done all he could for his country and himself--because there is no way out--when he hates himself for shooting a gun and feeling pleasure when the enemy dies, what definition of morality can be given? To whom can "ethical" be ascribed?

From December 12

Two years ago today, at about this time, I learned what it was like to have a life ripped out from under me, what it was to know that happiness and love are illusions and that belief in either is the most foolish thing anyone could ever hold. It took almost two years to move from pitying myself because I couldn't believe my best friends had actually left me for both of those things. Now, I am as healed as I will ever be but I am changed. The walls I had built around myself and that were destroyed, never came back. Instead, steel grew in me, infiltrated me. I am a realist but I still hope.

My life is a sea of motion and I ride it. Outside, I make my own way, I race against time because I know that "we all owe death a life", and that "to be born again, first you have to die". That's some good old Salman Rushdie. That's some good old truth. I like it, because there's hardly any of it.

One day, someone accused me of wanting to save the world. I would love to save the world but I'm not an idiot. No one can save the world. No one's "got the whole world in his hands". I know that nobody changes, no one can change anyone else, and to think otherwise is foolish. I can't save anyone, including myself. I do know, though, that I can't sit back ad do nothing while I watch the human race blow itself to hell. One at a time. I will try to instill respect, rationality, acceptance in. I am not too optimistic. But I have to try.

I will spend my life trying. I will die trying because I know that the civilian becomes the soldier and the soldier, often, cannot understand himself as a pawn and cannot live with himself. In other clothes, the soldier we view as merely collateral is the civilian we mourn. There is no difference. Both deaths, on all sides, are just as tragic. Both are human deaths no matter how "wrong" or "right", how brainwashed or aware.

Because I'm me, I look everywhere, so I have to borrow this: "there's a cross for everyone and there's a cross for me". Amazing Grace. Am I running away from my own pain by focusing on that of the world? No. I have been in pain enough and I will continue to be. So will the world. The problem is, many people are incapable of pain: killing is a hobby. Pain signifies the humane within the human. If you can't feel pain, essentially, beneath the post traumatic stress, then there's a real problem. I swear I'm not a sadist or a masochist, but my goal is to make sure that if pain is warranted, it is capable of being felt. My goal is to make the human race, in very small doses, humane. Perhaps, the virus will spread.

How many times have I been in the same place: where I don't know where I am and even less where I'm going? All I know is that everyone is slipping away, either into the grave or into time.

"For my people and others like me," Little Blue Hawk said, "people whose flesh comes from this land and rose out of this dust from the beginning, names have a real meaning. A name can change if a person grows out of one and into another."
"How can you grow out of your name?" I asked.
Little Blue Hawk grimaced and looked sideways at me without turning her head. "You become someone new," she said. "Twisted Spear, my mother's brother, grew out of that name one summer. He went out with his brothers and a few others. They made camp by the river. On the fourth night a storm blew in. The storm swelled the river in the dark and the water swallowed the camp before they could climb high enough. They all drowned. All except Twisted Spear who awoke on a far bank the next morning. He returned home alone and after the mourning was over, began to be called Spared by the River. You see? Twisted Spear drowned along with his brothers and Spared by the River was born."
Little Blue Hawk smiled and reached her hand over to me and pushed and clump of hair away from my face.
"You look too sad, Judah. Why?"
I shook my head and swallowed the lump in my throat.
"It's almost like one of Early's stories."
"I haven't heard them."
"If you stay with us long enough, I guarantee you, you will."
Little Blue Hawk nodded.
"What name were you born with?" I asked.
"The one you call me by. I was born into it, though. Not with it."
"How come?"
"The day I was born, a hawk from the East, where the trouble came from, flew into the reservation. It landed on my parents' roof the moment my mother felt the first pains of labor. Eventually it settled on the windowsill outside the birthing room. It stayed all day and night. At the dawn of the second day, I was born and with my first cry, the hawk cried, too. When the people looked, the first light of morning slanted down from the sky and shone upon the hawk and upon me. Over the course of the night, the hawk had changed colors, from gray to blue. When the sun was completely above the horizon, the bird flew away. I was left in its place but the Old Ones say it was a guardian and so I would hold it in me. Little Blue Hawk is my namesake. I go where my wings carry me and I watch over. I have not outgrown my name."
"You're watching over us."
"For the time I'm here."
She blew out a breath and gathered dust from the ground in her fingers, then let it fall. "There's an eastern wind blowing," she said, looking up. "But you give the White Man a better face."

"Val?"
"Judah?"
"Hi."

Valentine looked me over as if to make sure I was real as opposed to an apparition. He'd done his time searching on foot for us in the desert and a fair share of it trapped inside a mirage. "Spent my life since then wondering if it weren't a mirage that just kept on going. After all, they say the last moment of your life and every dream you ever dreamed or ever would dream flash in front of your eyes so that it's like living it all over again or for the first time," he'd told me and Phin once.
But we were in the present moment and I'd gone lone on an exit local road.

Val looked up from his newspaper from the other side of the counter and gave me his full attention.
"What are you doing here?"
I looked right back and shrugged.
"I got lost."
Valentine laughed and shook his head.
"Lost! It's impossible for you to get lost, Judah." Right. I have no base. How can I get myself lost when I've never had a place to be found? "Where's your mother? Your brother?"
"I'm alone," I said.
Valentine drew his brow into a furrow and looked me over good.
"She really did you in good, didn't she? I told her it would catch up with her one day."
I laughed.
"Well...we all grow up sometimes," I said. "Maybe Early's is still happening. Her growing up, that is. Has to have the road."
"Or maybe she's just running."
"Maybe mine is standing still. Or learning how to. But I don't feel grown up."

As we stood there talking to each other over the counter in Val's hard-earned/hard-worked convenience store, I noticed that his eyes had begun to wrinkle, little cracks, creases, around the edges that hadn't been there before. Maybe some people never grow up--like Early--and maybe others stay young on the inside but grow old on the outside. I wondered which I would do. A mix of dirt and sky and water.

"Well, come on," Val said and folded up the paper before putting it down in a shelf under the counter.
I smiled and followed him through the doorway. Half-way down the hall, Val stopped and half-turned to look at me.
"You got lost, huh?" he chuckled as if to himself. "You fell in love, didn't you? Or was it really only your mother's craziness?"
I couldn't help but let a smile crack out the corner of my mouth.
"I got lost. Lots of ways."
"Was she on the road, too?"
"Yeah. No Wheels. And not like us. But she was wandering, too."
"What's her name?"
"Little Blue Hawk."
Valentine raised an eyebrow.
I nodded.
"It's a long story," I said.
Like the road. But maybe longer, 'cause Little Blue Hawk got me to sleep atn ight and shut the nightmare out.

"Little Judah boy man, I sees me a fine lookin' hella fire of a whatso beauty up there on that horizon," Phinnaeus declared.
I barely heard him through my sleep, but I turned over and groaned. He punched me.
"Wake up, little brother."
"What is it!"
"We's got us a beauty," he said.
And I got up, right in the middle of the day no less and Phin had the wheel while Early was napping in the back with me. I looked over at my mother and climbed carefully around her and up into the front seat. Up in the middle of the bare rock mountain road with her long hair blowing around her like a protective veil and her thumb held out for a hitch was the most beautiful goodamned thing I ever seen.

Phin, my brother, slowed with his foot on the brake and I looked out the rolled-down window at her. I stared for who-knows-how-long and she smiled with a wall over her eyes like our Early. Like me.

"Gettin' in, yo?" Phin said, leaning over me.
She nodded and Phin punched me in the bicep.
"What!" I hissed and punched him back.
"Open up, little brother! Whatso man you gone stupid?"
"Shut," I said and twisted around to open the slider door.
"Watch out, miss," Phin said to her. "Our momma's dead asleep in the back you be sharin' a lift in now."
The girl nodded and in acknowledgment and climbed in with one, swift motion.

"Valentine?"
Valentine Russel looked up from newspaper he was reading from behind the counter he presided over. I swallowed in my desert-dry throat. He scrunched up his forehead and looked at me. It had been a long time.
"Judah?"
I nodded.
"Judah!" he exclaimed and stood up. "Where's your brother and Early?"
"I'm alone," I said.
"You're alone?"
How could this be. I know. Times had gotten long and short so that I measured time in the thickness of dust on the dashboard. People grew up after all, and now I was doing mine.
"I'm alone. Phin's somewhere on the road. Early is, too."
Valentine looked me over for a minute and tried to read me but I was my mother's son after all. When the door was shut, no one could open it.

Without thinking, I ran. In retrospect, how could I have ever been so stupid? But a child is ignorant, and so was I. I'd put the babies in the barn alone. Seven months old and almost consumed by fire because of my thoughtlessness. But Betty never protested. There had been many nights she'd put me to sleep in the barn on the hay. What are the odds? Thus are the tribulations born of staying in one place.

I ran into the pitch black smoke and followed my instinct through the flickering flames and the acrid air to where I'd put the boys. Betty was near me, but it didn't matter. I hardly felt her. Once I'd been consumed by water, drowned in it, buried. Now, I'd begun to rebuild and fire would destroy me all over again.

"Here, Agnes! The babies are here!" Betty yelled through the din.
A surge of fury swept through me and rushed to them and tore Betty away.
"Don't you touch them! Don't touch them!" I screamed and I yanked her away from my children and scooped them up in their blankets and covered them. I squeezed them into me and ran, navigating through the burning barn blindly. Part of me registered that I was being burned, the flames licking me, grabbing at my arms and legs.

My baby Judah was choking and when I'd gotten far away, onto the road, out of sight of the barn, I put them down. Phin was silent and Judah was choking, but Judah was all right. I turned to Phin and unwrapped him from the blanket, put my hand over his body and felt for breathing. He was alive. Both of them, alive. More than alive, absolutely unharmed.

"Judah boy," I whispered and the baby looked up at me, his choking gradually fading away. I stroked his cheek and he gurgled, a little baby gurgle and I was satisfied.

Then, I turned to Phinnaeus. The baby stared up at me, had been watching me. His gaze was eerily mature, not the gaze of a child, not the gaze of an infant. "Phinny,"I breathed in his ear as I lifted him up to my shoulder. "Phinny," I said again, but the baby didn't make a sound. I held him at arm's length in front of me, and somehow, I could see his eyes clearly in the dark. Fear had made my senses particularly acute tonight. I'd almost lost them and I need every moment. Still, I could lose them. Phinnaeus stared at me accusingly, his expression pointing out all my flaws. His gaze and his silence said one thing: "You left us, Early Silver. You left us to burn."

A firetruck passed us on the road, sirens screaming full ahead. Then another, then another. A violent shudder passed through me and came back. Then didn't stop. Something was missing and it was my fault again. Suddenly, I remembered Betty. I'd pushed her away in the middle of the flames. Where was she? A demon awoke in my stomach and I put Phinnaeus down, got up, clambered a few steps away and vomited.

I turned back to the boys knelt on my knees before them and knew I had to get out of the road. First water, then fire. I couldn't risk more with earth, matter hurling itself full speed at us down the road. At least this one would be painless and instant. "No. Don't think like this," I thought. I gulped down air and steadied myself. "Mind over matter, Early. Mind over matter," I repeated over and over until I had control of my body. When my limbs were steady and my breathing regular, I stood up and stretched. In the distance, I could hear the firemen working and the crackling of the fire being put out. I picked up the boys and held them to me, squeezed them hard for a moment. Judah yelped. Phin groaned.

I looked both way down the road and turned back towards the house and put one foot in front of the other. For better or worse, I had to find Betty.

"Well, the weather's fine tonight, honey."
It was Betty London talking to me, barefoot and in a self-made flower printed dress that went to mid-shin. She was creaking in her rocking chair and I sat on the floor next to her on the front porch. Above us were only stars and behind us, the house. I'd put the babies in the barn for the night.
"I know it's fine," I said.
Betty looked at me with one eye, a talent of hers that tended to scare people off. I pretended not to see and kept my eyes on the horizon. Wheat fields for miles was all I could see, covered up by the dark.
"You'll never guess who I saw the other day," she said. "Just walking around like he owned the place."
"Who's that?"
"Your River."
I should have guessed. I did guess. But the name went through me like a bolt of lightning when she said it. Two more seconds and I recovered.
"Oh?"
"Mmm-hmmm," she drawled. "What's he up to these days anyway, Agnes?"
"I don't know," I said and clenched my mouth shut. First River and now she insists on "Agnes".
"What do you mean you don't know?" she persisted.
"I haven't talked to River in two years, Betty. I'm not about to start now."
Betty clucked her tongue knowingly, a sure sign that the picture was falling into place for her like it always did without anyone trying to explain.
"He doesn't know, does he?"
Of course, her near-mind-reading abilities always meant she knew too much.
"Know what, Betty?"
"I'm not fool, Agnes. Don't try playing me one now."
I turned around and looked at her.
"He knows he's a monster," I said.
"Last I heard he was the best thing the world ever brought you."
I didn't answer for a moment, then: "Things change."
"He's just a man to you, Agnes. But he's more than that to those boys."
"Don't bring them into this. They have nothing to do with River."
Betty cocked one eyebrow up at me and studied me like I was a pane of glass. Maybe I am, still, transparent like a window. But what you can't cure you can learn to live with. And if there isn't a remedy there are other solutions. Opaque curtains have done a good job.
"They may have nothing to do with River, girl, but he's got everything but half to do with them."
"No. Leave River alone. The discussion is over. The boys have nothing to do with River, I told you."
"You don't mean to say they're Valentine's?"
"I don't mean to say they're anyone's but mine. That should suffice, Betty. You'll know what you need to when I want you to know it."
I stood up and slapped my hands against my jeans to rid them of the dirt.
"You're playing yourself like a fool, Agnes Silver! You can run all you want from the truth but in the end you'll see it's just slapped you in the face and you've gone numb. No one gets nowhere while running in place."
I whirled around to her.
"I never run in place, Miss Betty! River does that. I move and that's it. I accomplish distance and destination."
"Mmm, you believe that, do you?"
"I know it."
"What's that smell?" she said suddenly, her neck craning up.
I followed her gaze with my eyes and froze when I took in the sight.
"Oh my God," she said. "Quick!"
And without thinking, I ran.

Phinnaeus:
I say, man, there be moments that affect you for your whole sadsilly life. Early, she says "Phinny boy" to me "what moments are those?" and I just keeps on telling her, man, that I can prove to her I remember the way I was born with that Judah screaming and hanging on to me like it was nothing short of a sin for me to come out first.

"Sin's baggage you don't need, Phinny."
"I know, Early, but you be setting me up and I know where I come out from, man."
"Speak like a person, Phinnaeus."
"I'll be speaking like a person, man, you think when you throw the Misters out of those Wheels and I don't have to be hanging out on the shoulder with Judah blocking out the whoo-whoos yes and aahs," I says to her. But Early turns away leaving me an old cold shoulder Early she does and I go on my way, man, trying to figure out which memory is from the past and which is from the future but I know ZERO is the midway-bidway point so I starts from there, man.

Now I comes out into this world, man, covered in a red satin curtain like I mean to be hid away forever in her guts where she stowed away and stuffed us through a chord woved of blood redandblue like a bridge-highway between her being and ours full of marzipan and elbow maccaroni and fruit and birds and leaves all mashed up broken down into fiber and proteins and saturated/trans/unsaturated fats and hydrogenated thisandthat. I remember it like yesterday covered up spat out like goo, man, because that's all we ever be in the end and it's life, so a miracle beautiful like a ribbon highway.

And I remember it like yesterday when she was alone but soon to have us crying around, man, and she felt her guts rejecting us parasites because we grow too big and too much for her take in one sitting. But sit she does all right and the guts contract and she's silent, my Early, because no coward ever dribbled from my mother's mouth or lurked up in her head, man. The body has a mind of its own not Early's not mine not Judah's and it screams but mindovermatter wins over 'cause it's Early here we're talking of and she silences that scream and channels energy God energy towards my head. That's right, man, my head.

Judah boy, he rebels and that twists fate up in confusion inside her. Words-not-words but emotion like a photon stream slice up and into my head and it's war. But the war, man, it don't last like for everybody else because inside her, man, Judah never saw me and once he opened his eyes and did, my first and his second arrival are forgotten.

I've been staring at a blank screen for a while now and still have nothing to say. As a writer, though, I tend to write more when I'm in a block because to get past it, you have to put yourself through torture and torture involves forcing words like these to come out. No, they don't sound so great. No, they're not very enlightening. But what can I say? They get the job done and if a picture is worth a thousand words and I make it my task to take at least one picture a day without a camera because I don't have one, then my job has been clearly laid out before me.

A little bit about today: rain everywhere. Everyone coming in with sopping umbrellas and moping. "What a disgusting day." I grew up in a drought and any day there's even one drop is a day for celebration. The sun isn't always good for everything. Too much of a good thing turns sour. I'll take the rain. It's misty at the moment, falling slowly, like snow in February. It made the spring end when it kicked all the blooms off the stalks and now the spring's rainbow-on-the-ground has transformed into the summer's every-shade-of-green. Green gets old, like white, but the clothing gets better. Maybe we should wear the bright colors in the winter to combat the seasonal distress and the dark ones in the summer because we have enough of everything else. Keep the balance.

Two days ago I was at work and the phone rang at the info desk. Just because I work at a desk labeled "information" does not constitute my (or any of my co-workers') needing to know the answer to the secret of life. But we have our label and that means to the average Joe that we're literally omniscient. Call information and you think it's the equivalent of calling God. Well, maybe it is. I guarantee you'll be disappointed.

I don't know where to get your W-2 forms. Perhaps your place of employment? The IRS? I don't know where a homeless lesbian can find food and shelter other than the Salvation Army or another kind of shelter that I looked up for you and I really don't think you should be picky about where you go considering you're homeless. It's not my fault that the line for the bathroom is over 45 people long. That's what happens when you're a woman. I don't know where your caretaker is because that's your responsibility, not mine, especially since I wasn't here yesterday and I don't live with you, am not related to you, and no one gives me the information I need to know off the top of my head to give to you because people don't believe in communication or efficiency but osmosis. If you don't like the policies of this school, don't apply here. And if you already have and got accepted, go somewhere else. Not my problem. I'm just information. But I usually don't have that because I'm only supposed to know about this building and to tell you the truth, this building is pretty small.

We'll take a break now, go outside and walk through the rain sing in the rain dance through the rain and the green will get greener and the colors will fade because when it rains (generally) the sky fades to gray and white and the blue gets hidden behind it. This is real life these days, whatever that means and I go home to my half-painted half-white half-yellow room and fill it up with the one thing I could ever fill anything up with. I go home to an empty room and blue curtains and yellow sheets and stained wood that I worked hard for and unfulfilled dreams that I'm trying trying trying to make into reality past present and future for me and I talk to no one out loud inside those walls to doors with no knobs and to windows that open down and I imagine a presence a friend a voice someone to lean on and laugh with and cry with but it all comes back to the beginning and my life is a labyrinthine entity. We go one way and it's down with no ladder up but motivation and no matter how much of that I get the Exit is just a dream. When I travel, I travel for a long time and one day, I'll hit the end of the world like a brick wall that stops us all. So I'll stretch it out for as long as possible, stretch it out for the interim.

But the phone rings off the hook with people calling God. I learned the lesson that won't get through their heads a long time ago. All they're doing is calling me and either way, the answer's disappointing.

People wonder what it is that comes off of me like a repellent scent when they look at me. Trust me. All my life I’ve wondered, too. I imagine too much, I think, and imagination leads me down paths where reality is merged with legend and legend becomes the truth. But, I suppose, what’s true in the mind is what’s true, and where legend is concerned, it works on the emotion and emotion is what really moves people even when they don’t have a reason. Instinct is guidance. Legend is what you become when nothing else makes sense.

Someone once told me that if souls were rivers, we could walk into almost all of them and get our feet wet but if someone walked into mine, they'd drown. I can't help what I am, though, no matter how much I fight against it. But I can prevent people from walking into the river. Of course, it comes at my own expense because unless I dry up, which I hardly believe could ever happen, I am left alone with myself. If I am nothing but a river and if I let no one in, who will throw me a life-float when I begin to drown? And what difference would it make anyway since it would only be water trying escape from itself?

Last year I heard a legend and I tried to chase after it for a grade. It turned out that some legends aren't written about. They're only spoken. I lost myself in that legend, the one of a half-fish (or half-snake) half-woman. It's a European myth. It's a myth that I might have once been a part of if I hadn't been made in America. But mythologies parallel themselves across the human race. Part of me is still standing there, on the banks of the River Alzette in Luxembourg City, in the Grund, staring up at the cliff that really is nothing more than the overrun ruins of an old tenth-century castle.

Luxembourg is a place where you can lose yourself and recreate yourself from nothing again. That's how beautiful it is. Part of me is still standing on the banks, waiting for Melusine the mermaid to pop her head up out of the water and start stitching one more link on the chain-mail vest. I want to catch her so that the city won't fall into the hole and die. I want to be her, so I can escape myself and refuse to be a river.

Imagine that! An American sitting on the banks of the River Alzette waiting for a mermaid to show up. I know. I'm a joke. But I want to know where that legend came from. I want to escape this and stop worrying, stop drowning in myself, stop missing the people I never had but thought I did. So put myself into fantasy and study it like an academic...Is that a remedy? Or a cop out?

Maybe a little bit of both.

Meditation on an Erev

I share my emotion like a windmill
Turning, turning, brushing the ephemeral on.
Mourners gather:
Life is taken and I cry for a substitute
corpse
On a substitute day,

Lean my head against the window-cross
As the bagpipes play and the players march.
The breeze must be pleasant under their kilts
but even agony is pleasant these days
because its absence is the numb-
oblivion-destiny.

I wonder to define myself but
Selves are
indefinite like the shape of wind and the
direction of water.
Is Eve a beginning or an end? a joy ride?
Or electric shock treatment from a distance
that burrows deeper than a a coffin maggot?

Eve is the mythical worm that settles
inquiry too early.
Eve is the ipso facto that stops the
question and evades the answer.

The world isn't pretty but it's beautiful. Really beautiful. It's full of surprises, both good and bad; full of ascents and descents and deaths and births. All at once. All for something and all for nothing. And I think of Eve over and over again. On the way and on the way back. When I'm sitting. And I keep walking.

Don't stop living because you're afraid of death. Life's too short for that. Death will meet you no matter what, so take the risk. I guess I'm glad that the gypsy left me and that the flower let itself be uprooted by that wanderer. I wouldn't be living like I am now if they hadn't. I wouldn't really be living for myself and only myself. Tough lesson, I guess. But life isn't pretty. Well, I've known that. The angels are merely companions. They aren't tyrants anymore. Mainly because I don't allow them to be. I'm in charge. Art is an animal but I hold the reigns. Life is beautiful.

All my life I've seen angels. They talk to me in words and in images and in pure telepathic idea. I've never understood them. I've never understood why they choose me. Many times I have asked "Why do you speak to me? And do you ever speak to anyone else like this?"

The answer is always convoluted. "We speak to everyone," they say. "But most of your kind lack the capacity to take us in pure form." "Do I?" "Not as much."

I'm paraphrasing.

So I've learned, from their presence and their absence that they come in many forms and that everyone does see them and hears them whether they believe or not and whether they notice or not. They have left for now, at least in the form I am used to. Angels are not purely messengers carrying a note. They have led me to understand that we are our own messengers. The message delivered is not carried; it is revealed as something the receiver, ourselves, have carried within us all our lives. Angels show us a path. They nudge us in a direction. We choose to follow a path or to another. Either way, the message is delivered.

This message was in a book and it released a message I have been waiting for for over a year. Because it is necessary to know completely something about the world in order to heal. Although I have known it, or been aware, I have not owned it. I am not completely in possession of this truth, for the message is being granted and sold to me in the form of a payment plan that I have not yet carried to fulfillment. The debt will be paid soon, though, and I will once again thank the world for giving me so much grief in order to grant me that much more wisdom. In the end, I always end up thinking desolation a fair price.