Teach the Gifted Children

In America, we teach our children a good many things.  We teach them our dream -- collective, of the vast pioneer-plain, where hard work is due-paid and value is placed in  the hard-hearted honesty of the frontier -- clean.  We sing our patriotic songs to a flag and a god we pray keep watch over our sleepy-eyed new dawn electronic nation, but the end result's the same:  hard work and honesty won't get you far, morality and decency, even less.

In my heart I know my cunning, the shrewdness of good Christian followers of the Bible, but I cannot make it pay out for me.  I cannot profit from it.  I cannot rob Peter to pay Paul, and I cannot make sense of it all, much less any of it.  I cannot deliberately gain while others loose.  I cannot deliberately break, hurt, crush, and step over bone and marrow to climb up out of my fetid muck.  I hurt everyone around me.  I alienate those that love me.  I push away those steadfast and curious few, but I do that by accident and without malice.  The result is the same, same, same.  I am cold-lonely, a vacuum of a girl, of a once-was, of a hope, of a bright and shiny cellophane future.  I am torn plastic wrap from a cigarette box, a stolen DVD, a discarded tissue from a blood red nose bleed, a piece of wadded up alumnium foil burnt in a boy scout campfire, a broken window pane in a boarded up house.  I am ruin.  I am too far into this place to even ask to be pulled up by my hair or croak a hoarse voice talking in lurid sing-song.  I am destruction.  I am the void.  I am a dry well. 


Teach the gifted children?  Teach them what?  Teach them to hide their minds from the watchful eye of the world.  Teach them complacency.  Teach them to be boring, to be useless, to be hidden from those that would take advantage of their vulnerably, their loneliness.  Misery, oh misery...loves the company of this festering fox hole lined with world war frontier justice.  All I ever learned was fear and self-loathing.  Teach the gifted children where to find the hemlock, where the stairway meets the rooftops, where the razor blade has no suitcase to hold the blade back, where the train tracks collide at the end of a thread, a bare thread, of human tissue.

I am anger and I have learned nothing.  I captain; I go down with the ship.  Sink, sink, sinking, sinking, to the deep, to the deep, my head against the masthead, my heart shrinking with the boards.  We laughed once of "Captain" and "Commander," but there ain't no laughing now.