Playground Bullies and Fireflies

Playground Bullies and Fireflies
July 26, 2004


As if it were disguised
As if it had been bruised by some brute force
Lying bleeding and blinded with bandaged eyes
Or as if it were disguised

We scream and send out a search party
To comb historic forests
And stoic forces
Who must have hid the truth from us
The daybreak turns to dusk

It was just as we had settled in
By the firelight
By the candle’s flickering frail fright
That doubt
Took the seat beside
And propped his feet in pride
And the truth slipped out

Leaving the window open
And letting in the cold breeze
Which sent a sliver
Of a shiver
Down our social spine
Serving to remind
Us that the truth was gone
And the race was on
Our innocence had come and gone
And we were left wheezing, heaving, and lost

It was the letter that grabbed our attention
It was the suicide note that truth left on the seal of the window
The one where the breeze burns cold
And the crisp flick of the curtains
Snap like a hissing serpent in the wake

The letter really proclaimed more than defamed
It was more lament and less fluorescent
Though we always confused the truth with light

“I have not been tried and found wanting
I have been found difficult and not tried”
So the letter reads
And so the search begins

So the difficult becomes the passion that rests inside a weary soul
And bones ache in cold breeze because we can’t bring ourselves to shut the window

We find comfort
In the rhythm
Of the popping
Of the stale sticks falling
From broken limbs
Of trees
Who one knew leaves

We cry ourselves to sleep
On pillows that turn
To ice
In the cold night and crush themselves
To salt
In the morning light
Just in time
For us
To cry again

In the midst of our pathetic, rambling, escapades
We search for the long lost friend

“Where are you?”
While combing the woods behind the house that you left

A wise little weirdo told me how he planned to find you
With a snorting laugh and a silver chain
Connecting
His neck
To a sacred silver cross
That hung over v-neck Haynes

He said “the opposite of truth is not false,
But counterfeit.
the presence of a little bit”
Then he spit
Into a snarling, snorting, sneezing frenzy
And jittered, clumsily away

Maybe you are gone for good
Maybe it is fa(o)r worse
We only wish we understood
Your absence was a curse

Long before the window seal was crossed in silent night
Long before the window seal was broken by your weight
Long before the window fell with this house like a stone
With this house like a stone
Like a stone
Like a

We can fall asleep by the clanking clatter of cobblestone streets
We can ignore the myriad of ads in adjun(ct)k sales
And let sales figures climb in through the hole you left in our hearts
The day you left
You left
That hole
In the shape of you

And though
We know
The glow
That shows
Through clothes
Is just another view

Of our loss

We search

And we do so as clothed as we can
Bare
We cover up in warm daylight while the public eyes are bright
And reveal ourselves naked, scared, and dripping
To the loneliness of night


And it’s all because you lef(p)t out the window
You left your widow
You didn’t shut it
You didn’t cover your tracks

You made sure we’d know exactly how you went
But not where
You made damn sure we never got to close that thing again
It’s not fair

But it’s true
See?
That’s the problem is it’s true
We can’t escape you

You can run, and we can’t hide
Fists split and wrists slit when worlds collide
And you don’t move
But you did once
Once upon a time

In the back of this house
You woke from a dream
As quiet as a mouse
And you split your lip on the broken glass
When you dove face first
No one heard the crash
But we found the trail of blood
That led out back past the trash

We were covered
We were mesmerized
We’d been dreaming that we’d never let you
From our eyes
Again
After tonight
After we’d had our fun and forgotten for a while


So we bomb the girl
And rape the world
And scrape
Grape juice from the bottom of the sacrilegious pearls
Make a jelly thick enough to dip a wafer into
And we lick the goo

We suck it dry
We eat it up and sing a gospel lullaby
And we know you’re gone

You’re so not here
You’re so 5 minutes ago
You’re like, that one guy
From that one place
With that one look on his face

The one with bleeding eyes
And watery sides
The big naked center-place

The picture hangs above the mantel in the house that you just left
Yeah, you’re like him
You‚re dead
At least that’s what they said

We told them you were gone and when the search had yielded none
They told us you were dead and that we should find another one
The translation killed the messenger and we could save our shots
But I remembered that wise weirdo who was covered in sun dots


I’d just been staring at the sky lying peaceful in the grass
When he leaned over the sun and said “this too, has come to pass”
“What the hell, man. You’re blocking the rays. I was about to go blind”
So he walked away with the urgency of a drunken father time

He said “dude, I know you’re pissed ‘cause you’ve been lied to for so long
But it was for your own good, though the liars were still wrong.
If you always knew the truth, you would have never grown through time.
But now that you’ve tasted mother earth, you should enjoy the wine.”

“Wine’s for drunkards, you freak.” as I sat up on the hill.
“And stop your cliché an(ec)tidotes I’ve taken my last pill.
I don’t care anymore. I’ve lost that flavor from my tongue.
Or maybe when truth left, I bit it off.
Either way, I’m done.”

“Then why are you screaming?” he smiled, but cleverly, or wry
He was grinning like a school boy with a secret he wouldn’t tell
I noticed now that he was holding a baby and my hands fell to my side
“Don’t follow if you don’t want to, but I‚m gonna get the hell…”

Before he could finish I jumped
Like waking
Like water
Weeping and whining all at once
I felt like I’d pissed my bed and fallen down
I had a headache that wouldn’t stop

And I felt the breeze

It was c(rue)ool
Long before I even had the chance to think it was all a dream
It was like a slap in the face
Some resounding gong
An alien probe that wasn’t so private
This was capital punishment in the private parts of my inner ear
The letter and the wind joined together to remind me

Like a child in the corner of the room screaming to the top of his lungs
“I’m hiding”
Only this “child” was the truth
And this “hiding” was having been beaten down, broken up,
Battered
Tattered
Torn
Worn

Wrangled
Mangled
Maimed
Framed

Feared
Speared

Resisted
Raped

Abused
Misused

And what’s worst of all
Forgotten

But not by me
I have not forgotten thee
Don’t think for one moment that you are out there on your own


“Let the truth sting” sings the foreign man made of black and white
Like a shepherd of the yin, yang coming from the clock radio in the night

Sing it out
Let the truth sting
And while we’re at it,
Let it burn and bleed
And fear for its life
As if a feeble fable of its own ghost


We seek for truth like it’s lost
When it’s we
Who are being (not so much) sought by the truth
(As) baited
By truth
Having waited
Knowing we’re jaded
And it’ll take a while

One day we’ll discover you
And when we do
We’ll be blinded by the darkness of it all

The absence of you was the search in itself
Your opposite is not the absence of you
But counterfeit
The deception of thinking we’ve found you
Just long enough to call off the search,
Feed the dogs,
Downgrade the code from the red of the dragon
To somewhere around a suburban Orlando tan

The search for the truth is over
We’ve found something almost as good
He claims to be god.


He has a church on a hill
And he drives long silver sedan
He’s a family man
An all-american boy
He’s the talking, walking, shaking, quaking, Playschool Jesus toy


And all the while you wait
Desperately in the shadows
So close
You have to sense that one day we will trip over you
And when we do
You will look laughing from above
Cover up the sun
And float down like a dove
And hand us a picture of

Ourselves
Before we were dead
But only by a moment

You’ll say this is what you’re looking for
You wink, I think
Then you’ll vanish.

We’ll awake, feel the breeze
Call the search party
Bring the dogs, the cops, the neighbors,
“Who wants take-out Lebanese?
We‚re gonna stay-in to burn the midnight oil”
Then we’ll squeeze
Our eyes shut
And hold on tight to what we saw
But there is nothing left
Just pupils burned raw
From the sun

The sun!
That's it…
It’s when we’re staring that we see
And I fall asleep
And dream in the darkness
That the truth is here with me
And as if some day I’ll see
When I open my eyes
…as if it were disguised




- meshach.