mentula

DANGER, DANGER, DANGER! POETRY ALERT.

The following is a rough draft of a piece I am working on. I need to cut it some more. It's a performance piece, meant to be heard not read. Feel free to skip it if poetry is not your thing.

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Alone on a sacred mountain, in a foriegn culture, lost in translation, half a world away from home, my hike up the elevation, my walk by death, came randomly and without causation. One moment I'm minding my own business somewhere in San Jose and the next I am alone, climbing Mount Fuji in the dark of night.

I have climbed mountains higher and more difficult to ascend, but that was several thousand cigarettes ago when my knees didn't protest their every move.

So I struggle and I stumble and I lose my way and I see nothing in the dim starlight. I have to get to the top. I don't know why, I just do.

And there I lose my sanity and there dead relatives join me.

"I'm going to die on this mountain" I said to myself. "Yes you are," said the voice of my brother. He had been a man of immense intellect and no social skills. The last of the many great things to pass through his mind was a bullet. We spoke of things past and hidden secrets as I labored up the mountain. But I could never hold my brother in conversation and soon he faded. I was, again, alone.

"I'm not going to make it," I cried. "None of us do," said the voice of my father, "It's not about the making it, it's about the trying."

And he walked with me for awhile and we spoke of the present and how the slightest misstep, the tiniest deviation, would take us on an entirely different journey. After a strong dose of folk wisdom and similes he had to leave like an Autumn tree.

Once more alone, my natural state, I could see the top of the mountain from here...still so far, still so high. "Can I do this?" "Yes you can Daddy," said the voice of my daughter. The first words I have ever heard her speak. She could do things in death she could never do in life: Walk and talk and hold my hand as we ascend. Forever twelve years old, forever my little girl, now perfectly fashioned in the afterlife without the handicap of malformed flesh.

We smiled and we laughed and we sang and we skipped up the volcano, a father and his daughter sharing a moment outside of sanity. Then we stood at the summit, the rim of the crater.

I had made it.
WE had made it.

"I have to go now, Daddy" she said and she was gone as the first rays of light came from the horizon and a tear came to my eye.

I told myself it was from the brightness of the Sun.