Preamble:
I’ve not always been this breed, but no longer do I mind such fanfare.
I will tell you what I am, entirely:
Starving to speak, hear, instigate, be someone seen, and in the quiet hours I’ve been
so blessed to witness, see someone else, wholly, bare, frigid.
Besides, I remember what the nuns always said as they taught the proverbs, my
bony schoolboy knees knocking together under the wooden desk, how they told,
with thin and careful lips, of God creating earth because he loves to be known, and
my flesh from then on blushed red
and tingled with a warmth for the fallen.
And I did it without the words (perhaps better without),
and I did it with them too (so many of them) once I learned the wretched things,
I begged, still beg, am begging the question:
Is it worship
to know someone?
I. Before Birth, and for so Shortly After, That Nothing Has Happened Yet:
I was birthed and soon bounced in infancy upon the calm leg cradle of Grandmother Sue Abbott who hailed from Neponset, Illinois—grey, lonely farmtown, population 236 and on the decline. She, the town's fourth annual prom queen, married soon after to Bill Abbott, and together, they burnt down the bar he owned to collect on insurance money, fleeing east to a farm town not much bigger where my Mother would be birthed.
Where my Mother, through the ecstasy of youth, would smile, cry, learn what life was,
and later meet a man much older who, made stoic by what he’d already seen, would
be called my Father, and together,
unlike the ones before them, they’d burn nothing, but would bear witness
to the end of the millennia they’d both been reared in,
would enter a new one, starker, with less song, in which—
either out of boredom, vanity, obligation, or guilt—
they would birth me.
II. Pride and Confusion Felt in an Automobile for A Country Rather Large and Lost:
I was in God’s care now and he’d lent me a life in which I’d be witness to the rogue Mother, my own, who before my memory divorced the man, my Father, and would play loudly, the radio, as she did herself up to frequent the dim light billiard bars in town from which, once I was of age, I’d be told to stay far away from, and in drunken scurries of stumble and scream, she’d bring home haggard men, who for now had her as company, but in daylight were doomed forever alone, and they’d lean themselves down to me, in their rare acts of tenderness to tell me their names—I still haven’t forgotten them— and to ask me mine, and I’d stew below them in the clouds of whiskey breath,
I’d see that beaten look in the eye which marked a life-lived and harshly,
the glint which even in those grade school days I so desired to possess,
the same look in the eyes as that man, my Father, who spoke so little of the past, that I’d tell the neighborhood kids he was from Nowhere,
No Place, and who, when he did speak, would tell me of histories not his own, of
expansions westward, and the native who taught us honest warfare, freed us from British charades of drum-lines and bugle-blows, and he’d speak it in such a way, that even in those days, later in youth, when I’d drive the beat four-runner bought with the money earned from when he’d taught me how one must work,
the one I bought for dirt-cheap with no keys and had to start up by spiking the ignition with a flathead, he had spoken it so firmly, that even in those days, when my head was filled
with tract and axiom, demanding death to empire, the disintegration of borders, he’d spoken it so, that when I’d drive into town in the old four-runner past the rotting silos, decayed barns where the bats lived, the tattered stars and stripes still hung from the silent houses, I’d feel a certain pride in being from a country so large and lost
and I’d grip the wheel tight.
I’d drive fast, whispering:
This is the place where I was born.
This is the place where I will die.
III. We Used to Say Back Then, “Fuck Every Cop Who Ever Did His Job.”
I remember in those later days
a real mean officer pulled me over and told me to turn off my engine.
I complied, and as I revealed the jagged flathead from inside my ignition,
he drew his pistol on me real quick from the waist,
and pointed it between my eyes, thinking I was threatening him,
but I was only following orders.
Truth is, although I’d begun nursing a meaner mug then,
with the aim of either being taken seriously or taken home by a pretty girl,
though I preferred to lay about in crime-infested airs then,
and kept a gaggle of company quite similar,
though all of us would laugh, rejoice in the image of lawmen burning,
truth is, even with all this, I’d never threaten,
I couldn’t hurt a fly back then,
wouldn’t have wanted to.
Just like everyone else
(and I would’ve never confessed it),
I wanted no pain, ever again,
I thought, and still think:
This longing
is all that ever was,
is all that ever needs to be.
— Jacob Madkour is a 21 year old writer living in Boston.