Wack Pack

a retarded black midget
a midget in a wheelchair who listens to Kelly Clarkson and humps the bed
a crazy lady with a bird who shits everywhere and likes to scream
an obese cab driver who doesn’t pay his taxes because he has Gulf War Syndrome
a dwarf who fucks hot chicks but he’s always drunk
a crackhead
a crazy black lady who hates black people
a quadriplegic keyboardist
a KKK Grand Dragon from Georgia
a retarded white woman who watches Nightmare on Elm Street everyday
a retarded white guy with half his teeth missing
a dumb white slut
a transsexual
a really fat dumb white guy who’s scared of fish
walk into a bar

Jackson County War

At 3 years old I held the hand of a Miss Lucinda Shapely, who was the wife of a Great Possum man in Marianna of Jackson County, Florida. Our conversation was short because I was so young but I remember potato salad with peas which I never asked for again until my 8th birthday. “We shall keep the things the same way that they are forever,” she told me, & I believed in a dream of blood that mattered for many years to me.

Jackson County was in fact under the great province of the Great Possum Organization, due to several reasons that are socio-economical and tough to illustrate due to my lack of knowledge at my age. I hear though during the what is now called the Reconstruction Era they was quite mad, though I could never quite understand being so angry about any subject, due to the stoic temperament instilled in me by my family.

Father was an accountant at a bank & taught me tabular analysis. He showed me the manner in which one calculates yield, and what profits are, though I still don’t understand it well. My mama was a card player, the best in her field I am told by Gabby-Dear (is what we called her), my friend around the house. Mama would never play cards with us because it was too difficult to let us win, but I recall beating her several times on my own.

In the mornings, Gabby-Dear would wake me up and let me go see the chickens & horses – she would tell the pigs “Git! Git! Git!” when they’d try to steal the feed from my hands. (“Times is hard with no help in these fields” he telled me) In the evenings, James, used to be our Overseer, gathered soft flowers from the pond, & laid them next to the window at the morning gruel. Daddy was so glad the War was over he nailed that portrait of Abraham Lincoln against the wall, proud of we was still here (I learned art falls against walls because it covets hanging). We was slave owners but we gave it up easy because daddy knew business well.

Baby Doll takes us babies out to the water & helped us look at our reflection (“Cain’t you see yo’self in there? It ain’t you but it’s a reflection of you) & later in the mornings before lunchtime she held me to her breast to hold me and sang a soft song about the Old Days to me as mama gathered my sisters by their hair and tied them together in a game.

As an expert at hiding around the estate I knew well the layout and configuration of the entire plantation – or what was formerly one. I could calculate the exact angle necessary for the quick ascent to the top level of the barn, where we kept all the hay to feed the horses and various tools like rakes and shovels which we did not necessarily use too often – only in the worst part of summertime when we needed to dig everything up and plant anew. That was always the best place but I knew others, like the workers’ outhouse where no one much used it no more because most everyone used the field when they needed to go.

So I hid in the barn when the Great Possums tried to take our land. Remus my best friend told me to hide in the barn. I was small & fit under a sack, I brushed the hay away, & the horses started kickin’ up dust & made me choke, but I held it in & coughed like a horse so the men wouldn’t know the difference between me & a horse. I don’t know what happened to Gabby-Dear after that but I suspect I really do.

Out on the porch I would listen to the frogs, I would count my marbles & put them in the tree for Remus to find, & mother crying in her rocking chair because William my brother of 13 years old was taken by the Possums on his way from school, because daddy was a friend of Mr. Fleischman a Jewish one who sold to all the black ones, & I know that William was later found dead by the Chipola River, covered in his own blood, & me and William my brother used to play jacks with Remus out by the pig pen but we can’t no more.

cattle

I’m a cow for you

There will be a time when you’re all alone and there will be nothing you can do about it.

Shed behind the woods a chicken house, the beams slatted on top, painted pink. These have protective properties, this pink, of rain and weather. High grass, I add, protects the snakes too. I know. And then he ask why ain’t the grass done away with and I don’t give any answer. These things get away with me. “We can save these shells for the chickens to eat.” “Sea shells?” (NO, RETARD). We haven’t any chickens yet. “We haven’t answer snakes yet either” – I lie. We do have them, but we (including “I”) know not where they are. Sense they are always there. Know not where from they arrive. Pond, as it is, must be filled with new fish, and we ask not for any snakes during the summer. They cross the road. Unwanted certainly. Washing machine the grass terraforms, abandoned. We in the dump.

The land makes way for us, you know. The climate adjusts, not changes. How many tools do you have in there, Father? I would not mind counting for you. If I knew there weren’t snakes.

So the chicken house will be pink. Is that amendable? – no jokes about “fags” or whatever. Strong moral compass. Good. You shall be pliable for some new order where I can’t be myself. Moccasins swim with their heads only poking out the water little. Blow them with shotgun. Deadly at short range, everything is exactly the same in that way already. Need to eradicate difference not necessary, ordained already. Need for it safety like a big tall tree – oak – I hope gets cut down. One is the back of the house, one is front. Thoughts of it falling down on me. It is me mostly after all who does the dying in my dreams. But no one will listen to me about memories of men with nightmares of doing terrible & hateful things to women and children in the jungle and in the desert. Know not if they were real or not. I will reassure myself. Everything is real – holy terror of a terrible thought. Must get rid of. But won’t.

Money was reason thereof for disappearance of trees out back. We sold to him he said he’ll make some trees grow again. Eventually. How many times I must explain that. Big field all of a sudden disappears, it’s not the worst thing to history, to have had happened.

There was the impression that is it was important for men and women to disappear once. Then again, greedily. Came back home and they were different. Same “person” returned is difficult to say. What even is it to be the same person or different person. Change is always a smoothed out like ice cream. I believe to believe in that when minds came together in which the differences between men and women returned is when change happened.

Know a guy who says he sat on Saddam Hussein’s golden toilet. I’m not sure I believe in toilets like that. What else does he know that he was prepared for? It’s not so much change as something unlocked maybe. So returned is inaccurate. Abducted, more like, & likewise this is not much my voice, but my voice similarly inhabits I; what inhabits I is.

School I went to – not my school, I should say, because I would not ever want responsibility of telling anyone something they didn’t already want to know to do, no one needs to know what to do – got sold to lumber mill. Long time ago, would have had freakout over such. Something unlocked maybe. All I know for sure is that where I go we go. I began to think responsibility is too much for anyone to have. As an old saying goes you never do anything on your own. There will be a time when you’re all alone and there will be nothing you can do about it. Even the slightest hand will graze a cheek and you will feel that.