We Are All Prisoners

We Are All Prisoners
copyright @aladreth

"A man's history lies in his own hands; where he finds work for them is his home." ~ Taylor

In prison, we are shamed from being there.  We hold everything close.  Furtive.  No matter our crime of murder or our crime for stealing a loaf of bread, we do not want to share too much for fear of ... well, who knows what our individual fears are. I am not here to analyze that.  I am here to tell a story.

I am all wrapped up in stories - that is what I really need ... I need your story.  You may think I am only interested in sex and getting that "feel good" feeling from you.  Perhaps I am.  I don't know.  I'm trying to figure this out right now.  I am being tested it seems.  God, Himself has offered me the opportunity to heal someone if I take on their own illness.  Is my love strong enough?

I am no Mother Theresa.  Talk is really cheap.  We all know that.

It seems I must play a game of hide and seek to get my stories.  I must pretend to be aloof and not care and that is when they will come to me.

This morning, I heard Robert's story between red and swollen pains.  He was a prisoner previous to this new life of his. Perhaps he is still a prisoner.  You will decide for yourself.

Some girl took him in.  She wrapped her own story around his.

She weaved her story around his own story of once gentle hands filled now with hard labor scars from work in the prison. He could tell you the story of each scar's day.  This was the day the pipe fell too hard right above his right hand's index finger and this was the day a broken shovel handle scraped his life line on his palm.  So on and so on.  The prison was serving old fashioned, "shit on a shingle" both of those specific days.  The things we remember, huh?
 
All his hands had touched before his prison stint were ancient manuscripts.

He was a smart guy.  A guy who studied history.  His crime that sent him away to prison for five years was more of a social nature.  Nothing you or I should be worried or concerned about.  we shouldn't sit around pondering, "Oh, my! What if he was a murderer?"  In a social land or some type of place where revolution was still favoured, perhaps he threw plaster and paint over the statue of their King.  I didn't really care about his crime, so I didn't listen as well during that time of his tale.

Mainly I listened to him cry.  He cried tears of hurt like a bitter blanket sent to warm him.  He clutched his misery tight to him, crying for all the things that were lost to him.

Rejection after rejection.  No one wants a prisoner.

After he was released from prison, the revolution did not want him. Truth be known, they didn't want him to begin with.  He only convinced himself he had something to offer to their cause. They definitely didn't want him now.  Who would want a gentle man with hands so weak?  Even with five years work in the prison, he was not a strong man.  Years before his cell time, always bent over the ancient manuscripts, had not given him strength for sure.

People had warned him about the girl.  The girl who would take him in, she was known for being controlling, and had her own struggles she had to get over.  Her mother did not like Robert; said he was a derelict drifter.  She replied, within her heart, "I am as well.  I know the verses written on the jail walls too, Mother."  She wouldn't dare say it aloud, but she was already in love with Robert and didn't give a hill of beans what anyone said about him.  She was going to take him in.  She would parade him right down the middle of the village if she had to, just to prove her point that love conquered all.

Robert had his own naysayers who counseled him, "You know you are just leaving one prison for another one, Robert?  Well.  You are!  The work will be hard, the fields dry as a bone will need to be nurtured and fed water.  There will be hornet's nests to move, you know.  After that, all you will have is the girl to come home to.  Oh, she will see to that."

He knew this and asked her straight away as she guided him along the dusty streets to her home, "Will there be ancient manuscripts there at your tent?"

She put a finger to his mouth, perhaps to hush his worries, "No, you silly boy-man."  Then looking down at her dirty feet in rat chewed sandals said, "We will make new history."

THAT'S FROM THE 60'S - CAREFUL YOU'LL BREAK IT

THAT'S FROM THE 60'S - CAREFUL YOU'LL BREAK IT
copyright @aladreth

Inside me I've got: "World peace, 2 rainbows, light from 4 stars, 
green stuff, milk, some dog hair, and a raisin."  - Seen on a Onesie
designed by Gwendolyn Gardner

I want to write
thoughts that lie deep
and move at 32 miles a second
on your ham and cheese dinner
and bourbon drink,
your, "You aren't
going to believe this,"
and, "You know
what I mean?"

I want to write a
letter so big with
Christmas decorations,
moonlight maidens,
and swans ... there have
to be swans.

I want to write car crashes
in Rhode Island,
abductions from Northern Arizona
clinic parking lots,
I want to write
your, "You have to stop the 'bad'
thinking."

I want to write you right
into bondage cuffs and
ceiling fans littered with
bullwhips and fish net body suits.

I want to write lunatic, monotheistic
governments sunny,
green and black jelly beans,
evidence at
murder trials,
and laundromats

I want to write forgetting,
forgetting the evil and
remembering how we chose
the dog we adopted from the
shelter - you asked me, and
I can't remember right now ...
I think it was because she
beat up all the other dogs.

I want to write Burroughs,
The Marquis de Sade, Paul
McCartney, and Charlie
somethinaruther,
Parker, that's right, yes!
I want to write your
nightflower eyes, your
"I'll be your slave," eyes,
kissing in back alleys,
Stevie Wonder
"Part Time Lover" songs
I want to write Rita Hayworth
and my Mother, the spaces
between lovers, beautiful boys
with bright red guitars,
stars, orange jackpot express bears,
hallucination of dead folks,
week old suicides,
I want to write,
"I LOVE YOU, YOU FOOL,"
on the matinee board
at Stadium 9.

I want to write.

Love Helped A One Eyed Gelding

Love Helped A One Eyed Gelding 
copyright @aladreth antoinette brown
(shorter version previously published 2008 or 2009 - I can't remember and it's not like it is that important because who would want this story as their own, anyway?)



All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living, dead, or undead is purely coincidental.  But, I did use real names.

Love Helped A One Eyed Gelding 

Nothing happens until I tell you about it.  So, here goes.

I met a clairvoyant today at the hair and nail salon where I had my fingernails painted the colour, "Avalanche."

You would guess that colour to be white, but it's more like the colour of Mount St. Helen's ash mixed with silver glitter.

I said aloud to all of the women in the salon, "God grant me an avalanche, but without too much damage."

A couple of the women replied, "Amen."

There was a dead crow in my yard and I knew bad things were coming.
 
The clairvoyant.  Well, you would think she would know bad things were coming and would warn me, but she just kept talking about, "Clara," the dead little ghost girl who held her hand on a ghost tour in Colorado.  She walked and talked with her for a very long time and then when she released her hand, Clara kicked her in the ankle.

I tried to catch the eye of one of the other five women so I could smirk, roll my eyes; you know, do something disapproving.  Maybe make a motion like, "She's crazy," but they were too busy talking and laughing about the parties in Wales where men dance with paper loch ness monsters and the bobbies wear their badges on their leather jock straps.

Since the crow was a harbinger of danger, I laid down for a nap when I arrived home.  I thought, "I must go get cucumbers for my desert tortoise when I wake up."

My dogs laid next to me on the California King water bed. I laid my hand on my older dog's stomach several times to check her breathing.

I dreamed a lesbian had her own, "Google."  It wasn't called, "Google."  I used it and found all sorts of pretty images of flags and intense looking women.  I found updates on "Jon and Kate."

Half asleep, half awake, I recalled Shannon and my favourite games when we were young.  We would pretend we were witches with gold mirror boxes full of nails.  We never used the nails but we knew they would come in handy at some point in time.

We were Kate Jackson.  Kate was the one we liked best.  The one of the three witches.  I mean, angels.  You know Kate was hot.

We were crazy old women from nursing homes.  We would stand in the utility room dressed in night shirts eating peanut butter cups.  We would put our hair in curlers and then shake our heads making the curlers hit us hard on our temples.  We would make weird noises with our tongues and pretend we had escaped from our rooms.

Finally, we would turn our eyeglasses upside down and mimic the stork's voice on the Vlasic Pickle TV commercials and say, "Did you skin yer elbow?" We would reply to ourselves, "You didddd?"
We would say, "Hey, sonny, ya got any money?"  We would pause and then finish, "To help an old lady out?"

Sometimes we would tie up Jamie.  He was a neighborhood boy.  We would hog tie him and whip him with his own belt when we played 'house.'  I would say, "How dare you steal your father's red Corvette and drive it to Vegas!"

There was no red Corvette.  We were poor.  The most exciting thing was that Jamie's parents owned a Dairy Queen.  It didn't help, though, as there were no favours (or free ice cream) given us.

If we only knew then what we know now.  We could have bribed fourteen year old Jamie, somehow, I'm sure, since we knew of his extracurricular activities.  Imagine that.  Letting girls tie and whip him.

I was so young.  I could see it all ahead of me.

I would say things like, "I will be a cool old lady."

I wanted to be old; my mother's sister, instead of my mother's daughter.

I kept trying to remember that green was green and orange was orange.  My father, before he died when I was 12, had confused me for years.  He teased me unmercifully telling me orange was green and green was orange.

To this day, I'll say things like, "Please hand me that green thing over there."  And it will be orange.

I fell in love one time.  He was a sweet blonde boy from Las Vegas who gave me a gold bracelet of the "Ten Commandments" in the back of a church van.  He kissed me.  It was soft.  He wasn't like the other boys.  He dressed in proper white dress shirts and black slacks.

The Pastor separated us.  He said I was getting too "boy crazy."  It really should not have mattered as we didn't even live in the same town, but I was forever known as the girl who got too close to boys.  I was made to  ride in the front of the church van between the Pastor and the Pastor's wife.  They were in their 70's, I think.  I was bored out of my skull as I sat on that hump that housed something mechanical, I'm sure; with Pastor's thick veined, desert tanned hand on my knee.

Sigh.  That sweet little innocent boy in the back of the church van.  Does he remember me like I remember him? Does he tell his girlfriends all these years later about me?  About how he bought a stringy haired bony girl a bracelet and softly kissed her.

Maybe he stole that "Ten Commandments" bracelet.  That would definitely make a good story.

Even now, I lose my breath for a moment, thinking of him.

I still have the bracelet.  I will be in a nursing home shaking my curlers at my temples, talking about the bracelet.

That is, if I make it to nursing home status.  

Oh, I had another boyfriend, but it was not love.  It was obsession and possession.  We took turns being door mats.  Dirty door mats we would wipe our feet on many times and nasty wet mats that would get soaked by the rain.  If it had been true love, I would still think of him and how he grew up to be an airline pilot in Alaska or a police officer who shot at hobos on the train.

But, I don't think of those things.

I try hard not to hold time on the head of a straight pin.

I try to find the lights in parking lots late at night in the summer so I can see to write in my car.

To write - to cure this one eyed gelding.  She's no longer a bony pony girl.  The old girl is quite fat and half blind.  I will make the other horses wear bells to help lead her.

I write to remember my finest hour.

It was not when I was a cool old lady, but when I was 12.

Directly after my father died, my half brother came from California for the funeral.  He made enchiladas and picked up some of my dad's guns.
 
More than a dozen years before, he had been to Korea as a Communications Specialist.  He was the same age as my mother.  He had seen things.  He had a dog, a beagle, he had to leave over there.  The Army never let the boys bring their dogs home.  He gave my dad the pictures of him and the beagle and now I have those pictures.  Being a dog person, myself, I think the Army must have sucked back then.

He had a daughter three years younger than me who wouldn't eat anything except pancakes with mustard.  He had a new dog named "Charlie Brown" who would wake me up whenever I would spend the night when we visited him in California.  Charlie Brown would jump on the bed and lick me in the face.  I loved the smell and feel of that dog.  He was blonde and fat.  It was a loose fat, and you could get your fingers lost in the soft folds.  It was attractive on the dog.  That dog was like a voluptuous woman.  Getting woke up in this manner; it was downright exciting.

My half brother had a wife who was a paralegal when she wasn't a horribly depressed nut case in a terry cloth robe glued to the living room couch.

He had a pool, a Jacuzzi and a really nice back yard.  His front yard had a huge Magnolia tree.  He had a truck with a camper on the back.  He listened to country music with harsh language.  He had lots of coins in his ashtray.  He wrote large checks to animal rescues like Doris Day's place.  He bought me bright yellow perfume they called "toilet water" and powder with soft satin puffs and told me I was beautiful and that my eyes had pretty flowers in them.

He hated his job.  That's what adults do.  They hate their job.

He dropped me off at the county fairgrounds.  "Go find your friends,"  he said.

I did not see any of my friends or any kids I knew, for that matter.

I was by myself.

He dropped me off anyway.

He put more money in my jean's pocket than I had ever seen at one time before.  It must have been about thirty bucks.

The dusty fairgrounds behind that chain link fence enveloped me.  The swirling lights of the carnival rides, the screams from the top of the Ferris Wheel, the smell of the small animal stables. Wind flapping the white, red and blue ribbons against the wood, the cries from the dusty fairway to lay your money down, the smell of the corn dogs and Navajo Fry Bread, the free things in the booths (how I loved the free things!), all the wonderful displays of houses made from match sticks and the town's largest pumpkin.

"Go have fun."

Fun must continue.  That was the feeling in the air.  Pretend nothing devastating has happened.  Your dad didn't just die.  You ain't just twelve years old.

Grieving can be postponed.

I learned the hard way this is not true.  I should never be left to my own devices.  I should never be left alone for any amount of time.  I should never be forgotten.

No one should be ashamed of me or embarrassed of me.  But, they are.  I am always "too much" for people.  At the same time, I am easy to forget no matter how crazy I pretend to be.

I become invisible.

But again, let's not dwell on this.  Let us remember that one hour.

My finest hour.

Oh, really, it was.

My finest hour...and the winning of a beautifully decorated cake in the Cake Walk.  And getting that dime straight on - in the carnival Fenton glass.

I'm.

So.

  Twelve.

Scattering

Scattering
@aladreth antoinette brown


During the night he screamed.  She ran her long nails along his back and then tapped on him, "You are only dreaming.  Wake up."

Because she knew he did not fear anything, she wanted to know what he was dreaming.  What could have made him cry out in fear?

He told her there was a man at the third story window grasping to the screen. He had just climbed up and was staring in at them like a peeping tom.

"He was some type of killer, murderer, oh, something like that," he said.

"And, you were scared?" She asked.

"No, I was not scared," he protested, "I was screaming to warn him away."

"Well, I think you were scared," she smirked, "It sure sounded like a scared scream."

"You were standing behind me, so I was protecting you," he remarked.

"What did he look like?" She wanted to know so she could keep an eye out for this man should he appear in real life.

"He was a white man," he replied.

Well, that explained it all.  White men were to be feared.  Look at all the atrocities that have been done by white men.

Geez.  Men in general.

***

There was a boy clown and many other boys.  They were walking with Goddess and me.  Goddess was a tad bit older.  She had "sparkle" in her name but her sparkle was fading.  It did not matter to me, however, because she was still Goddess and had a way of grabbing me by the womb.

I liked it.  She could be rough and persistent and I preferred it that way.

I suggested the boys go try to fix things.  That is what boys do.  I like watching boys fix things but I like being with Goddess better so I suggested I give the boys a few trinkets and gadgets.  Maybe they could go and try to fix things.

I gave them a cardboard box.  I did not want to give it up because I thought it might be better suited for something of mine, but alas, they could have it if they would just move along.  I gave them other things that would keep them busy.

I had many doubts they could do anything.  Especially the clown.

Goddess reassured me if I gave them the magic stones in my jeans pockets it would help them to complete a task or two.

I didn't want to give up the stones.  But, I wanted to go.  Go somewhere with Goddess.

I took the stones out.  They were smooth, circular, and rose quartz.  I tried to remember what they stood for.  Peace, love, happiness ... something good like that.  No matter what they stood for, they were magic and would help the boys to fix things.

I kept the best stones for myself.  Goddess and I would need them on our walk back home.  We were in Butler.  Anything could happen in Butler.

***

He had not cried in months.  I knew he needed to cry.  I was slightly worried that he had not cried in so, so long.

The other night I asked him if he loved me.

He said, "Yes."

I asked, "Do you love me so much it makes you cry?"

He cried.

He cried on command, it seemed.  

I like this fellow.

But, I did not think it would be so quick.

It must have given me power.  His tears gave me power, for I went on to find relief many times in his capable hands.

***

It was a story.  An old story.  It was all the rage in France.  I had never read the story but I had heard many things about it.  I asked this fellow I like to read it to me.  He obliged.

I think he has read dozens of books now to me.  More than anyone has ever read to me.  He moistens his mouth, clears his throat, and reads.

Sometimes I am irritated if the book is getting in the way of sex.  Like that Annie Dillard novel was always getting in the way of sex.  I like sex and hate to be interrupted from having it.

Sometimes I am overjoyed to have someone's voice as I do not like to be alone.  The sound of his voice comforts me.  Even when he reads Edgar Allen Poe, I am truly calm.

Sometimes I am so engrossed in what he is reading that I cry.  I cry, shake my head or nod in agreement at what is happening with the characters.  What the characters are saying or going through.  I agree.  I concur.  I went through it myself.  I am going through it now.

But, most of all, his reading aloud is an answer to a fantasy.  A fantasy of a man in chains at the end of my bed, holding my feet while reading me a nightly bedtime story.  Sleeping sideways until I undo his chains and allow him to crawl up to me.

Well, this last book he read was that story that was all the rage in France.  We liked the first chapter and then we hated the rest of the book.  We hated it together. That is a strong emotion to contain.

We once read a book where a woman was in handcuffs for the first 246 pages and we liked it better. We kept wondering when the author would let her get out of those damn handcuffs.  What power authors have.

I told him he did not have to continue reading the French book as it was frustrating him.  He felt it was, perhaps, the translation from French to English.  I told him, "No.  The book is crap in any language."

But, we had it under our belt.  I think it was about 3am when he finished reading it and we sighed but I begged him to 'fix' it.

"Please, love of mine, fix it."

"Fix the last scene."

"Fix it, fix it!!!"

He obliged and he retold the last chapter of the book in the form and manner it should have been told in.  A little black rodent of the age of 15 was pecked at with the talons and teeth of a beautiful majestic owl as she swooped and danced breasts flinging two and fro.  And I had a powerful orgasm.  It was a wonderful fix.  A fix to end all fixes. I forgot the evils of the story.  I forgot how it had frustrated us both.  It was like there was no more story except the story he had told and within minutes all was well with the world.

It is much like that now with him.  I remember telling him of the hope I had when I saw a bee on the two toned pink flowers of the desert willow of the run down and neglected home.  He said nothing.  But, I felt he knew as I have figured so recently that 'nature finds a way.'

At times I thought I might be tricked and that he was not a man.  He was Jesus.  I was sure I heard the voice of Jesus in his voice.  My mother says I think him to be the Messiah.  I now jokingly call him my Messiah.

Make no mistake, at the end of the day, I know he is not Jesus.  I know he is not the Messiah.

He is just a little clown boy who fixes things.