The soldiers of my mind are pounding down my door. They knock with knuckles raw, shouting, Conform! Conform and come out unarmed! Dressed in slug-colored suits, these soldiers don masks so like the faces we face each day on Minneapolis streets, the ones who have seen you smile or have seen me trip, then skin a knee. These soldiers remain
professionals. They will not be swayed. They look right past. Their shoes soft as rubber rats would never bruise the ribs as swiftly as, say, steel-toed Gestapo boots would. But easy does it, I remind you, and myself, for thin-lipped soldiers’ slice and dice coolly what’s perceived as weak, or meek, with deer knives steaming in locked garages lacking heat.
The soldiers of my mind, and yours, too, sail in silent Chryslers through thunder, hail, and snow, to stand outside our door. They say they like me and admire you. They crave my heart, my odd, odd heart, and yours as well. They crave them both to be gutted, dangling from fresh, wet twine, to devour our brains’ left hemisphere, served chilled on ice.
With this thought, I’m wide-awake, and so are you. A pack of hounds tumble out from trunks and circle the house, hungry for an unprepared, raw flesh feast. It’s easiest, they bark and bite and snap, to devour and digest such hearts, exposed and wild, while the good people are fast asleep. In the morning when you and I, if caught, will have disappeared
without trace or note good-bye, the soldiers, pat their dogs, will soldier on, and model citizens will stretch their limbs and rise. One or two neighbors might glance around, wonder where those two weirdos went, a pair of shoulders shrug once, not twice, in a quick up and down dance. The morning bus arrives at dawn.
It carries inside its shell workers who work without a peep. Off they go! The motto is Safety First. They rest on rafts, in high tide or low, stitched to milk cartons and pig fat soap. They feed on cheese, ham, and crackers in cramped stalls of their own design, chew cud, daydream country lanes, tin-canned peas, and gated towns filled with faces they call their own.
They hum together songs they heard many years ago, but somehow never learned. A yellow bird, a tiny finch, flits by faster than the river flows, swifter than soldiers march. Thank God for it, and for you and me. We spot it. We hear it sing a song as tender as the soft flesh on dog throats, even as they bark, all teeth and whine. It and you and I escape
to the sky for warmer climes to a tropical land called vulnerability. It’s an island with a few living things, and, Thank God, there’s you and me. We live there, not safe at all, with furious fires that must be fed, where passion fruit drips down our chins. We wear our best
organs on our sleeves. We tore them out and sliced them open all by ourselves, we did it willingly. It’s beautiful to see yours and mine, side-by-side, in palms held out, exposed, lush as pomegranate seeds. The strangest fact in this land we found is not how you, the bird, or I
survive, or even how we thrive. It’s that our island has some soldiers on it, how they stumbled in one day, tattered and broken, how they finally knelt down and cried. We removed their ashen, threadbare clothes. They sleep like babies. We love them as their mothers had. We love
them that much. You and I. We kiss their eyelids, gaze at them for stretches at a time. We sing a lullaby we like a lot, despite its bloody past:
Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?
With silver bells, and cockle shells, and pretty soldiers all in a row.
The yellow finch we had spotted and, Thank God, had heard in time, is a sharp-eyed star that dives and darts. It no longer serves as guide. From a blossoming branch of olive tree, it chirps to you, to me, to the heartless and heart-filled things:
All in a row. All in a row. All in a row…one, two, three! Where do we go from here? No one knows!
