[Roy White]

Discontent and puttering, bounced from one thought to another. This surface of paper was once a stately pine swaying in the wind with what it was, or what it might have been.
A proud jutting mast on a clipper ship. The cut heavy center beam of a cathedral. A pier withstanding the thudding of surf. A pole to wave a flag with.
In the slow seasons the tree grew, this surface held rushing sap and frozen larvae. Woodpeckers wounds and squirrel young. Boy’s shouts and enduring the nails of a tree fort.
This surface, white and shallow as it looks chained by blue jail bar lines and Red Guard sentinel margin lines. Pierced by curved wire and buried behind the cover. Lost in the anonymity of the millions of other bound pages, reflecting none of the original life and beauty of the tree.
Now subjected to the idle scrawl and whims of my pen, a plastic tramping, scratching, rolling, elephantine express.
Thoughts to express. Wind of life to express… (Expressly so)
The paper suffers all of this without complaint. It’s only paper.
The abstract phrases and stumbling lines bounding about like billiard balls seeking to be free of the bordering bumpers and roll far and free on a real, green, sward of Velvet grass. Not dead wood…
They rebound and crack together creating disharmony. A vortex in my head, a thought tornado, a whirlpool that clings and whirls pulling memories and time out to spill like the ink spills out of the end of this pen onto the flattened trees called paper.
How would it be if God took our bodies and bones, our brains with their capability to be an artist or playwright, Poets or minstrel’s statesman or midwife? What if He mowed us down like trees, using our favorite things against us, then crushed us and ground us like sawdust until we were a fine white pulp.
What if He pressed the mess of muck into human paper? A flat, featureless plain of two dimensions with the blood of the visionaries as margin lines.
What would He write on this vast plateau of reduced man? Who would read it? Or understand...
NO!
The ricocheting billiard balls of undisciplined ideas rebound in my head once more and gibberish lands on the impassive white page.
I might as well stand back and blow ink through a straw onto the flattened wood. Random marks aren’t that much different from random thoughts bouncing off the edges of my mind. Yet they bounce and I understand the feeling they mark the page with, understanding not the ideas, or the flow of sense.
Some things are deeper than sense, or logic, or rhetoric. Isn’t that right? (You are not supposed to answer that one.)
I’m not trying to be clever, just honest to my soul.
There is no place in the straight-line fast lane, or the slow. There is no place in megahertz computer banks so adept at endlessly adding one plus one and each time making the fresh discovery that the answer is two….
The answer is not two…
There is no place in the foolish interaction I call ‘conversation’ for the silent signals from the hand of the inner man.
This page suffers the violence…
This page suffers the extreme puzzle of billiard balls never settling to rest in the pockets of dogma hemmed in by skull and skin, never coming to rest in the library of the cerebellum.
Well…
How did you expect to really understand anyway?
You are not I…
Maybe a like feeling in you will stir, maybe you will fling these muddy waters away.
I wish I could…
Maybe you will nod your head with a knowing smile and a little pity for me and remember how you lined up your own billiard thoughts for that trick shot trying to organize your own minds scurrying.
Well I am not you so bear with me while I scramble. I can, and must, drink the only drink that I’ve got. I won’t refuse it and shrivel up no matter what you say.
I’ll drink, and chase my greased pig life here and there even if my feet are bleeding.
As if they aren’t…
At least my footprints will be clear to see.
I haven’t accomplished anything here scrabbling and scribbling, reaching inside to grasp the things that like soap squeezed too hard fly at the slightest grasp.
A fly is hatched. He buzzes and snattles, jerking the air and zagging… Drawn to manure and garbage, born to be despised.
Hey, wait a minute… I ain’t no fly… I’m a man….
Sun on skin… Grass scratched back…
Children with plastic squirt guns learn how to aim…. I hope they don’t get wet. I am a man, a hu-man. I hew my way through life, the only trail the one I leave behind me.
I wonder if any termites got caught in the pulp of this paper?
My billiard balls change color as they rebound some more.
It is life that I long for. Not knowledge, not praise, not acclaim not concepts but life… I’ll do anything, live anywhere, eat anything, for life.
Not the motions of sleeping and waking, not the sham life of the old doddering priest and his rote prayers, the mass-produced masks that portray zombies as alive. Not, oh please not the shell, not the husk of the kernel.
Not the chaff… Oh God…
Not the chaff… Oh God…
Not the chaff but life booming like the laughter of Bacchus and his train. Life still and deep like the abyss between the points of the stars… Life fantastic and wonder-full like the myths of Dryads and centaurs, fairies and banshees of the old tales. Life, still as stone but graceful and fluid.
Let me get old and beautiful, my face chiseled away by pain, patience and sorrow, until at last these wildly rocketing billiard balls fall silent and inert on the old worn table. My eyes at last wrinkled and dry.
Dry and chuckling…
Chiseled and chuckling…
The man who shoulders His pack and stamps His bleeding feet can suffer no real harm. He feels the nails in hand and foot, His brow and side on fire he weeps, he dies.
He lays dead. Chiseled and chuckling he rises.
I can’t surround life there isn’t enough of me. When I try I’m spread thin and pop like a taunt balloon, or dried out soap bubble.
In spite of myself and the caroming pool table of carnival ideas one masquerading as a fat man, another as the hunger artist, another as the elephant man, the tightrope thrill-seeker, or Tom thumb…
The kaleidoscope turns and ‘presto.’ I have another point of view. Another peek behind the curtain…
Michelangelo pounded long and hard on a block of marble. David emerged chiseled and chuckling. You can bet his carnival was over.
A dog barked just now and reminded me I’m writing.