guns and idiots

My guns
my rights
he screams

the bullets
fly by like bees
stopping the screams

You can't take
my rights my guns
2nd amendment

he turns
just like death
staring coldly

the government
wants to take
my guns!

his finger tenses
he pulls against
the spring

I need to
protect myself
against the foreigners

the bullets
fly out like a swarm
stopping the screams

As he stands
proudly holding
a gun designed

the screams
are quiet and
the blood is so red

a gun designed
only to kill
other human beings

Two men
one screams about his rights
one doesn't scream at all
he just uses the gun
for it's only purpose
to kill

Terror deep

we sleep guarded

waiting for the word

that it has come

The missiles

make no noise

sliding through the sky

dropping on our heads

Terror keeps

we sleep guarded

waiting for the flash

that tells they did it

Someone’s decision

and then we pray

to whatever we believe

as we wait for it

Terror sleeps

we wait guarded

waiting for the word

that someone slipped

We wait for the

day after

the day

that everything has changed

Terror creeps

we stand guarded

facing East, West

North and South

The skin peeling back

the nausea

that tells us that the poison

is in our blood

Terror peeps

out from behind our knees

letting us know

that it is still there

No bomb shelter

will seal this out

no magic pill

will make this go away

We just wait

but Terror doesn’t

Jason Murray

How I traveled America as a sideshow of sorts or “You got Native Americans making this Stuff?”

Day 1; leaving, eventually, finally leaving and hitting the open road hoping not to hit a deer or crash or fall asleep at the wheel or get food poisoning

The car stands in the driveway, still and silent, tailgate open, all four doors open, things piled around it.  There is the bag with the display tent, black, long, bulky, heavy, the bag with the tents sides in it, amorphous in shape, soft like a pillow, four long thin weights weighing between 40 and 60 pounds each to keep the booth from blowing away in the event of a tornado, there are two suitcases, a backpack, two messenger bags, 3 folding white tables, the big black box with the display drapes; gray fabric with large white stripe designs on it like a fireworks display, the display stands, the display boards, the feet for the display boards, (amazingly most of our display comes from a little store called Ikea and people are always asking us where we got our displays, basically cabinet doors with feet on them forming small tables on top of our tables,) there are three more smaller black boxes with beads and point of sale equipment, there are two large white boxes full of parts and supplies for making jewelry on the road, sort of a mobile studio because no matter how much Lisa makes before we go she will need to make more.  On top of this will go pillows, the camera bag, the monopod for the camera, the countertop tripod, a bag with snacks, dog crates, dog leashes, dog food, my wife’s jewelry, maps, books, two Dell laptops, the iPad, two iPhones, numerous CDs, some Dvds and when we are finally ready to go will be two adults, two children, and two small obnoxious terriers.  I am trying to pack all this in the Volvo in between oxidizing batches of jewelry parts for Lisa.  

As usual we are leaving late.  I spend weeks before these trips with maps and calculations, pouring over hotel lists and figuring how far we can drive the first day, the second, trying to decide when to make reservations, when to wing it and when I am just going to drive until I can’t and nap at a rest stop between the trucks with their generators and refrigeration units humming all night. All so that we can arrive in plenty of time to set up the booth the day before the first day of the show..  We always leave late, me glancing at my watch, Lisa frantically trying to get just a couple more things done, me reassuring her that it is all right and that we can still get there on time making calculations in my head about the number of miles and where we can drive at eighty miles an hour and trying to predict how many miles of single lane highway we’ll have to drive on as they repair the freeway.  It rolls from ten in the morning when I had planned to leave;  Eleven o’clock the car still not packed, the tumbler squeaking away on the kitchen counter polishing jewelry parts.  Twelve o’clock the car mostly packed a hasty cleaning-out-the-refrigerator lunch.  One o’clock and I am sitting in the living room trying to figure out how far I can drive tonight.  Again I am reassuring Lisa that it is fine and we are going to get there while thinking that I am probably going to have to drive fast deep into the ocean of the night.  A night populated with trucks, faster cars, curves, missing rest stops, thanks to budget cuts, and deer gaily leaping across a three lane freeway full of fast moving cars that all too often stop moving fast thanks to an adult version of Bambi trainspotting with the cars (thanks to a deer that had recently been hit by another car but still lay in the road our car smelled like a barbecue for  about two weeks and I had to snap part of our bumper back on, but that’s another story.)

It’s three o’clock and we are finally leaving.  The kids are loaded up, the dogs are settled in, we have rolled down the windows and opened the sunroof because it is a beautiful sunny day, The Black Keys thump out of the stereo causing my mirrors to vibrate subtly, and we are accelerating onto interstate 5.  The iron, the coffee maker, the stove, and the microwave all  are unplugged, all things valuable are stored in hiding spots or in my mother in law’s care, we are feeling good and driving at the critical five miles over the speed limit that helps keep the cops at bay.  

“The signs, did we get the signs?”  I don’t know why Lisa noticed at that moment that in all the things blocking my rear view mirror the flat black artists portfolio that carries our signs is missing but true, the signs are still in her studio.  Get off the freeway and head home.  

Ok, we only lost half an hour, it’s now 3:30 and we are starting again.  Kids settled in, the dogs loaded up,, the Black Keys rattling my mirrors, the windows down the prescribed amount so that Rosie, our Jack Russell Terrier (the terriorist) won’t decide to make her grand break out the window of a moving car and  we are entering the freeway again.

“The jewelry, did we remember the jewelry,” this time my wife is joking, a reference to the first show we ever did when we forgot the jewelry and I had to run home while she set up the little table and drape and displays that were our pitiful first “booth” in the crowded basement of the Jupiter hotel a 4 foot by 4 foot space with our 2 foot by 4 foot table and us and two chairs and I hope we don’t have to go to the bathroom because to get out we have to wiggle between the other tables.

We drive relentlessly across Eastern Oregon a land of unending brown and unbroken vistas where my vision starts to blur and I can no longer tell where the horizan ends and the land begins, but finally there is a small change and we begin to climb finally into Idaho, as it gets dark, I am sure it is beautiful during the day but all we see is the edge of the freeway seems to spin away into a dark morass of lightless falling if you accidentally drifted off and shot over the edge.  It is with this thought that I spy a rest stop sign just beyond one of the large blue barrels that says “water, non potable” on it.  We pull in finding it deserted and spend a few hours sleeping waiting for the bad music to start and a man with a hockey mask and a chainsaw to appear on the hood of our car.  When we wake we find ourselves still alone at the rest stop and discover that it is lousy with signs warning of rattlesnakes.

“Kids, Stay on the paths!” Lisa and I seem to shout in unison.

Day 2; arriving in Glenwood springs home of the Glenwood hot springs and a giant one hundred year old hotel that once hosted Teddy Roosevelt. .

Our second day we spend crossing Idaho, which seems to be more unbroken rolling fields, there are supposedly cities here but all we can see from the freeway is the semi suburban businesses that grow along the side of freeways like some sort of cancer, the signs heralding Cat, or Freightliner, or Denny’s.  We drive straight through pausing only to get lost briefly in the outskirts of Boise to find a Starbucks and getting our large iced coffee speed back to the freeway “I swear it was this direction!?” as fast as we can, and again driving at the magic five above the limit with stops at a few more run down rest stops we dip down into Utah, driving South and into Salt Lake City. The drive throughs spring up like a rash, Hummers begin to crowd the highway and every direction you look you see the white spire of a local temple of the Church of Latter Day Saints, or Mormons.  The search for Del Taco begins, only to find out that In and out burgers have expanded to Salt Lake City.

A moment for haiku thought of while driving fast  down the freeway and seeing that sign on the side of the road “food ahead” with the little square signs inside of its green that announce what they are calling food;

In and out burger

french fries dipped twice in fry sauce

tums, glad to see you

We stop and relieve the dogs leaving them in the car, in the shade, windows cracked, and find a table outside even though the air conditioning feels so good inside.  A little less than half an hour later the distraught remains of our dinner lay across our table empty wrappers held down by the edge of our tray.  Now with a Double Double, fries, fry sauce, and a coke inside me I just hope the protein doesn’t send me into a coma. We all load back into the car welcomed by dogs that seem to not have seen us in days.  I look longingly at the Best Western plus with its free wi-fi, free breakfast, and advertisement of an indoor pool and turn onto the road following the signs back to interstate 80.

Back on the road, we have a long way to go and now it is obvious that we are not going to be able to set up today but instead will have to wake up early tomorrow morning.   Through the empty wasteland of Eastern Utah and Western Colorado, we sadly pass signs that promise National Parks, like Arches, and Mesa Verde, knowing that there will be no time on this trip for these places.  The sun drops on Colorado and again we are passing through an area that we can tell is beautiful but only looks deadly at night as my eyes waver and I begin to see things that aren’t there.  As we close in on 11 o’clock and about sixteen hours on the road we finally see the first signs of Glenwood Springs; a large sign informing us that the next exit will get us to West Glenwood Springs Super Target.  When we finally reach the exit for Glenwood springs, a town with two primary streets, we are briefly lost trying to figure out where to go for our hotel.  Our hotel is finally found and I discover that the lobby is locked and closed, but the night clerk, writing me a note on whom to call to get checked in  sees me and lets me in.  The hotel is clean, a little rundown, but mostly steril.  Once I have removed enough equipment from the car I collapse into bed and dream of roads and trucks and speeding cars and curves.

Day 3;

Glenwood Flippin’ Springs, or how an art show turned out to be a country fair.

I wake up early the next morning feeling a little like the washcloth that I used on my face last night, all wrung out and sitting wasted on the bathroom counter.  I drive the two and a half blocks up to the park since I have about 300 pounds of equipment to set up a booth to sell about five pounds of jewelry.  The show seems to be well organized but I don’t really get the layout as lanes seem to end.  My neighbor isn’t here yet on one side but on the other I see that we have someone who seems to sell some sort of dip mix.  It takes me about two hours to set up and I run the car back to the hotel to get Lisa and her jewelry.  Lisa has packed the jewelry back in the case and is quickly getting dressed as I arrive, the kids are still half asleep and in pajamas.  As is usual for us at shows we are running a litle late and have to hustle  up the hill to our new little “shop” in the middle of this sea of food samples.  Our neighbor shows up at the last minute with a helper.  Setting up their tent they crash into our tent several times fortunately our tent cannot be hurt that way unlike most ceramic or glass art booths so I let it slide.  Now I know who surrounds us.  Across the way is a woman and man team who sell pillowcases at twenty dollars a piece with her designs silk screened onto them.  She is very fond of ponies and princesses and animal prints and Texas A&M so her booth shouts at us in a twenty by ten cacophony of bright prints all about the same side on pillowcases for twenty a pop.  Next to us on our left is a booth that sells mixes for dips, and to our right the woman who kept banging our tent during setup sells homemade body lotions and lip balms.  The people behind us apparently sell a pillow made with some kind of chaff of some sort of grain and we hear all day for the next three days about how good it is for your cervical health.  A claim we’re not sure is legal to make.  

It becomes quickly apparent that the 115th annual Strawberry Days Art festival is a  country fair of sorts with a few artists thrown in to make it a little more highbrow.  People begin to come through.  touching Lisa’s jewelry asking about it looking at the prices.  “too rich for my blood”  or “wow that’s really expensive” a few comment about  how nice the work is but more often when we explain the process which requires my wife to dye a wood bead and then weave beads tightly around the wooden bead one bead at a time then to make all the silver parts by hand most just shake their heads “Crazy” says one, “Wow that’s tedious” says another.  but no one buys.  We  continue to stand behind the table taking turns to break and go wander the park or to walk the four blocks down to our hotel to check on the kids and the dogs.

“You got Native American Women making these things?”  asks a woman after I explain the process to her having just told her that my wife makes the jewelry.  “No, my wife is responsible for all the jewelry and the parts”  I reply.  I’m not sure where she thinks that we keep these Native American Women, does she think I hide them under the table so they can make the jewelry as I sell it. The first day has been a full one, watching people come by the booth, not buy anything, and comment on how expensive the jewelry is.  Lisa and I go back to the hotel and I drive down the street to the safeway and get some bland food for our dinner and some alcoholic beverages to help us preserve the little bit of sanity we have left.

Day 4;

My birthday, or another day of strange comments, a plastic clamshell of cake, and a roasted chicken across a linoleum hotel table.

Another day of telling people “my wife hand weaves every bead herself and makes the silver parts herself as well” to have people squint at the work and ask me “is this made of plastic?’

“No each little bead on the larger bead there is an individual bead that my wife weaves in place one at a time.”

“Are they glued on?”

“No she weaves each bead by hand using a special beading thread that used to be used by shoemakers to make their shoes”

Happy birthday to me, I turn 45 today and here I am standing in a ten by ten white tent in Glenwood Springs Colorado, talking to a unique breed of amazingly rude people.

The show ends today and we haven’t really made enough.  There is the cost of the jewelry parts and the time it took to make, the gas, the hotel, and not to mention the cost of our sanity.  Lisa and I end up at a Kroger brand Grocery picking up a roasted chicken, a loaf of french bread, and some slices of cake for my birthday dinner, and go back to the hotel and take the kids down to the pool, which is dappled by the leaves falling from the sheltering tree and Lisa and I sit in the hot tub trying to remember what it was like to stand all day and not be this tired.  

Day 5

The show ends with a whimper and daddy gets her whatever she wants.

The final day rolls through almost exactly like the first two.  One young woman, after Lisa has explained the process to her, turns over a pair of earrings and lseeing the price looks directly at Lisa and says “I’d have to win the lottery to afford this!”

Finally, in the last afternoon of the show, a young woman comes up who had been there the first day and without ever commenting on the price begins to look at several pieces.  Moments later an older man shows up and we quickly gather that this is “daddy”.  The process takes a while but she finally decides on three pieces that add up to just under five hundred dollars and this daddy’s girl and her father save the day for us.  

The show ends, Lisa packs up her jewelry, and heads back to the hotel while I begin the process of breaking down the booth and packing everything back to the car.  This is the point where I put everything into the car half hazardly because I am going to have to repack it in the morning.  

Day 5;

Goodbye Glenwood flippin’ Springs and onto the next show!

The next morning we pack up our stuff and vacate the hotel room fully an hour after our intended last moment to hit the road time, me spending an hour packing and repacking the car.  It all fit the first time.  Why not now.  At last the car is packed, the kids are in the car, the dogs are in the car, the windows are down the prescribed amount, we have figured out where the Starbucks is (five miles in the wrong direction) and we are on the road again.)  Now it’s 2000 more miles of driving to the next show in Philadelphia, my wife’s home town.  Let’s go!

written for a class last Winter

An Audience of One or One Thousand; Self Writing and the Imaginary Audience

When we sit down to write we do so in spite of the many things that obstruct and distract us.  Our emotions slow us down, our worries busy our mind and drown out creative thoughts, the physical world with its cleaning, bills, eating, sleeping, and working keeps us from having the quiet time to think, to write.  But, in spite of all of this we still write.  We write prose, poetry, letters, emails, texts, grocery lists, all sorts of different words with different meanings and purposes.  When is writing a creative medium and when is it a utilitarian medium?  Better yet, ask the question; when is it both?  For creative writing  can be both utilitarian and creative.   
One way in which creative writing can be utilitarian is when we write to an imaginary audience of our construction.  We can build a paper or a prosaic piece of rhetoric around a topic of our choice with an audience of our choice.  We can build an audience of one or one thousand.  They can be our closest loved ones, our selves, friends or total strangers.  The audience only matters from a standpoint of what we want or need to write.  
Kurt Vonnegut wrote novels, essays, and poetry.  He drew pictures and scribbles.  All this while smoking pack after pack of Pall Mall unfiltered.  At the end of his life he would often quip during interviews that he was going to sue the cigarette company because they promised all these years that the cigarettes would kill him and yet here he was still alive.  He wrote as if he was sitting with you telling you the story.  His audience tended to be the imaginary person in the other chair in his studio, occasionally he would reveal himself in his books such as Breakfast of Champions when he appears in the restaurant attached to the hotel and becomes for a moment his own audience.  Like Vonnegut I often write to an audience that exists only in my mind.

I often write to a man that has been dead these last 43 years because it has the effect of centering me when feeling stressed, of focusing me when unfocused.  I can say what I want, ask anything as long as I don’t expect an answer or a ready solution.  There will be no repartee.  I will not get a pat on the back and a good job, but these things I never expected from a father that left for good 43 year ago.  How can you?  You cannot, but maybe you can answer your own questions, and pat your self on the back occasionally.  

Isn’t most self-writing congratulatory?  Justifying your way of thinking or trying to explain it to the no one that is your audience mostly to have a better handle on it yourself?  Yes most self-writing seeks the adulation and congratulation that is missing from others.  An audience of one that may never read it allows for reflection and thought processes.  A letter written to my father is just one such document of self-reflection and justification;

    Dear Father;

                I don’t expect you to get this letter, nor do I expect you to answer but I am writing to you anyway to speak to you since we never got to speak when you were alive.  I’m sure that you held me at one time and spoke to me but as I was too young by the time mother walked out of the house you shared taking my to St Louis I never returned your conversation.  
It was a short time later that you went to bed early, not feeling well, while your friends went out.  When they came home you had left us.  You were still lying there in that bed but there was no you left in you.  You never woke up.  I don’t remember us coming home for the funeral  but I’ve seen pictures so I know we did.  I played with my brother for the last time until I was seven, and saw my Grandfather Kieth and my Grandmother Olive.  This was probably the last time either my mother or herself saw Olive alive.
In your dying we were robbed of your essence, your person, the music of your being.  You were robbed of your children, of a walk down he sidewalk, noisy moments of discovery, singing us to sleep.  Sometimes as I look at my jack I wonder what it would have been like for him to have a grandfather, what it would have been like for you to become a grandfather. You have four grandchildren now; my Jackie and Isabella and Keith’s James, named for you, and Jessie.
        Is there something out there?  Are you still there in any other part of the world than the memories of the smaller and smaller group you left behind?  As the people who actually know you gradually pass away, and forget about the effect you may have had on them is your presence on this planet slowly diminishing?
I ask these questions of you because it is you that has left this mortal coil, what is the meaning and can I really get an answer from someone dead forty three years?  Is there some piece of you still out there outside of me or is everything that you are rotting in that grave some 200 miles North of me?
I don't believe in God. Not the way Grandfather did. I am not an Atheist because I refuse to say that there is nothing else out there but I find most religion a big ball of blame. People need reasons for everything; "Why did he take my son?" "Why did he take my father?" because we don't want to think that these things are random. We desire order in a universe that tends towards chaos. We seek answers continually to the universe around us when in reality it is far to large for our minds to wrap around it.
The big bang, the ether, string theory, these are all things that we use to keep us going. Einstein's one downfall was trying to search for a theory of everything, for when we find that we will find the essence of God and mankind was never meant to know that.  People pour through ancient texts and swear to have found the one truth while happily ignoring several others sometimes in the very next chapter.  They Condemn gays due to Leviticus, passing over the passage on stoning a woman to death for adultery.  And yet it still remains a mystery and anyone who claims it isn’t is either not being truthful or needs some looking after.
One looks to the heavens and ponders what happens to those that pass on. That there is more to this life than our bodies walking around I know for I have seen the unexplainable. This is however how it should be; Unexplainable. When we pass on it is better that we not know to where we go. There is no heaven, there is no hell, no streets of Gold, no 42 virgins, no fire and brimstone, no red caped hooves menacing demons. We see the echoes everyday of those that came before.  The way someone brushes their hair that is the same as their parents, the inflection of words passed down as we learned to talk.
I write all this to explain in part why I'm writing to someone who has been gone for over forty years. Most of your echo is gone. I never really knew what you looked like so I have no face to forget, no smile and loving nickname, but even though you left before I had a chance to know you I love you and miss you just the same.

Love, Your son,
Jason Vincent Alexander Murray

This letter is written to a fictional audience, since the recipient, my father, will never, can never, read them, but isn’t every audience in prose a fictional audience?  As Walter J. Ong points out in quoting Henry James in his article The Writers Audience is Always Fiction, (Ong) the writer is inventing his reader as much as he is inventing his characters.  We imagine what our audience is like.  We imagine what the might be drinking, or eating as they read.  We imagine what they might say later to a friend about what they just read.  The reader while reading the writer’s work sits and imagines who may have written. Is it the imagined imagining the imaginer?
Much screenwriting, and playwriting is playing to a fictional audience.  To create scenes and conversations between people that may or may not have existed in one time or another.  These plays, or scripts often have the added benefit of allowing their writer to get across a point without coming right out and saying it.  No one in the movie Karate Kid ever says directly that to stand up to a challenge or adversity will make you a better person in the end but that is the not so indirect point made in the movie.  Plato wrote an imaginary conversation between two predecessors of his talking about an imaginary speech in order to get across his ideas on rhetoric and the place of a man of learning in his society without it simply being a speech of his own ideas.  
That in its essence is the difficulty of rhetoric.  To write compellingly, so that someone will want to read it even if it is never meant to be read by anyone but you and your dead father.  To overcome the difficulties placed on us by our schedule and our environment and write, convincingly, clearly, and comprehensively.

Ong, Walter.  The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction. PMLA Vol. 9, No.1 (Jan. 1975) pp. 9-21. WEB. 06 February, 2012.
Plato.  Phaedrus.  MIT Classics.  Web 18 January, 2012

It Was 

By Jason Murray, 

June, 2012

The glass turned

incandescent with a copper

glow.

    The wine

    sits reflecting the light

    absorbing what it is not

your fingers,

nails short move the glass

around in slow circles

    as you smell

    savoring the musty

    fragrance

of the bottle

kept in the dark

cold cellar

    not in your heart

    yet as it burns

    your nose

with its pungency

and its berry

brightness

    still there

    reminding us of the vine

    the grape that it was.

cuttle bone

Clipped by you
flightless

I stayed in my cage
alone

chirping and chortling
preening

and admiring my reflection
sideways
and always turning
unused
to the freedom of the open
door. 

they say no one

Quiet came at last

a calm no one wanted

field strewn with the

wreckage of this last

moment.

Why all of this

screaming came and

went no one seems to

know and no one seems

to care.

The battle cry

of artillery pounding

against the walls

babies crying seemingly

without sound.

Now They won't cry

any more, won't hug

any more won't kiss

any more.

No one wanted this

they say, no one deserved

this they say, no one

should have died they say

no one.

They say no one.