A Thousand Words

“Do you wanna fuck?”

The girl/woman stood looking straight and shameless.

Her dress was pink and snug to an hourglass figure that went on for miles. A little ragged, but breathtaking.

The question stopped me. Serious?

Her eyes, something about the depth hidden in them told me otherwise.

“I have been beaten, I have been shamed, but I have never been forced to bare the subjective degradation that my life has become.”

In her hands was a small neatly wrapped box, a piece of twine neatly around it.

“In answer, to the question in your eyes, No.”

She moved fluidly away from me.

She looked back at me, held the package out to me, and continued away,out of the crowds of people, away from the fountains and sculptures in the park and dissappeared into the deepening dusk.

As she moved the bystanders parted for her, and resumed former postures without noticing her passage. A few of the loners, gaped after her, she was oblivious and regal.

I stared after her until her figure left my sight and then I left as well.

I walked home slowly, as the twilight deepened, the street lights came on, and it grew a murky thick and gray dark.

Once at home I opened the small elegantly wrapped package that she had handed me, and sat trembling in my chair. Inside I was sobbing in weariness, grief, and even a little fear. These feelings were from trauma, from the loss and deprivation of the last few years and from what I would have to do next.

The last few years had been hard for many of us, we had lost whole families and communities to the plague, the ones that didnt die to the plague succumbed to the incumbent diseases of the mind. They were no longer the people that they once were and relied upon our systems of denial to continue to hold sway in our hearts. It was a truly devastating experience.

We would now begin the long road to restore and rebuild.

I attempted to shake the residual trauma and thought to open carefully and with a feeling of somewhat reverence the twine encased package containing the works of the lady I had just met at the park.

A graceful coup of letters, pictures, and memorabilia spilled across the shining and mahogany coffee table in front of me. It was quiet now, but, the lingering sense of horror and trauma managed to maintian some of its former foothold in my mind.

I lit a candle for ambience, poured a cup of coffee and settled in to the story the woman was selling me of photographs,pictures, poetry and words.

Here a picture:

Here a poem :

And this one:

A poem that she wrote from within isolation, the isolation was relative because this one had no family, and no friends left, but she was still fairly sane and had maintained a decent sense of humanity. She wrote well and often, long rambling ponderings on the good and evil of humanity, assertions of worth, rantings and sermons on the survival, and ethics of common dignity.

Here was one,

And another,

I stopped for awhile lit a cigarette, and thought for awhile. In my reflections, I marveled at the beauty of life, at the extent and vanity of injustice and how long and what it would take to make it right. I could feel the change in the atmosphere, as acknowlegement and recognition had gained momentum in the awareness of humanitys' common and worked to destroy the chains of denial.

I shuffled through the various works, and thought of how I could compose and market the woman’s work to maximize profit and cultural impact.

In this arena, we could all use a positive breath of refresh, a changing cultural identity could be dangerous, but with the right influences in place and the wrong ones removed we could definitely make a go of it.