Nowhere Left To Go

No more star. No more orbit. He’s off to jail and soon forgotten

Nowhere Left To Go

That’s all. No more. He’s done and baked. Upon the world stage and possessed of unexpressed knowledge and an enormous font of judgment. He’s fallen.

No more star. No more orbit. He’s off to jail and soon forgotten.

And can’t spell all his crimes, they say. Not enough book. Won’t matter. Off to lockup. Soon an ink splotch in a ledger of castigations. He earned it, Thomas Bardin, prince of all that flushes in gold, now wrapped in strong iron bars to bend his will backwards into the prison yard until the day that last reaper comes, the dark one with bags of eternal promises.

Thomas Bardin waves. The cameras elect him, elected him. Today. Tomorrow. Yesterday. All the same. He arrives, arrived. The crowd cries, cried: Take the oath of prison time. His self imposed existential crisis of impoverished study in a third story brickhouse for his law degree gave or gives Thomas the right to say what’s on his mind and what’s on his mind is to claim himself boss of the jail yard, boss of the nation, a man for each cold season that overcasts the towns. The mountains bow. They plant their peaks in desert sand. Thomas Bardin forces them down.

His speech slopped, slops over the stairs and drips or dripped into the dumpsters. Nobody knows what to do with leftover words. Could be the guards will beat them from Thomas, a confession, make his sinews ache and his rap sheet dwindle into shredded strips of forgotten misdemeanors and painful felonies. Beat him until he swears to love the law.

Each janitor, each benefactor, each portable chair rises or folds, folded, or rose when Thomas in the hotel ballroom receives his sentence, his grand electoral prize. Handcuffs are tried and true, given their size on wrists, unrepentant. Nothing is real in the world when the cell slams and the people cheer on the inauguration platform and from the guard towers.

It’s all good fun, couldn’t have a better show, couldn’t clean all the blood with a hundred mops, couldn’t let a good man make crime, slide into obscurity or eminence, soaring or failed, each an accomplice when the warden calls lights out and the cheap bunks squeak their cheap springs from the presidential bedroom. It’s nothing but dead light, executive orders, breath in the dark, forgotten, alone, Thomas scared that mother is still burned and buried, afraid that action has consequence.

It’s over. It’s all the same. One reality, two reality, three. More. All that Thomas Bardin could ever want when the searchlight crawls across the dark grounds and the bars cast shadows on the floor. As a kid he stocked shelves, his bootstraps pulled. He pulled them, pulls them and rose, rises into the rarified steps of privilege known to few. Parades start.

Then accolades arrive in steel shined words, in riches and purified heath, broken just as bad but on a higher plinth than Adam Unpronounceable Last Name who served two tours in a war of failed ideas and later twenty four months inside a concrete box in the same prison as Thomas. They discussed philosophers in the dining hall, great ideas punctuated with forks in the pursuit of responsibility. Thomas grew bolder in his high court immunity and Adam shrank from sight into a parole hearing one day and then into a small house in South Whittier where he drank dark bottles and blasphemed the Lord.

None of this exists or existed or will come into being. Thomas Bardin made crimes and makes jail time fly away from him as he waves pinstriped lawyers filled with hard candy words at judges and wardens and the cameras. Bright lensed. Spotless.

Meanwhile, Adam Unpronounceable Last Name camouflages his anger and looks for ways to even the score. No one should skate so damn free. No one should pay for a pardon.

And the acceptance speech was perfect. Thomas stood as he stands, proud and unaware and unconcerned for his meals. High birth gives and gave him an edge, one that can’t be unsharpened. It gives and gave him a protective prison wall of profit. It was time to claim his truth before the snipers and the cigarette butts. All the restrooms were clean. The service patrols stood for him, worshiped his presence with constitutional code names and numbers stamped in a register of offenders while security called the cops on itself for its oversight when Adam climbed unseen to a rooftop with a long scoped rifle and his military training.

It happens like this, happened. All the dark bottles in South Whittier erupted from their crates and into the paroled breath of Adam. He made a life that never fulfilled, a life dropped on its head as an infant, a great excuse to deny a god he never knew or ever read about in Sunday school. He took his preparation from the Marines and his displeasure from the first shooter in Dallas who broke his mind in a tower.

Game on. Everyone must die. Thomas Bardin grew a fist. Adam Unpronounceable saw someone else in the mirror. Inside the presidential quarters, an aide found blood on a wall. All because the cameras thirsted for footage, on the spot, in the air, in the execution chamber. Freeways carved and carve neighborhoods into useless dry chunks. Adam knew his weapon, his job, destiny, inside the prison within and inside the prison without. He climbs and climbed onto the roof.

The speech stirred fire. All fires die. The story was written before Christ got nailed. The story was written in the coliseums and the arenas, the trenches. All know and knew their purpose to survive. Thomas raises his arms to the warden and to the assembly of fans. They cheer his crime. The cameras belch. Adam salutes Caesar, his duty. The rifle has no sense of right and wrong. All fanatical mottos etch and etched themselves into the grand scheme of things. Books of death have no titles. God has no plan.

— (is) (the) (end)

Thank you for reading. Inspired by

Greg Lemon