As honor crosses into the distant distant time

Simple sorrows rend the heartstrings bare of rhyme

Wisdom sleeps soundly at the teats of sows

And Fools guard the gates of paradise singing Pluto’s praises

Lusty trinkets do decide

Designs upon souls with no time to bide

Duress bonds wicked framework to the blood red moon

While the martyrs of unimportant affairs paint pithy inscriptions on tombs

Beggars holding court at sumptuous banquets break in justice from behind

Pay the pauper inheritance to feast on sin on golden plates

And think it divine

Jeffrey M. Hopkins is a man.

Seek the truth even if you are threatened with being burned at the stake.

I will practice my craft because I enjoy it, not because it could possibly bring me fortune.  I will not lend my craft to political causes; but only in elucidating the strange relationship of humans with the universe.  Poetry seeks after beauty but it can also be molded into war hymns and political speeches.  I will not write them.

My observations are just that, my observations.  Nothing is gospel.  Not even the Gospels.

I cannot talk about values like they were waiting around the corner to be picked up, they are not an object.  They are plastic, moldable, bendable, and able to be violated because they are the basis for activities.  There is nothing wrong with crushing them under heavy stones of logic.

I will view money as a means to an end; but knowledge is my currency.  I will only invest in the tools of my trade.  Until ideas are free, I will make my ideas free and readily available.  No one has to care.  I share because I want to.

My mind will be my fashion.  My speech my adornment.  I will only foster revolutions of the intellect in myself and share my tools with others.

I will not succumb to the tyranny of entertainment.  I will not produce works that are immediately commercially viable.  They will sink to the bottom until the sea is ready for them to surface.  If they do not surface they will hug the bottom like a Leviathan.

I will kill off my base wants; the screaming child of instant gratification inside me will starve to death.  I will not starve, but I will not be fat and happy either.

I will not contribute to an age of phoniness.  I will never be a brand name.

I am a unity in myself and I share with others my smiling face and simple truths.  I will not make children cry, but I will not tell them the world is beautiful.  I will show them how to see beauty in the world.

This is my pledge, this is my code.  A man, if he is to be a man must live by a code and travel with his code to his proper death.  Otherwise he hasn’t lived a free day under the sun.

AN ODE TO THE CHARLATAN (FOR JOEL et al)

Danced a dance of illogic around people to blind to see

Wove in front of their eyes a magical tapestry

Arguments with soundness

Are flawless and perfect gems with faulty premises

Destroyed if only someone questioned them

It is what the people want to hear!

Entranced by the simple beauty of hope and blessings of prosperity from above

We forget that toil and sweat are the currency of this universe

How can you call yourself saved and neglect this principle?

Be a man who walks uphill with the wind in his face

Rather than a child who bides his time being good until Christmas

For the wrong reasons

The logic of the charlatan is easily analyzed into its component pieces

His silver tongue spins spiderwebs from a heart seeking influence and treasure

Met halfway by needful credulity in the soaked sponge ears and teary eyes of the audience

Charlatan my hope is that you stack gold to the ceiling and they get everything they ever dreamed of

by Jeffrey M. Hopkins, Copyright 2010, Hard Oak Press LLC.

Tree growing on a rocky outcrop of the Rocky Mountains

I climbed to a rocky outcrop and framed this solitary tree with my battered Leica M6.  I did not fear death, for someone had to capture this.  Just as someone must capture human experience in the frame of art.  We cannot all be purveyors of phoniness or holiness.  Someone has to frame the bitter truth – the truth which can serve as medicine, provided it has a palatable coating.  This need not be saccharine.

The first ten years of the second Millenium were perhaps the phoniest ever in recorded history.  Symptomatic of this rampant phoniness is reality television, where nothing is real, and the 24 hour news cycle where producers decide what is newsworthy and what is newsworthy is stories that drive advertising dollars and that is the extreme, the absurd, the beautiful white wife who is hacked up by her undeserving husband and tilled into a trash dump, the cute child held by developing world parents from a deserving American father, the ponzi schemes supported by hundreds of willing fraudulent participants, the entire sub-prime mortgage industry, the entire rotting edifice of Western Civilization pasted over by advertisements and glitz.  I’m telling you, find a raison d’etre, buying and selling has grown boring.  Not all the video games in the world can assuage the ennui of coming generations.  I see it on their faces.  They seek to be something more than the products they buy, but many do not.

Does money stolen from charities spend better?  Does mortgage money fleeced from people unable to afford a home look better piled high to the ceiling?  The US Economy deserved its implosion.  Perhaps it can be based on something real now.  I fear we have not lost our clamoring for bullshit.  The entire country reeks of phony baloney.  The economic crisis should have given us time to think; but the perpetrators were rewarded.  The victims paid the principle and will pay the interest back with their blood and sweat.  The problem with money is it cannot be smoked.  It is a narcotic but its high never lasts longer than the width of an attention span and those are slim unlike waistlines.  The waste lines are drawn in chalk around industries who died the slow obese death of the uninnovative.

Climb out on a rocky outcrop and feel the wind in your face.  Whether you realize it or not, your life cannot be indefinitely propped up by major purchases.  One day you will pay for your own funeral, only you won’t get to attend.  Choose what you want to do with your life and do it.  The tree wanted to grow.  The tree split a mountain and grew.  And it is alone.  Your life is on a rocky outcrop.  Fear not.

Your Life as a Rocky Outcrop was composed by Jeffrey M. Hopkins in the warm summer sunshine with the wind in his face with a Leica M6 and Leica Summicron 50mm.  Everything was paid for without defrauding any children, old women, or baby harp seals.

Misty Woods in Morning

There is a bit of the divine in each of us.  This spark could possibly be a soul.  I like to think it is not dormant; but unleashed through my creativity.  The fates did not assign me the straight and easy path, or I have chosen Everests for my intellect.  I choose the latter, nothing is written, to be human is to create.  Smash your false idols of what you are told to be with a fist of defiance and become what you are.

Dearest, should we meet, I think it in my best fortune to ask you what your parents named you.  If I find you sweet you might make me smile and warm the knotted marrow of my heart.  My eyes will see you but my eyes cannot know you.  You are as beautiful as the first shoots of flowers from volcanic glass hidden in the bitter cracks of the earth.  You are beautiful in your soul.

My path is windy and unknown but I choose to walk with you.  Nothing is written, but my blessings are abundant.  I do not believe this is only circumstance or a lucky happening.  If you cannot see a path ahead, or you are fearful, abandon me to my wandering.  My meanderings dot my time and make up the landscape of my loneliness.  I hope to fill in the margins with my good works.  I have imposed my own limits on the fruitfulness of my mind.

If you take the easy road – my journey is not with you.  If you stop for a respite, even brief, I will trudge onward up the jagged slopes of mortality.

We are two wanderers, you and I.  We will search our whole lives to end where we began.  On a hilltop.  Facing the winter wind.  Fearless.

THE OLD BASTARD’S MONEY

By JEFFREY M. HOPKINS (DECEMBER 29, 2009)

HARD OAK PRESS, LLC

There is something comical about when an old man gets really pissed off at you, like the way the old bastard is going to be angry with me when he finally wakes up.  And I don’t mean just angry like you stole his parking space at Costco.  I mean when you say something to him to get him mad enough to beat your brains in like he would have if he was a young man; but he can’t because all the strength has left his body and time has ground him into dust.

Time, however, did not grind all his ill-gotten money into the dust.  If anything it grew.  It doubled, it tripled daily in all of his accounts; but it just sat there doing no one any good.

People say money is power and influence; but I say that it is only influential if the money is in strong, able, young hands.  If it is tied to a miserable old bald bastard it’s usually only good at keeping the inevitable at bay.  I don’t understand why these old fools come to the hospital to die.   They would be much better off at home in comfort than spending their last few moments in the antiseptic splendor of this modern day digitally controlled death house.  The old bastard should be home with his twin Pomeranians watching them fuck and make 5,000 a pop puppies.  Everything this old bastard touched in his lifetime turned to gold.

They wheeled the old bastard out of surgery and he was hiccupping like he swallowed an entire can of spicy chili paste.  Apparently the doctors had been cutting cancer out of him for at least a year.  The men in blue slow dripped twenty thousand dollar a bag chemo drugs into the guy saying it would buy him an extra three months.  Three fucking months!  They did this at least five times a week.  He had sat his entire life at some big mahogany desk loaning money and getting interest payments, and now he couldn’t see fit to just pack it up and leave.  He didn’t even pay attention to his family.  He thought money was the answer.

I heard he was also donating a lot of his money to some Catholic church, the one with the statue out front with the skinny guy with all the arrows sticking out of him.  Catholics have the most nauseating statuary of any major religion.  They should get a clue that people don’t want to suffer needlessly anymore!  They want medical treatment.  If they donated their money to scientific research that they stuffed in the pockets of holy fools cancer would have been cured ages ago.  If this guy was religious at all why was he getting pumped full of poison just to suffer for three more months?  Was he afraid of the sunlight going out?  Did he even believe in God or Heaven?

No.  I looked at the ledger.  I know.  This bastard believed only in money.  He believed in the greenback, IN GOD WE TRUST.  Not God.

I hadn’t talked to him in years;  but, I did some research on him at the library.  I read on microfilm, in its grainy black and white images with stupid unbelievable 1930s advertising that he was also a notorious slumlord who was responsible in 1934 for the deaths of 15 low-income minority people in a shoddy apartment building of his that burned down.  And the motherfucker collected the insurance money.  And I knew that the bastard invested the insurance money wisely.  He bought companies at depression era rates that were now worth millions of times their value.  He did well during World War II.  He was too old to fight, but he was able to contribute canteens to the war effort at the rate of two dollars a piece, which cost him no more than fifteen cents to make.  Everything the old bastard touched, turned to gold.  I laughed out loud in my small cubicle when I saw the advertisement right next to the article on the suspicious apartment fire.  The article was right next to an advertisement for a man who could install asbestos at really cheap prices.  NOAH WILLIKER’S BEST ASBESTOS.  I bet he died out of cancer, much like this unlucky fucker was going to.  But the difference between Mr. Wiliker and Mr. Clancy Dournier was about two hundred and ninety seven million dollars.  Money can string hopes like pearls to the moon.  Your meager outlook is pretty much indefinite on 297 million.  It has a nice ring; but there always can be more.  Who knows if Noah Williker died of cancer from laying asbestos his whole life, but I know he probably died.  All your possibilities eventually reach zero with time.

I don’t understand why he chose this wretched hospital to die in.  He could have chosen to stay in the posh rich person’s hospital, or better yet, die at home with his prized Pomeranians filling the void with their barks.  Mr. Dournier was a famous dog breeder in these parts.  I don’t know why he chose Pomeranians over his family.   Maybe he did it for attention.   Maybe it was because they were the only perfect lapdogs he could find.  There were no dogs allowed in the hospital.   I inquired of one of the nurses why the old man stayed here.  She told me it was because he donated about twenty million dollars to the Sisters of Charity who ran the dump and was going to have the new cardiovascular wing named after him.  Immortality!  Vicious self interested old bastard!  I came daily to see if he had awoken yet from his treatment induced coma.  Nothing.  No twitch of the eyes.  I waited a damn week; but the old bastard slept content.

I decided when he came to, when he was awake and sucking his food down the straw, to ask him what good he saw in this life and why he was so desperate at clinging onto it even though death clung to him like an old stinky sock.  But the bastard slept.

In the meantime I went down to the circuit clerk and dug up every piece of coffee stained brief that the sonofabitch ever filed with them.  I did my digging in the sordid messes of his life that were buried in the annals of city hall and forgotten about with bribes and corruption.  I didn’t find anything, but I knew, I knew this old bastard had been up to no good.  How else do you get a pile of cash like he had in this world?  You do it by greasing the wheels of the machine.  You pay a little in to the judges and cops and fire inspectors to look the other way and you go about your business like nothing ever happened.  I found a receipt in his records for around the time of the fire payable to a Mr. Sam Watson.  I looked him up, hoping he’d still be alive.  Five thousand dollars was a great deal of money in 1934.

I walked by his room again.  None of the nurses stopped to pester me.  They kept drinking their lattes and frumpycinos.  It would all go straight to their asses which didn’t look like a bad thing for one of them that looked like a pogo stick with two big balloons riding shotgun.   I assumed she was married to the eternally bronzed plastic surgeon I saw making his rounds in the emergency room.   The guy glared at me each time he saw me because I won a sizeable judgment from him.

I represented a tit job gone bad.  With lopsided dannies a woman can’t make a dime in this town. We sued Dr. Czinko for the replacement costs plus wages lost in a ten year career as a stripper at Dan Hancock’s Gentleman’s Lounge.  No one wanted to see a girl with big gaping scars staring at them, even if it was a lapdance in the VIP room with Pink Neon lights obscuring C-section scars.  Scars really ruined your erection and your fun.  They send it soft like a piece of bubble gum snapped by a prepubescent girl.  We sued and we won.  We won over three hundred and fifty thousand dollars from Dr. Dannie Death as I called him in front of the jury.  The Terror of Tits.  I said that in private.  I knocked him out of the cosmetic tit game and sent him packing off to the ER to do skin grafts of motorcycle accident victims.  You could hardly fuck those up.  Still he drove his Porsche around the town and handed out business cards like religious pamphlets to anyone who would listen.  Fuck him.  I beat him.  I’ll stop thinking about him now.

Dournier.  That’s my mark.  That’s the man I’m after.  If the old bastard woke up from his coma I would have to have a word with him.  He’s the big score.  And from the time he was five months old he already had enough dirt diaper for fifteen tombs for pharaoh.  He makes me sick.  If I was a doctor I would rig him up a hot shot of potassium chloride and watch it drip in slow.  But these fuckers love him and keep him living day after day like he’s some sort of god.  Because he pays them money!

The children’s ward lost a young girl to the same cancer that is eating Dournier’s insides.  She was about four years old.  I overheard the parents crying that they couldn’t afford the treatment that is now dripping into Dournier’s decrepit old pipes.  Fuck him.  I looked into their eyes and saw the pain that Dournier should have felt his entire life.  Justice?  I think that’s a word thrown around by people with full bellies.

I walked by the children’s ward the other day and saw the kids lying sick in their beds suffering with their poor indigent parents taking the bus to see their little boy or girl after they break their back all day long at some wanton job.  I see this and it makes me sick that just five floors above them; the prince of the world, a ninety six year old man should be catered to like he was the resurrected prince of peace.  Wake up damn you!  I will really give you what you have coming Dournier!  The money you give me, why I’ll give it to these children’s families so they can at least get a car to come down to the hospital or pay for some home health care so that their little children can not have to lay down in this cold sterile factory with blanket warmers but hearts numbed by business.  But the old bastard just lies there with his eyes closed thinking about his millions.

Dournier woke up!  I walked by his room and saw that the bastard was sitting up gumming some pureed peas like a fucking big wrinkled bald headed baby.  His eyes stared straight ahead at the nurse that fed him like he was some cute little puppy.  I sat in the waiting room and waited until the Filipina waddled out of the room.  She was a kind heart.  She should have mixed glass shavings with his macaroni and cheese.  I stole up and surprised him.

“Dad.”

The old man did not seem to have even an electron’s width of surprise in his voice.  It was as gruff as usual.

“Son.”

“I suppose you’ve come to try to ingratiate yourself with me enough to ask to be put back into my will?”

“No.  I would never ask that.  I’ve just, well I’ve done some digging on you Father.”

“What did you find Clancy Junior?”

“Mr. Sam Watson’s still alive dad.  I know what he did for you.”

The old man gasped like he choked on some of his mashed potatoes but they had long since ended up in his stomach.

“You son of a bitch.  If I was a younger man I’d get off this bed and rip your head off.”

“Yes, you old fool.  I made him talk.  And if there is one thing that law school taught me, its to get evidence.  Here, listen to this recording.”

“ metallic clanking yep boy your father paid me five thousand dollars to kick over that torch in that apartment building….quite a big sum of money in 34 for a fella to come across.  metallic clanking who paid you? Why boy your father paid me, Clancy Dournier. So you did it? You kicked over a blowtorch in the basement? Yep I did.  He told me to kick it over and I kicked it over.”

“Sam.  Shit.  Where’d you find him?”

“Old folks home.  The guy’s pretty senile, but he remembers certain things.  I guess killing fifteen people kind of sticks out to you in your memory.  You think five thousand dollars is going to buy someone’s silence anymore dad?”

“How much do you want you ingrate prodigal son?”

“I don’t want anything.  I want you to come clean.  Use the fortune you made to do some good.  You make a donation dad.  You make an anonymous donation to this hospital and you put the conditions on the donation that it goes only to help out children suffering from rare diseases that are very difficult and expensive to treat.  You name it the H.E.A.R.T.S Program.  HELPING EVERYONE ACHIEVE REAL TANGIBLE SUCCESS.”

“What about my dogs?”

“No.  You donate all the remaining money you have Dad.  Fuck those Pomeranians.”

“But Clive and Sweetie need me.”

“They’ll be taken care of dad.  I’ll find them good homes.  If you don’t do this, I’ll bury your name along with you.”

The old man gummed his peas and thought.  As he chewed the peas and sloshed them in his mouth with copious spit, the smile on his face grew.  He swallowed.  I saw the slop trickle down his throat, that’s how skinny he was.

“It’s a pity son, that we spend our lives building a reputation, engaging in business,  and building something.  And all we’ve built is an empty shell of a name.  A shell of a name that is only as good as what people think of it when you’re gone.”

“You’ll be worse than a pariah.  You’ll be cursed and forgotten dad.”

“You name it Dournier Hearts son.  I don’t care, you can make yourself the executive.  You need a career change.  Chasing ambulances is making the family look bad.”

The old bastard had a point.  “Okay.  Dournier Hearts then.”

“Draw a nice salary from the foundation.  Marry yourself a nice girl from church and stop hanging around those loose whores I hear about all the time.”

I smiled.  My old man laughed like he had just discovered the investment opportunity of a lifetime.

“Call up my lawyer son,” he said with a smile.  “Who says an old man can’t change?  I just had a crazy thought, I’m thinking of changing my will.  I’m thinking of setting up a foundation that helps little kids suffering from horrible diseases.  I’m going to call it Dournier H.E.A.R.T.S.  It’s an acronym standing for Helping Everyone Achieve Real Tangible Success.  We’ll give them medical care, and hell let’s go crazy, we’ll give them scholarships to college too.  Sick kids usually read a lot.”

He whispered to me with his wrinkly hand partially covering his mouth, like he didn’t want anyone to hear, “Son, why we’ll be the toast of the town!”

The Attorney ran into the room panting.  My father could not be dissuaded from his wild idea.  The attorney made sure than his profligate son was entirely left out of the will, but posted no objection to me being named the North American Director of the Dournier H.E.A.R.T.S. foundation.  After my father signed the paperwork, we held a press conference.   We even wheeled my father down in his bed for the announcement.  He sat there silent like an old wizened monk.  We offered our first H.E.A.R.T.S. awards to several of the worst cases in the children’s ward.  Though he did not show it, I could tell that my father beamed when their parents broke down in tears on camera and threw themselves at his feet.  There was much adulation in the news media.

The old bastard died two weeks later.  Since its founding, Dournier H.E.A.R.T.S. has helped over one thousand children get treatment for diseases they would have died from otherwise.  It has sent hundreds of those children to the best colleges and universities in the land and many of them have devoted their lives to scientific endeavor.  My father was named Humanitarian of the Century by a famous East Coast Magazine, an award which I humbly accepted on his behalf.

ADAM

Copyright 2009, Jeffrey M. Hopkins

Hard Oak Press, LLC

“Listen up men.  We’re heading out today.  We’ve got a mission.  Higher staff’s getting desperate for a score with the losses that we’ve been taking.  Jackson’s men got chewed up out there yesterday.  Let’s try not to do the same.  We’re heading to their battlements, making penetrations of their extreme left flank.  You all know that’s the settlement of Toriao.  It’s fortified men.  They’ve got enough firepower down there to wipe out the whole lot of us.  It’s going to require subterfuge men.  But we take out that Command Post in Toriao we can take Toriao and after that Dilson Pass and after that CapCity 5 and after that we’ve got these bastards on the ropes boys.  Any questions?”

The men looked at the Lieutenant grimly.  None of them blinked and they had not shaven for months.  All had long beards that jutted from their lean faces like fists.  One of the men coughed as he smoked a cigarette.  They were a medley of different uniforms pieces mismatching and hodge podged to the point of absurdity.  Only the tall, thin, young Lieutenant had the appearance of being genuinely military.

“What’s subterfuge?”  Carlson asked.

“Damnit Carlson, what’s with the questions?”  Sarge McMichaels butted in.  Sarge was the gruffest of the bunch, short, squat and muscular.

“Now if Carlson’s got questions he can ask them,” the uniformed Lieutenant said.

“It’s sneaking, Carlson.  Subterfuge means sneaking,” the Lieutenant said to him with a smile.

“Well why didn’t you just say sneaking then?”  Carlson said.

The Lieutenant laughed loudly.  Soon all the men to their leave and joined with him.  Carlson smiled widely.  Carlson was always good for a laugh.  When the uproar over Carlson’s joke died down some of the men looked at the man with the backpack with serious side glances, like they were afraid to stare at him directly.

McMichaels pulled Carlson to the side and said to him slowly, “Just keep quiet and mind your satchel.”

“Yes boss.”  Carlson said and looked at the bag on his back.

The men assembled their gear into backpacks and oiled their rifles.  They loaded their magazines with the precious bullets.  Carlson sat by idly watching them.  No one spoke to him.  He sat with his satchel on his back and a blank stare on his face.  The Army was not a bad place for him.  He ate when everybody else ate.  He smiled and watched the men as they packed and wondered what they were saying to each other.  The men finished assembling their black rifles and started shuffling out the door.  Sarge McMichaels reminded Carlson that it was time to go.   No one was hard on him.  He saw some of the other guys getting yelled at by Sarge or the Lieutenant for messing up.  Carlson never messed up.  He was the best soldier that the unit had because he never got yelled at.

The men walked through the wilderness for days.  At night they camped out in small tents that they packed into their backpacks.  Carlson did not have a tent in his backpack.  He was not allowed to touch his backpack until the Lieutenant told him it was okay.  Those were his orders.  It was a shiny backpack that was not very heavy on his back.  Carlson felt sorry for the other men who had to lug everything on their back, like changes of clothing and tools to dig holes with.  When the men dug their holes Carlson sat down and talked to them.  The men usually ignored him except a man named Henry talked to him.  Henry treated him like a brother and always brought Carlson his food.  Carlson slept with Henry in the same tent that Henry carried on his back.  Henry was very strong because he carried two of everything in the backpack.  He carried all of Carlson’s food on his back.  Henry’s backpack was nothing like Carlson’s backpack.  Carlson’s backpack was shiny and light and he never took it off.

In the forest there were many animals that made noises.  The noises were high pitched and funny.  Carlson laughed at the noises but some of the men told him to be quiet because making noise would only alert the Gubment men who were out looking for them.  When Carlson was a little boy his father told him that the Gubment had gone bad but then his father went away with some men who came and knocked on the door late at night and Carlson did not see his father again.  His mother cried and cried and said something about how she wished that his father did not make a show of arms against the Gubment but Carlson did not know how a man could even walk without showing his arms to someone.  Carlson did his best to help her but it did not seem to do no good.  Then some men came during the night and asked his mother to come with them and he did not see his mother again.  The men took him to live in a home with other young boys who also did not have their parents.  Carlson remembers he was very hungry for a time.  He remembers the potatoes falling on the ground and the boys fighting over them like hungry dogs fighting in the streets over the garbage.

At night the men talked to stay awake while they were guarding the rest of the men.  Carlson did not have to guard the rest of the men his job was to guard the backpack that he wore and to never take it off unless the Lieutenant told him to take it off.  Henry told another man about the reason that he took up arms against the Gubment.  Henry said that the Gubment thought it could do anything that it wanted to do.  The Gubment did not allow anyone to speak their mind or they would disappear in the middle of the night just like Carlson’s father and mother.  Henry said that his wife disappeared in the middle of the night but not because she spoke against the Gubment but because she was pretty.

“Will your wife come back Henry?”  Carlson said from the sleeping bag inside the tent.

“You’re awake.  You need to sleep Carlson.  Its important for you to get your sleep.”

“Will your wife come back when we win over the Gubment?”

“I don’t know Carlson.  I mean I hope she does Carlson.  Don’t worry.  You get some sleep.”

The Lieutenant often stayed awake at night.  As the men walked further and further into the woods the Lieutenant slept less and less.  His color was not good and he began to look like he was made of the wood from the trees that surrounded them.  His color was gray and his blue eyes shown through the grayness like small oceans on a dusty dead planet.

After two days the men stopped and there was a big fight amongst them.  The men had wrestled two of their party to the ground.  Henry buried his knee into the back of one of the men who shouted and screamed, “All the accusations are false!”  The Lieutenant ordered that two of the men were tied to trees and he pulled out a pistol and shot both of them in their heads.  The pistol did not make a sound.  Henry told Carlson not to watch but the bright red blood that dripped from their wounds mesmerized him.  The Lieutenant said that the men were spies for the Gubment, that they had locating devices in their backpacks and that the men had to move out or they would be discovered by the Gubment whirlybirds.  While the men hurried and picked up the camp Carlson heard the whirlybirds beating the air like drums.  The men ran and Carlson followed them looking over his shoulder at the two dead men tied to the trees.  They ran until Carlson’s lungs burned like fire but the men kept running so Carlson kept running too.  He stayed right by Henry’s side and Henry kept looking at Carlson to make sure he was with them.

When the men made it to their rally point the Lieutenant took a roll call.  All of the men were present and accounted for.   The Lieutenant stared at Carlson, who was wheezing like a fat man under the weight of his backpack, holding the straps like he was going to take the backpack off like the other men that tossed their rucksacks and were now almost fast asleep.

“Henry, pitch that tent.  Don’t you dare take off that backpack Carlson.  Not till I tell you okay?”

Carlson looked to Henry who nodded to him in agreement with the Lieutenant.  Carlson stuck to Henry’s side for the remainder of the evening, mimicking his every move.

That night Carlson watched Henry sleeping in the moonlight.  Carlson put a few leaves on Henry’s face and laughed when Henry brushed them aside like they were insects bothering him.  Henry woke up and Carlson put some more little blades of grass on his face.

“Carlson.  Leave me be, I’m trying to sleep.”

Carlson laughed, continuing his game.  Henry raised his voice slightly to let Carlson know he meant business.  “Carlson, if you know what’s good for you you’ll sleep.  We’re going to make contact with the Government troops tomorrow.  You’ll want to be fresh.”

“Will I get to use Adam?”  Carlson asked with a look of wonder in his face that was accentuated by the moonlight breaking through the trees.

“You may, I don’t know what the Lieutenant’s orders are buddy.”

Henry turned over to go back to sleep.

“Henry.”  Carlson said.

Henry turned to the man who sat cross-legged with his sleeping bag wrapped around him like some Buddha dress in the darkness.

“What Carlson?”

“You ever seen the Adam used before?”

“No I haven’t.”

“Then I’m the first person you know who will use it?”

“No Carlson.  There have been others.”

“You see them?”

“No.  I just heard stories buddy.”

“You ever had a guy carry it before with the Platoon?”

“Yes.  A guy named Silver.  He was like you.  He carried the backpack.”

“What you mean he was like me?”

“Special.  He was special like you Carlson.”

“Oh.  What happened to him.”

“The Government troops killed him when we got ambushed.  He couldn’t run fast enough.”

“Those Gubment troops won’t kill me Henry.”

“I know Carlson.  You’re special.”

Carlson lay on his side because laying on his back was uncomfortable with the backpack poking into his ribs.  The excitement of tomorrow swam through his head briefly; but drowned in the swamp of sleep that kept pulling him like a hapless quacking waterfowl into its murky depths.

He awoke with a start as Henry shook him.

“Get up.  Its your big day Carlson.”

Carlson shook rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and watched as Henry packed up his belongings into the huge rucksack, which he then hoisted with a grunt onto his back.  The Lieutenant made a speech to the men.

“We’re only a click away from the South Eastern Army Allied Headquarters men.  We’re going to establish a observation post on the ridgeline to the rear of the Headquarters in order to conduct surveillance on those Government bastards.  When I decide the time to strike, we’re gonna hit them with something that those bastards in CapCity 5 will remember till their dying days, which will be soon I assure you men.  I want you men to know that if we don’t make it out of here, its been an honor serving with each of you.  We must do our best though men, and heaven help us, we’ll make it back to our families free men.”

The men nodded grimly and all of their eyes were on Carlson who smiled plainly as he stared at the Lieutenant, still trying to figure out what he had said.  When the men marched off, Carlson followed closely to Henry’s heels, never taking his eyes off his friend’s back.

The men squatted on the ridgeline behind the South Eastern Army Headquarters.  It was a much more massive structure than each of them had anticipated.  Massive and gray, it stretched nearly as far as their eyes could see.  Men the size of ants, in black uniforms darted back and forth carrying their messages and orders in the giant courtyard.  From their position, the men could see the huge mural portrait of the leader that none of them swore allegiance to, and who promised them all swift death if they were caught in any act of aggression against it.  What the Government counted as an act of aggression was entirely arbitrary, dependent on the prevailing mood of the ruler, whoever it happened to be.  There were four gates to the compound.  The Lieutenant waited patiently, his hands sweating on the binoculars.  The men swatted little flies that buzzed around them careful not to make too much noise.  The Lieutenant beckoned Carlson to come forward by pointing at him and motioning his hand, much like a man would call a recalcitrant dog.  Carlson looked at Henry who bade him to crawl up to the Lieutenant, even though Carlson was only a few feet to the Lieutenant’s right.  The Lieutenant grabbed him up by his fat cheeks with a look in his face that only success was permitted.

“Carlson.  You walk down there.  You walk down to that guard post down there real sneaky like.  You go down there and give them what you got on your back.”

“Give them the backpack boss?”

“Yes.  Sneak down there and hand them the backpack.”

“You mean sutterfewj right boss?”

The Lieutenant smiled.  “Yes Carlson.  Subterfuge.  Get down there.”

Carlson stood and walked down the hill quickly.  He had a smile on his face, eager to get rid of the backpack that had plagued him so long.  He looked back to Henry with the same smile on his face.  Henry glared at him to keep moving and not slow down.

Carlson repeated the instructions to himself out loud as he walked.  “Gotta hand Adam to the men.”

He repeated his litany as he walked up to the sleeping guards, two young men, no older than twenty years old looked at him bewildered when he walked into their guard post.  “I gotta hand Adam to you guys, the boss he told me so.”

Carlson smiled and took off his backpack and reached forward to hand to the guards whose childish faces were proportioned mixtures of surprise and terror.  They made for their weapons but did not reach them before the three of them were enveloped in a searing white hot orb.

By the time they heard the blast, the men had been running for minutes, following the young Lieutenant away from the expected area of devastation.  The wreckage of the South Eastern Army Headquarters was now just a burning twisted wreck filled by the screams of the dying.  The ruins burned for weeks and weeks and filled the sky with a thick sooty black smoke that crept across the horizon like a plague of locusts.

In the folly of war and the bitter machinations of politics the ones who followed orders without question were most valuable; but what was even more valuable was a man incapable of refusal.

Take A Good Look at Me, Jackrabbits

When it is time for me to rest under leaves I will have been a man.  I will have lived my life fearless of failure and expecting no success.  I will have looked the ugly hag death right in her rotten mouth and kissed her well.  I will have made love to the careful caresses of my soul.

I fully expect to die after I have shed my final skin and wrenched all vestige of my tenderness from the cloak of my misgivings.

I will be remembered for being a man, no more.  I was never a wizard capable of inducing people into fancy dreams.

I will be remembered for being a man.  A man of flesh and blood and appetite.  A generous man of a humble nature who told the truth always.

I have been warned to sell out.  I have been told that I will die a nobody if I do not cater to the wishes of the marketplace.  I was told that I have neither the talent nor perverse drive of Poe to make a beautiful corpse what I could not accomplish in life.  I was told to write bullshit.  I was told to shovel this bullshit as high as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and hope it could compare.

If my works should be the death of me, so be it.

If my hobby takes the better part of my soul, I offer it humbly to you.

If it does not approach anything original ever I will have died a pathetic producer of hackneyed rubbish much like a termite mound in the Serengheti.  But I will be able to live with myself in life.

If my obsession overwhelms around my better senses and runs hurly burly through the well laid fields of my mind they are all the better tilled and destroyed and burned with matches and magnifying glasses.

In the end to nothing I go.  To nothing with a full heart and a love of life.  To nothing I go.

To have experienced a moment of joy in creation is worth all the gold pumped out of all the cataracts and shiny rock mines in the rotten guts of the Earth.

When it is time for me to rest under soggy leaves I will know that I have been a man.

We All Dream Big Dreams, We Work, We Die

As a child I dreamed of being an Astronaut

Then I watched the Challenger take a fatal flight

Being scared at a young age

I dreamed of other things

Of adventure

Fantasies boiled up within me

Then I wanted to be a doctor and help the sick get well

I worked in a hospital and couldn’t stand the smell

That antiseptic smell of money lingering in the halls

To join Medecins sans Frontieres

But I lacked the courage

My will disintegrated

I retreated inside myself

Bolted the door for two years and stared at the walls

Alone in my room I read thousands of books

I talked to no one

I meditated

I considered suicide two thousand three hundred and forty nine times

I never tried it once

I looked inside myself and destroyed who I thought I was

I stood up and walked into the sunlight

Not afraid of life

Not afraid of death

Now I am living as a soldier facing death everyday

And all I wish is that I was a students

Studying to make the world a better place

(death to comes to us all it is what we do with our lives that makes us men.)

Where's her Bailout? Wells Fargo got theirs.

700 Billion by Jeffrey M. Hopkins

700 Billion is money well spent.

700 Billion is enough money for the rent.

700 Billion buys food for the kids.

700 Billion to buy skeletal babies bibs.

700 Billion while we haggle over scraps and bones.

700 Billion to get denied education and home loans.

700 Billion spent correcting bankers’ mistakes.

700 Billion to say life’s rough those are the breaks.

Everyone gets a bonus for a job well done!

A new Ferrari, stock options and a swimming pool in the sun.

Where’s your bailout? What do you mean your finances are in arrears?

Are you deaf or blind or just plain dumb?  Even Wells Fargo got theirs!

“700 Billion” and the photograph “Where’s her Bailout?” are copyright 2009 Jeffrey M. Hopkins, Hard Oak Press, LLC.