Author: iainthomas

Everyone always wants to know you for one thing, like Volvos are safe. I want to know you like that because I am as fragile and small as a child, still, at 35. You are fragile too, so I’m gentle with you, softly-softly to the grave with us, even when I’m yelling at the dogs to go outside. Sometimes I expect everything of myself because no one ever expected anything of me, and you tell me, “Shhh.”

There’s something wrong with everyone who likes me. I can go anywhere and be somewhere I’m not wanted. No one I meet believes I write love poems because everyone thinks we are who we say we are, that we’re all flat things. Safe like Volvos and I am so many things and you tell me, “Shhh.”

I try to be. I try to be quiet, even when I’m locking up and you’re sleeping. I told my brother about my new tattoo, he says it’s addictive. It’s a pen and a needle, of course it’s addictive and you tell me, “Shhh.”

Just, shhhh.

We will never leave Earth.

Battlestar Galactica, is a lie.

Star Trek, is a lie.

Alien, is a lie.

We will never leave Earth.

We will never leave Earth because we will spend the time we have left and the one chance we have to leave Earth bickering over who did what to who.

We will never leave Earth because instead of building spaceships, we decided to build walls and razor wire and prisons and bombs instead.

We will never leave Earth because we aren’t building space elevators and warp drives and new kinds of space suits and lasers – just in case we ever meet anyone as petty and mean as ourselves out there.

We will never leave Earth because we’re too busy building tanks to fight over the last barrels of oil and planes to drop the bombs we made on the people who disagree with us over the specifics of the story about where we all come from.

We will never leave Earth, even though all our stories agree, that heaven is above us.

We will never leave Earth. Even though Stephen Hawking says we’ve only got 200 years left. The last 2000 don’t give us much hope.

We will never leave Earth because so many of us have agreed that passing laws about what someone else does with their genitals is more important, than leaving the Earth.

We will never leave Earth and we will sink and drown on this ship while we fight over the deck chairs.

We will never leave Earth.

The Last Starfighter, is a lie.

Babylon 5, is a lie.

Star Wars, is a lie.

Iain M. Banks, is a lie.

We will, never, leave Earth.

We will never leave Earth and we will never be anything more than a strange thought the universe had, a moment in which it went, “Heh, wouldn’t that be crazy. Na.”

We will never leave Earth because the world will erupt in fire and ice while we’re still debating whether or not fire and ice actually exist. We will still be arguing over whether we’re burning or freezing to death when we die.

We will never leave Earth and the few robots we’ve sent out in our place will be our only fingerprints on the firmament, the only proof that a grabbing, desperate hand shot out of our coffin, before it sunk beneath the soil.

We will never leave the Earth and meet Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, or Pisces.

We will never touch Gemini’s face and hear her say, “You look just like me. You look just like me.”

We will never leave Earth because we’re too busy arguing over who you’re allowed to love to bother actually doing the work of love, of leaving the Earth.

We will never leave the Earth because we’re obsessed with the soil we were born on and we never realised that all the dirt that we stand on and all the dirt we’re made of, isn’t dirt. It’s star dust. Our dirt, is their dirt, and we will never ask their dirt for help and so, we will never leave earth.

Carl Sagan, is a lie.

Douglas Adams, is a lie.

Guardians of The Galaxy, is a lie.

Space Quest, is a lie.

We will, never, leave Earth.

Except as dust and ashes and minerals, returned to the sender, to be light, burning, in someone else’s stars.

I have a gift for you my child.

It is a gift that’s only ever taken.

Never given.

I will wrap it around you like a fire but know this:

Your clothes cannot hide it.

It will always be on your hands.

When they are open – when they are fists.

This gift will bond you to everyone else with the same gift, and you will help each other when things get hard, as we have done for hundreds of years.

Do not cry when life is hard, it will never be harder than our gift allows it to be.

You will never hear the sound of a window closing or a door locking as you cross the street.

You will never walk into a boardroom and have people wonder if you’re only there because of some governmental decree.

Yes, sometimes, you will be in a car, or pulled into an office with other people with the same gift as you, and then you will all be expected to put your real cards on the table.

They will whisper and you will hear how they breathe.

You will be expected to let a mask fall to the floor, and let dark and honest air cool your real skin.

You will have special names for everyone who does not have the same special gift as you.

You will walk into a mall and the people doing the shopping will all look just like you.

You will watch movies and read books and the heroes will all look just like you.

You will join us as we tap away on our screens, using the words, “out of the bush,” and making snide, thinly-veiled jokes that we can quickly point out are jokes.

Your gift allows you to say, “Can’t you take a joke?”

Who could hate a joke?

Who could hate a gift?

You will never be casually told to “move on” from the most painful parts of your past.

No.

Your past will be remembered with gunfire at noon and somber moments of silence and statues.

This gift was your father’s father and his father’s before him and he fought and killed and he took all he could before he died.

To give this gift to me.

To give this gift to you.

He did this for you.

You won’t ever even have to think about what you have or where it comes from.

You will have the luxury of taking things for granted.

Of owning history and in turn, the future.

Of expecting these things to always be there, because they always have.

Of being owed an easy life.

People will talk of change.

You will have to say, “Yes, change is necessary.”

But you will never actually have to change anything.

Not even your mind.

You will never have to use the superiority you might claim or your education to actually experience any kind of empathy for anyone else that doesn’t share your gift.

It’s not all roses.

Maybe you will worry about how you’ll afford the rent in your home.

But you can always call me.

Or rely on the skills I have taught you.

This is the gift I have given you.

You must call out.

It will be too much of a shock if you are seen on the street with old, ragged clothes.

People will write articles and pass pictures of you around.

People will ask you what happened to you and point to you as, “An example of how bad things have really gotten.”

We will hold you up like Jesus.

Children will say, “We saw Jesus at the traffic lights!”

If that upsets you, then protest.

When you do, you will never be considered a pawn of the government, a dumb thing, not even human, with no will of its own or nothing to say, nothing more than a manipulation, a distraction from the real issues of the day, which are so much more comfortable for all of us to discuss. Your gift gives you the right to choose what you want to discuss.

When you do, your protest will never be lumped together with the protest of others who look similar to you, you will never be expected to take responsibility for something done by someone else on the other side of the country who shares only the most basic of common denominators with you.

When you do, you will never have your protest dismissed as disgusting, as if protesting was something to be done politely and quietly, as if you’d done something unthinkable at a tea party you weren’t invited to.

No.

When you protest, those around you will raise their cellphone cameras higher and higher and chant:

“THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING.

THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING.”

And we will cry at the truly noble nature of your sacrifice and your protest, we will cry over you as we would cry over some fallen, noble bird.

We will cry as your white skin is broken like porcelain.

No.

Because this is your gift.

And it is taken.

Never given.

I know now why people are like they are because I’ve been given enough time to be some of them by now.

I think you miss everyone eventually. I think it’s demeaning to miss the kid who spat on my school uniform or the other kids that laughed and I thought I’d hate them forever but I don’t, I just miss everyone.

You grow up and you want more and more and more from the hosepipe and it gives you all you can drink if you hold it right and then one day you’re done and you say, ‘stop,’ and it doesn’t, and you find yourself trying to hold water in your hands, and it runs down your wrists.

I’m petrified there’s a kind of nostalgia that freezes you in place and makes you (me) forget that you (I’ll) miss this too one day.

Isn’t that the truth? You can’t miss something until it’s taken away? How do you ever know what’ll go next and isn’t it unfair that you can’t hold everything to your chest all at once.

Sometimes I will walk into a room surrounded by so much history that I am overwhelmed and I don’t know if everyone gets that or if it’s just me but I know for sure these days, I am not fun at parties anymore.

_____

P.S. Buy a book from a sad git.

When they knew someone was dying

they called each person who had ever loved someone

and told them to come to someone’s side

and that whatever they’d taken from someone 

they should return 

and each put something next to someone’s bed

a lock of hair

a box of matches

a note

a shard of glass

an old book

a mixtape

an empty bottle

and so when someone died

no one had anything left that belonged to someone else

and no one was sad

at all.

It’s the future
But we haven’t worked out a way to move ourselves out of our bodies
So I’m still a little sad

I’m going to listen to everyone patiently today
And be kind and gentle and wise when they’re quiet
And make people smile every chance I get
And try to be stronger than I am

I still don’t know how you sat at the backdoor
And looked out at the backyard like it was endless
How you’d love the three of us
In the different ways we needed to be loved

I just remember how you’d sit in the light in a comfortable silence
I don’t remember all the jokes but that’s ok
I still remember how you’d laugh
And what that sounded like

I’ll take the roof off the car later
And drive somewhere nice

You’ve been gone a year now
But I’m going to spend today with you

I’ll be a better, stronger man tomorrow
Just not today

She walks up to the counter

in her fucked-up skirt

and her fucked-up leggings

and her fucked-up Doc Martins

and points at each of the packs of cigarettes

“How much tar in that one?”

“And this one?”

“Does that one have filters?”

“I’m not a used car salesman, pick a pack of cigarettes and

get out.”

“I’m still not sure,” she says, she’s got her finger on her cupid’s bow.

She leans over and says, “Just tell me which one will kill me the fastest.”

The shopkeeper shakes his head and throws her a pack of Texan Plain.

Years later she marvels at how she doesn’t get change for the note she slides

across the counter.

Years later she marvels at how she needs two notes instead of one

to buy the same pack of Texan Plain.

Years later she’s upset and confused and alone and she hates herself but the person she hates the most

is the shopkeeper

and all his stupid, fucked-up broken promises.

Now’s the time to hate who you want to hate.

We can hate the people who killed people.

We can hate the people who provoked the people who killed people.

We can hate the injustice of it all.

We can hate the people who say “They had it coming” and we can hate the people who say, “It doesn’t sound like you have much faith in your religion if it can be toppled by a cartoon.”

We can hate the media for circling it for days like vultures circling a rotting carcass.

We can hate the media who don’t cover the things we want them to cover.

We can all hate everyone we need to hate for a while.

We can hate the moderates, the politically correct and the apologists who allowed this to happen.

We can hate the extremists and the diehards and the people who refuse to see anything differently.

We can hate the people who are trying to make it about something other than what it is.

We can hate the people who are for the guns that killed people.

We can hate the people who are against the guns those who died could’ve protected themselves with.

We can hate those who find hate as an answer before we’ve even asked the question.

“What are you in highschool you fucking jerkoff, go write another poem you faggot or put your fucking boots on and learn to hate.”

Because hate is comfortable, like an old chair you know and love.

You can put hate on like a pair of Levi’s you’ve had forever.

“What kind of pussy are you for not hating someone at a time like this.”

Hate like a river that flows to many fields.

Hate like a flower that blooms in your heart.

“Let’s bomb the fucking desert into glass and make a mirror so big you could hold it up to God’s face and scream

Look at what you’ve done.

Look at what you’ve done.”

And if we hate enough and we’re lucky, he’ll send an angel to tell us who was right.

But it was you.

You were always right.

He’ll say each of us is a universe.

He will lean down and take your face in his hands and whisper it again and again.

“It was always you.

You were always right.”

My child, you will weep, for all the hate, you love.