IT'S ALL THE SAME IN THE END NO MATTER
15. IT'S ALL THE SAME IN THE END NO MATTER:
Like gravy-ridden old men telling about themselves mile after mile of renegade story from here or there – the time he was in Berlin right after the war and it was a communist zone in east Berlin where the taxi-driver wouldn’t take them to some Strasse or the other and how the only thing that got them there was 20 bucks and two packs of Marlboros – for which the taxi-driver would have taken them most anywhere all of a sudden and if he’d had a daughter of age thrown her in too to boot or the time the soldier’s rifle went off in the guardhouse as he was cleaning it and killed the woman from Paris who’d just been passing by along the way coming back from a vegetable market and how the bullet went clear through her arm and body and how an international incident was prevented at the time only because two snarling dogs had scared everyone else away from the scene and two East German Stasi’s had come down off the higher platform and sprayed the air with gunfire as the lady died and they’d had a military car pulled over her and taken pictures of the horrible ‘traffic accident’ which had killed this ‘lonely visitor from Paris’ who was unfamiliar evidently with the traffic habits and walking patterns of the ‘new’ Berlin and how it had all been hushed up and quieted off so long ago - and they’d keep telling stories of things they’d seen these two men on the outside bench of the circular path around the bottom of Riverside Park down by the Eleanor Roosevelt statue in a nice garden area where they could watch the traffic separate and pass and the river out below stretched placidly along : gigantic old fronts of the big stone and granite homes along the road – voices of the little girls and kids with balloons coming down off the hill : I was there everywhere too and spent much time figuring to the west and then to the east where and how I wanted to go – fifteen or twenty pigeons flocking and pecking along the sidewalk picking up not food so much as the tiniest specks of gravel and dirt to ingest by which they cleaned their system and added grist to digestion – such a bird-simple system we should be so lucky ingesting grime-ridden hot-dogs and mice-infested kernels of popped corn - and it always seemed that everything was everywhere that May and warm weather would never arrive like this again and all the flowers and blossoms had bloomed and had their wonderful moments and then disappeared that quickly as cold weather and cold rain came back - everything good seemed washed away and every Spring color was lost – only green light green and dark coated the hillsides and the trees oak and elm and sycamore too in their own ways and own timings had taken over the landscape the world once ablaze with colors was now a steady strong green rippled by wind and coated by wet and it seemed over and over that everything was just as it had to be or it wouldn’t be and we ingested that like the gristle roughage the birds ate in the very same way and went on – no shame ever penetrated it seemed the Earth and its matter two-hundred billions and more again of dead bodies since ever – dead of natural causes bludgeoned by cavemen’s stones and rocks fallen from cliffs sundered in two by lance and axe and saber and knife blown to bits and dead by cannon rifle gunshot pistol grenade bomb atom bomb hydrogen bomb laser-guided missile bomb suicide-bomber poisoned by the slice cut open in experimentation and left to die contaminated bad blood disease-withered emaciated ripped to pieces by hordes by mobs a’frenzy burned at the stake buried alive tortured for the Pope or Allah or Moghul or Hengdu or Pashat whipped by Lucifer death-by-the-Devil or hung by a rope : Good-God it just goes on one thing after the other : and here we sit and here they sit and there they are again telling stories or making things up it’s all the same no matter.
Like gravy-ridden old men telling about themselves mile after mile of renegade story from here or there – the time he was in Berlin right after the war and it was a communist zone in east Berlin where the taxi-driver wouldn’t take them to some Strasse or the other and how the only thing that got them there was 20 bucks and two packs of Marlboros – for which the taxi-driver would have taken them most anywhere all of a sudden and if he’d had a daughter of age thrown her in too to boot or the time the soldier’s rifle went off in the guardhouse as he was cleaning it and killed the woman from Paris who’d just been passing by along the way coming back from a vegetable market and how the bullet went clear through her arm and body and how an international incident was prevented at the time only because two snarling dogs had scared everyone else away from the scene and two East German Stasi’s had come down off the higher platform and sprayed the air with gunfire as the lady died and they’d had a military car pulled over her and taken pictures of the horrible ‘traffic accident’ which had killed this ‘lonely visitor from Paris’ who was unfamiliar evidently with the traffic habits and walking patterns of the ‘new’ Berlin and how it had all been hushed up and quieted off so long ago - and they’d keep telling stories of things they’d seen these two men on the outside bench of the circular path around the bottom of Riverside Park down by the Eleanor Roosevelt statue in a nice garden area where they could watch the traffic separate and pass and the river out below stretched placidly along : gigantic old fronts of the big stone and granite homes along the road – voices of the little girls and kids with balloons coming down off the hill : I was there everywhere too and spent much time figuring to the west and then to the east where and how I wanted to go – fifteen or twenty pigeons flocking and pecking along the sidewalk picking up not food so much as the tiniest specks of gravel and dirt to ingest by which they cleaned their system and added grist to digestion – such a bird-simple system we should be so lucky ingesting grime-ridden hot-dogs and mice-infested kernels of popped corn - and it always seemed that everything was everywhere that May and warm weather would never arrive like this again and all the flowers and blossoms had bloomed and had their wonderful moments and then disappeared that quickly as cold weather and cold rain came back - everything good seemed washed away and every Spring color was lost – only green light green and dark coated the hillsides and the trees oak and elm and sycamore too in their own ways and own timings had taken over the landscape the world once ablaze with colors was now a steady strong green rippled by wind and coated by wet and it seemed over and over that everything was just as it had to be or it wouldn’t be and we ingested that like the gristle roughage the birds ate in the very same way and went on – no shame ever penetrated it seemed the Earth and its matter two-hundred billions and more again of dead bodies since ever – dead of natural causes bludgeoned by cavemen’s stones and rocks fallen from cliffs sundered in two by lance and axe and saber and knife blown to bits and dead by cannon rifle gunshot pistol grenade bomb atom bomb hydrogen bomb laser-guided missile bomb suicide-bomber poisoned by the slice cut open in experimentation and left to die contaminated bad blood disease-withered emaciated ripped to pieces by hordes by mobs a’frenzy burned at the stake buried alive tortured for the Pope or Allah or Moghul or Hengdu or Pashat whipped by Lucifer death-by-the-Devil or hung by a rope : Good-God it just goes on one thing after the other : and here we sit and here they sit and there they are again telling stories or making things up it’s all the same no matter.
posted by gary j. introne at 1:51 PM
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