A forged sword

And when the sword falls,
It does not make a sound,
Nor does the tree that fell
To forge its handle
In the forest, in the same way
The rolling head and heart
And soul
Screams to those who do the forging;
Those who break backs
To reap the good side of what they sow.
But we all know --
That is, those of us who truly do the hard work --
There is a chance we take
Even though we try and make
The best of the hard work we must do
To make a living.
Just be careful
What you forge.
Intention can be all things
But in the end,
The head that rolls and the sword that felled it and that
You forged
Is yours.

Surrender

It's that certain light again:
The one that is neither half-lit
Nor half-extinguished
In the bipolar sky of dusk, unsure
Whether it's coming or 
Going, quite like
One in a tizzy, indecisive,
Growing up to learn
That things, instead, are
Not what you were told
They would seem 
To be,
But a confusing
Amalgam of yes, no, maybe, no, I think so,
But no,
And then yes.

It's all a battle until
You surrender.

Cheater, Part Three

And in a dismissive motion that flashed me back to the dismissive way my boss addressed the less-than-masculine way I had appealed to his humanity earlier that day – or, more accurately, gone all but prostrate on the floor – the girl’s head twitched slightly toward me as she kept walking back to her bar stool.

“Finder’s keepers,” I thought, and carried her chewed Bic back to the bar where I ordered my second gin (well, technically third and fourth) for the evening. As the bartender slung the double order into a clean glass, smug look of “by George I’ve roped me another alcoholic” all over his baby face, I grabbed a napkin and started to doodle.

I doodled the same thing I always doodle, usually without thinking, the same A-frame house with the four-square windows and three-lined smoking chimney that extended to the upper end of the napkin reminiscent of kindergarten with the scratched-in grass lines and lumpy-sheep clouds. My house and my office are full of them. My wife mentioned often and in passing, first, how it wouldn’t be a day at the Carter house without her tossing several of these "houses" into the trash; and second, more poignantly and with a bit more concern, how odd it is that I always, ALWAYS doodle the same exact thing.

“Why don’t you try and draw me?” she joked, since the artistry in my houses never failed to rate slightly below the draftsman prowess of a kindergartener.

“I can’t draw what I don’t deserve,” I snapped back one night, three-deep into my gin habit that was barely infrequent enough to fly under the radar. Or, more likely, it flew just within the realm of my wife’s and my own willful denial.

“Is that your bedroom window?” the deep girl voice asked me as her unpolished fingernail stabbed at one of the squares on my napkin, snapping me out of daydream for the second time that evening. I fell halfway off my chair from the surprise.

“Is that an appropriate question for a college kid to be asking an old man?” I snapped back. I was never good on the fly. On the fly, my deep-seated insecurities tended to unleash themselves into casual conversation, and age discrepancy was one of them, particularly in my interactions with women.

“I am 32, and you can’t be more than 46,” she quipped. I cringed. Though it was a “no more than” statement as nonjudgmental as a math equation, the arbitrary age boundary she set was four years greater than my actual age, and each excessive year dug irrationally into my sore spot.

“Well,” I stammered, realizing I had possibly revealed that sore spot, which was another sore spot, “you look much younger.”

The bartender Justin or Bobby or Whats-His-Backstreet-Boys-name rolled his eyes at me halfway down the bar, thinking I hadn’t seen it.

The girl laughed a too-deliberate “Thanks” and called out, “Buy this one his next drink on me, Jimmy. He obviously needs it.”

She grabbed her pen out of my hand, smiled a genuinely kind smile that melted me in previously unknown hard places, and was gone.

***

CHEATER (from the beginning)

I love my wife.

She bought me oranges yesterday. Not the yellowing, chalky-skinned kind, but the bright, clean orbs of more-juice-than-pulp from the farm with the orchard in the country she knows I love but don't have the time to frequent due to the demands of my job.

She has a job, too, oh yes – and one in the city, too, a dozen streets and avenues from our small but decently equipped people-box downtown. Coming back from a meeting that took her to the suburbs, she drove two hours out of her way to get me the oranges in the wood-lattice box that smells like hay and tobacco, because she knows I've been orange-crazed since I was a kid.

And it's not as if we're new to this, with the sheen still on, butterflies in full attack, with five-times-a-week lovemaking sessions no matter what even if they must be stolen in a public place.

We're twelve two-twin-teenage-boys, taxes together, "I fucking hate you" hurled into the city streets through open windows, marriage-counseling regulars years into this. I have a loveseat in what the realtor called the "entertainment area" farthest from our bedroom with my name on it several times a month.

If work has gone badly for me, it's several times a week.

But every time I'm sent there (or flee there, as the case may be), I'm but a good REM hour into sleep before I feel the ends of her straight blonde hair brushing the sides of my sometimes drooling face with the creased-brow, just-woke-up-and-found-me-not-next-to-her expression – one that immediately makes me forget the harsh things I whisper-yelled about her to myself as I punched the couch pillows into submission at first exile. She then kisses my chin upside-down, grabs my forearm, pulls me back to our bed.

I love my wife.

Then there was this bar I was in one night, with its low light and reflective, brushed metal surfaces so unlike the table at my mother-in-law's house. It pulsated with the low grumble of club-worthy bass lines so unlike the piano my sons' saxophone teacher accompanies them with at their small-room recitals.

I didn't want to go, not being a particularly bar-loving guy myself. Not that I never had been – it's just that two kids and a mortgage will do that to a certain kind of man.

I met my wife at a bar. Back then she didn't want to be there, but I had, and she mocked me for it. It's one of those things that drew me in to her.

My coworkers took me there one night after we had barely escaped alive the sort of day at work that involves threats of furloughs and unpaid overtime. "Come on, James (Jamie was my father/husband name). This calls for happy hour. Just one beer. On me," they said. 

The bar was just around the corner from work, and just about a world away from home.

I was in no mood to not kiss my twins hello this evening ("That's just not COOL, Dad!"), and though I love my wife and she is not generally a complainer, I knew she had spoken with her mother today. It was Tuesday. She always speaks with her mother on Tuesdays. And with a mother like that, she was certainly allowed the weekly hour of necessary complaint that routinely followed just after I had hung my suit jacket up in the bedroom closet and she had, out of empathy for what she was about to unleash on me, asked me with those too-often bunched brows how my day went. She didn't expect an answer because she knew I'd never give one.

However, that night, with two simultaneous college tuitions having been dangled in front of my face as a bullying-one-into-selling-one's-soul-for-peanuts tactic, I would not be able to respond with the usual, anticipatorily brief, "Fine. How's your mother?"

I needed an hour to prepare. A happy hour, frustration emulsified slightly by beer.

So I went into this bar with my coworkers for a drink. They were greeted by name by a bartender half my age dressed in tapered-leg dark-blue jeans faded in the stylish places. They were accustomed to the "just one beer" bit as a way to combat similar work days they experienced more frequently than I had, perhaps because I was not THE superior, but I was theirs. Perhaps I'd even driven them here on occasion, though I fancied myself a reasonable boss.

The stress drained from their faces as the bartender drained different drafts into draft glasses that were far larger than the pint I was used to.

"It's the Sucks-to-Be-You Special," the bartender who donned the pants I thought only worn by women said to me in explanation with a knowing wink even though he really did not know anything at all. How could he? He was hardly twenty-two.

Coworkers' beers poured, they migrated to what they termed "their table" before I had the chance to order my own Tanqueray and tonic, which at the moment made me feel exceptionally elderly, even though my age never truly gave me pause – except, perhaps, when my wife would joke on occasion and with no mal-intent that when I was graduating college, she was a sophomore in high school. And even then, after the initial evolutionarily defensive impulse, I wound up feeling proud about it.

"So I suppose it doesn't quite suck to be you tonight," the bartender told me as he twirled the Tanqueray bottle once in his hand in a circle before unleashing it into my beveled rocks glass. I didn't understand at first that he was not only referring to my decision to pass on the giant frat boy beer. He then smiled from just one corner of his mouth with his lips pressed poignantly together and slightly jerked his head in the direction of the far end of the bar.

After I had concluded he was not in fact bopping to the beat of the music with this gesture (as he had been consistently while pouring my coworkers' beers), I turned my head toward the jerk.

I caught the tail-end of the dark-eyed stare of a woman perhaps ten years the bartender's senior, but no more than that. As she snapped her head back toward the book she was reading alone, her long reddish-brown and slightly unkempt hair whisked in a halo around her shoulders, betraying her less-than-sly attempt to avoid meeting my gaze.

The whole thing struck me as odd. And I was momentarily hurled back to the time when I met my wife. She had been reading, alone, at a bar, too. But there was jazz music playing, I remembered. That's why my wife tolerated that bar. I also remembered hating that it wasn't rock, and my embarrassment about my own musical preference in comparison to my not-yet-wife's more sophisticated one made me strangely uncomfortable.

"She's been checking you out since you walked in," the bartender said as he mixed some unknown martini-like concoction with the greatest of ease like a circus boy. I never understood how restaurant people did what they did, slinging drinks and food like monkeys, and then I remembered why I was at that bar in the first place.

"Well, that's fine," I answered, caught off guard and regretting the words even as I said them. Fine? I'd been tongue-tied and unable to properly express myself to my simian of a boss in so many instances that day, I suppose it'd become a habit. Distracted by the hellish remembrance, I over-tipped the bartender, took a too-big swig of my simple mixed beverage, and walked toward my coworkers' table.

On my way there, the book-reading woman dropped a pen she'd had swaddled behind her ear and hair, which caused my eyes to move automatically to her, and to the sort of sad way she sat on her bar stool cross-legged.

“This is why we stick with the sucks-to-be-you special!” one of my coworkers called out to me with the pre-tipsy joviality of a man who plans to be drunk. “It doesn't take the entire happy hour to serve!” I covered the remaining distance between myself and the crew, chose a place just beyond the end of the banquet style table, took a sizeable swig, and placed my drink on the table’s corner.

*The table was a thick old-school oak, much like the new banquet table my wife and I recently bought from the farmer who sold her the oranges I love. It was a sizeable investment, but well worth it for the way the elderly owners nursed it into being from large trees they’d had to down from their own property, over time, rubbed repeatedly and over years with orange oil, accumulating hour upon hour of the spills and enjoyments of evening parties stolen after hard days trying to make a living off the FDA grid.

It had been their own dining table, and we only took it off their hands because my wife fell so hard and fast in love with it as the second reason; the first was because it helped them replace an essential piece of farm equipment which, left broken, would have left them with far less than just a dining table.

I picked up my glass and put it to my forehead as the good-ole-boys around me grew rowdier. Staring through at the roomful of regulars muddled by the prisms and distortions of liquid gin, beveled glass, and half-melted ice cubes made their questions put to me every seeming half-minute less nonsensical, and the fear of the knowledge that I’d have to sacrifice my integrity to make things financially right from now on less nauseating.

It was either that, or tell my twins they’d have to leave the house they’d grown up in a mere years before leaving to go to college. Well, and then there was that, too. No college for you, boys, because Daddy had to make a point and be true to himself.

And there’d be no more oranges, because the table would have to go. Who spends that much on a bloody table in this damned economy anyway…

“Excuse me.”

I was jolted out of my heading-off-a-cliff angry reality check of a fantasy by the dulcet (and slightly off) tones of a deep but decidedly female voice that emanated form a place far closer to my head than I’d been able to anticipate.

“I think you dropped this.”

The reading girl had uncrossed her legs and appeared suddenly, too close to my side with her awkward, slim arm extended toward me clutching the worn-down business card of our (that is, my wife’s and mine) orange farmers.

“Yes, yes, I did,” I fumbled, both in response and in taking back the card that made my brain hurt because it was in her hand and I didn’t know why this total stranger holding something so intricately representing my family would bother me – and intrigue me – so much.

The girl turned to go immediately after the frown and furrowed brow of “I knew I shouldn’t have given it back to him” passed over her, and the image of holding her naked and kissing that look off her face flashed deeply in me for a nanosecond before I saw the selfsame pen that fell to the floor earlier hurl itself fatefully out of the back pocket of her very worn cargo pants and onto the floor.

“Excuse me,” I stuttered, replacing my now-empty gin drink on the table corner and swooping up the pen in one surprisingly capable motion. “You dropped this.”

 

Cheater, Part Two

(For Part One published quite a while ago, scroll down to the asteriked bit below first and then read from the top for continuity's sake.)

The table was a thick old-school oak, much like the new banquet table my wife and I recently bought from the farmer couple who sold her the oranges I love. It was a sizeable investment, but well worth it for the way the elderly owners nursed it into being from large trees they’d had to down from their own property, over time, rubbed repeatedly and over years with orange oil, accumulating hour upon hour of the spills and enjoyments of evening parties stolen after hard days trying to make a living off the FDA grid.

It had been their own dining table. We only took it off their hands because my wife fell so hard and fast in love with it as the second reason; the first was because it helped them replace an essential piece of farm equipment which, left broken, would have left them with far less than just a dining table.

I picked up my glass and put it to my forehead as the good-ole-boys around me grew rowdier. Staring through at the roomful of regulars muddled by the prisms and distortions of liquid gin, beveled glass, and half-melted ice cubes made their questions put to me every seeming half-minute less nonsensical, and the fear of the knowledge that I’d have to sacrifice my integrity to make things financially right from now on less nauseating.

It was either that, or tell my twins they’d have to leave the house they’d grown up in a mere years before leaving to go to college. Well, and then there was that, too. No college for you, boys, because Daddy had to make a point and be true to himself.

And there’d be no more oranges, because the table would have to go. Who spends that much on a bloody table in this damned economy anyway…

“Excuse me.”

I was jolted out of my heading-off-a-cliff angry reality check of a fantasy by the dulcet (and slightly off) tones of a deep but decidedly female voice. It emanated from a place far closer to my head than I’d been able to anticipate.

“I think you dropped this.”

The reading girl had uncrossed her legs and appeared suddenly, too close to my side with her awkward, slim arm extended toward me clutching the worn-down business card of our (that is, my wife’s and mine) orange farmers.

“Yes, yes, I did,” I fumbled, both in response and in taking back the card that made my brain hurt because it was in her hand and I didn’t know why this total stranger holding something so intricately representative of my family would bother me – and intrigue me – so much.

The girl turned to go immediately after the frown and furrowed brow of “I knew I shouldn’t have given it back to him” passed over her face, and the image of holding her naked and kissing the look off her face flashed deeply in me for a nanosecond before I saw the selfsame pen that fell to the floor earlier hurl itself fatefully out of the back pocket of her very worn cargo pants and onto the floor.

“Excuse me,” I stuttered, replacing my now-empty gin drink on the table corner and swooping up the pen in one surprisingly capable motion. “I think you dropped this.”

****

(CHEATER, PART ONE)

I love my wife.

She bought me oranges yesterday. Not the yellowing, chalky-skinned kind, but the bright, clean orbs of more-juice-than-pulp from the farm with the orchard in the country she knows I love but don't have the time to frequent due to the demands of my job.

She has a job, too, oh yes – and one in the city, too, a dozen streets and avenues from our small but decently equipped people-box downtown. Coming back from a meeting that took her to the suburbs, she drove two hours out of her way to get me the oranges in the wood-lattice box that smells like hay and tobacco, because she knows I've been orange-crazed since I was a kid.

And it's not as if we're new to this, with the sheen still on, butterflies in full attack, with five-times-a-week lovemaking sessions no matter what even if they must be stolen in a public place.

We're twelve two-twin-teenage-boys, taxes together, "I fucking hate you" hurled into the city streets through open windows, marriage-counseling regulars years into this. I have a loveseat in what the realtor called the "entertainment area" farthest from our bedroom with my name on it several times a month.

If work has gone badly for me, it's several times a week.

But every time I'm sent there (or flee there, as the case may be), I'm but a good REM hour into sleep before I feel the ends of her straight blonde hair brushing the sides of my sometimes drooling face with the creased-brow, just-woke-up-and-found-me-not-next-to-her expression – one that immediately makes me forget the harsh things I whisper-yelled about her to myself as I punched the couch pillows into submission at first exile. She then kisses my chin upside-down, grabs my forearm, pulls me back to our bed.

I love my wife.

Then there was this bar I was in one night, with its low light and reflective, brushed metal surfaces so unlike the table at my mother-in-law's house. It pulsated with the low grumble of club-worthy bass lines so unlike the piano my sons' saxophone teacher accompanies them with at their small-room recitals.

I didn't want to go, not being a particularly bar-loving guy myself. Not that I never had been – it's just that two kids and a mortgage will do that to a certain kind of man.

I met my wife at a bar. Back then she didn't want to be there, but I had, and she mocked me for it. It's one of those things that drew me in to her.

My coworkers took me there one night after we had barely escaped alive the sort of day at work that involves threats of furloughs and unpaid overtime. "Come on, James (Jamie was my father/husband name). This calls for happy hour. Just one beer. On me," they said. 

The bar was just around the corner from work, and just about a world away from home.

I was in no mood to not kiss my twins hello this evening ("That's just not COOL, Dad!"), and though I love my wife and she is not generally a complainer, I knew she had spoken with her mother today. It was Tuesday. She always speaks with her mother on Tuesdays. And with a mother like that, she was certainly allowed the weekly hour of necessary complaint that routinely followed just after I had hung my suit jacket up in the bedroom closet and she had, out of empathy for what she was about to unleash on me, asked me with those too-often bunched brows how my day went. She didn't expect an answer because she knew I'd never give one.

However, that night, with two simultaneous college tuitions having been dangled in front of my face as a bullying-one-into-selling-one's-soul-for-peanuts tactic, I would not be able to respond with the usual, anticipatorily brief, "Fine. How's your mother?"

I needed an hour to prepare. A happy hour, frustration emulsified slightly by beer.

So I went into this bar with my coworkers for a drink. They were greeted by name by a bartender half my age dressed in tapered-leg dark-blue jeans faded in the stylish places. They were accustomed to the "just one beer" bit as a way to combat similar work days they experienced more frequently than I had, perhaps because I was not THE superior, but I was theirs. Perhaps I'd even driven them here on occasion, though I fancied myself a reasonable boss.

The stress drained from their faces as the bartender drained different drafts into draft glasses that were far larger than the pint I was used to.

"It's the Sucks-to-Be-You Special," the bartender who donned the pants I thought only worn by women said to me in explanation with a knowing wink even though he really did not know anything at all. How could he? He was hardly twenty-two.

Coworkers' beers poured, they migrated to what they termed "their table" before I had the chance to order my own Tanqueray and tonic, which at the moment made me feel exceptionally elderly, even though my age never truly gave me pause – except, perhaps, when my wife would joke on occasion and with no mal-intent that when I was graduating college, she was a sophomore in high school. And even then, after the initial evolutionarily defensive impulse, I wound up feeling proud about it.

"So I suppose it doesn't quite suck to be you tonight," the bartender told me as he twirled the Tanqueray bottle once in his hand in a circle before unleashing it into my beveled rocks glass. I didn't understand at first that he was not only referring to my decision to pass on the giant frat boy beer. He then smiled from just one corner of his mouth with his lips pressed poignantly together and slightly jerked his head in the direction of the far end of the bar.

After I had concluded he was not in fact bopping to the beat of the music with this gesture (as he had been consistently while pouring my coworkers' beers), I turned my head toward the jerk.

I caught the tail-end of the dark-eyed stare of a woman perhaps ten years the bartender's senior, but no more than that. As she snapped her head back toward the book she was reading alone, her long reddish-brown and slightly unkempt hair whisked in a halo around her shoulders, betraying her less-than-sly attempt to avoid meeting my gaze.

The whole thing struck me as odd. And I was momentarily hurled back to the time when I met my wife. She had been reading, alone, at a bar, too. But there was jazz music playing, I remembered. That's why my wife tolerated that bar. I also remembered hating that it wasn't rock, and my embarrassment about my own musical preference in comparison to my not-yet-wife's more sophisticated one made me strangely uncomfortable.

"She's been checking you out since you walked in," the bartender said as he mixed some unknown martini-like concoction with the greatest of ease like a circus boy. I never understood how restaurant people did what they did, slinging drinks and food like monkeys, and then I remembered why I was at that bar in the first place.

"Well, that's fine," I answered, caught off guard and regretting the words even as I said them. Fine? I'd been tongue-tied and unable to properly express myself to my simian of a boss in so many instances that day, I suppose it'd become a habit. Distracted by the hellish remembrance, I over-tipped the bartender, took a too-big swig of my simple mixed beverage, and walked toward my coworkers' table.

On my way there, the book-reading woman dropped a pen she'd had swaddled behind her ear and hair, which caused my eyes to move automatically to her, and to the sort of sad way she sat on her bar stool cross-legged.

“This is why we stick with the sucks-to-be-you special!” one of my coworkers called out to me with the pre-tipsy joviality of a man who plans to be drunk. “It doesn't take the entire happy hour to serve!” I covered the remaining distance between myself and the crew, chose a place just beyond the end of the banquet style table, took a sizeable swig, and placed my drink on the table’s corner.