When I was born, the first thing my mother said to my father was,

“Well, I guess I’ll get used to it.”

For years mom neglected to mention that what she actually had meant by “IT” was not me.

She had been talking about my genitals.

I found this out one afternoon when I was in my early twenties.

I confronted her, saying,

“Goddamn it, mom, I am not an IT!”

“That’s good,” she nonchalantly remarked, blowing smoke out of her nostrils like a perplexed dragon. “Who said you were?” Now she looked like a ruffled owl.

“You, that’s who, YOU! It always pisses me off when you tell that tired old story about what you said when you first saw me.”

She threw her head back and laughed the way she always laughed when the absurdity in the room was beyond all bounds.

She laughed full out,

coughing, wheezing,

with hysterical tears,

with a deep awareness of the ridiculousness of life, especially hers,

with an unbearable black cathartic cleansing mirth at the general futility of the human condition…especially her human condition.

After catching her breath, she patiently reminded me that she was one of five daughters and that she did not have any brothers.

“You see, I was not used to penises,” she sighed.

I said, “Well, no one ever is,” and we both went into apoplectic convulsions of laughter…uproarious laughter my father used to scratch his head over, shrug his shoulders, and then look for an escape route like some inept Union general who realized too late that he had been outflanked by Stonewall Jackson.

I have always wondered if mom ever really got used to all the other ITs in her life.

Like her schizophrenia.

She would have had to be really crazy to get used to that.

To get used to that IT, she would have had to deny that she had ever been sane in the first place.

After all, she was once sane…I guess.

Dad would not have married her if she had not been sane in the first place…I guess.

You would have to be insane to marry someone who was crazy,

and my father was so sane he was almost crazy.

But who knows anything anyway when you’re in love?

My father and mother had been in love.
And they had always stayed in love.
Of that I am sure,

because you could always be sure of adults from that generation,

from the Great Depression/World War II generation.

Anyway, mom was the sanest person I had ever known up to that point in my life. Maybe the sanest person I will ever know.

I guess a kid cannot really grasp that his mother is insane. My sister and I certainly couldn’t. To us, it was just mom being mom.

We couldn’t understand why she was sad,

why she cried during our happy times and laughed during the sad ones,

why she once took her false teeth out of her mouth in a rage, smashed them on the bathroom tile, and broke everything in our house…including our father’s heart.

Why she thought actors in commercials were threatening her when they walked toward the camera trying to sell something.

We thought she was just kidding when she yelled at them.

Once, I said to her, “Mom, it’s not like they can hear you.”

She said, “I know, but if they could, then I would know for sure that we’re all crazy.”

Maybe she just wanted more company, but she did have a point.

Mom always had a point,

although she came upon it in her own roundabout way.

Ways like baking hundreds of 4 kinds of cookies every Christmas, carefully placing them in layers separated by wax paper into 2 huge tin cans painted with reindeer, Santa, elves, the North Pole, and stars in the clear polar night.

Like starching and ironing my cassock and surplus so that I looked even better than Father Miesch did when I served Mass at St. Cecilia’s.

Like showing me how to diagram sentences so that I could dissect and analyze language and therefore thought.

Like making a belt and a comb holder for me once when she was recovering at the sanitarium from one of her nervous breakdowns.

Like making my sister and me a hot breakfast every morning.

Like blowing smoke rings.

Like singing better than most women sang on records, radio, and television.

Like crying whenever she saw or heard something beautiful.

Like looking like Hedy Lamarr according to dad.

Like being probably the first-ever politically incorrect person in the whole world.

Like loving Mario Lanza, Julius La Rosa, and Liberace.

Like being fascinated with Bishop Sheen’s showmanship and totally bored with his theology.

Like when we would argue and she would finally give up, light a Chesterfield, and huff, “You’d rather be right than President.”

Like when she had the lobotomy and still cooked, cleaned, washed, ironed, starched, and blew smoke rings like nothing had ever happened to her...but of course it had.

Like how she got used to it all with more cigarettes, less church, and no more suicide attempts.

I guess she got used to it all before she died of a heart attack in a hospital very much like the one where she had first said, “I guess I’ll get used to it.”

But I will never get used to missing her cookies, her singing, her smoke rings. And I’ll certainly never get used to being wrong about her and about so many other things.

I’ll never get used to all those ITs.

My dog’s name is “Shadow,”

which is a perfect name for a dog
that is only a hint of his former self.

I’ve never known what that expression means,
except for the obvious because everyone is always
a mere glimmer of who he once was.

And nothing ever stays the same.

Shadow is not as fast as he used to be, not as alert,

not as keen to chase a squirrel up a tree,

which is something he’s never been that good at anyway.

But he still acts as though he has a purpose.

He still carries himself as though he has a job description.

He’s 12 now, and that’s like my being 84 instead of 63,

which is how old I will be tomorrow.

Shadow and I are getting old together.

He has sensitive skin, so do I.

His joints are stiff, mine too.

He loves his walks, which is when he does his best work.

His work is smelling everything he finds on his journey

in the only world a dog can ever know,

the world at the end of his nose.

He doesn’t miss much.

My world is without limits,
unless you count what I can imagine,

what my mind can grasp,

what my soul can feel.

Sometimes I imagine more,
grasp more, feel more than I do today.

Tomorrow will be no different.

The world will continue to expand beyond my nose,

far beyond my grasp of it.

And my eyes, unable to focus on things close,

will be good for seeing things far away,

which is where the world is going.

Away. Up a tree. Like a squirrel.

Squirrels used to be the world to Shadow,

but he no longer chases them as he used to

because he cannot catch them.

He never could.

In his old age, he admits this fact,

a fact so obvious even a dog can grasp it.

I also cannot catch what I’ve been chasing all these years,

which is something I’ve never been good at anyway.

But my work is also at the end of my nose,

too close for me to see,

but as sure as a squirrel running up a tree.

The world is constantly running away from me,

but wherever and whatever my life is,

I can smell it.

It is not what I can see,

not what I can understand,

not what I can imagine,

perhaps not even what I can feel.

But whatever my life is,

and wherever the world is taking it,

Would have made me fall in love with her

If I wasn’t already.

When you look out onto the ocean

Holding the hand of the one you love

Anything is not possible

Everything is.

They turn on the umbrella blast heaters

And no moment of physical comfort could be better.

And poetry takes over your subconscious.

My girl. My wife. My destiny.

Everything I have lived for in her eyes and her body

Nothing could be more perfect.

Angels in the sky.

Heaven wafts down and touches us.

And we are part of its expression

Floating on the sunkissed clouds,

Warmed by alcohol

Ensured by love.

Surrounded by reassurance from the earth and ocean itself

That this will last

Be as permanent as a womb

That gives everlasting life

That drifts on the ocean breeze to the tops of the hills

We have driven up to and looked over

Amazed to be here

With each other.

Our hands together like earth and sky.

Her blue eyes reflecting the sky

My whole life there

Deeper than the ocean

More beautiful than I can stand

In moments when we are eternal.

Her blonde hair

Shining like the sun in my soul

Forgiving my sins

Embracing me in my desire

Just to be with her and all that she is.

In love with every molecule of her

Every look

Every motion of her face and hand

Every bit and parcel and piece of her

Every look back to me in her eyes

I didn’t know existed.

I didn’t know could be one, not two,

Could create a moment larger than time

In a cocoon created just for us

By wisdom and mystery and earth fire and gentleness

That drew us to each other’s arms

With the ocean just below and heaven just above.

Loretta. And Laguna Beach.

And everything that could be full of wonder

About ordinary life

That was.

Still pulls at my heart.

Even though it is long past.

Washed away by the tides.

To be washed up on my soul

When I forget to remember

She is somewhere else

Other than my heart.

Copyright 2009 by Joe Fellhauer

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- About the Author -

Joe Fellhauer is an award-winning copywriter whose work is nationally recognized for capturing the imagination through the skillful use of everyday phrases and sentences about uncommonly common human experiences. His light but deft touch elicits sudden recognition of universally shared human conditions, a recognition that invariably produces surprisingly profound emotional responses. When he puts his craft at the service of poetry and other literary forms, Joe’s stripped-down and unadorned language invariably pierces the skin of the human situation and does not stop until it lodges at the heart of the soul.

At present, Joe is compiling an anthology of more than seventy short pieces tentatively titled, The Underneath Parts.

I met Joe in high school in the mid-Sixties, and we took many courses in literature and philosophy at the same university from 1966 to 1970. During my last year of college, Joe and I roomed together in a trailer we dubbed, “Easy Acres.” He is my best friend and the finest professional writer I have ever met.

“Night Falls in Laguna Beach” is #74 of 74 pieces from The Underneath Parts and a small sample of Joe's extraordinary art. I am very proud to present it here at Yellow Brick Road.

- Don Gerz

We, the Donkeys of Santorini, are holding your friend, Don Gerz, hostage here in Greece.  His offense: making fun of us donkeys on his Nov. 9^th blog post (http://dongerz.livejournal.com/2009/11/09/), an offense punishable by death from volcano.  (You may not be aware that we have a volcano here in this beautiful place, a place where your friend has brought great insult to our proud heritage.)

If you do not want to see Mr. Gerz plunged into our volcano, you will wire us, the Donkeys of Santorini, one million Euros worth of fresh hay.  And believe me, that's not peanuts (it's hay).

We await your immediate response, as the life of your friend is in your hands...and wallet.  If you want to see Don Gerz again, you will send us the hay...now.  Our patience is running out, and the volcano awaits.

Stamos IV, Commune Leader,
The Donkeys of Santorini, Greece

I was leaving Spokane, Washington

On a frigid 10-degree New Year’s Eve by Greyhound bus

To catch a train in another town that went to Omaha

My next job.

Greyhound had been bought out

And the employees were bitter and surly.

It had been a great job but I had been hired away

Because I won a national award and was on a roll.

People who could only afford to travel by bus were there and it was packed.

Most were blue collar, some resigned, some handsome in their simplicity,

Some just there because their lives had put them there

I was there on a start of another great adventure.

But all the while in Spokane, I felt the pull of Indians,

Native Americans whose souls still roamed the land

The white man had stolen from them and from nature, and changed.

I even bought an Indian blanket that hung on my wall.

I didn’t know why it meant so much to me.

I didn’t understand that Indian pull,

A white boy, half-German, half Scotch-Irish.

I didn’t know then that my grandfather had been half Osage,

And his blood and soul still occupied my body

As only an Indian’s could.

I was killing time as the busses stank up the air

Next to a crowded ugly station, when I looked out into the big empty

Parking lot next to us and saw a pile of rags in the near-midnight darkness.

So I walked over to the heap

And saw a drunk Indian asleep who would surely freeze to death

By morning if he hadn’t already, although he seemed to be breathing,

So I went back and called the police to come get him

And watched as they came 20 minutes later

And lifted his limp body into a squad car.

He was a heap of rags in the darkness

But he may have been something else he had forgotten.

He may have descended from Pacific tribes of the Cayuse, Chilluckittequaw, Chimakum, Chinook, Klickitat, or Yakima.

His family may have part of the Cathlamet, and hunted deer, rabbit and beaver. He may have been related to the Cathlapotleotle, Cayuse or Chilluckittequaw, whom history books often refer to as ‘Significance unknown.’ He might have been a Chimakum, Chinook, Clackamas, Clalskanie, or Columbia, who tracked game and lived off the land.

He may have been related to the Salishan, the Okanagon, Sanpoil, and Senijextee, all Pacific Northwest tribes of great pride and renown.

He could have been Duwamish Hoh, or Klickitat, or Chilluckquittequaw or Kwaiailk or Cowlitz. Who had all been there before the white man.

He might have been Lummi, Makah, or Methow who caught salmon with a spear.

His ancestors may have been farmers and hunters of the Mical, a branch of the Shahaptian tribe called Pshwanwapam. He might have been Muckleshoot, who never dreamed their land would parceled into a reservation

He may have descended from the Neketemeuk, Nespelem, or Nez Perce, who occupied southeastern Washington.

He may have stood tall and looked out over the hills and forests as a Nisqually, Quallyamish, or Skwalliahmish. Or a member of tribes called Askwalli, Calapooya, Ltsχe'al or Nestucca.

His mother or father may have been Suketī'kenuk, Sukotī'kenuk - Columbia Indians along with other coastal tribes such as the Tsĕ Skua'lli ami'm, Luckamiut or Kalapooian. All before their land, their homes were hemmed in, before there were railway tracks and bus stations.

He may have forgotten or not even known that he was Nooksack or Ntlakyapamuk, Okanagon or Ozette.

His ancestors may have farmed fields as Palouse. (Significance unknown). Or he may have had cousins who were Pallotepellows, belonging to the Shahaptian division of the Shapwailutan, and closely connected with the Nez Perce.

His tribe could have been Pshwanwapam. Meaning "the stony ground.” Also called Upper Yakima. Or he may have related to the Puyallup. From Pwiya'lap, the native name of Puyallup River.

Someone could have identified him as Queets or Quaitso. Or Quileute. Meaning unknown. Or Quinault.

He may learned how to make moccasins and blankets as a Sahehwamish. Or Sanpoil. Or part of the Satsop tribe. (Significance unknown.)

He may have hunted quail and game as a young Semiahmoo. Also called the Birch Bay Indians. He may have stepped through the clear streams of the Northwest as a Senijextee.

His wife may have been a Sinkaietk. Also called Sinkakaius, meaning "between people."

His grandfather may have been a shaman who was Skagit. Also called Hum-a-luh, meaning "the people." He might have been Skilloot or Skin, belonging to the Shahaptian division of the Shapwailutan linguistic stock. Who lived on the Columbia River from The Dalles to about 75 miles above. He might have been a young warrior with Snohomish or Snoqualmie. From the native word sdo'kwalbiuq^u.

He may have been Spokan, said by some to signify "Sun people," also called LêcLê'cuks, a Wasco name for this tribe. Other tribes, other traditions, other homes could have been as a Squaxon or Squakson. Suquamish. From a native place name. or as a Swallah or Swinomish. They numbered 268 in 1909. In 1937 about 285.

His Indian name might have been remembered by the Taidnapam. Also called Upper Cowlit. Or Twana. Said to signify "a portage," between the upper end of Hoods Canal and the headwaters of Puget Sound. They were also called Tu-a'd-hu, as he may have remembered. His tribe may have been Skokomish, Wi'lfa Ampa'fa ami'm, or Luckiamute-Kalapuya. Even Wallawalla. Meaning "little river.”

He may have descended form Wanapam, Watlala, or Wauyukma. (Significance unknown.) Maybe he knew what the tribal name of Wynoochee meant, as our meaning of the word is unreported.

He could have been Yakima. Meaning "runaway.” Shanwappoms, a Lewis and Clark name. Or Stobshaddat, of the Puget Sound tribes, meaning "robbers." Or Waptai'lmln, "people of the narrow river,“ referring to the narrows in Yakima River at Union Gap where their chief village sat.

This land had been his long before it was mine.

He was as much a part of it as the sun and trees and wild salmon and bears and deer and rabbits and beaver. His ancestors' footprints may still have been seen where no white man had ever been. He may have had a history that went back farther than the Mayflower, or the Renaissance, or iron tools.

I had no way of saving what he had lost, but maybe I could save him from freezing to death that night. So I did.

And my privileged life went on to become eventful and purposeful and creative ever since. I went on to Omaha, and New York, and Portland and L.A. And everywhere I went I wrote for money and approval and pride and ego and advancement. Every white page I filled with what was expected from my talent. The pages of my career. The scripts of my life. The story of my success.

Unlike that half-frozen Indian whose pride and place in the world and way of life had been taken from him. A people whose history had been reduced to a list of tribes and whose lands had been restricted to a few acres for house trailers and huts, out of sight.

That was where I found him. On a dark parking lot on a frigid new year’s eve. A pile of rags, significance unknown, who was going to leave no discernible mark on the empty pages of his life,

Just a footnote on mine.

And a wounded place in my own heart, whose Indian blood still pumped through both of us.



Copyright 2009 by Joe Fellhauer

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

- About the Author -

Joe Fellhauer is an award-winning copywriter whose work is nationally recognized for capturing the imagination through the skillful use of everyday phrases and sentences about uncommonly common human experiences. His light but deft touch elicits sudden recognition of universally shared human conditions, a recognition that invariably produces surprisingly profound emotional responses. When he puts his craft at the service of poetry and other literary forms, Joe’s stripped-down and unadorned language invariably pierces the skin of the human situation and does not stop until it lodges at the heart of the soul.

At present, Joe is compiling an anthology of more than seventy short pieces tentatively titled, The Underneath Parts.

I met Joe in high school in the mid-Sixties, and we took many courses in literature and philosophy at the same university from 1966 to 1970. During my last year of college, Joe and I roomed together in a trailer we dubbed, “Easy Acres.” He is my best friend and the finest professional writer I have ever met.

“White Pages” is #21 of 74 pieces from The Underneath Parts and a small sample of Joe's extraordinary art. I am very proud to present it here at Yellow Brick Road.

--- Don Gerz

To Joe Fellhauer - a Great Writer, Person, and Friend

Italy, most of Greece, Croatia, and all other places on this earth are everything to my mind but nothing to my blood and flesh, to my eyes, and nose and ears and tongue and fingers compared to the donkeys of Santorini.

Venice, Ancona, Mykonos, Corfu, Dubrovnik, even Athens are blurs compared to those brutes.

 

The Grand Canal of a dreamlike yet real city built on water, an impressionist painting without a frame,

Mile-long chunks of Hadrian’s Wall, towering churches carved into hills that are almost mountains,

Fragments of the Roman Empire’s still crumbling greatness…

They are nothing compared to Santorini’s donkeys.

 

Dubrovnik, jewel of a town not long ago leveled by Milosevic’s bombs and now rebuilt with stronger stones and bricks and the sun’s red and orange tiles.
Today it is more beautiful than ever, a city where human statues clothed in gold robes bless surprised tourists with gilded roses for a Euro.

But Dubrovnik is less for want of even a feeble mule or two.

 

The Acropolis of Pericles fades into history’s dust.

The Parthenon, where western civilization poured greatness into the streets of nations yet to be born…it too is nothing.

Even the ancient Agora where Sophocles wrote about a king who gouged out his eyes because he had blindly killed his father and married his mother…

How can any of these compare with the donkeys of Santorini?

 

All civilization, all barbarity, and nothing in between can account for the wretched beasts.

 

Hundreds of donkeys madly galloping up and down the zigzag path to and from a tiny, anticlimactic town balanced on a small Greek mountain.

Foul-smelling creatures untended and stampeding in herds of mindless compulsion.

Sometimes as many as twenty donkeys (and an occasional mule) avalanching down the cliff-side, 

crushing whoever gets in their way, even children…especially children…and pregnant women, old men and women…whoever, whatever.

 

Hugging walls, hiding behind an occasional pole on the side, helplessly hoping to be spared death by donkey.

 

You know the last thing you will see on this earth will be a donkey’s numb eyes before the horrible, inevitable blank-faced animal crushes you to cinders underneath its rock-like hooves.

 

You find yourself impotently raising your clenched fist, determined to deal its stupid face a brutal blow as the last act of your absurd life.

 

The unending path covered with donkey shit and straw…Aegean gales whipping up the dung dust, blinding you as surely as fate blinded Oedipus the King.

And you must inhale that foul air and breathe it deeply because you are climbing to Santorini and your world and the donkeys’ world are one.

 

When you survive (if you survive), you ruefully rinse donkey crap off the soles of your shoes.

 

At 2:30 in the morning, you stumble out of bed to piss.
You fart and it smells like a donkey.

 

The donkeys of Santorini have gotten inside you, and you cannot comprehend how hundreds of beasts have done what much smaller things and events have never been able to do…but they have done it.

Not the Acropolis, not Ancona, not the Agora, not the Grand Canal, not Corfu, not even Dubrovnik, but donkeys.

Donkeys.

 

And you know you are alive and fortunate because the power of Pericles, the wisdom of Socrates, the tragedies of Sophocles, and the reality of whatever donkeys represent are miraculously alive and well in your body and forever in your eternal soul.

 

All because of the donkeys of Santorini.

The Zigzag Donkey Path to Santorini, Greece

 

At the End of the Donkey Path: Santorini

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To and from Santorini

The Grand Canal of Venice


Hadrian's Wall


Ancona, Italy


Mykonos, Greece

Athens: Ancient and Modern


The Acropolis and Parthenon as They Were


The Acropolis and Parthenon Today


The Parthenon and Acropolis Today


Athen's Agora in the Time of Sophocles


Poster of Sophocles' Oedipus the King


The Ancient Agora Today


Corfu, Greece


Dubrovnik, Croatia


Dubrovnik

Human Statue of Dubrovnik
 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Santorini's Donkeys

 

 

 

 

You want that car.

Who wouldn’t?

That meal.
Who wouldn't?

Especially if you’re from Afghanistan

Or Iran

Or South Africa

Or Croatia

And you’ve been tenacious enough to get here.

Does America know itself anymore?

Do our hearts do our thinking?

Or are we McDonald’s

A pitch or a jingle

An elevator to a sales meeting?

I’m just as guilty

No one keeps me from speaking into the clown’s mouth. 

Rosie the Riveter thought with her heart.
My dad did in the radar room
On the U.S.S. Massachusetts

When you could lose your life in an instant

To a kamikaze or torpedo.

Did all those men and women die

So we could have a Big Mac?

Maybe.

Maybe this is the good life.

The destination of Democracy,

Capitalism in its inevitable, unregulated and unevaluated form.

But why, to me, is something wrong with this picture?

What do I miss that I was never part of

Except in moments on the History Channel?

I saw the video of Auschwitz but missed the horror.

I saw the smoking plane plummet to earth

But missed the impact and instant death.

I’ve seen the footage

But missed the telegrams of “We regret to inform you.”

Our soldiers fight now and die

Bravery is part of their heritage

But learning isn’t part of ours.

Our soldiers know what they die for

But it doesn’t match what we live for.

Would Rosie be proud of us?

Would my dad be proud of what he faced death for?

And millions of others?

Not handfuls or hundreds or thousands.

78 million.  Who can’t sit with us and have a glass of wine.

Their sacrifice lives in history instead of our hearts,

except for diminishing survivors.

Because we have waved a shallow hand of thanks

And lived our lives of self-indulgence.

In our Levis and Lexuses.

My guess is that they don’t resent it

Because any life was precious to them

Especially if yours was given up so others could live.

78 million lives lost in World War ll.  Lost forever.

Even eventually in memory.

So that I could be born in 1947.

And the plain fact of the matter

Is that I owe them more than my life.

And I believe that

The faces and lives that were lost so we could live

Are still existent in a permanent and touchable and living way

And have nothing but love for us.

And touch us every day.

Joining their souls and hearts to ours

As part of our lives, our breaths, our heartbeats,

Our looks over mountaintops

And the touch of our children’s hands

As if they had never left.

Copyright 2009 by Joe Fellhauer
 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
 - About the Author -
 

Joe Fellhauer is an award-winning copywriter whose work is nationally recognized for capturing the imagination through the skillful use of everyday phrases and sentences about uncommonly common human experiences.  His light but deft touch elicits sudden recognition of universally shared human conditions, a recognition that invariably produces surprisingly profound emotional responses.  When he puts his craft at the service of poetry and other literary forms, Joe’s stripped-down and unadorned language invariably pierces the skin of the human situation and does not stop until it lodges at the heart of the soul.

At present, Joe is compiling an anthology of more than sixty short pieces tentatively titled, The Underneath Parts. 

I met Joe in high school in the mid-Sixties, and we took many courses in literature and philosophy at the same university from 1966 to 1970.  During my last year of college, Joe and I roomed together in a trailer we dubbed, “Easy Acres.”  He is my best friend and the finest professional writer I have ever met.

“Soldiers” is poem #69 of 73 works from The Underneath Parts and a small sample of Joe's extraordinary art.  I am very proud to present it here at Yellow Brick Road Review.

- Don Gerz

April 2008, Victoria, Texas.  In this photo of Joe
and me, he has just picked up another tab.
I have no idea why he's smiling.  - Don

 

As I put together a small slideshow on our recent trip to Athens, I find myself particularly fascinated with the interplay between the worlds of Acropolis and Agora.


Model of the Acropolis

The Acropolis, summit of ancient and modern Athens.  The Acropolis, where seemingly eternal buildings such as the Parthenon are marble memorials to the birth of western civilization’s political and military might.  The Acropolis, where ancient greats pursued their destinies by spinning out the web of history transformed into action from the threads of philosophy, science, law, political theory, psychology, economics, religion, literature, art, and more… the idealized protoplasm of civilization from the spiritual stem-cells of the ancient Athenian Dream.  The Acropolis, where public life was first lived as art.  The Acropolis, where our own tiny yet magical lives 2,500 years later become inevitable miracles of learning, creation, and refocused destinies.

 
Ruins of the Acropolis

The Acropolis.  I scarcely can believe I stood on the ground Solon, Peisistratus, Cleisthenes, Themistocles, Pericles, Alcibiades, and the other greats walked on.  But I did walk on it, and you were there.


The Agora in Its Prime
 

The Agora, the ancient Agora, where master philosophers, dramatists, poets, artists, teachers, historians, soldiers, actors, artisans, performers, musicians, athletes, rogues, merchants, and everyone else who wasn’t Pericles hung out.  Where Aeschylus wrote his bloody tragedy about King Agamemnon.  Where Aristophanes satirized Socrates in The Clouds, a comedy used by philosophy’s enemies to force an old sage to drink hemlock.  Where Euripides retold the eternal story of the revenge a wife takes against her husband when he betrays her for another woman.  The ancient Agora, where Sophocles penned a mighty cycle of plays about the mythological Oedipus and how seemingly absurd prophecies that ruin three generations can come true in real life through no fault of anyone.  The Agora, where Herodotus earned his title, “Father of History.”  Where Thucydides wrote a history of war that is still required reading at West Point and Annapolis, and where Xenophon admired Socrates and preserved some of his sayings.  The Agora, where Plato learned about the forms of existence from Socrates and where Aristotle turned Plato’s thought upon its head.  The Agora, where Pericles learned from the elderly Anaxagoras and was then elected as the incarnation of the West's Golden Age.  The Agora, where Alcibiades learned from Socrates and was then chosen to succeed Pericles.  The ancient Agora, where Aristotle took notes on Plato's dialogues and then formed the intellect of a little boy named Alexander who conquered a brave new world we all still live in.

Ruins of the Agora
 with the Acropolis
in the Background

I walked eagerly upon the dust and rocks of the Acropolis, but I would not tred on the Agora's sacred ground.  Its soil was too hallowed, and I froze at its unimpressive entrance where there is no Parthenon.  Indeed, the ancient Agora is now merely a few stones resting precariously on yet more stones.  Oh, I would have walked into that sacred place when I was a philosophy major in my foolish twenties.  But now in my sixties, I realized I could not step into the Agora, even though it was only a meter away.  I could not trivialize the place and what it represents to me…and to us.  I went in by staying out, and you were with me.

The School of Athens by Raphael (1510)

I’m not an expert in Philosophy

Or much of anything

But I’ve come to realize that for me

There is big truth and little truth.

Little truth occupies most of my awareness

Sits with me at breakfast

Looks out through my eyes

Speaks through my voice

Feels with my hands.

The truth of my moments.

Big truth is about a question

I once asked John Gordon

When I spent the night at his house

In grade school in Richardson, Texas.

We were both in bed

Probably telling dirty jokes

And I said, “John, have you ever wondered why I’m in my body

And you’re in yours?”

I wondered why I was looking out of my eyes

Instead of his.  Why my mind occupied my consciousness

Rather than his or somebody else’s.

Neither of us knew the answer

And I still don’t.

But I like the question.

And I think I just figured out, half a century later,

Where the answer lies.

I think I was looking for big truth

And like all human beings I was on the dividing line.

Between the small truth of the sound of leaves in the wind

The changing of colors of fall

The first moments of falling in love

A great catch in center field

Helping serve Thanksgiving dinner at a center for the homeless

Riding my first bicycle

Looking into the eyes of a woman I loved

Putting my arms around a friend moving 1,000 miles away

Etcetera Etcetera Etcetera…

And the big truth that explained it all.

The whole shebang.

Life and death.

Suffering and Genius.

Land and Ocean.

Men and Women.

Power and Greed.

Forgiveness and hatred.

Cornydogs.

My whole life and everything in it was about small truth

While I was distracted, wondering about big truth.

The meaning, purpose and elegant engine behind everything.

What an idiot.

My mind, heart and soul were not built for such a gigantic task.

Just to know that I am on the dividing line

Helps me realize there may be more than I can imagine

To what I can’t imagine,

And helps me realize what a life-charged place I am in

That might be an expression of that overwhelming purpose.

I give up.

Give in to what my life is and has been about all along.

The small truths that sustain and nourish me.

The open hearts of my friends.

The love of parents still there even though they aren’t.

The joy of children at breakneck speed on their tricycles.

A really good chicken-fried steak.

It’s quite a livable dividing line.

In it, I have loved a woman and a man with all my heart.

I have felt the second-hand agony of atrocities

I have been forgiven for my arrogance

I have felt a world of hope in a moment

I have touched the profound fullness in quietude

I have felt my legs buckle at the beauty of an Impressionist painting

I have breathed in all of life

Accepted all of failure

Lived through all of time, with my molecules spinning and my eyes open.

And as I turn my body to face the big truth

And raise my arms to open myself to it

All that is in my heart is thanks and love

Because all that I am is what I have been given.

On the dividing line where truth decides we will live.

Copyright 2009 by Joe Fellhauer
 

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 - About the Author -
 

Joe Fellhauer is an award-winning copywriter whose work is nationally recognized for capturing the imagination through the skillful use of everyday phrases and sentences about uncommonly common human experiences.  His light but deft touch elicits sudden recognition of universally shared human conditions, a recognition that invariably produces surprisingly profound emotional responses.  When he puts his craft at the service of poetry and other literary forms, Joe’s stripped-down and unadorned language invariably pierces the skin of the human situation and does not stop until it lodges at the heart of the soul.

At present, Joe is compiling an anthology of more than sixty short pieces tentatively titled, The Underneath Parts. 

I met Joe in high school in the mid-Sixties, and we took many courses in literature and philosophy at the same university from 1966 to 1970.  During my last year of college, Joe and I roomed together in a trailer we dubbed, “Easy Acres.”  He is my best friend and the finest professional writer I have ever met.

“Big Truth Little Truth” is poem #55 of 71 pieces from The Underneath Parts and a small sample of Joe's extraordinary art.  I am very proud to present it here at Yellow Brick Road Review.

- Don Gerz

Joe and Me
(April 2008 in Victoria, TX)

Okay, okay, I realize I have not been writing new stuff for a while, but I have some very, very good reasons.  One, I joined a tennis league and have been playing a lot since September.  Two, I’ve been helping Joe Fellhauer collect, proof, and word-process a growing anthology of his poems entitled, The Underneath Parts.  At present, the manuscript is over one hundred pages with over seventy poems.  The work is growing unabated.  While involved in this labor of love and amazement, I have chosen to immerse myself in Joe’s technique in order to learn a new thing or two about poetry.  His style is completely opposite of mine, and I’ve decided for now to bathe myself in his “poetry of objects and things” while giving my own “poetry of bloodless abstractions” a rest for a time.


(Joe must be consoling me over something I wrote.)

Three, we just returned from a vacation overseas, and I’ve been putting together a huge photo presentation that no one but my wife and I will be interested in, although it means something to us.  Finally, I’ve been rehearsing my family for our annual Halloween spectacle.  Initially, I was going to call it “This Is Throwing a Fit,” but I’ve run into copyright difficulties with the Michael Jackson estate.  So, the extravaganza’s working title is “The Marietta Monster Mash.”  Below, please find the link that will take you to yesterday’s practice.  Please let me know where you think we need to make improvements.



I imagine I’ll get back to writing some new original stuff eventually, but please be patient!  In the meantime, keep writing for the usual reasons, not the least of which is to take up my slack.

Happy Halloween to all!  - Don

“The Marietta Monster Mash”

http://www.monstermashup.com/e7158b

In order of appearance:

Shadow Gerz as “The Hound of the Baskervilles”

Don Gerz as “Dr. Frankenstein’s Monster”
Andrea Gerz Glasofer as “Countess Dracula”

Paul Gerz as “The Mummy”
Carol Gerz as “The Good Witch of the Southeast”

Fall is sneaking into south Texas

It has projected its sunlit clairvoyance on my den wall

Through the blinds usually closed to keep the heat out.

And something has come with it.

That surrounds me and calms me and takes my hand

As if I were still a child anticipating Halloween.

When all the Saints were out as I was getting candy dropped into my bag

With the million other kids in costume.

Which most of America has abandoned today.

Fall meant tracing real leaves

And using every color in your box of crayons.

It meant real change

You could see everywhere out your window

As if nature wanted to paint itself so you wouldn’t miss the point.

And what came with the coolness was the nature

That ignited the rods and cones of your eyes, and widened them

That pumped through the veins of leaves and of people.

That how could anything this beautiful last forever:

I will make it impossible not to love me and feel privileged to be alive,

I will make the world so beautiful you will want to stop it now

Right where it is and never let it go;

I will inspire your greatest artists who will never capture my majesty;

You may be in awe but I am in charge.  And now we are on my pace

And my time, and this is my earth for you to embrace me while you can

But will never own or create anything that ever was or will be

More powerful and beautiful.

This is my gift to you.  Don’t waste the time you have with it.

And in its transient beauty it becomes the perfect metaphor for our lives.

Beauty that will never end, while we will.

The trees, the leaves, the ground, the air, the chill, the fading light,

The stars…all knowing more than we do.  All more renewable.

More permanent.  More wise.

It even stirs something in children while they soak in and explore

And become part of fall’s momentum.

Something that they sense will pass.

As their childhood slips away and they want to grow up

And as their parents want them to stay children forever.

But nothing is forever except the cycle.

My orange crayon is pressed hard against my pumpkin drawing

My little tongue sticks out of my mouth in intense concentration

The nun’s thin black robe moves close and I smell her soap.

Not so different from what I do today at my computer.

Trying to draw fall the way I drew a pumpkin

So you can be here with me, time travel back to my childhood

So we can be together and I won’t feel so alone

Knowing that there are other kids-in-waiting,

Kids-in-adult-clothes who want a box of crayons

And a picture to draw or color in.

So that when fall sunlight and change and colors

Like yellow, gold, brown, red, orange and green

Tell me there is only so much beauty my life can hold

It is time to blend in with them

And become part of their radiance.

So that other children

Will look at the beauty of a fall leaf and know that it is not an accident

That its wonder is my wonder,

And that the leaf he or she puts in her pocket

And smiles to have found

Contains all of fall’s magnificence

And part of my disappeared life and recoverable love.


 

Copyright 2009 by Joe Fellhauer
 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
 - About the Author -
 

Joe Fellhauer is an award-winning copywriter whose work is nationally recognized for capturing the imagination through the skillful use of everyday phrases and sentences about uncommonly common human experiences.  His light but deft touch elicits sudden recognition of universally shared human conditions, a recognition that invariably produces surprisingly profound emotional responses.  When he puts his craft at the service of poetry and other literary forms, Joe’s stripped-down and unadorned language invariably pierces the skin of the human situation and does not stop until it lodges at the heart of the soul.

At present, Joe is compiling an anthology of more than sixty short pieces tentatively titled, The Underneath Parts. 

I met Joe in high school in the mid-Sixties, and we took many courses in literature and philosophy at the same university from 1966 to 1970.  During my last year of college, Joe and I roomed together in a trailer we dubbed, “Easy Acres.”  He is my best friend and the finest professional writer I have ever met.

“Yellow, Gold, Brown, Red, Orange and Green” is poem #67 of 68 pieces from The Underneath Parts and a small sample of Joe's extraordinary art.  I am very proud to present it here at Yellow Brick Road .

- Don Gerz

Joe and Me
(April 2008 in Victoria, TX)

“We begin to be when we directly experience what dwells within the authentic self—when we are silently present to what is casting the shadows on the opaque walls of our dim caves.”

“Being is what happens when we dare to love and be loved.  We cannot love and receive love if we do not assume that we are loved.  We are loved.  Of this, there must be no uncertainty.”

--- Numbers 9 and 10 of 35 from Raids on the Inexplicable 

---------------------------------------

The complete text of Raids on the Inexplicable
can be found at:  http://www.orgsites.com/ga/millsprings/Raids.doc

You’re drunk in a bar

Making a million-dollar deal

Barbecuing for your family

Walking the dog

Doing the dishes

Selling a car, an idea, technology.

But you’re a failure.

In that private corner of your mind and heart.

Like a virus that can’t be killed.  A death sentence from a doctor.

A corporate decision you can’t rescind.

You look in the mirror and the evidence is there.  Because the mirror is looking back at you looking into your soul with your own eyes.

You have a family or you don’t.

You’re rich or you’re not.  It doesn’t matter.

Whether we meet in a jail cell or a boardroom, we carry the same secret.

Failure is our commonality, our brotherhood.

It’s why it’s OK that the homeless guy who shits in his pants sits on the corner of 7-11.

It’s OK that middle managers take the guns meant to protect their families and blow their brains out.

It’s OK that you pretend to believe in God but that you almost believe in nothing.

We don’t believe.  We don’t have faith.  We provide and we persevere.

And through all of it, we fail.  Because our dreams can’t come true.

Our dreams crashing like waves on the rocks of the lives we follow instead of lead.

Cascading into the oblivion of larger forces then disappearing without a trace.

As the ocean of life carries us out to sea.

We’re men.  We’ve been this way forever.

We fight wars for righteousness.  Become fathers for humanity.

Become husbands for purpose.  Become social workers for love.

Become teachers for contribution.

We fuck up everything we create, negating the true mystery and purpose of our lives.

We spit in God’s face every day.

I was having a milk punch in a bar on Cedar Springs Avenue in Dallas and got into a conversation with a guy.  We talked for a long time.  The alcohol made us friendlier and more caring.  We liked each other.  He told me he was at the end of his rope.  An alcoholic who was ruining everything in his life.  I told him I would drive him to the state mental hospital in Terrell, 30 miles away if he wanted me to.  He was ready.  I shook his hand and waved to him as he went in.

It’s the only act of kindness I can remember.  I loved him as much as I’ve loved any woman, but in a different way of course.  Or maybe it was the milk punch. 

One act.  So many failures.  It wears on you.

Makes you want to be better.  Makes you want to embrace men you can’t, comfort them, love them, reassure them, be there for them.  Because we need each other as much as we need our better halves, because women don’t know how much we miss what we don’t have.  How our hearts have hardened.

Only another man can understand it.  And be with you as you joke and smile and enjoy the camaraderie in your suffering and despair.

There is no answer.  Alcoholism and spousal abuse and making women pregnant and betraying them are symptoms, not solutions.  We cry privately or silently.  We cling to a woman with a grip we think will save us because of their power and strength.  But they are solace, not solutions.

So far, we are men without solutions for our own happiness.  With a few exceptions.

Before she died, my mother received a phone call, years later, from the young man I had driven to Terrell.  He remembered my name.  On a visit back to Texas from California, she told me about it.  And it reinforced her perception that I was the good caring man she imagined me to me instead of what I really was.

That’s my only good mark.  My only act of brotherly love without expecting something in return.

So when I’m washed out to sea, I’ll remember that and welcome the crash of the waves
And cascade into the ocean with something in my heart other than emptiness

And maybe it will save me.

Copyright 2009 by Joe Fellhauer
 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
 - About the Author -
 

Joe Fellhauer is an award-winning copywriter whose work is nationally recognized for capturing the imagination through the skillful use of everyday phrases and sentences about uncommonly common human experiences.  His light but deft touch elicits sudden recognition of universally shared human conditions, a recognition that invariably produces surprisingly profound emotional responses.  When he puts his craft at the service of poetry and other literary forms, Joe’s stripped-down and unadorned language invariably pierces the skin of the human situation and does not stop until it lodges at the heart of the soul.

At present, Joe is compiling an anthology of more than fifty short pieces tentatively titled, The Underneath Parts. 

I met Joe in high school in the mid-Sixties, and we took many courses in literature and philosophy at the same university from 1966 to 1970.  During my last year of college, Joe and I roomed together in a trailer we dubbed, “Easy Acres.”  He is my best friend and the finest professional writer I have ever met.

“Milk Punch" is poem #13 of 58 from The Underneath Parts and a small sample of Joe's extraordinary art.  I am very proud to present it here at Yellow Brick Road Review.

- Don Gerz

God does not deal with divinity

We invented it to give him a place to live

And imbue him with powers we don’t accept as our own

We have no idea what he is or whether he exists

We do, however, know that we exist.

We exist in mystery and misery, perhaps even majesty

We exist in time and space, whatever those things are

We may well exist as the exactitude of God

Having given up our powers and his intention to “the human condition,”

Whatever that is.

Is it a millionaire movie mogul, sipping a martini at the pool with L.A. as the perfect backdrop?

Is it the last whimper of a child in Biafra so swollen with malnutrion she has moments to live?

Is it your honeymoon night where love and intimacy seem heavenly?

My guess is that divinity is where it’s always been. Nuggets of gold in the piecemeal existence of our life that God scattered across our human landscape.

Some sort of consciousness that pushes us to understand what we can’t.

Something divine born with every child that gets ignored instantaneously by cooing and praise. 

We always seem to be looking for answers outside of life instead of within it.

Its fabric, its science, its surprise, its shock, Its renewal, its volcanoes, its clouds. The stuff we eat from it, the sounds it makes, the thunder that rocks us, the ocean that humbles us, the breeze that moves past us, the colors that ignite our eyes, the hope that for no reason fills up our souls.

Is God responsible? Who cares?

If he’s given us life, it’s up to us to figure it out.

God may or not be many things, but he wouldn’t abandon us without hope.

Three fingers. The guy in the ER at my hospital held up 3 fingers.

They were the 3 kids in West Virginia he’’d never seen. I could tell he needed them.

The same guy who’d died of a heart attack just last night at that very place and was brought barely back to life.

But there he was.

Scruffy and scary and big and endearing and wearing his failure and rebellion like a cloak.

Holding up 3 fingers once to tell me he had 3 grandkids he wanted to see.

Holding up 3 fingers to show me the 3 stretches in the penitentiary he’d done.

There couldn’t be anything more different or ordinary about those 3 fingers and my thoughts about the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.

But his 3 fingers were right there. So maybe they were, too.

Copyright 2009 by Joe Fellhauer
 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
 - About the Author -
 

Joe Fellhauer is an award-winning copywriter whose work is nationally recognized for capturing the imagination through the skillful use of everyday phrases and sentences about uncommonly common human experiences.  His light but deft touch elicits sudden recognition of universally shared human conditions, a recognition that invariably produces surprisingly profound emotional responses.  When he puts his craft at the service of poetry and other literary forms, Joe’s stripped-down and unadorned language invariably pierces the skin of the human situation and does not stop until it lodges at the heart of the soul.

At present, Joe is compiling an anthology of more than fifty short pieces tentatively titled, The Underneath Parts. 

I met Joe in high school in the mid-Sixties, and we took many courses in literature and philosophy at the same university from 1966 to 1970.  During my last year of college, Joe and I roomed together in a trailer we dubbed, “Easy Acres.”  He is my best friend and the finest professional writer I have ever met.

"Divinity” is poem #16 of 57 from The Underneath Parts and a small sample of Joe's extraordinary art.  I am very proud to present it here at Yellow Brick Road Review.

- Don Gerz

Authentic pornography is not as it is commonly understood.  Instead, its real meaning is number four on Merriam-Webster’s list of denotations of the term: “the depiction of acts in a sensational manner to arouse a quick and intense emotional reaction: the pornography of violence” (http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=pornographic).

This sense of the word focuses on things other than sex.  It describes any choice, act, behavior, perspective, ideology, etc. that primarily focuses on and exploits the surface appearance or phenomenon of a person or idea without acknowledging (or being interested in) his, her, or its substance or spirit.

In other words, in this sense of the word, the true pornographic impulse objectifies and consumes the phenomenal and material aspects of existence while discarding, debasing, devaluing, and/or disregarding essence, spirit, and noumena as it does so.