The man stands, staggered, disoriented, beaten but still standing. Punch drunk. Mickey Mouse ears, cartoon bullets, bird masks, empty voice bubbles, the Everyman, his voice not heard. He is surrounded by all the detritus of the world. He looks out over the landscape and is immersed in a sea of fences, nature blocked off, a show of ownership, quantification of the land fenced in and fenced out. He makes his small space in the world. Surrounded with the mass marketed, in an attempt to save his innocence, his childhood. He is the Mouseketeer and the victim. All the world reduced to demographics, nostalgia for sale. Here explosions look like childish trees, cartoon bullets, a particular kind of naïve violence. Heads upside down, disembodied, and goofy with useless ears are a separating of the intellectual from the body. The body is a base connection to the earth bound, animal wants and needs. Eating, shitting, and entropic, he lives the life of the mind, the intellect is boundless. He lives inside himself, the life of the poet. His connection to the world is tenuous and abstract. Everything surrounding him packaged and priced to move.
. He fights gravity with every step, seeking out the shadows. Stiff backed and shaky he moves along unseen, finds a good butt and looks for a light. He is always searching. Cracks in the sidewalk, break your mother’s back, he’d long ago broken her heart, her eternally broken heart. She always told him that with hard work he could do anything. But hard work had only showed him that he didn’t want to be anything. Cracks in the sidewalk looked like the cracks in his leathery bare feet. A child’s game that had stuck in his head.
Progress has pushed him out of every hole he has lived in, pushed him finally, to the edge of town. He pushes his own history around the city worn in the sunburnt lines of his face. Those lines worn to permanence by the track of his tears, long ago gone dry. His gnarled hands resemble the roots of some strange tree. They look like the hands of his father, busted knuckles from many bar fights gone good or bad. Shit just happens. He had never been close to his father, but now dreams of him often.
E. Charles Rolwing III 