Lynn Wilson Astrology

Neighbors and Invaders

Mackie Blanton

Along my inner right thigh the stealth of teeth or pincers or stingers unsuspectantly has invaded poisoned stiffened my musculature.

An expected self-effacing Southern Male I have quietly endured the stale pain for five weeks now bowed by grim armature; first before leaving the US and now here, at a sidewalk café, bending beneath lemon trees over memories, a cappuccino and chocolate-covered nuts, at best each night believing it would lift, at last surrendering to my massages and caresses.

This unneighborly incursion happened I suppose six weeks or so ago (What do I know of such things?) on my own Louisiana land somehow somewhere among the debris and rubbish splintered from the womb and maw and tresses of a sweetly named hurricane.

All I have sought here was an antibiotic salve bought in halting Turkish at an Ankara pharmacy. I have hope now here in Izmir that the balm, absorbed below crusting pus, will work miracles beneath the skin:

a sleuth to match my silence an experimenter to match my risk-taking a problem solver warrior to match my visitor’s love for the terrain and plains of the daughters and sons of conquerors.

I am kept awake at night however both by the pain setting up camp just above my knee

and by images entrenched along my brain of a suffering worse than my own (unless of course poisoned I am dying): of those abandoned homeless or dead along America’s Gulf Coast by an indifferent loveless wind with a comely name: Katrina.

But let’s put all of this aside; for more than all of this, my personal concern for self and others has been diminished by the disgust and enmity hardening my heart.

For my life, for our lives along the Gulf, have been embalmed by the caresses of quacks shysters and hucksters not by the pummeling of sudden war or famine or suicide bombers but by the greed and slight of neighbors massaging their pockets purses and wallets.

There are no words now sublime enough to distract us from thieves, from the truth about men and women who have not led, nor even to divert our aim away from their target heart.

When was I bitten or stung exactly?

Was it when I hung out mildew on tree trunks in the sun light so that my clothes could air dry out smell fresh again?

Was it when I fell to my knees, lay down on toxic pavement, exhausted from rushing through the swampy stench and mold of living room bed room study, retrieving possessions things I would do better to learn to live without?

When were we fooled and betrayed exactly?

Was it when we first opened a book about union unity liberty good citizenship? The Dream?

Or was it that second book often read at mother’s knee about belief community compassion

forgiveness? Again, The Dream.

Those books from my home, now heaped at the curbside, besogged with unseen toxicity, hidden warfare inherent duplicity, surrender their ink and evasive stains to the evening air.

Take pictures and save receipts, adjusters tell us. My neighbor, an amateur photographer, will flit here and there in most of the neighborhoods of dead zones and ruin - Flick! Flick! Snap! Snap! - and frame his takes for an eventual one man opening at a fine French restaurant, with wine cheese and chocolate-covered ants.