Jack Spratt

120803 0102 gods country

God is not a destination or roadside attraction or a post card. No. God is where i live. I've been other places too many to remember where I thought 'why is God so nakedly apparent here?' But this is god where i live now in upon within surrounded by the womb of god is here New Mexico The Land of Enchantment By God in the United States of America.

Joe Z and me slept on the ground under a canon in Gettysburg before I began my six year hitch in the artillery part of the Connecticut National Guard joined instead of the real Army Airborne or Army Security Agency he was then and remains my best friend ever since Cos Cob Elementary School and when I finished my hitch we hit the road for Mexico City two long distant travelers we eclectic as hell we remain apart but attached through our curiosity of the shy why people do what they do when and how i never forget my friends and he's the best i've ever had still is.

I knew his mom & dad & brother & dog Molly or Susie living in a house never finished and I return to the abyss of my family compared to his and can't ever forget my attempts to heal or fix the breach between what he had and what had me what i'd hoped to flee at eighteen that horror & freak show abandoned at birth punished for being a man the hole whole of it no home just not even a house but sheltered in hell.

And there we were visiting a friend of my mothers who knew me as an infant in St. Louis where mom nearly bled to death from a back street abortion pregnant one year or so after my birth she said was a dry delivery fifty eight hours in Christ Hospital Cincinnati Ohio. The friend's name was Jessie she'd married a man from New Mexico and moved there to Las Vegas, NM and he took Joe Z and me in his pick up truck through the surrounding terrain and it was there I first really saw God naked remembering the clouds the mesas the mountains squeezed between Joe Z and him driving don't remember his name only his wife was so different from mom memorial so odd I'd studied snapshots of mom there in Mexican clothes like the silk screen of medics carrying blood stained sheets ashore from an invasion fleet my life now splayed before me like the conductors score from The Brandenburg Concerto hearing what was to come in millisecond silence before the sound began on my return after a bitter hard difficult life in between then and now and never say never about anything just play the hand dealt you in life's games.

I'm a strider a runaway a long distance traveler within my psyche and then around the world so many times the thought of a airplane makes me consider Auschwitz a vacation destination naked in a box car with my wife and kids mid February packed like sardines with our families generations going back to the beginning of creation At midnight May 16th 2006 i mounted the pass from east going west and saw before me in the valley ahead the new home where I now live struck by lighting bolts arching across hundreds of miles mountains mesas ahead the night was otherwise dark yet illuminated by fingers of fire touching here and there randomly playing a score silently until now

And now I'm in deep shit she called to say hi and I asked about how goes it after your mom's death are your crying or sick? Both she rubbed up against me like a cat her voice a burr purr and I'm lost again or am I found? God goes on and I'll be dust soon enough blown in the wind between the Track Way and mountains still home forever yeah god lives here more nakedly than anyplace in eternity & no goddamn gringos from up north no more like me no solution the overcrowding need apply please don't make me move to Patagonia

©2012 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved

PTSD is . . .
Giving comfort under affliction requires that penetration into the human mind, joined to that experience which knows how to soothe, how to reason, and how to ridicule; taking the utmost care never to apply those arts improperly.
Henry Fielding (1707-1754)