After the reading
“Did you enjoy KGB?”
“That was incredibly manipulative, even for you”
“It was just a poem, Amanda”
“Everyone at that reading is completely conflicted by what you did”
“What I did? I got up to the mike and I read my poem. Amanda, that’s what you do at an open mike”
“But not that crowed, Doug. Not that poem. They wanted to kill you after it, or at least through you out”
“I didn’t realize such pacifists…”
“Pacifist! Your work is fascist! You are supporting an imperialist tyrant! You’re such a, such a, a…”
“Guy?”
“Asshole! You glorified a militaristic killer!”
“I don’t think that the Major has actually ever been in combat”
“He’s a Major in the Army that feels it’s right to bomb children around the world!”
“Amanda, I wrote about a man, in a cockpit, at a point of decision. Where he has no choice but every choice and that choice will impact the small and the large. Our county, and his son. I realy don’t know what he would do had not the other thing happened on the jet.
In my poem I asked everyone in that room what they would do, and they didn’t like their answer.
So they wanted to kill me? Nope, they wanted to kill themselves.”
Amanda just stared at me. Waiting for me to say “And what would you do?” Because the next military jet up that day was flown by a woman, so it’s not a guy thing, you can’t get out that way, and her plane was armed. So put yourself in that cockpit, Amanda if it’s easier. Because then you can miss the horror of contemplating that ejecting out of your jet just after crashing into the wing just shoots you into the wreckage. And then you don’t have to imagine who you’ll see tumbling in the air as both planes fragment.
I didn’t say that but I thought it into her brain. I did say…
“And even after that you still took me home?”
“I took you home because I like to Play with you. And I was drunk. And I was outside when you did it.” She couldn’t look at me when she said that.
I didn’t know she missed my reading. I was hurt. Was she really outside? She couldn’t have been. But I couldn’t recall seeing her now…
“Sex is violence. Right?” I said
“Right now, I don’t think we should go there.” and she walked away.
More with Amanda here…
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