What is the mother of all stories?
Today is chest day for Dwayne Becky and he is killing it. This is the power lift. The perfect lift, the olympic lift, the master lift, the mother of all lifts, the shit-that-was-too-heavy-I-should-have-told-that-guy-to-spot-me-but-I-didn’t-think-this-skeleton-could-so-maybe-I-did-the-right-thing-but-I’m-stuck-now.
Like hell I’ll call for help though.
Poor Dwayne Becky. Orange pressed under the weight of his bar. “Iron my lord, my beauty how, how can you crush your friend, your follower, your lover.” He wants to shout now but the rubble of the mountain of pride his mountain of muscles created mutes the chords of his throat.
“Why is your poetry so sad and sarcastic?” asks the reporter
The 63 year old raw and disillusioned John De Changy who looks like he’s 30 with his white hair perfectly groomed and eyes with crows feet ornaments, sips on his fresh yerba mate with no milk or sugar whatsoever:
“My poetry is the mother of all stories
And the mother is always worried
The mother is always waiting at 2am
Next to the door for the last child to come home from another god-forsaken-party-where-he’s-probably-doing-drugs-and-having-unprotected-sex-or-else-why-would-he-be-so-late-oh-god-you-just-wait-you-punk
She sips on the cigarette she lit on the biggest heater on the gas stove
She is the final, the ultimate, the eternal greeter, the speaker of truth, the oracle of the night, who lights up when the buzzer goes bright. He is back.
Dwayne Becky comes in half-drunk, half-wasted, half-dazed and confused and ready to vomit but before he can moma Dwayne slaps him so hard he falls and injures his arm”
“Is there no happy poetry?” asks the reporter.
“All poetry is happy but it’s happy like a martyr is happy when she’s escaped the burning torches romans just threw to burn her flesh in the gladiator arena.
She is happy like the black man whose rope broke for the 2nd time and the villagers in the deep Midwest start wondering whether it isn’t a sign from God and they should stop.
Poetry is happy like Dwayne who found just enough strength in his left biceps and his right biceps to start clearing the bar with 200 pounds that was starting to crush him.”
“Why do you write you poetry then?” asks the reporter even more intrigued by the ever mysterious John De Changy
De Changy drinks the last gulp of his yerba mate under the Buenos Aires sun and looks in the distance as a fly lands on his right shoulder and stains his white shirt when he kills it elegantly.
“I write poetry for the flies and mosquitoes.
I write for the soul unhappy with the happiness around.
I write for the grinch who sold Christmas and whose ancestors are actually the monks of the Himalayas.
I write for the Heyokas.
In Native American tribes, Heyokas were the intentional contrarians you see. Mad men who would wear wool in the summer and run naked in the winter, cry when everyone laughed and laugh when everyone mourned their dead.
I write for the one who gave up to teach them that giving up is part of being a Heyoka too.
I write for the negative space of life.
The positive space of death.
I write for the melting pot of sorrow and sadness and boredom because in the midst of the heated salsa they dance, in the form of their trance, you can glance at the half-smile of existence, the mother of all stories, sitting next to the buzzer at 2am.
But most of all, I write for Dwayne Becky whose left arm injured by moma. Dwayne can’t sustain 100 pounds and through the signal goes in rounds from his brain to his muscle making the case for the hustle.
The arm, like the martyr the romans caught again, like the black man the North Carolina folks are hanging with steel wire now.
The arm looks Dwayne Arnold Becky’s deaf-dumb destiny in the eyes and says sorry as she sinks into the Pacific ocean from which Dicaprio will rescue her.
Becky’s arm snaps
The bar bumps on his chest and lands on his neck
He lasts for a second as no one hears the wreck his feet are trying to make because of how good the noise cancelling technology is on all those new beats by Dre wireless earbuds.”
