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| Spring by Abel Grimmer |
[In a vivid dream dreamed in my mother's house, the home where I first took flight from the nest, I experience a dream unlike that yet experienced on this visit to the places of my origins.]
I am an Occupy demonstrator; with stereotypical shaggy hair and a wiry beard sparse enough to age me youthfully. At first impression, a fire-born Sagittarius without regret or remorse. I have a taste for the insane rush of amateur denial. A ferocity grows in me to bleed with the public truth of mass suffering at the hand of the few: 1%. I feed off the morning dew before the violent marching of our militant society exhales its smog of consumptive dread over the undreamed folds of a quotidian, earthly stress.
With sudden instantaneous manifestation, my surroundings turn into a punctilious mold of congruent geometry. A seemingly shapeless mass of grey and beige frosts the walls of my interior perception with gross boredom. Enraged, I tear with mad vivacity for a new paradigm. Social dominance does not move astray from my line of sight as it defies internal contemplation and steers ever clearly into the bedrooms of the few: 1%. I give them all the middle finger with raw, open tenacity.
I am reminded of W. Bush; his first trip outside of the U.S. after his term of totalitarian presidency. We geared to angry maximums in a show of torrential defamation at his name.
There is a slump in the public demonstration. The efforts sway to clandestine operation. There is an underground swell of purpose. An optimistic slumber chimes beneath the sidewalk cafes. I am welcomed at a subterranean meeting place. The air is unpredictable. There is a contingent wading in passersby and onlookers who wonder about the end of their movement; it may be nearer than they fear. I have a purpose. I make my delivery and ask desperately for a place to sleep. I need to rest on a surface other than that of concrete smoothed by nylon. The muffled sound of sheets once quelled my silent might and now I am only stirred with the jarring gripes of untrustworthy leaders from this, our autonomous modus operandi of Darwinian survival.
Sleepless, I cower trenchantly outside the walls of an Embassy in Cairo, Egypt. The streets are emptied with sacred failure. The notches of murder scale high across the batons of the street police. I have come here to die to the American Lie. I wait restlessly, dealing with bureaucrats in twilight hours. The Cairo dawn inflames my vital organs with a need to escape this devil-coaxed life of American savagery. I fight for the freedom to move, for my wife and our sanity. We ask only to be awake, and not depraved of a social camaraderie known from collective suffering, shared through speech, and simultaneously lightened through action for one being, our whole. At the same time, we fight for the dignity to rest our heads on a feather of respect in this anthropomorphic hole of modern factory-style life ways.
The struggle continues.
