M.P. Amram's Writers blog: a more personal blog

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And on those evenings of séance, as the sun sank to mesh what lies beyond bucolic Gerymanders, neighbors’ TVs flickered through windows into the night. We glanced up occasionally from our operations to see the codes. The intermittent glares reflected on windows told my friends when to go home. Their parents were watching Cronkite deliver the CBS nightly news report. The “most trusted man in America” delivered casualty numbers to the parents who sheltered their kids from the war. They were the parents of many of my peers who were ostensibly indifferent to the war's endurance. They did not see the bleak possibility that, under the current administration, the conflict in Southeast Asia could last long enough to draft their sons. I went home when the crickets commenced and the stingray bikes clicked gentle in the night.

I entered my home as strained voices whispered behind me. My dad sat talking with our next door neighbor on his step. They smoked cigarettes and sipped at cans of Hamm’s or Grain Belt beer. Our next-door neighbor, Dave, was a high-voltage tester for Northern States Power. They chatted about sports and laughed about the neighborhood gossip. Their laughs, especially Dave’s, rolled deep into the evening. As the conversation lagged, and quiet enraptured the block, their whispers suggested the lady who lived across the street was bigoted and rumored to spy from her window. The allegation, from 1966, hinted that she had looked through binoculars to locate my crib. Rumors went around the neighborhood, though, that she still looked into our house from across the street. Her curtain fell as my dad and Dave talked. They paused for her shadow to pass. Talk began again and their whispers lulled the twilight.

coming this spring

Finding Me and Them: Stories of Assimilation is a collection of ten stories. They are autobiographical. They are nonfiction. They are fiction based on fact. Each story tells the author’s life as an individual with or (fictional) without a disability. All of them find the author. They show different phases and challenges in his life, from rehabilitating from a head injury at age five to learning the logistics of an after-life. In ways that co-mingle genres, the stories in my book are related. There are central themes concurrent in all of them. Many of the stories are written from the perspective of someone growing up with an ambiguous disability. By about 1981, I walked with a staggered gait, but without crutches. I did not wear a brace; I had no “props” to indicate I was just physically disabled. A theme is how I found the world to perceive me. Family is a theme. Wandering, exploration, the search for identity, are central themes in my stories.

My book is learning to live (physically different). It's learning to love. It's learning what faith can do and what's offered in worlds we can't see.

Easy nights in fish eye country

In utero proses

Books gestate. Ideas cognate. My long- coming memoir Ten Years and Change: A DFL Boyhood in Minnesota melds the truths of the Vietnam War with the most astute recollections of my growing up. 1965 to 1975 was an exciting time to be a kid, exposed to see democracy get its day in court. I grew as the war widened and those around me seemed powerless to stop it.
I was born in February of 1965, just as LBJ was exercising the power the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave him to begin his sustained bombing of North Vietnam. I turned three February 1, 1968. The previous day the NV launched the Tet offensive and the war in America exploded. On January 22, 1969, less than two weeks before my fifth year, Nixon began to bomb the hell out of Cambodia "expanding the war in ways Lyndon Johnson didn't dare."
Lessons of losing, working for a cause, racial and gender equality were displayed to me. They gave me that sense of social awareness that everyone of the Dissident Democrats (those who abandoned their champion Hubert Humphrey to support Gene McCarthy) had
　
　

Synopsis of Orange

Corporal Chauncy T. McClarren is a Vietnam Veteran. His ten years of service as a marine are
glibly worn on the sleeve of his dress uniform well into civilian life. He went to Vietnam before the draft began
with the hope of being a martyr. He is
reluctant to admit this to his friend and even to himself.

Elizabeth A Spaarkes randomly selects Chauncy’s door. She flees to Florida
after two years in the Symbionese Liberation Army. She is the perfect
woman. She is a redheaded goddess. “Lizzy” is a nymphomaniac who fills his every
desire sexually, and eventually, domestically.

Gunnery Sergeant Harrold H. Coffman comes home from the war a
paraplegic. He owes his life to his
Corporal. One day he learns on the news
of Spaarke’s possible involvement with the left-wing group. He believes she is guilty. Chauncy chooses to give her the benefit of
the doubt. He refuses to believe a woman
that beautiful could be a fugitive.

Agent of Orange is the story of a Rheinlandbastard. Chauncy is a pragmatist who shifts the
stations in life around so the logistics favor him. It follows his trail of passively sequencing
fate from Vietnam to Florida. It leads
him to the Bahamas where he takes an orphaned boy back to Florida. Fate leads him on a series of trips to
Germany to learn his origin. Chauncy
McClarren is a biracial miscreant who grew up unloved and beaten. It is one man’s perception of racism in
America and abroad. He is taught some
manners and discipline in the marines. He faces a world that begs for his attention as he begs for its
salvation. The marines outfit him with
the diplomacy necessary to deal with what life has thrown, and continues to
throw, at him. Chauncy T. McClarren
takes his time in life. He orchestrates
things while sauntering through life with a grifting nonchalance. He is methodical and pragmatic enough to see
his various operations through to the end.

From Agent of Orange

It was a clenched fist that pulsated anger, threatening him from the corner of his room. The Purple Heart Medal―earned saving his buddy’s life―adorned a nightstand. Rickety and old, the heart made him flashback to a hail storm of bullets he dodged in the rushing waters of North Vietnam’s Han River

A marine uniform hung out of place in the closet, crying out for recognition In a black garment bag it did its best to distinguish itself from a sparse civilian wardrobe. Corporal Chauncy McClarren had served two tours in Vietnam. A cargo plane deposited him back in the real world May 5th, 1975.

Outside, a breeze filtered though the palms to make him feel welcome. He glanced out the window suspiciously and inhaled deeply. He liked what he smelled. There were no scents of gun-powder, or errant wisps of death fighting to be smelled.

His physique was extraordinary. The butt of a machine gun had often rested in his hands, hands that were large enough to suffocate someone. A fifty- inch chest had proudly filled out his uniform for nearly a decade. His proportions now sought to envelope the pedestrian seams of civilian clothes. Chauncy knew after one month stateside that his modest beach house in Palm Beach could never be his permanent residence.

“I love the smell palms make when they sway in the morning,”

He murmmered to himself and inhaled once more, savoring his isolation from the world.

The Corporal squinted as the sun pierced his home. In the summer of 1966 he’d woken up many mornings in the jungles of Đà Nǎng, n blinded by foliage and deafened by latent mortar fire. His sight now was clear, unadulterated and astetically pleasing. The lapping of the tide was the only indicationof what he’d left a world away. He slid his chiseled face past the shutters. The Corporal gazed at the symmetry of his reflection in the window. Genetics had favored him. He had a bronze skin tone that accentuated perfectly defined back muscles When he ran shirtless along roads in Hanoi, he often felt the eyes of his buddies tracing his back like it was a relief map. His tight, black curls fit securely on a head that rested on broad shoulders. Its naturally sloping trapezius muscles created the illusion of a neck within itself. His head was strong and determined with a small afro that rarely let a hair go astray.

ｶ

Elizabeth Spaarkes appeared at Chauncy’s door late in May. She was on the lam from California and the community of Palm Beach was chosen for its presumed annonimity. “Lizzy,” as she preferred to be called, chose the Cororal’s door by chance―almost like a lottery number is picked.. Lizzy was a goddess with long flowing red hair and a body with curves and abuttments that made most men putty. By tax filing time, they were having sex like rabbits..

“Come back to bed Chaunc.”

Lizzy rolled over, to entice her man. Her breasts had the tan of a nudist and quivered like gelatin holding their shape. Her mane of hair fell around them as she propped herself up on her elbows. He studied her, mildly curious of her motive.

“Penny for your thoughts,” she offered.

“You know Liz, when I first got my draft notice I thought of burning it and heading to Canada. I think I actually strucka match. Shit Liz, there was no damn lottery in ‘64. I was lucky I suppose. I beat the system by four years. The lottery began at the end of ’69. The Pentagon pigs stuck little bits of paper in capsules. They were numbered one to three hundred and sixty-six of them, each representing someone’s birth date. Then the fortune tellers put all of those capsules in a big glass jar. Suppose the Selective Service picked the one numbered two hundred fifty and seven and you were born September 8, 1946, you’d be sent an engraved invitation to their war. The odds were against us. Shit Lizzy, it was the old carnival shell game and we were the peas.” .

He prattled on in his nakedness.. The comfort and originality of civilian clothes hadn’t sunk in yet with Chauncy. He’d hated every minute of the war; still he had gone back for more after coming out of the first tour alive. He was a pragmatist; but also an optimist who was hounded by a need to find the worth of everything he did. Besides, there was nothing for him in the States. No job, no ready girl, no prospects for a career, not even his real parents.

After going through a series of foster homes for the first six years of his life, Chauncy had been taken in by an elderly couple. They were the type of Catholics who hung rosary beads on the coat hooks. They were the pure white, sugary kind of religious people whose hypocrisy was usually a Hail Mary away. They wanted him to believe in their God; the God who applauded sinners for punishing themselves.

improbale poetry

I’ll twist my arm to hear it crack

So joints will snap and she might blink

And then smirk to see her laugh,

Or pull my legs to see them keel

On what folds out before pews

In church halls steeped in rising

Songs sung for what they know is true,

hearing ligaments popping,

breathing low as mermaids think;

When she was born from lakes that shone

The faint shades her reflection saw;

I’d bend my knees willfully

And reach beneath her silk white blouse

To hear sounds religion makes

For worshiping her alone,

Like a subject for magistrates

Who can break the golden rule

For long Sabbath lots they draw

Now she stretches her naked past

My fingers fixed fast in my pain

For sympathy I sing now

As she reflects from glass that’s stained

In soft blues for weary eyes

That begs mercy on the souls

Who flagellate with broken whips

In rooms naked as suns fade

Them to see beyond her prize `

Of the world

my toe tosses clods

of earth with reverence

as I lean coolly

on your mezuzah's

door with a skull

cap petitioning g-d,

and earth moves as

I till it for assurance,

my bare toes

flick at clods to get a

better sense of

how life there went,

but I waited for

a train to run on time, right

through your Shiva's

wake to take me far

away from pictures I

left in Germany,

you remind

me of how you did not

want my life

to repeat itself when

the train runs out

of tracks to obliterate,

you realize then

I’m not coming back to wait

and sell my clothes

and eclectic yarmulkes

I teased you with

when my tziziot fashioned me

they were the nooses

that suited my hanging days

when clods stuck

between my toes so I

stayed and canceled

my train and thought I’d give

earth a go again,

I blended it and

hoed the rakish rows until

a chilly wind found

my shawl’s fringe to pull

some holy strings

to symbolize departure's end.

M.P. Amram's Writers blog

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Monday, May 28, 2012

a more personal blog

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improbale poetry

Of the world

penguins