Ch 12 part 1 – Provisions to Sail the Atlantic

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Chapter Twelve – Provisions to Sail the Atlantic part 1

359

I gathered financial documents.  Legal biological processes began mitosis.  Blood pumped to address child support requests to avoid cardiac arrest.  Procrastination might permit plaque build-up in a father’s arteries.  I tallied a property segregation list.  Discovery affidavits were assembled.  Nothing can stop the Frankenstein. 

My world was filled with hanging fowl necks to strangle before our marriage could legally die: W-2’s, tax returns, school-year matriculation locations for a soon-to-be kindergartner, automobile insurance liability segregations, hosing equity, and Master Card statements.  Ashley conducted her dissertation via the internet on child custody scenarios hoping her PHD from an online university would come in time for court.

Inevitable collisions ticked in fully-loaded legal eighteen wheelers approaching from perpendicular paths.  Buffered-static filled semi-discussions trickled in two-hundred dollar an hour conversations mapping war plans.  Asteroid sentences between Ashley and me occasionally collided via email.  The junkyard of divorce would remain cluttered.   I sorted bank-statement baubles, Chevrolet fenders, and poetry notebooks in a scrapheap attempting to organize the eclectic distractions before the battle cry.

360

Ashley and I spoke to each other as if we both held secret recording devices in our pockets, which sometimes I did as insurance.  I assume Ashley did the same.  I was afraid of what Ashley would accuse me of saying, of doing if the two of us were alone.  Ashley spoke in legal tones, crouched like a tiger.

In my attempts at conversations I told Ashley, “I do not want to get divorced, but I am trying to give you what you want.  I want us to be peaceful and accept whatever the court decides.  I would like to try to resolve these things before court.  If you would just view us as equals this would not be where it is.” 

I wrote a letter to myself as if I could ever have a normal conversation with whoever used to my wife again to say what I felt.  I wrote as if the words could usurp tug-of-war legal crap.  

What I would emit if I was free –

Narnia’s White witch is less condescending manipulative and frost-hearted.  Your Turkish delight is fugu tetrodotoxin shrouded in wedding cake.  Your incessant compulsion to act as if you made even a minimal effort to share your feelings with me during our marriage in a meaningful way to alleviate the poor treatment that you claim I inflicted upon you in order to rationalize your blatant abandonment of your marriage vows is a complete and utter farce. 

I built my being around you.  I flew across the Earth to propose.  I gave you my twenties.  While our generation was exploring love’s ciphering I confined my energy to your benefit.  These better-soul women made their selection during my service time and I am paroled to a vacant cow pasture. 

We moved to your hometown and built your dream a block away from your parent’s corral.  I lived in your gene donors’ stomping grounds for two years to facilitate the financial possibility of your porch. 

I wrote you poetry.  I told you daily the three words every human craves.  Our conversations were my sustenance.  I cooked and cleaned in a palette for your palate.  My ears were your pillow.  I shared our Catholic faith.   I returned your calls with haste-filled exuberance.

361

Your appreciation was like the glue-based food concoctions advertisers assemble to film commercials.  Gratitude for anything without the Hingle brand on the box harbored and fostered resentment large enough to rationalize your self-righteous pursuit to expel me from my house, child and marriage without offering a kernel to salvage the humanity we shared. 

From day-zero you have refused to take my calls, to meet, to email, to write, to go to counseling or to communicate except for when you deem necessary.  Our daughter is pinned in Hingle-land where you can manipulate history.  Your porch guilt is alleviated in this distorted Nottoway cocoon.

“Best interest of daughter,” is emblazed across your Hingle crest.  Vows burst horrendously.  I am willing to equal custody of Penelope and yet you drag out this emotionally and financially depleting no-anesthesia surgery rather than compromise in days. 

You want me to hate you.  If I mutate myself the applied anger would be fresh water.  This house we built is a sledge hammer that you refuse to swing, claim or let us put up for a yard sale.  You simply have your lawyer hold the blunt mallet over my skull as I put head to pillow.

Indispensible career positions controlling money and prestige created a toxic-waste entitlement mentality.  How ambrosial you deem the aroma of your malodorous feces in your invulnerable power suit.

Your soul is in a clam-tight oyster for an empress opal immaculate pearl.  We each know the normal taints in our egg shells.  I use to laud your praises when you viewed me as human.  We are each flawed.  I never wanted perfect.

The soul of a normal female is drenched in elation by feeling the luxury of emotional vulnerability.  A woman wants to know her counterpart will hold her feelings with care and allow her the freedom to express herself without condemnation or judgment.  I had the stalwart faith in your intelligence and emotional confidence to attempt to help you resolve your internal battles with empathy rather than advice.  Now you wish for neither. 

362

I dove down for you.  I went spelunking to seek your water-well fears and you drowned me.  You closed the cave like a Maghreb sorceress.

Girls expound on how men suck.  Men do not listen or communicate.  We test poorly at non-glamorous parental routines.  We are emotional vaults, struggling to repress our infidelity.  Father and husband are kind roles you crumbled like mailbox credit-card applications.

Whatever you want in a man I must not be it.  Wallow with your succubus demons in a mollusk skeleton.  Surely outside the shell you will smile, fuck other men, but the squall that inks in you will never clear until you release to heal.

363

I am a good man.  I treated you well.  You may not want to be married to me and I have accepted that, but there is no need for this.

Hell is but the absence of God experienced in these human days.  Seek and pray for the woman I once loved.  I pray you find peace. 

You act as if any assignment of blame to you is immediate grounds to move under the extreme invalidating logic that I am absolving myself of any accountability.  I am no attacker.  There is no requirement for liberation.  Freewill is absolute.

Whatever Hilton may have ever taught you to sift away with a highball of Bacardi and Coke to go to sleep and pretend nothing ever happened in the morning and then silently hold resentment for years, you must unlearn.  The journey out is into your self.

I will be cordial throughout, but without a direct and significant apology and addressing these issues I have no grounds to begin to forgive you.  Forgiveness begins with a person asking for forgiveness.  I forgive you for myself inside, but true forgiveness is a duality.  Therefore I will live without the refurbishment forgiveness would bring to our interlinked perpetuity and kindle a peace in the only platform pertinent to that which I am duty bound, my inner being.

364

You are no martyr.  These courtroom shenanigans are coarse short-sighted displays at the detriment of our daughter.  These words live long.  Penelope is no automaton.  You cling with claws of control.  I see your secret sadness to the core of your planet under these green-house guilt atmospheric insulations.

I may drift far into a future where I can no longer see, but today I can peer into your onyx orchards.  I can read you.  Go to God.  Seek the nexus.  I pray for your reconnection to that which I knew of you.  Explore into yourself.

I see you launching missiles at my camp.  I look to the sky and pray for answers to whys like wasps.  I pray for you.  I know you are not assaulting me or what we were, rather you stab the decency that breathes inside you that will oxygenate the wind of your tomorrows.  The shrill whistle of these rockets will leave you gasping for a how to find again the nourishing humanity you strand fallow with the tenacity of this war.  Pacify, drink peace, I let you go; we need not be enemies.  I value my own interconnected humanity more than any acidic addiction to anger.

I pantomime non-panic so as not to ignite your alarms to summon the hive or relay the brunt of your impact.  I dissipate the allowance to scream.  I want to let out a howl of raw emotion.  Yet, I am calm, flaccid in the sheath, my hand off the hilt, muzzled.

I see a self-righteous high priestess to a congregation of one that for too long I tried to please.  The girl I imprinted never existed.  I poured my being, but your heart is an upside-down plastic pitcher.

Kennel me no more with your take-home puppy-men pity. Your tainted sex and drugs dislodged like seed burs for a bargain-basement margin call.  You drank my compendium.  You tried to help me see the error of my commitment to a fractured partner.  I see my ignorant canine heel despite your commands for me to flee. 

But you let yourself say I do and commit and you have bailed.  It tears at the seams, but aside from altar words, I rescind your obligation.  Live as you wish; I pray for your happiness, just allow me the same. 

365

I could talk to my mirror as if I understood a God-damned thing.  It was comforting to try to put a little why-ribbon and bow on contemplations.  

In Nottoway court, Osceola Parish Louisiana, Ashley had ovaries, a former sheriff’s family with legal system connections, Rotary back-up plans, a spare house, a bigger paycheck, a daughter still pressed to her three-week back to work nipples, and stories to tell with a self-determined meandering definition of perjury at her disposal.  I was me.

The prenatal vitamins still sat in a bag in the dual-vanity bathroom on Ashley’s side under the sink.  I never knew how many boxes the bag started with, but there could not have been many missing.  I dreamed of having a little boy and naming him, Seth.  I wrote another I will never send letter.

There is a gap in me where I wanted him to exist.  His soul will never segment from God like a parcel into humanity.  Maybe he would have been a she, or twins, or never conceived, but as dreams go I dreamed of a son.

I imagine your thoughts.  How could you bear another child with your secret words?  You knew you had to leave before his conception would lock you into to a marriage and his growth.

Penelope readying to be a big sister, siblings playing; the four of us got postponed with the rain, the moving and the construction.  The quartet is obliterated.  In nothingness, his absence still bears weight to balance the seesaw of your departure.

I did not even get to have a say in the storm.  Our marriage, our promises were not even worth discussing to you.  Am I so ugly?

You have become this witch-ragged hag with her cauldron of passive-aggressive sorcery with voodoo dolls and bobbing Spanish pipe-bomb dream poison-peaches and your who-me speeches.  Save the chants because you can not explain that to Seth.  I guess his soul will unroll into the fabric of a family that is supposed to be.  I do not blame you.  I would rather it this way, than to live a lie.  It just makes me sad.

366

I found out Mr. House died of lung cancer.  A few years ago St. Baptiste fired House over some disagreement.  I contacted Brother Gregory, who had left the school to work in Indonesia.  Brother Gregory assured me House’s firing was more complex than money.  Former students bombed the administration’s embassy with emails and phone calls. 

House was relegated to teach in a New Orleans public school and now to death in his fifties.  The funeral was on a Saturday.  With all the stuff going on I do not remember if I could not go or just did not want to look at death that day.  I think it was the later.  

A few students staged a protest at St. Baptiste’s homecoming game with “St. B killed James House” T-shirts revealed from under coats later in the fall.  Fired for health insurance costs of getting cancer was the accusation by a propagation of faith set of Catholics.  The resistance fighters made the same sign on the front of the school with a painted bed sheet and a whiskey toast.  Viva la House!

367

At the end of May we had a mediated negotiation in Martha’s office.  Leading up to the session was like sticking my head in a Fargo wood chipper because I was in need of a haircut.  I asked Ashley beforehand “Is there any way you would agree to anything close to fifty-fifty custody?  Will you discuss settling property before custody is resolved?” 

Both responses were in the range of negative and mute.  I did the math of two-hundred dollars per hour lawyers, the mediator, and the preparation.  Mediation added up to another three grand for us to put my mouth on the curb like in American History X and have Ashley kick me in the skull.

We met in my attorney’s office for four hours.  Ashley was in one room, I in another.  I brought printed excel spreadsheets of proposals of week A and week B alternative scenarios.  I was prepared with lists and questions about what I was willing to accept for Penelope’s hobo-boxcar existence. 

Ashley’s opening salvo was Saturday nine a.m. to Sunday at six p.m. two times a month.  I talked to Martha.  I felt like I was back at Tulane in my negotiations course.  I remembered these tactics and skills of manipulation to find out the scarce resources, what your adversary held valuable and cloak your own.  All this business acumen were fallow tools, cash on a lost island.  Who had the power was obvious.

Martha told me, “Ask for what you want for your daughter.”  Mathematics buzzed.  Was this a Baksheesh-backdoor black market for abducting children?  Was I supposed to barter based on dazzling starting-points as if we are haggling over a Tunisian fruit scale for a bushel of apples?  Am I supposed to bid this auction for more than I am willing to settle for to meet in the middle or am I supposed to hold to that gray-haired principle and ask for what I want for my daughter? 

368

My best case scenario was Ashley’s worst, to see Penelope half the time. I wanted Penelope to have access to her mother and her father in commensurate measure to allow quality time in each aspect.  If I got the house and some majority of custody, if I commandeered some fool’s gold pirate-raid of alimony based on Ashley’s elevated income; if I “won” in court I would have failed all humans. 

I wanted Penelope to have her own happy life.  I wanted me to re-make my own.  None of that was attainable anyway.  I simply asked for fifty-fifty custody.  I asked for even and less than even in seven different scenarios. 

Ashley’s retort was a two-hour visit on a Thursday twice a month, which I did not think was even a good idea for Penelope.  What happens when Penelope starts getting homework?  Isn’t the child under enough confusion about where she is supposed to be and when?  

Ashley declared my scenarios had too many transitions.  So Ashley proposed a scenario with more transitions.  Ashley kept insisting that her house be termed Penelope’s “home base.”  Hours cannibalized themselves.  I put the mediator’s business card in my wallet and left. 

After the mediation, Ashley requested exclusive use of the home.  Ashley was not following through with the offer to my lawyer for Hilton to help buy me out.  That got smothered in silence, if it ever really existed.  I spent five and a half brooding months in that coffin.  Ashley was going to take on the mortgage for the interim.  I had a week to evacuate. 

369

When I was packing up for the move I found Ashley’s notebook from when Ashley and I went to Engaged Encounter.  Separated from the front pages I found an unknown letter Ashley wrote to herself after we were working at Arthur Andersen maybe a year or more into our marriage. 

I looked at the information in that notebook and especially that letter.  It further cracked my heart to a point of realization of how Ashley approached our marriage

Ashley’s letter to her self from the Engaged Encounter notebook:

I decided to start this journal because I feel like I have no one to talk to, Ethan and I just fought again.  I am so depressed.  I have lost twenty pounds since the wedding.  I feel so trapped.  I can not talk to my mom, because she will just get mad at Ethan.  I wish I would have known.

I always felt sorry for him.  I thought it was his looks that made him lonely or his teeth.  I never knew how selfish and spoiled he was his whole life.  I guess all those years being alone made him that way.  I do not understand why he can not see that I just want to be happy.  I am not his enemy.  I do not want to admit that I made such a huge mistake.  What does it matter anyway?  I can not divorce him.  I can not kill myself. 

How do I have his children knowing that I could not put him before them?  I wish he could learn to take responsibility and be able to say, “I am sorry, period, no buts or becauses.  I do not know how much longer I can live like this.  I wish I would have known or at least had the strength to say no over a year ago.  I wish he would never have come to Europe.  I went there to leave him. 

I guess I did kind of know, but I really did not think I could do better.  I did not want to hurt him.  He can be so sweet.  I thought that at least he would treat me right.  He was not very handsome or special, but he was good and nice.  I just hope this was not the disease.  

I do not want to end up like Janelle, divorced at eighty pounds, depressed, lost and unsure of any other decision; afraid to be trapped with no way out, no one to talk to about it.  Why can’t he love me and treat me well? Hold me close and want to make love to me?  No more poems, kisses, tender words.

After reading that I collected my thoughts into a letter I emailed to Ashley that like all the rest went out without a response.

Ashley,

I was going through boxes of remnant memories of our former life.  I found your Engaged Encounter notebook along side my old poetry notebooks.  I sat on the bathroom floor in the garage and started reading it with an eerie perspective.  I felt knives in my chest stretching horrible space to retrofit an uninvited emotion.

The Engaged Encounter words ring out like harbingers.  Mixed amongst open pages alone in the back is a letter you wrote to yourself like a single-window journal inked.  If I had ever seen that page, my mind wanders the implications.  You wrote these words probably in 2002.  Here we are in 2009. 

Do you feel that if we had made love more often to wash away our conflicts rather than trying to talk about them that we could have had a healthier marriage?  Being a devil’s advocate did not make me a devil.  I sought the middle.

I get the feeling that you feel the way you saw your father loved your mother was through physical affection.  Your father would get upset and threaten to walk out.  The whole family stopped and tried to make “peace.”  Now you have walked out on me and there was no talking about it.  You feel Paris and July 14, 2001 were mistakes, you were so worried to conceal you lived on eggshells.

Your stress sat like this great white ostrich pointing her ass in my face.  You contemplated suicide.  You worried about our potential children ending up with some horrible taint from me.  You never once mention that you love me. 

I was not very attractive, nothing special, but at least I was nice.  You went to Europe to leave me, yet you mailed postcards initiating my overtures.  You write that you did not think you could do better. 

It appears to be a litany to rationalize your choice to stay and a testament to your insecurities.  I never wanted to put my pursuits in life before you or on a path that did not include you as the protagonist to the story of my days.

Maybe the truth is that you married me for my happiness and not your own.  I felt a component was missing inside you.  My pursuit to find the cog flooded you with guilt and pushed your deepest pain to the forefront.  My questions for concern forced you to run away and never acknowledge it with every part of your being. 

You wanted to make our marriage work for me and eventually for Penelope.  You were never really attracted to me.  I found you at a vulnerable time in your life where I made you feel better about your self.  You used me as esteem.  You tried to get me to hate you and break up with you because you felt guilty.  Your love like wine into vinegar, tastes like pity now.

Your internal turmoil and combative grief suppressed both the love you do feel for me and the resentment forcing you into this seesaw.  The resentment finally won.  All was settled with our house, no more hurricanes or building inspections.  Our life was you and I with another baby contemplated.  The only drama left was the one that wrestled in your belly on our wedding day.  

I am not sure how to view the love I have felt from you, because despite the insecurities I feel that you have about why our marriage exists.  The fact is it does still exist today.  There are too many real moments of love I have felt to dismiss.  

I know the little girl playing on the open land, with the dirt floor bathroom, with mixed emotions about growing up too fast, who felt that those choices disqualified her from ever being happy, who dated men she tried to fix, who she did not have to be vulnerable to, because she did not have to love them to be with them.  She just had to be their savior and in that she had a purpose.   I know her.

I know you know me too.  I know the words you wrote in the front part of that Engaged Encounter notebook.  I know the times you signed your notes with wifee, or told me I was the most wonderful man in the world that you were letting go of those pains. 

I grew up in a house where I rarely faced criticism.  I never had a long-term love before you.  I spent years using my teeth accident as a crutch to avoid physical and emotional intimacy.  I know I am stubborn.  I like to have my alone time. 

Please know there is nothing that I would rather do alone that I would not rather do with you.  I love our conversations, holding you and making-love.  I want you back, but we have needed to talk about that letter for so long.  We need to either get past those words or we will end up divorced. 

Marriage is a choice we make every day.  I still choose you, but I need honest.  Tell me the reasons and emotions.  Search your being if you still want to choose me enough to go to marriage counseling or talk.  It is each our choice. 

I am the man you married.  I am human imperfect and wanting to balance.  I understand your current path may convey a back track is impossible, but if nothing else when we meet, maybe we can at least talk about the whys in an honest fashion so we each can be in the best place of peace with this that we can be.  I’m sorry. 

Your husband, your lover, your friend, Ethan 

370

I wrote this letter to Ashley and left it in an envelope by Hilton’s door knob.  I emailed it to her, but Ashley did not respond.  After writing it I packed what I deemed pertinent to move.  I left Uncle Sidney’s pieces of sliver in two stacks of fifteen on a prayer book my mother had given Ashley on the coffee table. 

I surveyed the tomb.  Like a prolonged layover hotel room stay, I checked to make sure I was not forgetting essential socks underneath the bed skirt.  I called our wedding photographer’s studio and offered him the framed canvas.  Nine years since the snapshot, five months since the thousand dollars to buy; it was a piece of art to him, a maggot road-kill opossum to me.  I said, “Put it in your studio, the scene is beautiful.  You can’t see our faces anyway.  We’re staring at the altar.  Take it.”

I bought a push mower and Sisyphus-mauled the whole fucking uncut-for-months grass acre.  I watched circuses of arthropods and locusts scurry from the complacency of bush cover. I debated the spring pollen polluting the porch boards and decided to mop the slats with bleach before departure.  At least the surfaces would be glistening for Ashley’s return, even if I could not get my deposit back.  The labor was cathartic. 

371

I rented a 1970’s home from elderly Katrina refugees.  The couple rented out the house after the Alonzo’s moved back to St. Bernard Parish two years after the storm.  The wife was in a geriatric motor scooter, a veteran of lung cancer and a pack a day habit.  The husband was old-school Italian, determined not to waste a dime.

I invited Ashley over to tour our porch-house before I moved out.  I wanted Ashley to pick what she wanted to tentatively keep and for me to take.  We could settle up later in some month Ashley deemed acceptable.  Ashley did not want most of the furniture or linens, only the acquisitions generating from a Hingle blood line. 

I packed boxes of coagulated memories.  I tried to decide what to leave for Penelope to play with and what to set up for her at the rental.  I moved out in April on the day of the NFL Draft.  Tim and my father helped me lug the marble tops and frames into a U-Haul.  I left the porch house and have never been allowed back inside.

372

The rental was a three bedroom abode in a suburb of builder basic with my own lawn to cut and an electric-coil stove.  The house was dark, covered in shaded violet carpet and gray walls, but it was Valhalla.  My cell phone did not work anywhere but occasionally in the driveway.  I got the carpets cleaned.  The house bred a dank aroma. 

Penelope seemed happy, but rotated between utter confusion and a heart-wrenching desire to have her mother and her father in the same place.  I set up Penelope’s room and a playroom with Montessori book shelves.  We had music and Penelope’s little animals and for us to play pretend.  Penelope wanted to have what she had always known. 

The pressure piled on her tiny shoulders.  At times Penelope acted out.  I understood.  Penelope would release through her own tirades to orient.  I could only witness one facet.  Sometimes kisses on stubbed toes were marginal medicine.  Little girls sometimes just want to see that you notice their pain, their uncertainty.  A hug, a kiss, a testament of recognition is paramount. 

Leading up to court again, I was nervous.  Sleeping was difficult.  I avoided focusing on the uncontrollable aspects.  I was in a foreign cobweb stuck with unpacked boxes attempting to manufacture security.  I slept with a listening monitor for Penelope. 

I had this recurring dream, in which I awoke sweating in panic to the sound in my head of a home-invasion hell; the loudest skull-ratting echo of a gun shot resounding into my daughter’s face in a room down the hall that I could not stop.  The horror repeated every time I closed my eyes like a snow avalanche until reality registered.

My head was a mess.  I feared saying the wrong thing or performing the wrong act.  Ashley would take Penelope.  Logic was not applicable.  My greatest fear was that Penelope and I would be severed.  Some compartment of my brain was dedicated to that possibility.  It distracted me from work, sleep, or basic functional tasks.

373

I would make groceries at a local produce market called Berry Town and the Win Dixie.  I forgot my wallet in line, but did not realize it until checkout.  The guy in front of me had a Louisiana Purchase card checking out a parade of frozen pizzas, dog food, steak and Dr. Pepper.  (I had one of those for a week during the Katrina; never say never.)  I set aside my baggage and went to wherever home was.  I returned for my peaches.

374

I wanted knowns to sort the chaos.  Sometimes I wished there was a car accident instead.  Either of us could have died as false-heroes. 

The word widower sweats sympathy like sunscreen under the glare of lonely.  Every deceased spouse had a perfect marriage.  Solitary survivors are bequeathed lasagna in carpool lines bearing condolence post-it notes.  How could a man cope with such absence being dad, chef, maid, and paycheck?  His head might explode like a listeria cantaloupe.

The barter to be one of the living required a butter knife in the gut to spread mayo.  Coffin queens could go on shining to eclipse whoever followed.  Divorce bred opponents.  No one drops off casseroles to Vietnam vets wandering Arizona highways.

Ashley and I were like perverse mirrored-beings.  We were reverse language deciphered in not quite palindromes of star-crossed rats.  Sometimes I could not imagine how we were ever together as if we were a complete reciprocal of positive and negative energies.

We were in this war to both achieve the version of what we deemed best for Penelope’s life.  Death was potentially preferred than this spit, three meanings none of which fit: ejected saliva in my face, a pointed rod to impale my head, a narrow slip of land extending into this ocean to walk out as plank.  Ashley tried them all.  

375

Sometimes when I felt sorry for myself or burrowed in an irrational penchant for self-pity, when I felt like a man blabbering in the dark that no one ever took the time to fill in the blanks to understand; I thought of the continent of Africa.  I thought of misunderstood stereotyped Africa sketched in poverty and natural animals mating and killing each other on the savannah.  The stream of consciousness poured north in the Nile.

Africa is so vast and yet put in the thimble of the world’s perspective.  Who wants to see Africa in all her Rwandan glory, her Kenyan Eldoret churches, her Afrikaans speakers, her Northern deserts, her Freetown sense of celebrations?  Who wants to see behind a single man in his black skin outside a singular pocket-abiding scope?  Who wants to think about humans packing other humans as provisions to sail the Atlantic to a hell waiting on a foreign shore?

Over the years I marveled at Africa like my own New Orleans for her courage and her frailties.  Fela Kuti save me with your double-based groove and harem of wives.  Could you spare a kind one?  Lucky Dube, Bumaye, T.I.A.  Hooray, this is Africa.  K’naan says, “Somalia, I cried today.  I saw you falling face down and dragged away and when I told the world none would bat an eye.  Somalia since you know how to kill, you should learn to die.”

Africa is so immense and varied amongst its nations.  Defined in bullet-point under covered world-media line items of a savannah of mud huts, AK47’s, Negro-skin toiling, wallowing and every so often singing in a bird’s cage dodging Siafu ants.  Colonized, conquered, independent squalor, sporadic electrical connections cut off by the wrist under the ruthless pragmatism of a machete.  There is no Zamunda.

Rwanda, Chad, Darfur, Uganda, Kenyan elections, Somalia are hacking neighbors to death when paid some insignificant amount of money to commit heinous crimes.  Education is a life and death issue.  When people are not educated they are easily exploited and that is how we get violence and conflict.  The one educated kid is hope for an entire family; pressure.  Why even try when there is no money for a secondary school?  Why are you studying by lamp oil you can not even afford land?

Nigerian Pentecostal gospel pulpits vomiting torture sentence accusations on witch children to prompt confessions.  Helen Ukpabio, Liberty Gospel Church, machete, buried alive, acid splashed faces, rock-ankle drowning, kerosene, fire, and barbed wire obliterate the possessed covens of six-year olds.  Pandemic poverty and environmental contaminants pulsing in rivers from Nigerian delta oil externalities blamed on satanic witchcraft.  Profiteering exorcisms done in the name of Christ. 

KCPE scores are sent via texts like lottery tickets to orphaned refugee children staring mothers in the face praying for salvation.  Persecution of Jews, Auschwitz deaths, Frankl wrote his theories of meaning in suffering, of suffering well, Logothearapy.

Killing assumes its own life.  Killing gun violence multiplies like sperm-bullets fathering vengeance in the brothers and sons of the deceased.  Ethnic cleansing mops in machine-gun Clorox.  Bacterium bifurcates in factions in Kikuyus and Luos.  Odd sounding names of other countries humans to melanin-deprived ears.  Pirates and torpedoes sponsored by foreign investment firms.  Ignorance is the breeding ground for intolerance, misinformation, and violence.

Tunisian fruit vendor self-doused in gasoline and set himself afire.  He started a revolution in a ticking death, burned like a phoenix.  Reset the regime.  These oranges are no longer home-grown.  Sage Francis is asking, “I am at the fire, where are you?”  Spark in Sidi Bouzid, a place, Mohammed Bouazizi, a man, ethnic fruit can not be sold here.  Confiscated his scale, had to pay a bribe to get it back.  Palm to the face of a government woman, just wanted his scale back.  Gas station canister beer-can pop-top in the middle of the traffic; how do you expect me to make a living on ten dollars a day, a week?

One man made one illegal tender tsunami-slap to demonstrate an expression of anger.  I need for dignity.  Active in the uprising, spread to other towns, obliterate this lonely suffering of class in the interior like a liberating virus.  Government turned to police. Tunisian people do not have guns.  Government asked police to sniper-shot heads.  Facebook was only visual of reality, no film on the Danziger Bridge.

It is one thing for young people to over throw Middle Eastern despots.  It is another thing to form a working democracy.  ICC, if groups under their direct control can be shown to have committed these atrocities they will be prosecuted.  Who cares?  Repercussions, humans search for the ghost of justice to put war or evil in a Pandora tote-bag they can understand that makes sure “good” wins.  Someone is in prison now.  Someone has been held responsible.  The non-victim has a name tag.  The taxidermist is off unemployment.

Tunisian refugee boats sailing off for Italy like Cubans to Miami.  Boat parallel paths motor on for the simple justice of honest work.  Libyan, Italian treaties and investment fund tradeoffs, oil and arms.  People coming to find freedom where there is the fragrance of democracy.  “We will go there.  We hate it in Tunisia.  We want to be treated like humans not prisoners.”  The threat of a power-vacuum, Iraqi dictators absence creates chaos and the certain brutality for most and reward for the few.  Oh, we happy few. 

Recipe for Somalian piracy related to extreme poverty entwined with a weak or nonexistent government, readily available automatic weapons, no birth certificates, under-age machine-gun-toting sea-goers, busy maritime industry.  America side-jacking stragglers to Virginia courtrooms under century-old piracy laws on United States flagged vessels.  U.S. Navy Seals drop in on Iranian fishing boat to blast Somali pirates.

Who were the real pirates of the Caribbean?  Smut white-cap runner rouges on single-mast cutters hiding, killing, raping, and flushing the spoils on island whores and rum, are we all that different on the brink?  No Jack Sparrow, just look in the depths of the marrow.  Resolving all this is like trying to drink every drop of water from a fire hydrant.  There are no non-extortionist fire companies when Rome is burning.  Sierra Leone launched stuffed ships corralled by Negroid hands brimming with provisions packed from the Empire of Mali.

Ivory Coast Bakbo, fair election would not leave, French and U.N. Forces required to get him out.  Nelson Mandela’s ex-wife Winnie, opera in South Africa, mixed militancy even after Nelson was free, notorious Mandela United Football club abductions; what happens to a splintered soul, not wounded by individuals, but by the world?

Millions of parentless South African AIDS children are born into death sentence condemnation; not asking for pity, but understanding.  The cruelty of orcas toying with the free-breathing seals flipping them around before consumption and South African Great Whites get all the bad press.  Oh to have a Shamu uterus and milky tits to make friends from Orlando to San Diego.

Serra Leone tribunal courts on fires in Freetown to try marauders.  Generals funded through Charles Taylor to Foday Saankoh, and General Issa Sessay sits there to take account.  Weigh his remaining life for fifty-two years measure the preservation of peace against chopping off appendages to account for all the missing limbs and phantom fingers that can no longer cast purple-thumb ballots against a war. 

The special United Nations court is computing the human skeletons, bones strewn from a rebel cutlass, raped civilians, decapitated heads in a bag, rebels asking could be next carriers to laugh at the expressions on the dead facades.  The Rebel Nation United Front igniting civil war, the fear, the thugs invading ones own country through Liberia.  R.U.F. if you choose not to fight with them they will kill you, bush wives and yellow-jacket child trained-terrorists.  All this played out in contemplation on the Serra Leone Amputee Football Association field.

Gaddafi marches on his own pretending King Idris is a peasant with self-portrait Dinars buying LIA bomb downs and a NATO no-fly zone.  How long before the oil oozes up and on: Syria, Bahrain and the sshh?  Kingdom of Saudi’s, world would be at war and destined for hell if there were not so many Riyals to go around from this gel.

Japan is drowning in a nuclear ocean.  Retirees are barking unionized-defined death threats.  London riots with idle men burning boutiques.  Neapolitan lifetime employment booms Croatian shipyards.  Indonesian beach vacations.  Haiti is in hell.  Is California falling into the fucking Pacific next?  Mocando inked up Plaquemines and I look at ant hill feminine abandonment like happenstance.

I lounge here in this American splendor, South lands farmed by African slaves, bought and sold in Congo Square belting out empathy in Mardi Gras day Indian costumes for understood Diasporas genetically inherited in a drowned out Treme.  I have no fucking clue.  I dare contemplate feeling sorry for myself in this Cherokee town Nottoway quagmire.  Fuck.  It could always be worse!

376

I was a poet water buffalo wallowing in the mud hole of pre-trial anguish. 

This love is a ravaged entity, this carcass is carrion for the foxes and ravens.  You married me in the oyster-white freshwater shell of a woman outside your own bed, rejecting and ignoring my brackish pools to perish inside torturing yourself in masochistic Catholic self-flagellation to be this woman nailing her own hands to a cross.  You were a scared submissive-want-to-be, yearning to please her parents, imagining this suffer-thorn crown just to feel validated as an actress for what you deemed to be my happiness.

I turned the spotlights off.  I spoke to you at our porch-hugged table in naked candlelight.  I see in your reflecting eyes recognition that I have seen you all along.  Norma Desmond, the jig is up.

When have you ever felt beautiful?  Tickling your back in flowing fingers brisling wheat.  I am unequivocally now un-chosen. 

An oiled bird Gulf explosion comes from the south and a Mississippi River spring flood spillway from the north.  The fresh and salt waters are converging en masse mollusk-bedrooms.  The dispersants and contaminants are bleaching this will to talk.  This liquid metal coating is receding far into your oyster being.  Go and eviscerate the old pearl.  Digest her into a pebble.  Let the walruses and the carpenters sort out the rest.  Oil fires can not be put out with water.

Suicide that girl too afraid of what this town would think to tattoo our family name on her tickled skin.  Tight in your shell, blossomed for me a thousand Scheherazade nights, until you slit our belly and gush the blood over sterilized boards.   

I cry on this hardwood-raised slab floor to burrow inside a memory, badger-down, hermit-hide facing this first-level catacomb-mansion.  A non-loved trumped a window advertisement golden-magazine dream, my energy, and a daughter.  Escalation of commitment and this is what happens, no peace; enter my Invictus. 

Resolve, Oxi-Clean, Zout, chemical elixirs to get any stain out, but what do I do with this blood dried into the carpet?  Egg yolk canary-yellow bodied precursor perished in, smeared the skull and the guts glob in an adhesive add-in.  Candle wax iodine, acids no longer alkaline batteries dripped out the rim of a flashlight on a marble counter top, mildewed in Katrina bedroom mold spores. 

How do I extricate this chemistry in a periodic table of maladies?  Motor grease, urine, vomit with the tar and soot scored in a run out the door of the home I am moored.

377

On June 17, 2009, I received Ashley’s response to the discovery process through my attorney.  This was where each party trades a list of questions before court.  There really was only one question on each side that mattered.  What custody do you see fit and why is that best for Penelope.  Here is what we each wrote. 

Interrogatory No. 7.- State with specificity the reasons you believe you should have 50/50 physical custody of your child

(Ethan’s Response)

I believe fifty-fifty custody is what is best for Penelope.  Although I want to be with Penelope as much as possible I know that Penelope needs both of her parents to support her as the pillars of her childhood.  If it were up to me, those pillars would support the foundation of who she is becoming, under one roof, but that is not up to me.  Ashley made the choice to abandon our family.  Penelope needs me in her life. 

There are many things that I can teach Penelope that her mother can not and vice versa.  I am a patient and calm father.  I am creative and maintain a child-like exuberance to meld Penelope’s imagination and my own into inventive and creative games of pretend where we create characters and superheroes, kings and queens, pandas and kangaroos or just father and daughter.  Ashley is a good mother, but I have seen her patience exhausted at the expense of Penelope where Ashley has sought out my level-headed demeanor.  The fact is Penelope has two good parents and she deserves and needs us both in substantial measure.

Penelope is the most important person in my life.  I am willing to live in a community where just about everything I see reminds me of Ashley, just to structure my life around Penelope.  I want to still fix Penelope breakfast and eat with her every morning.  I want to drive Penelope to school and sing the song I made up when she was one and a half and have sung to her every school day.  I miss fixing Penelope dinner and playing pretend with her little animal figures.  I miss hugging her good night. 

I have been with Penelope since her conception.  I did not leave her side for one second when she was born in the hospital.  I held her tiny hand as she laid in the warmer and brought her back to her mother and me as soon as it was permissible.  Penelope and I bonded from the start.  I got up with Penelope every other night as was Ashley and I’s parenting plan when she was an infant.  I changed Penelope’s diapers and fed her.  I have shown Penelope a true father’s love.

In Penelope’s life as a four and a half year old, I show her my love every time I am with her.  I reassure her with hugs and kind words.  I prepare her fresh home cooked meals.  It is very rare that we eat out.  I have created a comfortable, safe, educational, and loving environment. 

We read books together, make art projects, play pretend, and care for her fish and plant.  We play educational games on the computer.  I am helping Penelope to learn how to read.  I take her to the library every Tuesday.  We read them together and I give her one word a page to read on her own.  Penelope is doing great.

This is our family’s life.  This is a major and significant part of Penelope’s life that should not be mitigated to Ashley’s determined restriction to eight days a month.  This time, this life we have should be held in equal importance to the world Ashley exposes Penelope to when they are together.

I am Penelope’s father.  I have stood up throughout Penelope’s life for our relationship.  I have the emotional, physical, and monetary capacity to support Penelope.  I did not abandon my marriage.  Ashley chose to leave our family on December 15, 2008, without provocation or prior warning. 

I have been forced to accept Ashley’s decision, but I should not have to sacrifice my relationship with my daughter because of it.  I believe Ashley has been preoccupied with being labeled the domiciliary parent and having her home be labeled Penelope’s “home base” in order to reduce the amount of guilt she feels over carrying out her decision to abandon our family. 

Ashley knows and has expressed to me on many occasions her belief that I am a good father.  Ashley is now trying to muster up questions about my character as a husband and a father in a court of law and her only straw she can even attempt to pull is over a couple of hobbies.  While Ashley has spent all this effort at grasping at straws, I have maintained my civility and good will because I believe that is what is best for Penelope.  I will continue to live my life as a man and as a father with that intent. That is why I believe I should have fifty-fifty physical custody of our child.   

Continue to Chapter 12 part 2