Bucket of Hope Could be in the Cards
By Willie Kiernan
FingerLakes1.com Contributing Columnist
Monday, June 29, 2009
Everybody wants a bucket of hope, an anonymous gesture on their front porch as down payment for a lonely if not meaningless life to be lived before an ultimate and ensuing death. I may be half a century late and short on my mortgage, car payment and attention span, but here goes.
I am hopelessly in love, thoughtlessly in tune, cantankerously adrift, spontaneously awry and flamboyantly deranged. 
I simultaneously climb and fall from various precipices, some created, some imagined, but I'll probably never play baseball again.
There is a tapeworm in my left leg and a hollow casket of booze in my right. My tongue is blanketed and my eyes are sheeted. There is a left-handed raincoat on the right side of my stomach and an empty umbrella stand collecting cholesterol in my arteries. My liver resembles an inkblot buried in the ruins of some medieval asylum. My aches and pains are fighting a family feud while my hemorrhoids and my kidney stones are not on speaking terms. Free range State Fair variety roosters fall dead at my feet and I have to kick them with my numbed-out toes spaced with lit firecrackers.
I used to pray to God nightly when I was a child, but now he prays to me to get the job done. My concept of divinity changes daily like a blog post while my prayers are juggled randomly, too naked for me too look at, though I can't help but see. I worship Mother Nature like an urchin in an oven playing with matches yet the voices in my head speak a language yet to be. There's an apple eating a worm eating an apple eating a worm, and I'm on the outside looking in looking out. I get cold; I get hot, even though there's a house around me, and these clothes, and this flesh and these bones fated for dust.
The walls are spinning as I cling to the ceiling and the floor calls me like a nightmare bathroom run. I can't break the window with a colored paper Louisville Slugger and the firemen are laughing like I'm sliding short of home. Cavorting in the shadows, all my blatant whispers become heroes; all my heroes become just jargon and all my jargon becomes nonsense and all the nonsense becomes my clarity and my clarity can only be whispered as it cavorts back into the shadows.
The pedestals on the patio are crawling with snakes that look like diseased and spreading ivy and the stained glass windows are clear except for the breath prints of dead agnostic monks. The couch coughs up chicken bones as the carpet does the wave. I'm slipping from my stool like saliva on a windshield when the phone rings my reverie to sleep. It's a machine on the other end, wants me to hold while it drops the needle on a Dylan instrumental, Talking WWIII Blues played with harpsichord, bassoon and fiddlesticks.
A windmill stops in Denmark, an egg yolk breaks in Cleveland, a rainbow falls on hard times as a fire somewhere goes out. But before going out, the fire smiles in the mirror, shifts the shoulders, straightens the belt buckle, a little spittle on the cowlick and inventories the cash on hand. Make a wish and blow it out, a symbol that life never stops, it just gets blown out, one birthday cake at a time.
The whole world is dancing, drinking, quitting, working, crying, cursing, laughing, howling, as the last of the confetti falls to the drumbeat of the unsung. Glory fitting raptures wrapped in orgiastic swagger march bumper to bumper onward into the valley of the forgotten while restless but untrue rebels wave in silence behind their lies and their false idols.
The history train of longing never stops but is ever filling as it traverses the countryside dodging the mythical outlaw savior who carries a crucifix like a gun. In a scratchy, sleepless night your imagination wanders and you think you hear a whistle blowing but it's just your wheezing narcotic lungs.
They're loading up the platforms and they're lining up the ducks. Mattresses are playing catch with ricochets and bayonets are being wiped clean. Army's beating Navy, but they have to kick from the two with their one-legged landmine hunter punter and static's the best song on the radio these days.
My father went to Vegas before he went to heaven, but my mother is at the garage sale in the sky every single day. She would buy anything for a quarter, a nickel for a quarter; drop it in the slot, another day away. I miss them like two bowling balls hanging from my earlobes. You'd think I'd feel much lighter, but my head hangs anyway.
There's a party around the corner playing low-card-in-the-hole poker and I'd like to ante up but go figure, I'm still on the phone on hold. Sure, I can hang up before the cows come home, before the thirteenth day of never, before pigs sprout wings, before the glaciers melt or before a fist comes through the line. But maybe, just maybe, someone died and wants to leave me the Willie Mays cards I used to have, the ones I flipped, scaled and traded for, the ones my brother sold at the flea market for five bucks a shoebox full.
You see, there's always hope. Even if it's as slim as a baseball card, it's always there. And if I can have it, you can have it. Now go out to your front porch and grab all that hope and fill your pockets and your head and your heart until you can't fill them anymore. Share it all with your family, with your loved ones. And then you can kick the bucket. It'll land on someone else's porch, sort of like an anonymous gesture.
Willie Kiernan lives in Upstate New York and is a freelance writer,
web editor
for cazindependent.com and the author of “Not Your Father’s Shorts Vol. 1.”
