[Newspoetry] 2/15/03 Protest 1000 Words Draft 3 for newspoetry

[William Gillespie]

Technical note: When you compose a document in Word and then paste it into
the body of an email message in pine, the apostrophes make it freak out
and jump back to the beginning. You can avoid this problem by saving the
Word file as a text file, closing it, and then reopening the text file
and copying and pasting. So here is a remix of the message I just sent, in
the form in which it originally appeared when I pasted it into an email.
In the spirit of experimental poetry.

.

t believe anybody could be that cruelly oblivious but obviously some
people can be or else two million of us, in places like Honolulu, Austin,
and San Diego, would not have to be enduring the worst blizzard of the
worst winter of recent years in order to wave our icecovered signs at
motorists and smile with lips drained of all sensation. At the end of the
line I found two brave souls to greet the oncoming traffic and beyond
them camerapeople filming us, one for Channel 15, one for Michael Moore
(so I overheard him claim). Then the cars. Some honked. Some refused to
look. At least one more shouted epithets endorsing Kill Em All or
violence even more concise and widescale than the atrocities our leaders
are proposing. We had brought cookies which some protestors were actually
eager to eat even if it meant momentarily exposing their faces to
frostbite. Back in the car, as we went through the ritual of cranking up
the engine and defrosters, almost a superstitious rite as they were all
but ineffective, considering which route home might be least dangerous, I
observe in the rear view mirror that my face has become reflective,
plastered with a thin layer of glistening ice. The drive back was epic,
even a lame REO Speedwagon tune on the radio seemed sung by angels. I did
not like the sensation in my feet when I regained sensation in my feet.
Afterward I collapsed into a feverish lull from which not even cocoa
could quite revive me. And yet I know it was only a trip to the mall and
I suffered not at all, not of thirst, not in the desert, not of bombing
or disease, not like the children splashing in the sewage, the parade of
dying citizens, or the Baghdad intellectuals forced to trade their books
for black market water I saw in the photograph which for some reason
remains as vivid in my mind as the moment I was looking at it. Despite
everything the people of Iraq have suffered for our soundbites,
sanctions, and bombs, it is being forced to barter treasured books,
pieces of ones mind, invaluable and yet probably, on the black market,
nearly worthless, that gives me a window on suffering worse than any I
can imagine. Did we stop the war yet?
t
we shorten that to NO WAR, or, if one really thinks war might someday
be necessary, perhaps NO BUSH WAR?). After one impressive blast of wind
would come another, worse, for emphasis. TEACH A CULTURE OF PEACE (I like
that one). I was ascending a rise to the front of the line, marching
through deep snow behind the line of people, who stood beside a curb none
could see. While cars streamed past. ATTACK IRAQ? NO (unequivocal). As I
went higher above the highway the wind got noticeably more intense until
I had passed beyond pain into the serene onset of hypothermia. A car
moved by and a teenaged man leaned out the door and shouted bt
Kill Em All!bgoing  I assumed he was being funny, because not even Dick
Cheney is suggesting we Kill Em All, and anyway I have basically had a
life sheltered from death and violence and just canbto attend, but at
least one of us was confused enough that we all
ended up going. So approaching the intersection of the protest, as all
139 (by one count) of us must have, we expected, perhaps even hoped, to
see no one there. In the whiteness with the traffic going two ways on a
street with no visible center line a shadowy figure crossed the street as
if an apparition. Then a few more. One with a rectangular sign,
silhouetted against the swirling ice, moving through clouds of snow as if
lost. And then, and then, emerging like a hallucination from the
blankness, a line of us stretching wayback. Lots of people with signs and
kids and dogs and all manner of scarves gloves hats and facemasks,
smiling grimaces of frozen pain beneath inflamed bloodred cheeks. We
passed through two drifts we thought denoted an entryway into a
parkinglot, where we slid into a drift in what we thought might be a
parking space. Outside the car, the cold was immediately unendurable. A
penetrating wind ballooned our parkas, knocked us sliding on the ice, and
savagely tried to wrest everything from our grip especially the windsails
of protest signs. The ice was ideal for taking a running slide for fun,
but the serious blistering fierceness of the windstorm made recreation
inconceivable. Well, this was the day, of citywide, statewide,
countrywide, worldwide protest, and six of us out of two million
protestors picked our way across the wild blasted tundra of the Lowes
parking lot as a gale reduced everything to monosyllables until our very
lips were numb and we could only mumble in the slow measured accents of
patients undergoing heavy anesthesia. I walked from one end of the line
to the other, what seemed like a few blocks. I saw people I thought I
recognized but most peered at me like anonymous hitmen from skimasks
sunglasses hoods stocking caps shawls and scarves. Despite this, the mood
was euphoric. Giddy even. We were drunk with pain and laughing through
our endorphins as serious weather conditions made extremities burn, ache,
and go numb, as the freezing rain saturated and penetrated every garment,
and was taken by a stiff wind up every crevice of clothing. NO IRAQ WAR
(couldnbs entire mind and then are gone leaving no memory or consequence.
One
person almost drove through an intersection in front of me, they were so
intently perusing oncoming traffic from the other direction. There is no
braking action in these conditions, only more or less controlled slides.
Actually hitting the brakes could mean relinquishing the vector
altogether, your best option if in trouble is to use the brake sparingly
while dropping the car into second and letting the drag of the engine
slow the wheels down. If you skid, turn the steering wheel in the
direction the rear wheels are going. Be prepared to immediately repeat
this in the opposite direction: often your only course of control will be
to go back and forth like a pendulum while the car loses momentum and
hopefully passes over an area of the road with friction to reinstate
velocity in the direction of the tires. I missed the turnoff from
Springfield onto Prospect because, waiting at the intersection, when the
light turned green, I started to drive and the car barely moved. I
upshifted and the speedometer read fifteen while the car slid forward at
about two as the wheels simply spun and encountered no resistance from
the icy road. I had not encountered a driving surface quite like this and
rapidly tried to crunch a decision on whether a lower or higher gear was
more appropriate, and moved through the intersection at such a slow pace,
while beneath me my wheels ridiculously spun as if I were trying to
escape police, that the light had turned red again before I made it to
the other side. Not wanting to bother with an unplowed side street, I
continued to Mattis, and came back East via University. Would there be
protestors there? Because believe me we had dwelled on the thought of not
attending at such length that each of us must have at one time been
convinced we werenbs
car is light, low slung, and has a fully manual transmission, so the
action was more like iceskating than rolling. A gentle touch it took, but
too much gentleness would leave one stranded. Momentum, balance, poise,
motion, and a studious regard for all oncoming or nearby traffic. Losing
control in the open street might mean spinning and coming to rest in a
drift, at worst bumping in to a telephone pole or streetlamp. But losing
control in the presence of other vehicles could mean collision, leaving
the vehicle, rain and painful conversations, police, insurance, bills, and
terrible dramas that lead nowhere, occupy oneb side window and take a
quick appraisal of oncoming traffic from that
direction, squinting against the freezing rain, before rolling it up
again. If we backed out into the white area where the street was without
colliding with another vehicle that was only because it was Saturday and
few people were foolish enough to be driving that day. Then we were
moving mostly forward into a tunnel of white with curbs somewhere and
houses on either side. Meadowbs
car, pushing away snow and using a scraper tool to make areas of the
windows transparent, though the ice continued to fall all around and over
us. Once inside we fired the engine and let it warm, carefully adjusting
every defrosting mechanism, all of which roared vainly against the
accumulation of precipitation. Windshield wipers went through their
motions bearing clumps of ice. We looked forward through the condensation
of our breath in a mist on the inner windshield, glass, and an archeology
of ice, some clear and wavy, some of it white and frosty, as wet and dry
snowflakes continued to thump and tick outside the vehicle. Backing out of
the driveway was strictly guesswork, the passenger side window would not
roll down. We could only roll down the driversb After what has been since
Christmas Eve a harsh winter today
was especially fierce. For two days we anticipated the ice storm like a
rumored faroff apocalypse, a blizzard that continues to rage quietly
outside with no end in sight. At about one PM we began to shave the ice
off the white enameled shape that contained Meadowb