Writing poetry and keeping a journal had served as good therapy for more than a decade. Both would serve me well for a couple more years before I stopped writing either and segued to writing first an autobiography and then several autobiographical novels before I finally moved to Denver in 1991. It was only then and there that I began to conceive of the Rainbow Arc of Fire series and the several characters that I came to create and admire.
The following lengthy poem was certainly yet another attempt to come to grips with what had happened to me and how I would come to deal with it as I tried to adjust to being a civilian and struggling to work full time at one job while teaching two to five evenings a week and sometimes on Saturdays, to make ends meet. My new job at Kaman paid me only $13,500 per year while my previous Air Force salary had been over $17,000. I had barely retained my home after I left the service. Now I would have to work at two jobs, working many additional hours beyond a 40-hour week, and even take in roommates, to keep my home and my sanity in the aftermath.
Minorities
On a morning road
topping a hill to the present,
I see my past driven to distance,
poised over the mirror looking down.
Fate makes mistakes
when men conspire.
Like some wired disaster,
controlled and cascading
through my battered lives, I retreated.
Never one so seized
by regulations routinely permitted
to sever my career from me.
How can we inspire a man's honesty,
his sincerity, to catch him indecent?
All flesh is corrupt when we look without law,
and they looked far too long.
Our time only appears matured
when scoundrels are practiced with the past,
exposing those of us too different for now.
I remember...
Like some medieval monk,
I made pilgrimage to the machines underground.
Like penance I served for years,
to forge honor like armor on knights.
Does not one's purity, one's filial devotion,
cleanse one before any king?
My ratings, my location, my awards
protected neither my gallantry nor me.
Even brave men weep after capture
when fitted for life in chains.
In Warwick dungeon, I saw a smaller pit
within that larger pit, dug to the side.
In it they would fit a man to completely forget.
Sometimes I, too, felt so confined.
As my military records are now defined,
no one will ever look,
for a chivalric code seals and deflects.
But never were we enemies;
and war is too wide an excuse.
So how do you justify my imprisonment,
the limiting of my ability and my spirit?
I suspect, like Salem, like Hollywood, like Europe,
we must impermanently maim
one minority or another,
to struggle again as other names,
to mutilate anew.
This is our renewal
of permanent persecution,
permitted and powered by authority.
Our society does not damn a heretic publicly--
fire being an unfavorable means,
crucifixion too lengthy,
and committees too corrupt.
So I named no names.
My private testimony only turned against the betrayer.
Silence was my conspiracy, so we too betray.
But times will never be too different
for emotionally similar beings.
Events still grant us one opportunity.
Yet today's tormentors torture us in community
when they no longer cleave people so physically.
Many of us are permanently bribed and ill-advised
simply to slip out that side escape--
exiled to disguised disgrace.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The lies come to this:
if we don't tell,
they won't.
The following lengthy poem was certainly yet another attempt to come to grips with what had happened to me and how I would come to deal with it as I tried to adjust to being a civilian and struggling to work full time at one job while teaching two to five evenings a week and sometimes on Saturdays, to make ends meet. My new job at Kaman paid me only $13,500 per year while my previous Air Force salary had been over $17,000. I had barely retained my home after I left the service. Now I would have to work at two jobs, working many additional hours beyond a 40-hour week, and even take in roommates, to keep my home and my sanity in the aftermath.
Minorities
On a morning road
topping a hill to the present,
I see my past driven to distance,
poised over the mirror looking down.
Fate makes mistakes
when men conspire.
Like some wired disaster,
controlled and cascading
through my battered lives, I retreated.
Never one so seized
by regulations routinely permitted
to sever my career from me.
How can we inspire a man's honesty,
his sincerity, to catch him indecent?
All flesh is corrupt when we look without law,
and they looked far too long.
Our time only appears matured
when scoundrels are practiced with the past,
exposing those of us too different for now.
I remember...
Like some medieval monk,
I made pilgrimage to the machines underground.
Like penance I served for years,
to forge honor like armor on knights.
Does not one's purity, one's filial devotion,
cleanse one before any king?
My ratings, my location, my awards
protected neither my gallantry nor me.
Even brave men weep after capture
when fitted for life in chains.
In Warwick dungeon, I saw a smaller pit
within that larger pit, dug to the side.
In it they would fit a man to completely forget.
Sometimes I, too, felt so confined.
As my military records are now defined,
no one will ever look,
for a chivalric code seals and deflects.
But never were we enemies;
and war is too wide an excuse.
So how do you justify my imprisonment,
the limiting of my ability and my spirit?
I suspect, like Salem, like Hollywood, like Europe,
we must impermanently maim
one minority or another,
to struggle again as other names,
to mutilate anew.
This is our renewal
of permanent persecution,
permitted and powered by authority.
Our society does not damn a heretic publicly--
fire being an unfavorable means,
crucifixion too lengthy,
and committees too corrupt.
So I named no names.
My private testimony only turned against the betrayer.
Silence was my conspiracy, so we too betray.
But times will never be too different
for emotionally similar beings.
Events still grant us one opportunity.
Yet today's tormentors torture us in community
when they no longer cleave people so physically.
Many of us are permanently bribed and ill-advised
simply to slip out that side escape--
exiled to disguised disgrace.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The lies come to this:
if we don't tell,
they won't.
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