by Eric Freeze
I wish I could be
A navy seal—just the way I imagine it—
Undisciplined, the maverick.
where the bullets and shrapnel
Pass by harmlessly like
Folds in the air.
Near the end of my life,
My meaty pockets would hold an
Assortment of adventures:
Chasing a mig through a
Tawny desert at dawn,
Splashing down a foreign canyon in
An inflatable dinghy
Or rescuing a fatale POW
With size double D breasts and
A penchant for leather.
I don’t know how many times
I would escape with just
The long sinews of my arms
Or how many times I would find
That I had been betrayed by
What I hope to know.
It’s like I’m in one of
Woody Allen’s anticapitalist dramas—
Bananas—a shaky parody of what is to some
Real life.
It’s only near the end that I realize
I’m not any of the characters with
Guns and authority, but
The man with a harp in the closets,
Playing his empty notes
Until someone hears them,
Paints my words into corners
Of the screen, and hides them under
The dead extra with bloody gauze in his mouth.
When the credits roll,
I’m the sour memory of a dying wound,
The remnants of truth in fantasy
Turned into a malaise of
Forgotten identity.
Eric Freeze graduated in April from BYU’s MA program in English. His future plans include teaching a French Cinema course in France this summer and pursuing Creative Writing Ph.D. at Ohio University in the fall. He thinks that everything ever written should be embarrassing in some way, which is why his family wants him to quit writing and become something respectable, like a lawyer.