Profane Men by Rex Miller

Author:Rex Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-05-11T17:44:21+00:00

Chapter 17

“Here I sit, broken-hearted — ”

— unfinished latrine graffiti

I look straight ahead without seeing. I know if I had the eyes I could see the jungle and Charlie coming, the quarter moon that’s out there somewhere hiding behind the blackness, fields, tree lines, horizon, river, and beyond. Somewhere out there is the “Demilitarized” Zone and KILL Outlaw Radio, and North Vietnam and the world. I look up at the stars and realize all those planets are orbiting around up there, and beyond them is more of the same, and beyond that, out into a space that pitiful man couldn’t begin to fathom. How can it be that of all those stars and suns and moons and galaxies and solar systems that we’re the only place where there is a recognizable life form? God! Life should be sacred. Human life should be revered. It is the ultimate cosmic miracle. Instead, what do we want to do? We want to kill it. Is that fucked up or what?

I see it all so clearly through my black beauty sleep, through my Dexamil night eyes. And now my night vision has come, and I can see every tree, every rib on every leaf, each blade of grass, every twig, stone, clod of earth, as clearly as if my eyes were twin starlight scopes. I see the beads of moisture in the air, the molecules, the atoms. My eyes pierce the black night like superlasers, invisible headlight high beams slashing out at the dark.

Before the light there was only darkness. The night was black, a near total absence of light prevailed. That is to say, an achromatic object color of minimal lightness content, dig it, which is characteristically perceived to neither transmit, absorb, retain, nor reflect what you call your basic light, was visible to the — you’ll pardon the expression — naked eye.

On an ambush or deep in Charlie country on a night LP, I do my night vision trick. It is more than uppers and Jack Daniels. The opaque contractile diaphragm, pardon me girls, perforated by the pupils and forming that which is the colored portion of the eye, admits a visual perception to the sensory membranes that pick up and receive the image formed by the eyeball’s lenses, and they transmit those suckers along the optic nerve to the Vision Center of the brain. Fortunately, as luck would have it, the Vision Center was having a sale and I was able to cop a pair of soft contact lenses for only $89.95. Now, if only we’ll just have some soft contact.

I suddenly realize that in my oneness with the night I have amazingly remembered all the words to “Black Is Black” by Los Bravos, the ever popular “Paint It Black,” and all the words to a poem by Vachel Lindsay that begins “Fat black bucks in a wine barrel room,” and I will blackball any black-hearted blackmailer who blacklists Black Jack on my black market blackboard made in Black Rock.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.