I wrote this in the late part of 1996. My wife of six years and I were in the process of divorce, and I was trying to come to terms with my loss. There were several other poems written during this time frame; Wait, and Create, the best of them.
Part I:
Part II:
Part III:
Part IV:
Those were the directions I wrote to myself the same day I wrote of my frustrations. It has only been within the last three or four months that part 4 has made any sense. Until now, Flail has just been a very deep poem I still didn�t understand, but now I do. Wait and Create make more sense now too.
Interesting how the title of this poem actually brought about its creation. I remember I had just gotten online and found a chat website where I had a few friends. Among them, someone who styled himself Rage Against The Machine. He said he was the drummer for a new group that was known by the same name he used. In my chats with him, I found him to be very intelligent and also very dissatisfied with society as a whole. Society to him was a perverse form of punishment for the common man, yet the way to change it was just as appalling to him as the problem itself.
My mind twisted his band�s name just a bit. The name is the same, at least the spirit of it is. To me flailing means to strike out with little or no control. In essence, to rage� and in my case, the machine was just myself and the way I look out at life.
A long time ago I bought into something someone said to me. Bought it, brought it home, hung it on the wall and made it my creed. Not literally, but I might as well have. What I bought was a low self image, and the belief that I was not worthy of love, or happiness, and worst of all, that there was nothing I could do to change those facts. As far as I was concerned I would always be lonely and always unloved� therefore always miserable. Rage is a very small word for what I felt in my believed helplessness, a very small word.
The human brain is incredibly complex. I thank God for the way mine works. Even when I don�t understand things, my subconscious does. My poetry is in many ways, a complicated carrier of messages for me from me. Flail Against The Machine, started out a poem to express how helpless I felt in my misery, but anyone who reads can see, the last part are instructions for steering the beast once my mind set is ready.
I remember very clearly where I was when the ideas in my head finally formed up and became line after line of intensity. I was driving to work. My barely one year old twins, in the back seat sleeping, and I was on the longest bridge in Arkansas. Of course being a bridge, there was no place to pull over, so I kept the flood of words back as well as I could and repeated the first three lines over and over till I got to the end and could pull over. There on the side of State Highway 109 South in Logan County, Arkansas, I wrote the words that expressed how I felt about all the miserable things happening in my life.
I was flailing against the injustice I found in my life, at the sheer misery I felt as my family fell apart, and the sand castle I had given my soul for, washed away in the sea of tears I cried as it crumbled. Through all of that, I had one friend, one person I really leaned on. One friend always ready with a hug or a shoulder on which to cry� and just like a wounded soldier I thought I loved her. My heart sure wanted to love someone. Why not her? My subconscious knew why. It just took me a while to figure it out
More injustice. I am a gentle giant. Though not a huge giant, I am pretty big to most folks. About 6�4� and around 220#, I am not a small man. Yet I was raised to be kind and gentle in my dealings with people, to treat others as I would be treated, and to have and show compassion for those around me less fortunate than I. To be aggressive is an unknown behavior for me, yet I was about to undergo a medical treatment that had as a side effect, aggressiveness. Not just violent tendencies either but aggressive sexuality too. I felt myself becoming a predator, and it was more than foreign to me, I was both frightened and ashamed, and so helpless to change it.
Rage� brought on by helplessness. I was beating myself to a pulp inside. Along with low self esteem comes guilt for things not my fault. Along with intelligence came certain knowledge that what I was doing to myself was wrong. but I couldn�t figure out how to stop it. Helpless to stop my destruction at my own hands, and enraged at how I lied to myself that time would fix it all, I was beating at the excuses I used to lie to myself without ever facing the real problem inside� and slipping inexorably into a pit of despair from which escape would be all but impossible. But my subconscious was at work on the solution, and I wrote out the travel directions before I fell all the way into despair.
I couldn�t heal until I got past the anger at myself, until I stopped beating myself up and started facing the problems inside. First order of business was to tear down those rules and laws of worthlessness I had lived by for so long. Second was to stop fighting myself but instead work with my mind and redirect my energies towards course corrections so I could pull out of the nose dive I was involved in. Then find someone to love, and love her forever.
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