“No. I should be able to sit next to the Prince,” I have said never. “Yes. I could use a headline,” I aspire to say. But before I give up my seat and beg for attention I would like to disclose that I have more to say about the metamorphosis from delight into madness that I endured in the fall and winter of 1995.
I heard somewhere that there was a huge spike in the number of suicides in 1995. I am fortunate enough to say I was a clip shy of hurting myself or others during my transition from being just an average prick into a big shot on the Haldol shuffle floor.
Something was definitely making the wind blow strangely during that time, whether it was at one’s back for those who needed a nudge or straight down the throat of those who couldn’t come up for air when air was all they could hold.
Either way, in my world, people were moving way too fast against the wind, which was so unpredictable in its direction and where it was coming from that there was no solace in feeling, hearing or seeing it. My only hope was giving the wind a taste and force feeding it to myself as I went head first into the swells of it, spitting poetry all the while, because I figured that wind and words could not hurt me.
I used to write poems and memorize them so if a big gust came and blew my words away I would still have them as protection against the four winds.
The first wind is the loneliest because it is only moving in one direction so it’s easy for me to square up and muster a line or two in self-defense, being the only one battling something that can’t fight back.
When the second wind blows I turn my head to greet it with the rhythm and rhyme of a genius wearing an animal onesie while giving a speech to a group of third graders on Mars. It’s easy to watch, impossible to hear and most likely not going to happen in our lifetime.
So the third wind comes quickly on the heels of a mock poem, adding to the intensity of having to go up against the only force of nature that doesn’t have any density to it. So with the third wind I begin the schizophrenic process of blurting and clanging, hurting and banging my head against an invisible wall closing in on me.
The fourth wind comes in like the first line of this post. You don’t know where it’s coming from but I do. I have never been in a room with only three walls and so I trust that the wind doesn’t blow inside four walls and that my head is more stable than the forces of improbability that is the wind. When I waver before the four winds it is because there is something missing in this dimension. That the motion of the ocean is as real as the four winds and the four winds as natural as the three dimensions, so is the depth of my poetry, so is the width of my words, so is the height of this story.
Francis Erich McElroy 