Homecoming For Hernando

LYONS, CO - When he returned home from Baghdad, he was amazed and appalled at how everything had changed in such a short time. Behind their caring, no one seemed aware. Everyone seemed accustomed to the bustle, oblivion, and fog of their everyday lives.

Went searching for familiar connections through old friends and history teachers, their lives sanitized, insulated and encapsulated cocoons of apathy. The sky had long since fallen on ground zero, the ashes run to storm sewer then out to hostile sea; the line blurred and fragmented between friend and foe; paved streets of greed, graft, and gratuitous corruption in the city of righteous lights.

No sign or recognition behind those masks. Alone and isolated in volcanic percolation, worn of despised trepidation and fictitious smiles. They were a busy people, a galaxy away from the sorrow they'd sown, a tragedy spawned, his confused role of tormented incarnate evil wrestled into a corner, stuffed into a crevice, convinced it was good.

Try to penetrate the mummified warrior's world, his unfortunate survivor's sheath of anesthetized guilt. No light nor hope in those distant hollow eyes of abbreviated and aborted dreams. Their phrases awkward and inane, their praise muffled and incoherent, their laughter hideous and repugnant, their joy obscene.

They had attended his convoluted drama on scalped tickets, dismissing their compromised values with incongruencies, faulty logic and repressed truth. They had reconciled his steely stare and cold, shiny, automated metallic claws for hands.

They grew accustomed to the cool chrome wheels guiding him down the parade route and 50-yard line at halftime. They cheered, whistled, and waved as he sat in an embarrassed and cheated lava lump of humiliated despair, knowing what he represented, and in the end, they didn't want to be reminded. They didn't want him around at all.


- end