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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