The
Images of Lethal Desire by Todd Moore
When I was a kid there was a ratty
hotel down by the railroad tracks that had a whore house in it just like the one where I lived. And, you could smell that
joint a block away. It gave off an odor of old rags burning, urine, rotting garbage, soiled clothes, and shit. But, it really
didn’t disgust me because I had gotten used to it from where I lived.
What drew me to this fleabag hotel
was the antique gun store right next to it and from what I’d been told, was managed by the owner of the hotel. This
was back in the 50’s when old guns were plentiful and this guy had the window of the store loaded with six guns, flintlock
pistols and rifles, blunderbusses, Kentucky rifles, derringers, boot pistols. He had practically every kind of old firearm
I could think of Once, when I tried to go inside and look around, he stood at the door and said, “No kids allowed.”
So, I’d press my nose against
the window and stare. I’ve always liked weapons. They appeal to my dark
side. I used to carry a small hunting knife tucked up my coat sleeve. And,
whenever I could get my hands on one, I’ve carried switchblades. This was when I
was a kid and regularly prowled bad neighborhoods.
But I never forgot that old gun store
and the sight of all those old and exotic firearms. And, this guy had blades as well. Mostly, he carried swords, though I
do recall that he also had big, evil looking bowie knives displayed against wooden boards. I especially liked the blades.
I’d press my nose to the glass, and the guy would get all pissed off and thump on the window for me to get back. Sometimes,
he’d even flip me off and I was always tempted to flip him back but then if I did that I was afraid I’d be 86’d
from staring at the guns so I pretended not to see him do that.
And, the one thing I wanted to do was
look at those guns. Because there was something about guns that had the mystery of death about them and I wanted to know more
about death and my father never liked to talk about it and death of some kind was always there in the movies and on the railroad
tracks where a guy had been cut in half by a switch engine and in the river where one of my friends had drowned and in the
guns some of my friends and their fathers had.
So, if I went to this gun store and
stared at those guns, maybe by just staring at them I could find out something about death. And, I could also find out something
about the Civil War and the Indian wars, and maybe I could also find out something about the fake deaths in all the movies
I used to go to. Because maybe the fake deaths were in some way related to the real deaths that happened every day. The big
death which took you out and you never came back.
I didn’t know it then but I was
already studying the stuff that poetry is made of. And, I didn’t want to go to the books. The books smelled of school and school smelled of work and boredom and a lot of the shit I’d been running away from. I needed some thing else, something that smelled of the soil, fresh air, the grass, the trees, but also smacked a little of the dangerous and guns and knives were dangerous. Guns and knives had death inscribed secretly
inside them. Guns and knives held the stories of what I thought it felt like to be alive but also what I dreamed it must have
felt like to be hurt and dying.
I knew, 1 was absolutely sure that
guns and knives carried all the stories of our secret wounds and longings and I wanted to know all about those things, I wanted
to study all the ways those wounds and longings made us real and vulnerable and alive to all the kinds of death floating in
the air around me.
I didn’t know just how much a
poet I was then. Even though I hadn’t written a line of poetry and wouldn’t since I and all my friends thought
it was a sign of weakness, though when I was alone I used to make up stories and had some of the same lines going through
them to give them more power and effect. Just like in music.
And, going to the movies, especially
the gangster and cowboy movies where guys got killed but not for real, it felt like the stories I had going in my head. With
some of the lines repeated or if they weren’t I repeated them and that made them feel better. And, then going to that
gun store put all those feelings of death back into my eyes like a fresh shot of something I had to have there. The railroad
tracks, the river, the gun store, and the movies, with the hotel where I lived hovering somewhere in the dark at the back
of my mind. In the whirlpool of darkness at the back of my mind.
The big death lived there. It was bigger
than anything in the movies. In those days, when a guy got shot at the movies there was never any blood. And I was always
looking for wounds on the dead guys but I never saw any. Friends I was with would say it’s a movie for chrissake. But
if it was death it should show some blood. I was certain of that.
Just as I was certain that all those
guns in the gun store were secretly inscribed with all the names that death ever had. Sure, it was a dream, but it also was
real. As real as the silent poems I used to make up with the repeated lines going. This was really the poem I put everything
into. I had all my friends in there and all the movies that I went to and the names of all the rivers I knew and my father
was there with his beaten up typewriter and his bottle of whiskey and all the street names were there and my father’s
alkie friends and the hookers. But especially all the forms of death that I’ve ever known or imagined. They were there
in the little pieces of broken beer bottle glass in the gutter. And they were there in the discarded hubcaps and they were
there in the flat tires in the vacant lots and they were there in empty cigaret packs thrown into the gravel and they were
there in the bent nails tossed into the weeds.
But, those guns in that gun store.
They formed a special cluster of images I could never get rid of They still swim around in all of my dreams. And, I always
go back there when I need a gun for one of my poems. I guess you could call them my little images of lethal desire.
