Give A Little (Take A Little)

(faye, pine, and mel camino, January 20th, 2010)

I'll meet you halfway, where the getting gets tough, and we'll have to use our life jackets for fire wood. I'll turn my bed into a boat, and we could live there for a while (an evening). We'll throw records on the player, I'll pull the pulleys and put the needle on right; a drop as quiet as a mouse fart. With each rotation, with each hiss, crackle, and pop we'll melt before the lamp and a dancing flame. Remember this time, remember that time, and let it all come back. Before we were, after we weren't, and what we are now, who you are, and who I transformed into, with awkward shoulders and naked in a broken miniature house. I'll operate on your hand, I'll pick away at it until all the splinters are gone. I'll hold them before your giant eyes, and you'll lick them clean off, and swallow whole the history of everything that once was.
A broken tree is cut down; the sons of farmers turned to a lifetime of being lumbermen, a tree grows alone in a forest, and over hundreds of years it has made millions of friends. A son loses his arm but gains a family. The axe is put on a plank and raised to live over the family couch where it collects the dust of a daughter, of a son, of a father, and of a mother for what would be a decades and a half before the son of a son is old enough to fit his father's shoes on.
Outside, just feet from the house; upon the first strike the son's arm withholds a quake that rocks his shoulders and jolt the roots his teeth. The axe drops and the son of a son never holds an axe again in his life. Through the window a mother looks to her one-armed spouse who cuts wood humbly off only few feet from his offspring. The father sees his son walk away from his fallen axe, and looks down to the axe and see visions of blood and bone, and a tear forms in the crest of his eye; this one is for my dead arm his wet eye says (drop). The father comes around, grabs his old axe for the first time since his accident, holds it firm in his good hand, his only hand, and takes a swing at that tree with a cat scratch from the previous axe attack, and strikes not once, but a second, third, fourth, and etcetera until the tree has lost the fight. With a sudden release the tree falls, crushes the man, and runs a line to destroy everything this man loves. The house falls, the son, fresh from his attempt at his father's shoes, cries in his room before the ceiling gives. From her kitchen window, the mother witnesses her spouse be destroy and decides to watch her demise as well. And of the daughter, we don't know, she was off in the woods too far from this narrator's eyes.

Years pass.

More years pass.

...

The house falls to legend, and told over campfire for years to come, but those days are no longer. The house has been taken by trees, and until a year ago hasn't see a human in what could be ages of Aquarius', and all the discoverers see is a lone oak that is cut perfectly and ready to be processed. The discoverers call their truck over, use rope to secure their bounty, and off they go to a plant where the tree will undergo a complex system of formatting only to be put into separate trucks and delivered to several lumber yards (four to be exact).

Where we bring you back into this story is when you are walking through a warehouse and spot a piece of wood that, in your eyes, is perfect. The piece is taken into your hands, and it's curse is cooled to your touch. In the next few days, what you end up doing to that piece of wood is rather graphic, so I'll omit the details, leaving you with splinters, and those splinters I end up having to pull from your hands, under a magnifying glass, the same glass I used on my father's splinters, and now your hands bring me joy in the act I call smoothing your hands once more.
The licked and consumed splinters travel through your body, and eventually they are disposed in means I would like to not mention, and that your unmentionables travel through a complex system of plumbing before they end up in some plant where they are filtered, and another complex system occurs, and a few more vastly interesting and complex things happen before we end up at the conclusion to this story.
Three, four splinters after what-could-be-the-worst-way-go-to, are reunited with the earth again. They make sweet-sweet love to the earth and as a result for their act, they form life, and this narrator comes to his conclusion by quoting Elton John.

From the day we arrive on the planet
And blinking, step into the sun 
There's more to see than can ever be seen 
More to do than can ever be done 
There's far too much to take in here 
More to find than can ever be found 
But the sun rolling high 
Through the sapphire sky 
Keeps great and small on the endless round

It's the Circle of Life 
And it moves us all 
Through despair and hope 
Through faith and love 
Till we find our place 
On the path unwinding 
In the Circle 
The Circle of Life