If All Else Fails by Craig Strete Page A

matter, we ramble on. Looking at what we see, adding what's missing, and
making up the rest.
    It's a good life,
here on the third planet from the sun. I know it's a good life because when you're number three,
you're a charm. Well, why not? Why not peace and serenity and dark women in the tumbledown night?
If only there were no dark men, but no matter. We have them convinced they shouldn't be and
that's almost the same.
    Take Cassie, and
what do I mean. Take Cassandra, ah, the word itself, in its full length, a truthteller unbelieved
in her time. What a waste of starlight. The legend persists. Grind it down in the valley below.
Seasons are made to for­get. Forget it, let the truth oil the wheels, mesh with good and bad. Use
truth for lubrication but keep it trapped in the machine, endlessly touched by wheels. Busy. Keep
the truth busy. Change its meaning and diapers every day. Speak to me in circles. I only
understand circles.
    Cut the rebels with
looking glasses and false senses of power. Mirrors praise beauty and we name planets after you
and you lubricate as if Cassandra never lived. We photo­graph the side of stone faces. We
photograph, recapture the planes of a face for a special something else, something more. We
photograph and freeze moments, while lurking memories move outside the frame. Oh, spin on darkly,
mother night. Hold the candles away from the light. Wish­ful, sinful, wicked too.
    The dark fears of
primitives are awash here. Don't pho­tograph me. I can't look like that forever. Don't capture my
soul, devil box, the beauty hoax. Souls don't look like that except when forced. Rabbit hutches
are filled with too many contents, all looking for a place to die on the photograph of their
souls. A place to die on the photograph of your soul.
    I wonder if you
have seen Earth. Golden wasted acres of blame. Graceful fields of forage and bovine creatures,
harnessed to photographs of photogenic souls, plowing the literary worlds with foreplay-sharpened
elbows. And the hordes that await glitter, they swarm among you, beneath you, in carpools and
typing pools, writing indirect memos to the sun, typing double-spaced copy on Art Deco bedsheets.
A place to die on the photograph of your soul.
    Sail into the wind,
Cassandra. The third planet from the sun is hungry for your votes and every vote is a vote and as
planned; there is no storm that can drink any more of you than you of it. Only where you spin too
loudly, only where you bulge the equators where others have planned some­thing polar and cold for
you, perhaps then they will be frightened of you. When you BECOME where formerly you BELONGED,
only then will the third planet from the sun, busy with some little war or other, stop for a
minute or two. Perhaps the world will uncircle the sun, hold its breath, con­sider itself in a
new light. Perhaps.
    Ancient wisdom
exists only if you use it, knock down the azure sky. Touch people with human hands. Cover the rab­bit hutch with stolen thunder.
The cattle are fat and mean in this weather. They like the grass prechewed. The fences men erect
don't fool anybody and they really don't count sheep to put them asleep. They don't.
    They're afraid of
sheep and what lurks in innocence, buried deep. I am sheep. I toil not in the fields and eat not
of the grass therein. I have beautiful jeweled eyes. I live asleep on the blade of a dagger. I
crouch in culture fright on the edges of the cities. I await my liberation with eyes that stalk
not beauty but power and world-unfearing strength.
    Hard sisters, sleep
here among the sheep but in the dark, carry scissors. Free us from the wool of men's eyes. Take
us away in your strength, take us with you, leave the cattle a place to die on the photograph of
their souls. I lose my legs angrily, they fall off in front of tourists and I won't dance
anymore. Lose your legs, too. Cut them off the photograph. The ears of the planet and eyes, cut
them, trim them out