A Time Traveling Guide to the Perplexed Fanatic

Note- This guide is only meant to be a guide for perplexed history fanatics, so if you were browsing through the "Guidebooks of Fanatics" section of your local Borders or Barnes and Noble, go away try reading the work of the sodding bastard whose work is all of the five books to my left. Because any man who happens to be more successful than me simply because he writes about the history of pornography has either permanently lost his sense of humor and deserves to to be guillotined, or has lost his sense of humor, spent several days looking for it desperately, and then remembered that he had to no sense of humor from the start. As for the gentleman picking one of my rivals books off the shelf, you can fuck off.

"A Time Traveling Guide to the Perplexed Fanatic: Written for Anyone Who Doesn't Read 'The Guidebook for Idiots'"

By a Perplexed Fanatic

Table of Contents
1. An introduction for anyone who reads These damn things, and they're always so bloody boring anyway. Not mine, though. My introduction will have you laughing so hard your stomach will tie itself into a slip knot.- page one
2. Chapter One: Where I admit that I am more cynical than sarcastic, that I have no sense of humor whatsoever, and that I can see so far into the future that I know at exactly what time your wife will trip over her too-long wedding dress.
3. Chapter Three: Whoops! Looks like the printer forgot how to count.
4. Chapter Four: Why it is necessary for BIMA 2008 writers to post if they don't wish for me to grab the eighteenth-century musket I keep in my closet and unleash holy heck.
5. Chapter Five: Where I gladly conclude this book and announce my retirement from the life of a writer, and I announce that I will begin a lifetime of work at the Hospital of Uninspired Writers, where I expect to meet Shakespeare, Dickenson, and Alcott very soon.

I Weep for Our Blessed Continental Soldiers- This is a very personal piece.

I lay awake in bed, tormented by the scream of the dead and dying
Soldiers who fought two hundred years ago.
Silly girl, such tears have no place so late and far from their inspiration!
So sang the embittered psalmist, as I recall.

I can still hear the bullets at Lexington. Isn't that odd?
That I can still here the random shot,
That I can see the smoke and blood and feel my legs
Running from the regulars,
Seeing them spill down the blood-soaked soil of Breed's Hill,
Someone's hand crunches beneath my feet,
"Don't fire until you can see the whites of their eyes!"
Have you ever fired a musket before?
I half-know the motions from reading about it and seeing it done.

One shot is loud.
A broadside is louder, and the volume can be tuned out,
But not the blood, the crushed skulls underfoot,
The constant waves of men that tumble and knock down their
Comrades who are marching up the hill.

Then New York and Fort Washington.
May God bless the souls of those
Unfortunates who were bayoneted to trees by the Hessians.
May God bless all of our brave soldiers who died that day.

I suffer with them when they call smallpox and dysentery
And the flu and colds and measles and venereal disease,
And it is terrible at Valley Forge, where I am stuck inside a hut
In a winter that sucks the warm breath out of my lungs
Like an icy vacuum.

Call to Arms Number Two

When in the course of BIMA events it becomes necessary for the BIMA 2008 eight writers to post on their blog, and to assume, among the powers of all writers maniacal and mad, that they will continue to post on the blog, a decent respect to their welfares before I go threaten them with the musket I keep in my back pocket requires that I should declares the causes which impel me to threaten them unless they post.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all BIMA 2008 writers must post on their blog, that HaShem has blessed them with this extraordinary power to create something from nothing, and that they had better damned well use it on this blog or I will use that musket I mentioned therefore.

In witness thereof I have hereunto affirmed that I will come after them with my musket (and I know how to use it) unless they post.

The Answer

I have a question for myself:
Why? I mean, what does everything in the world come down to?
What is the final answer?
Science and math and language and breath can only explain so much.
What is the answer to "why?"

Of course, there are some why's that can be answered,
For they stem from human stupidity.
The parents who leave their children to die in the gutters?
Because they were stupid and didn't choose see the miracles in front of them
When they were perfectly capable of doing so.

But that still leaves the other why's unanswered.
Why do we die? Oh, that can be explained
By how our bodies nurture the soil,
Earth would be over-populated,
No one wants to live on seeing every war and death camp-
All true reasons.
But why? Why is something so?
Why is it that there is something beyond human comprehension,
Something eternally vast and majestic,
Yet it requires a greater will and love of all to hear and feel and touch it?

This answer has been, is, and always will be: God.

Frustration

You never quit, do you?
I admire that in some people,
The stubborn will that seems to be completely absent
In the generally dispassionate person in the back
Who are bored with eating and breathing-
Those are the sort of people who look at the successful ones
Ahead of them, and loathe them intensely because they have not
Strength to rise up against sloth and ignorance and fear to
Step out of the norm, for Christ's sake!

Just Before Death

Down in the depths of darkness,
Chained to an iron wall,
Naked, I wept
Then I heard her, a soft, trickling murmur,
A whisper, a word, "promises you give"
As the Great Bard has sung before
In a stream of love and sadness
A ray of light struck from a crystal sphere
To push away the sorrow and pain and regret and shame and agony and death
Leaving nothing but peace

But then her voice leaves,
And her shadow crumbles into the murky dust
That floats in drifts to the tiny window
Through which rain and mud are thrown by God and man
Leaving me covered in a fine layer of silt,
To suffocate under eternity

The chains have rusted and blow away,
Burnt shards of bone piled outside the tiny window
The darkness swept clean of everything
Everything but the darkness

Unloved

Her hair fell
Across her back, Gossamer tumbled
Effortlessly, her hair clouded in my face
Dreamily I kissed her
Hair, dancing the cold, autumn breeze,
A bit of warmth cleansing with
Waves of silken, neatly

Folded, wire threads scraped my face like
A single, iron hand struck me across
My mouth bled, my tears
Crashing into the dirty
Fingers clawed open my throat, spilling
Into a crimson puddle, I sank, collapsed,
Unloved