Ghost To Ghost · Cat Pea

they found you in that bus,
ninety-three pounds of what was left
after the potatoes and the squirrels ran out,
and the papers called it tragedy,
the television people shook their heads
and said you were a fool,
a privileged kid who didn't know
which berries to eat—

but I think you knew exactly
what you were doing
when you set fire to the cash
and watched the faces of dead presidents
curl into ash.

you understood something
that your father never would,
that the whole bright California mess of it—
the cars, the lies they called life,
the clean shirts and quarterly reports—
was excrement
dressed up in a suit.

I'm writing this at 2 a.m.
with a drink I probably shouldn't have
and the radio playing something
about asses and Lamborghinis
and being a bad something-or-other,
and I think about you out there
in the Alaskan silence
where the only music was river water
and wind through spruce,

and I wonder who is the crazy one—
you, eating seeds in a broken bus,
or the 50 million people
bobbing their heads to lyrics
that teach them to be
less
than they are.

the schools did a number on us, kid.
they sat us in rows
and taught us to fill in bubbles
with number 2 pencils
and called it education,
and the teachers who should have been
setting fires in our minds
were too tired from their second jobs
to do anything but
hand out worksheets
and wait for the bell.

they taught us to memorize
but never to think,
to regurgitate
but never to question,
and when we got our grades
we didn't know if we'd learned anything real
or just performed the right tricks
for the right treats
like dogs in a circus
we never asked to join.

and your parents,
I read about them,
the secrets, the other family,
the way money was supposed to fix everything
the way it never does—

you saw through it
the way some of us see through it,
the ones who grew up with holes
in our shoes and holes
in the stories they told us
about working hard and getting ahead.

the poor know something the rich don't:
that the whole game is rigged,
that the ladders lead to rooms
full of more ladders,
that somewhere along the way
we forgot what we were climbing toward.

they want us stupid.
I don't mean this as conspiracy,
I mean it as commerce.

a thinking man doesn't buy
the truck he doesn't need,
the beer that's killing his liver,
the politicians who've never missed a meal
telling him that poverty
is a character flaw.

a thinking woman doesn't believe
that her worth is in her waistline,
that romance looks like the movies,
that the right mascara will fix
the emptiness
they've been cultivating in her
since she was five years old
watching princesses wait for rescue.

the songs, the commercials, the shows—
they're not entertainment,
they're instructions:
stay small,
stay hungry,
stay dumb,
buy this.

I've known men who worked themselves
into heart attacks at fifty-two,
who never read a book that wasn't assigned,
who died with money in the bank
and nothing in the soul—
and everyone said they lived a good life.

I've known women who raised children
in fluorescent-lit cubicles,
who came home too tired to think,
who watched cooking shows
instead of cooking,
who watched travel shows
instead of traveling,
who lived through screens
because the real thing
had been priced out of reach.

and nobody calls that tragedy.
nobody puts that on the evening news.

You read Thoreau and London and Tolstoy,
you went to the woods
because you refused to discover at the end
that you had not lived,
and some people say you were running away
but I think you were running toward—

toward what a human being is
underneath the job title,
toward what a morning feels like
when no one is selling you anything,
toward the terrifying gorgeous question
of what the hell we're doing here
and whether any of it means a damn thing.

they say only certain people
are capable of genius,
that most of us are born to work
and not to wonder,
and that is the biggest lie
they ever told—

every child asks why
until we beat it out of them,
every kid draws and sings
until we grade it out of them,
every young mind reaches for the stars
until we schedule it out of them
with homework and tests
and the long slow lesson
that curiosity is inefficient
and dreams don't pay rent.

we are all born with fire.
the schools are there to manage it.
the jobs are there to harvest it.
the songs are there to mock it.
and by the time we're thirty
most of us have forgotten
we ever burned at all.

but you remembered.
you walked into the wild
with a bag of rice and a rifle
and the whole crushing weight
of everything fake
finally off your shoulders.

and yes, you made mistakes.
yes, the Stampede Trail swallowed you.
yes, the river rose and cut you off
and the body gave out
before the spirit did.

but God, kid—
you lived.

for 113 days, you lived
more than most people do
in 113 years
of going through the motions.

and now they've made movies about you,
and people take selfies with the bus,
and your story has become
another product to consume
between commercials for trucks and beer—

but some of us know
what you were really saying
when you wrote that happiness
is only real when shared,
when you scribbled in the margins
that you had lived a good life
and died a happy man.

you were saying that the treasure
isn't in the inauthentic prestige,
that the answer isn't in the office,
that somewhere out there
past the billboards and the bullshit
there is something true
and worth walking toward,
even if it kills you.

I'm still at this desk.
it's almost 4 now.
the drink is empty
and the radio has moved on
to another song about nothing,
and outside my window
the city hums with people
getting ready for jobs
they didn't choose
in lives they didn't design
running on fumes and coffee
and the vague promise
that it will all make sense
someday.

and I think of you
in the sleeping bag,
writing your last words
to whoever might find you,

and I want to tell the young ones:
listen—

the television is lying.
the commercials are lying.
the songs are lying.
the schools are lying.
the politicians are lying.
and they've been lying so long
they don't even know anymore
that the truth exists.

but it does.
it's out there
past the noise,
past the sales pitch,
past the fluorescent-lit prisons
they call opportunity.

it's in books by dead Philosophers
and walks through actual forests
and conversations that last until morning
and the terrifying freedom
of asking what if everything
they taught me was wrong?

You beautiful fool,
you didn't die searching for something
that doesn't exist.
you died proving that it does—

that there's a self beneath the self
they manufactured for us,
that there's a world beneath the world
they're selling us,
that there's a life beneath the life
of quiet desperation
and it's worth everything,
everything,
to find it.

the sun is coming up now.
I should sleep.
but I keep thinking about you
walking into that green nowhere,
twenty-four years old,
done with the lying,
finally free.

and I write this for you,
and for every kid
who looked around at the circus
and knew in their bones
that this couldn't be all there is—

you're right.
it isn't.

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