Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the Wakefield Doctrine’s contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

It is hosted by Denise. And this week, we’re having ourselfs a ‘Poetry Slam’.

While the format is as it has always been, i.e. stories involving the prompt word and being no more (or no less) six sentences in length; this week Denise is inviting all to incorporate or otherwise include a poem. Freeform, iamwhatIam pentameter, limerick or shout-at-the-audience-with-conviction, whatever style moves you, the stage is yours. The venue is the Six Sentence Café & Bistro; the lights are low, the beverages are plentiful and spirit unconditional.  (New Readers? the bar is along the right-hand wall as you enter, most everything else is to your right. Being a converted textile mill, the ceilings are high, the floor is scarred wood and the stage is all of two steps up, set along the interior wall facing a whole bunch of round-top tables with spindle-wood chairs.)

The Prompt Word

SECOND

The tall, thin man stepped into the cigarette-hazy column of light and stared at the darkened room. The audience, night plankton glowing behind cigarettes, splotches of life waiting for some evolutionary lightning bolt to galvanize them into a higher form of life.  Plucking the microphone, he turned away, like an Adam 2.0, his chromium apple to be consumed in private; away from hand-me-down spouses and jealous gods, he ate of it.

“Bah WAAAHHHHHHH!!!!

Our lives begin on the exhale… surprise protest at the unexpected slap from a dry giant, torn from the sea world of peace and contemplation, held aloft by the heels in cruel parody of the weightless posture in the quietdark sea where everything was provided and nothing denied;

Spitting our lungs clear, the sounds around us mask the silent, but compelling inhale, and so begins our love affair with couplets, dyads of life to be more concise;

Breathing in and breathing out, inhale and exhale; this fundamental rhythm, the most benign tyranny, both a chain that binds the spirit to the earth and wings pulling upwards, pretending heaven is in reach, demanding without words we accept it’s rough measuring more of our capacity to endure;

We grow if we are lucky, are healthy if blessed, the inhales and exhales as natural as each breath

Like the rest of nature, our breathing responds to the demands of the world, in storms and in drought, our respiration adjusts, no more ambitious a goal than ‘one more inhale-exhale’;

Man and Woman, confront demands on this rhythm of life, we are, but as Godlets, (as we were informed, by that in-My-image thing), we adjust our breathing to the world as we experience it, not merely and automatically as it is experienced;

• as children we breathe without thinking, in sync with our surroundings, the most fundamental barometer of the environment: demands and lessons, reinforcement and persuasion, temptation and punishment, an orchestra of one lead by a multitude of conductors,
• as the child learns music, the first and simplest of songs scored for the small ensemble of family, then, like Diana Ross we desire recognition and dream of contrarian scores for impromptu groups of other-not-family; each new rhythm of breath develops as fast as we can meet new people and take on new roles
• as solitary lifeforms we refuse to be surprised, or, to be more honest, we deny like fig leafs before a neutered angel, our need to find another to manifest our couplet song; our breathing strives to match another and sometimes it does/sometimes it tries/other times we fail in earnest simpatico,
• the stutter of first tears, a most compelling of breaths, the embracing of laughter the most treacherous of invitations, the matching of love, at first the surest of bets despite our insistence on how synchronous our breathing might be, in and out…up and down… finally, for one, alone with a consolation prize of temporary Godhood as a new breath is introduced to the world;

they say that life is a number of inhales and exhales, that breathing is the definition of life itself

that is almost true

there are two times when this irreducible pairing, that dyad formed when coming into the world, is violated: when we’re born and again when we die;

our death is marked by an inhalation,

by inhaling, we claim membership in the world, however, when over-taken by mortality, we have no need for the downbeat of the exhale, the rhythm of breathing the last, the other half of the rhythm of life is left for the living to appreciate, the departed no longer needing the comfort nor the confirmation from the world around them”

The tall, thin man replaced the microphone on it’s chrome spire, looked out over the crowd and after a second, smiled toward the private alcove, to the far left,

“There once was a man from the Vineyard

Who thought his mind would Life’s path make clear

The closer he got, the more grew the fear

On the fringes he remained, unwilling to let down his guard.”