"Aw, come on, it'll be fun! Besides, Bolstrood will be there."

Danvers swiveled. "What!?"

----

Reykjavik Bolstrood, despite being named for the struggling capital of Iceland, was Norwegian-American-Norwegian and was to a right-wing patriot what a necrophile was to a romantic poet. His hobbies consisted of finding leaked information on the internet and firing guns, and to the eternal dismay of the U.S. government he was extremely good at both. Reykjavik was not a military man, but he knew enough about the training procedures for every special ops unit on every country on the planet to approximate his own regimen, which lacking any sort of leadership figure was instead entirely driven by sociopathy. For twenty years of his life he had apparently worshiped and sought advice from an eight foot tall stone bust of Uncle Sam, although recently he had announced his switch to Deism "in the spirit of the founders". Conservatives occasionally referred to him as a LODite, as in Liberty Or Death, which Danvers had actually found funny at one point.

While Granite Sam had always been a considerable influence on Reykjavik's life, his transformation from wingnut to Threat to National Security had been the 9/11 attacks. Frustrated by a lack of action against the Taliban, Reykjavik spent eight years slowly building himself into a vicious, angry, destructive and above all informed one-man military operation. When the USFG dropped the ball on yet another lead on the Taliban's location, Bulstrood shipped out on his own, spending every dime he had and a number of the banking systems to airlift himself into hostile territory, where he proceeded to torture, murder and maim his way towards finding Osama's newest mountain cavern so he could "strangle the sonovabitch with his own turban".

It was difficult to tell what irked the U.S. more: that he tried, that he succeeded, or that after the fact he found asylum in his mothers home country of Norway where he proceeded to write three autobiographies that earned him slightly under a billion dollars in capital (most of it frozen by the various nations the books were published in). He was too well-liked, well-connected and well-hidden to get at, which was Ironic with a capital I in Colin Danvers book.

The worst part of it had been this: considering Bulstroods military training, he had felt his capture would be an obvious blow to the United States governments credibility on a national level. In order to not be viewed as a spy or enemy combatant, he instead devised a simple plan to distance himself from the country he loved before he ran roughshod over half of the 'stans. Since Reykjavic basically had only one talent, the plan was very similar to his other plans and consisted of killing a large number of people, several of them renowned talk show hosts and war protestors, one of them Danvers friend. For years Colin had wanted nothing more than to stab the son of a bitch in the face.

And now he was here. And Danvers had lost his knife.

Another round for loves lost

and loves never won. I'll drink to that, and only that.

To the gleeful consideration of all those might-haves and maybes

and the heartache of has-beens and never-weres.

The highs and lows of my intoxication

damage not the liver, but the soul

but maybe forge anew

that lonely shoal.

Look, maybe some of it is genetic destiny

luck of the gods, the right blow to the head at the right time

rearranging all those neurons in some particular pattern

but since when have you been one to believe fully

in something that cause and effect can't trace

something that science knows it can't prove?

God is getting you down, I think.

Listen: the reason I write well is because

in school I read books simply to read them

every day, through any class

where I could get away with it.

I read in crowded halls and quiet corners.

I read in locker rooms and libraries.

I read behind the four big timpani's in band,

I read during the songs, and sometimes I read during the parts

I had to play.

I read in English period, never what I was supposed to

but whatever I could get my hands on.

I read when it made me a target, made me outside,

made me my own worst enemy

and when the pain of it was too much I read for solace.

When I couldn't read I thought

about stories, told them to myself

always had words in mind for paper.

I write well because of the delighted squeal my mother gave

when I was so young and I sat and thought about

how words worked until

I understood them.

But destiny has nothing to do with it.

Look, you are not who you say you are

you are One Of Us. And we can do

amazing, wonderful, terrible things.

We can do them whenever we want.

We can do them even if we spent our lives

doing something else. It's not a straight path

there aren't two roads

one of them isn't any less traveled

than the other. Because all of it is unexplored territory

until it isn't.

I don't read now, as much as I used to.

I don't write as well as I could.

But I am who I am because I chose to be

this way. And I know how words fit on paper

because that's one of the things I want to know.

And while I'll sit and think about that as much as

anything else, while I'll hesitate and stall and stare at blank pages

until my eyes grow red and weary

I won't give up on it. Even though I could.

Maybe this poem

Maybe this poem would be better if it were written on your lovers skin faint traces soft touches new spaces meter metered out in the span of what you can touch maybe it would ring true in the length of time between kisses and break with every catch of breath every sudden reassessment of a beautiful situation maybe this poem is best punctuated by lips and tongue and teeth and blood and sweat and other things which I blush to write about

in this poem but maybe it would be better written without pens or words or thoughts or any such conceits maybe this poems grammar is instinctual like it always has been like it never is maybe this poem shouldn't be in english but rather something universal other than lojban which is getting off track the real point being that maybe this poem is just fine the way it is but maybe its time to write a new poem together here now forever because maybe this poem has a few too many maybes, maybe.