DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE Poem: The Reason I Carry, by Matt Cooper

4.14.22.
Written as a Samsung Note dictation while driving from Newton to Wichita, KS.
No clouds were in the sky.

*Hang Me in the Tulsa County Stars by John Moreland playing through the radio on repeat.

After thinking about it for a while I have come to realize there is a reason why I carry around that old pistol in my guitar case.

And sure it’s because I like guns. Fuck it! No, I love guns. I like it that they’re loud and I like it that they’re shiny and have interchangeable parts that can be removed and put back and fiddle fucked with at will.

I like that Simplicity. Because I’m that simple and always have been. I’m a hillbilly so I like the bang bang of it

I like the boom bam bam of the sidearm that can make your bickering neighbors shut the fuck up at 4:00 a.m. if fired up at the sky with a safe angle

I like that I could remove someone from this Earth with it. Though I would never do that —at least not with malice in my heart. And I would never remove myself from earth with that old rusty pistol—

Because the idea of making my mother cry forever these days makes me so goddam tired.

At the end of the day for me it’s nothing more than a bow and arrow just moved forward a few hundred years.

But the reason I carry around this pistol in the same carrying case as my guitar? It’s just good luck, buddy. It’s cursed good luck—This gun. It’s a .22 that almost shot dead my stepfather who used to beat the shit out of my mother.

And it was owned by a dirty cop—my uncle. And my dirty cop uncle was an Indian—

And he was a decorated navy Minesweeper in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam.

So, it’s a trophy kinda. But It’s a pistol that I swore one day I would bury in my grandmother’s grave up in Custer County because again—it was cursed.

Hell, my cousin—the dirty cop’s son—almost shot himself in the temple with it.

Though it misfired at that particular moment. The hammer clicked and echoed across old Benton lake—reminding him that it wasn’t quite time yet.

And I pray on that. I pray on it because this pistol keeps not killing anyone

But yeah, I swore one day I would bury the gun the way it needs to be buried—the way things that try to kill people and that are owned by criminals should be forever. But no, I carry it around every day because in some ways it’s an instrument just like that old guitar.

And it scares some people that I carry guns around. But the thing is, they just don’t realize the truth of it. They don’t know how important these talismans are. When you carry around something that was once owned by Outlaws and you don’t use it the way Outlaws used it—

That makes you a curator and an appreciator of the annihilation that could be but never really will be—the annihilation that by god, never has to be!

I carry around this cowboy gun with me wherever I go. Because I know it was once held in the hand of an Indian who at least in some small way looked a little bit like me. He was not a cowboy though. He was an Indian who remembered the Tonka Wa Reservation like a good scary dream.

And I think about the fact every day that he held this gun in his hands and put it to my stepfather’s shaking pissing face and he said, “now listen here you little motherfucker!…If you lay another hand on my niece… You are going to see what Red means forever and nothing else.”

And I take pride in that. It’s a sick Pride. It’s a pride that poisons Hearts, but I can’t get over it, baby.
and it’s because I do like guns. Now— I don’t like all of them.

But the special ones, the ones that end Wars and the ones that you stick in motherfuckers faces to get them to stop being the way they are?

I like those guns a lot. Yeah, I love those guns. Because when you familiarize yourself with those instruments—the kinds of instruments that can stop pulses in a single moment—You realize that it’s possible to hold wild power in your hands and just laugh at it as though it were something flaccid. Something muted—a fun toy memorializing a war
that used to be fought over and over

At the gasping expense of entire races of people.

I love that. So, I will probably go on carrying around this pistol with me forever. Because it is cursed, yes.

But it’s also a totem for good poiesis—

And I love that more than anything in the world.

It’s funny too—because one night in a bit of inspired thought, I removed the cylinder in front of the hammer, behind the barrel, above the ebony hand grip and replaced it— I replaced the place where the bullets used to go—with wadded up bible verses that had my mother’s name scribbled on them.

It seemed like a ritual. A real one. Not just like in church when you kneel and it’s supposed to mean something.

So It helps me write songs—this pistol—and I know that it’s dangerous but that in my hands it never will be.

Never again will it be held to a man’s head—

Any or especially mine!

It will only help me mend

And

Remember

them;