3
Any tinny sounds of anti government slogans bespoke of the violence earlier this week
. And on the whole the nations of the world went about their stark grey
Business with worrisome faces and shoulders bent from oppression and drudgery. Those who have no wish to learn,
Remain ignorant.
But around the globe private radio, bootleg stations rebel channels all report the take over in New Iowa.
Where the audio jockey Boris
Criminal of the state has assumed command.
They listen once again to the sound of they’re own thoughts being echoed through Free Boris Radio.
They’re own ideas and dreams; fears and commitments reinstated nightly by an angry man huddled over a sound mixer.
At lasts a voice for the people! Someone unafraid to say what they all think, someone to do the unthinkable…
Someone willing to stand up and say
“This is an old jazz tune that begs to ask one question, Can a night as perfect as tonight really ever end?”
“Thank you folks for all your warm wishes and heart felt thanks”
The shadows loom and surge with the movement of his arms and head.
An unfathomable shade cast in blue hews of humming studio lights.
Bowed head drips with perspiration as he commits his deadly sin.
“This is Free Boris Radio back on the air,” with a breathless whisper and a desperate cry.
"We have taken control of our city and it is time for us all "to rise and become what we where born to be.”
The rustle of canvas shakes from his overcoat as he lifts the cigarette from his lips and breaths into the microphone.
Fumbling at a keyboard in a blue haze of lights and knobs is a silhouette painted of pain and loneliness,
Anger and frustration are the soup d jour
Fingers stained with cheap cigarette smoke are now fly deftly across the keyboard.
A nightly creation of angst and imagination takes flight in the cool breezes that carry his anthem to the people.
Everywhere they gather now; the hoards of shadow people who feel the truth of it in a desperate world
Where the only certainties are mistreatment and oppression.
“ Our comrades dig trenches and pile debris high around our city, trying to hold off the government troops that howl at are doors
And bid us enter!"
"Now against our protectors we must defend ourselves! Those who would find our music and thoughts so terrible that it is a crime
Punishable by death!” He moves back behind the console." I ask you comrades if you are afraid to walk your streets
Without fear of an antagonistic police force.
Then are you not already in the middle of a revolutionist it time you started to fight back?"
The ever-circling guard begins its nightly crusade of triangulating the signals and hunting down the illusive bandit broadcasting this filth.
In ice trucks and bread trucks they swoop across the city intercepting the pirate signal.
I am become the voice of war! But I have to ask myself comrades to look at how our governments choose to try to destroy us
We have asked nothing comrades NOTHING we have only played soft jazz and spoken in low tones
If opinions are weapons then this isn’t rock and roll this is a revolution.”
The bread trucks and other assorted camouflage techniques where all left behind, this wasn’t a police matter any longer.
The army hovered in helicopters crossing the city to intercept the illegal signals and triangulate.
The military didn’t have to be as precise as the police did during Boris first arrest. Not nearly as surgical as our over industrious local police
As the commandant in the oversized brown hat made quite clear with his nightly ritual.
Pacing the length of the command post in polished boots and crisply ironed uniform the high collar
Rubbing and irritating but he was used to that, in fact he liked it.
Smacking a leather glove into his left hand over and over to punctuate his statements.
“Just get me the building come on comrade just the building
.”He’d start out the evening saying it optimistically and patting the radiomen on the backs as he walked around the room.
By 2:00 he would be seething and often actually foaming, clenching they’re shoulders and spitting as he urged
“Just get me close, Ill take out the whole fucking section if I have to!”
It actually scared the men because they knew he meant it, they knew he’d destroy a block even if his mother lived there.
Hell they knew if he had the authority he’d just as soon nuke the whole place city.
If he had the authority he would not’ hesitate to eradicate’ it was one of his mottos.
“Just f do it I, tired of your Goddamn excuses!” Everyone jumped except Goshen he never batted an eye at anything,
As if he almost always expected everything and was prepared. We each have our own survival mechanisms.
Overhead the crackle of static while the speakers thrums to life.“ Ask yourself comrades….”
A squealing sound assaults the ears of the bunker command crew causing them all to flinch…except Goshen of coarse.
The Commandant now held a pistol to the lieutenant’s head very forcefully.
“Lose that Signal I swear ill kill you on the spot!
Do not lose the signal Corporal! That is a command!”
And the Commandant twists the barrel of the pistol into the man’s temple to punctuate his concern.
The entire crew was sweating with
The tension like a slow lash descending with a foreboding shadow.
Something had to give tonight the very atmosphere was about to shatter a world and they all knew it.
The overhead intercom buzzed and crackled
“And as always to our boys in blue…or brown which ever it is tonight,
I hope the cool breeze is making your job more comfortable like to thank Commandant Mansfield especially “
Now the entire crew felt the hair go up on the back of they’re heads and the sweat freeze on they’re skin.
“I sincerely hope you are enjoying the show comrade. I know your wife and daughter our finding it pleasant, and they had a request.”
The silhouette moves with light reflecting diffusely in the dim recesses of the basement.
With boards relays and routers driving his system into the satellites and beyond Boris has no fear of being captured now,
Not now that his people have set him up with the best they’re enemies had to offer.
In fact Boris was watching the commandant at this very moment from a live cam hook up inside the containment bunker.
Now he seemed to be holding onto the radio mans shoulder as they listened Boris could just tell the signal was being picked up by his expression
“Commandant we have taken control of the city because we had to and you cannot stop us in fact you yourself are surrounded.”
“I urge you to give yourself up peacefully” Boris’ laugh alone drove the commandant insane with anger!
“Come Comrade …join the revolution by phoning in a request. Just like you wife did.”
“He doesn’t believe me citizens, he does not believe we have destroyed him. He does not believe that we pity him and see he is lost;
No comrades he does not see 10 minutes into his own future as we do.”
Boris’ tone had taken a changed as he watched this commandant.
It sickened Boris and what was about to do did not make him feel good but he would do it for the benefit of the authorities that listened.
“Comrades The Commandant is a sad man with no knowledge of truth, he knows no truth, he knows and believes only what he has been told
He is innocent. I beg you take those like him not as enemies but as comrades who our need help and guidance.”
The outrage can be seen on the commandant’s face. He knows very well that his superiors are tuned in.
“Commandant when you arrive home to night you will find a letter your family has left you. Boris smiled as the military man looked up.
“They have left you Commandant.
Your beautiful wife and lovely 7-year-old child have decided they could take no more of you!
They would rather die with us than to stay with you and the hypocrisies of your shallow life!”
The Commandant was smashing his fist into the lieutenant repeatedly” Ill kill him I’ll kill him. I’ll kill you all! You stupid bastards!” he was so furious Goshen
Thought the man’s face would explode.
Above the speakers hiss and crackle with the amused sound of Free Boris Radio.
“I urge you comrade give yourself up please think about that while we all listen to your wife’s request…
The dark shadowy radio announcer moves with a rustle of overcoat to slip the disk into the drive
And access the play list. “Gladys knight and the pips folks! “A beautiful tune the commandant may recognize
Because when the airwave bills became law it was the last thing his wife begged him to let her play before he destroyed Her stereo.”
“Does this bring back any memories Commandant? Folks ten minutes into his future 10 years into his past,
While we listen to the unstained vocalizations of this old Motown classic
I think the commandant is remembering a time when music played while he made passionate love to his sweet young bride.”
Listening from a safe house the commandants wife lets tears fall for a love once true and a man whom she had once known,
How his believes had been twisted and torn.
The shell of a soldier she lets the tears fall soundlessly mourning the man long dead, with a sad shudder of relief
She shakes off the ghost of the past and steels herself toward a new future.
She turns to look at the sleeping child, a child she could not endure raising without music. She turns and looks to me. But I've no answers for they’re loss...
Have you Commandant?"
The chill of night is about whispering shadows run through dank corridors of the city in the very air is the sound of Free Boris Radio.
The background chatter that has become a soundtrack for revolution. Harmonizing with the shouts and sirens.
“Remember it commandant? I’m sure you do its called leaving on a midnight train to Georgia.
And now folks the Commandant knows that I do speak with his wife
The commandant knows that I speak the truth The Commandant now sees ten minutes into his own future.
Boris bolts upright! He could almost feel the bullets as the commandant shot the crewman 5 times until the gun was empty.
One crewman fell down another began to vomit, Goshen moved faster than all of them Lunging toward the commandant with a pen.
He tore into the mans thought holding on to plunge it in murderously some ten or twelve times before he stands up blood soaked and panting.
Boris didn’t know what to do! What he could do should do. As he sits watching events play out.
The blue lights flicker and fade in a chaotic rhythm
As he strums worn tobacco stained fingers deftly cross his keyboard.
The metallic hum deadened the senses and played the mechanized hum of another world.
It wasn’t just radio it, wasn’t a game, it was a revolution and he gathered himself into some state of numbed composure,
Flicked the mike switch up and glanced at the red light in the corner that glowed 'ON THE AIR.'
“Folks I have just witnessed the death of a commandant, his executioner stands in my view now as I speak.”
Goshen was looking around bewildered for a moment and then barked out a command and leaned over the desk for a moment.
Boris slips easily into his narrative tones his mouth hovers above the mike with the anticipation of lover’s lips.
“As you listen to the silence outside you may think why has it stopped? The rush the noise the commotion in the streets.
The helicopters and trucks the solders all come to a standstill; because this man
On the monitor in front of me has just bitten off the head off the spider.
Such a spider he was, preying on the people with a never ending thirst”
Even in the dark confines where none could see Boris raises his hand as if to stop someone.
“Wait the executioner is holding up a note” Boris laughs into the microphone”
“He tells me he has a command post 3 helicopters and 276 men 6 tanks…wait he’s writing more.”
Boris rises from his seat and hunches over the monitors squinting in the diffuse blue lights.
“Folks he informs us that this equipment is at our disposal!”
Boris was almost jumping, he could actually here people in the streets cheering. A dull growing sound carried down to him
Wafting through sewers and pipes and air ducts an almost non-existent sound the dull roaring had no location it just floated.
Another note and thumbs up told Boris that his signal was being fed directly into media one
And the revolutionary Free Boris Radio show was trans global!
“Citizens of the free city, the garrison has just joined the revolution” With a flick and twist music fades in from the tape feed."
"It is the Overture from an old movie called A Clockwork Orange. “ Folks when a few people gather and grumble it is a party”
Now Boris was walking through the smoke filled room with the head set mike strapped close to his mouth
A cheap cigarette burns trails of thick smoke across stained fingers and into a wilderness of blue reflections fading into the shadows.
The world according to Boris.
“ When a group of people gathers to express a mutual concern it is a forum…”
The listeners could hear the shuffling footsteps of the voice of revolution
Shuffling out the thoughts of a people a place a time shuffling towards a future uncertain
In a place where uncertainty is better than the status quo?
“When the authorities oppose them and the forums are made illegal it is a protest.”
“When an idea is strong enough to gather enough momentum it becomes a cause and then when blood is finally shed in the name of this cause
It is called a revolution.
But Folks when the military itself joins a revolution, it brings with it a legitimacy that makes us unstoppable.”
Now people freely listened, some held radios out windows for others to here, many stopped in the streets honking horns and discharging guns.
“Folks don’t listen to the media and government with the lies of war and terrorism and waves of death squads ready to kill you!
All that has happened here in new west city are that a handful of radio listeners has executed 3 criminals of the state.
And taken control of the local government. An almost bloodless transition of power has occurred here today!
. I can only urge that each individual listen tries to achieve the same goals…
By streets and alleys by sector, sections and cities let the people rise up in protest until it becomes an arm of war
Striking down on the anvil of oppression!
Again and again until it forges out the steel of justice into a sword of freedom!”
In the flickering lights glow Boris flicks an ash and draws deeply on his smoke.
Across the planet people begin to whisper
Across the cities on wavelengths of necessity whispers become ideas that formulate into plans and decisions a
Feeling is born
That is something new it is a seed, an idea, Hope in the form of a voice caressing away the fears.
His intonation of assurance and promise the sound of a dream crackles across the early morning cityscape.
As a newer day dawns where hope has replaced fear and resolve has replaced complicity.
A fresh breeze blows across the bleakscape carrying the sounds of Free Boris Radio to the dawn of a newer day.
The symphony fades into the morning mists and a cracked hoarse voice beckons in lucid tones.
“It’s been quite a night folks and if you’re still listening at this late hour you must be either a lover or a fighter
And so I’ll leave you with this last request.”
A deft hand slide through the haze of Smokey blue light and flips a switch,
Taps a key and tours a knob in a single seamless motion the speakers of the world begin to crackle with life.
“It’s from a young listener who does not care about our revolt.
All she wants from the whole wide world right now if for her boyfriend to stop being mad at her and get back together because…
Well. Patrick? Rebecca really misses you.
And that’s what its really all about isn’t it folks Patrick and Rebecca’s freedom to choose."
“So if your listening Patrick I hope Paul Anka can get the message to you young comrades
Folks we each have our own battles to fight and we do not necessarily choose where or what they are.
This is free Boris radio signing off for the night.
“Put your head on my shoulder, Whisper in my ears maybe the words I long to hear Baby…"
