DAVID R. BUNCH

A SAINT GEORGE PENS A NOTE TO HIS DRAGONS

(Disclosures and Offers)

David Bunch’s highly unusual, highly distinctive, highly odd stories have been assembled in Moderan and more recently in Bunch! He lives in St. Louis and views the world in a very strange manner. Witness the following modest proposal concerning ploughshares and swords and mergers thereof.

Dragons! all!! from this table in this room, where I sit long at rest and much in pondering, after the lateliest (and wearying) ride of the Guardsman’s rounds, I would write to you. I have some disclosures that I’d like to share [with you], leading to bright offers of the most extraordinary! dimensions!! But first — I grapple-and-lock a burden that I have to cast afar — from God, through me-and-you — and burst-to-wide the very Gates of Sin! on Conscience Dungeon: I’m really only a part-time Saint Knight World Guardian for Dragon. Threats (SKWGFDT). There are other, and many-counted very bad things that I do, some even having to do with smoke and flame and roars — your trademarks! — (On my best [pious] day of all in the Guardians, I still scored “not perfect” [not “saintly” enough]).

Are you surprised — DRAGONS?! I am prepared to accept that you are [surprised], at this, coming from ME (a Saint George), to YOU —considering my “saintliness,”

my relentlessness, my record to date [overall], and the fact that I have hunted you on all the fields known to Western Civilized Man. Pursued you almost as if you were, completely, Sin itself. — NOW DRAGONS, if some of you, or even all of you, have a like Surprise to spring, and would wish to “come out,” burst right forth right now! and “rip to tatters” the Cave Dark (in a manner of speaking), being only part-time Dragons (closet [cave!] Good Guys), and long I have surmised this might be so, I swear I’ll listen to you say: “I HAVE A BETTER

SIDE!”

And I feel I should take heed the blotching [pussed dark marks] of my soul and make confession, here at my time of trying to BE what I am driven finally to [be], (and conscience shrieking under the ceaseless flog): Sometimes, even with your blood still wetting darker that contended ground where I had felled you, while of your proud-fighter’s fire (your born-of Nature burning), there remained only the thinnest gossamer strands of the smoke of dying — I had questioned [ME]: Have I conquered a really old-bad Dragon, an all-wrong Ogre, a completely depraved and no-hopes for-redemption Reptile? Or should not we, somehow between us [long ago], have arranged ourselves toward some better mindset and an accommodation of our differing ways? Each for the other? Rather than for ME/YOU

to try to slay US, or by other means attempt to overcome US-all the days?

Let me toss three questions out there at you then — while a groom rubs down, curries and feeds my old Horse of War, and my armor {heavy and salting-raw-sores hot in summer and in winter the like load clammy and cold) lies now as busy insect housing in the grass beneath a tree. My tough shield leans at that same tree, near to my armor (likewise my great sword and my Dragon lance), and on that shield where it rests, caught in the dapple-shade of a middle-summer afternoon, raw marks (slashed in!) in the dented steel all-clearly tell the price of fights. (And starkly too they witness that I rode [or, burly-rough and lanceless stood and “fought the sword”], many Blood Days — while the Courts of Death ruled sternly on the depths-and-skills of wounds [on the Dragon-Claws Fields].) — Horse, armor, lance, sword, shield, Death — and you, Dragons —

have these not been our Life and Times…the World’s Life and Times…too often, too much of days, too many nights…brave and unkind…? Question number two: Though myriad the long, and countless the wasted, hours of our contending, are we not [essentially] exactly where we were— WHERE WE WERE— lance points out, claws set for carving…all [of us] too ready to BEat-War — that Anger which exalts “dying from one’s wounds” and inters entire generations? And Question numbering three: Should not the just above TELL US SOMETHING TO THINK A WHOLE

LOT ABOUT, DRAGONS?

SO — let US take time free from our Conflict Times to have ourselves a party!

— an Others-understanding celebration! one of fun and also full of fellowship and mellow good regard for the feelings of Everything that breathes of Life in the Great Room of our coming together. Oh, there we’ll be! self-proclaimed Saints and world-wreck-it-down Dragons, ready to laugh and yell, josh it up for fun and play games — together! What a sight! THAT’ll make — self-appointed Saint Knights [world-guardian], now unarmed, our armor and shields and sword/lances all heaped in a for-junkroom pile; and Dragons (with their flames down-doused to a glow) just horsing around and being jovial.

Plainly to show (in a much-clearer-than-hint self-abasement) that I mean this closely, I’ll bring the Saint George dart boards, those that I wrested from your cruelest Dragon’s cave one furious questing killfiercest afternoon I caught him where he chortled and Dragon-crowed at killing my! head, my saintly head! all the way off. Fang-darts and clawdaggers were splintery mayhem — right through the lumber! — And you too can play the dart-board games at my “drawn pretty”

head (all in sport of course) at this Others-understanding party we are going to have, and I’ll just smile you friendly. And maybe I’ll get back at you with some neat-clean-new parlor tricks to do with smoke and flame and roars —your forte (but all fun stuff [NOW], no burn-downs), that you will teach —

LET’S DO IT, DRAGONS! What have we to lose? What we have done as hostiles all these dying-and-wounded warring centuries — BATTLED — has not brought forth a better world one tittle. We are still at kill-kill odds, and please understand me, One-and-All, when I cry: THINGS DO BUT GET ODDER ALL THE TIME! I do not shout to jest.

DO let me hear (the soonest that you can), Dragons! — old familiar Monsters/Enemies that after all-these-years of close-fight and sore-hurt must seem almost, or quite! my other living selves — and nearly beloved. Reply about the main-line points I make and my offer to stop fighting. -An

Others-understanding get-together? WELL — that certainly can’t kill us any more perilously than we already are. Can it?!

(Gifts follow for all the little Dragons.)

Yours, George,

SKWGFDT — (retired)