obverse vision mirror like reflecting backwards intercourse between i eye aye sir
object subject conjunction confluence collide begetting one or the other 

120429 13:12

120429 07:29
    Vast as consciousness may become is superseded by infinity and the origin of itself. Otherwise, for me, this life is Hell as in wasteland--a toxic dump.
"Man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?" --Robert Browning
    Fear constrains us now as a psychological gulag or a stalag of consumption. Our lives expended for the shepherds of greed. The midway events of which are announced by carnival barkers shouting/screaming doom unless you do as I say not as I do . . . Peter & The Wolf . . . ate him eventually.
    Momentarily my sense is that I am a stylus upon something so vast that metaphors: a grain of sand or dust mote seem in compare terrifyingly overwhelming.
    Yet in this time and place, considering human history, all that is known, becoming and discovered, there is more. We collectively are like the life span of a fruit fly compared to the nest, our once pretty blue and while marble following and orderly course ancient before time was a thought . . .
“Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.” --Robert Frost
    My point dear friend, is that if you know how to die you will learn the value of life . . . love is a power and force that will vanquish everything eventually.
“A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.” --Oscar Wilde
    . . . have i learned nothing save that ‘man’ equals Self/Soul/without gender?
    I’ve often thought, and still think, St. Francis’s recommendation to embrace a leaper meant me. Self acceptance opens horizons beyond the far one we see.

 12428 07:08
In passing . . .
    I remarked astonishment at the number of people I know, who as children had been raped; in most instances, by their parents.
    She raised her hand, two fingers parallel, pointing upward, emerald eyes, steady in gaze unsmiling. Our now reconciled lexicon equivalent are: sexual/emotional abuse.
    Violation is not exclusively physical it is also emotional. Extreme ideals, perceptions, prejudicial conclusions and interpretations lead to extreme aggression. To correct misbehavior assertion seems more appropriate, especially when using “I” messages versus ‘YOU!” for opening negotiation.
    Another friend who, unaccountably like me, garners intimacies unsolicited. While at a topless bar he said; “Most of the girls here were abused by their fathers. Sadly I know too many men with a comparable history.
    Proverbs 13:24 is open to interpretation. Judging by the generation preceding mine, it seems that a literal conclusion was drawn and applied. By penis, stick, fist, or in cases of what we now call ADHD: Ritalin. The consequences of either, or all of the above, are to inflect a lifetime of hurt--self-perpetrating. I am especially concerned at the current accusation of desertion or malingering applied to soldiers with PTSD trauma. Were the solution to this problem a new weapons system, no expense would be spared. With sorrow I hear the position taken by those in authority to accuse, judge and condemn the victim as a coward. . . . And it is not uncommon for the conviction to be make by, and at, vast remove from the cause.
    The Rod can equally be understood as device used to measure the distance or length of things. Think, please, of scepter and crown. In any and all cases it’s use in any regard should be considered after a time-out, lengthy soul searching and mercy for both the punisher and the punished . . . or simply being held accountable for disruptions.
    Measuring the runes and ruins of my life, now forgiven and healed, I remember best the worst punishment of all: silence. I am reminded of a friend whose father used her sexually first at six. By the age twelve when, she sought his attention in the only manor of affection he ever paid her, she was abandoned to silence. In her lifelong quest for love she always sought “BAD BOYS”. . . . And it is not she alone, for I spent a few long moments in the cell with a woman who’d burned her husband alive. She didn’t say a word to prove her innocence of the conviction, a lifetime imprisoned.
    It is usually around the age of forty that we begin to feel, regardless of any other measure “success” is not enough to hide the distress fearing another forty feeling distempered. Women reach this apogee sooner than men since they mature early and out pace us, we men, ad infinitum.
    If you are mentally ill, or think you are, or suffering in silence the humiliation of abuse, it is a good time, getting better, to be so. My transparency and potentially “inappropriate” self-revelation, once was seen as indicative, a diagnostic,  of being bipolar--manic depressive. Acquisition cost me tens of thousands of dollars in medication. In retrospect; alternative remedy is available through self-investigation and lasting healing, is within your grasp.
    I sift through the hair suit of my life and discover choices I regret triggered by the simplest thing, an attempt to do penance for a crime I, at twelve, did not commit against my sister. She equally maligned at six. The result was and endless effort to acquire acceptance and love set upon hair-triggered bear trap snapping shut at any sign of disapproval. I was wired that way disembodied slavery as a victim or runaway.
    I advocate for you. What I write is a faltering attempt to sell you the best franchise of all: yourself.

120429 04:13
    Teachers who taught me best remembered, none definitive remain, yet she who ran bare foot at 11 emerald eyes seeking peaches and pears, for her persistence to encourage the deconstruction of self-contempt. Not me alone, thank The All, for such a work of art, and force of nature, it would be criminal to constrain, sequester, hoard or hide.
    Seen across the dog watch sea, a match struck glimmering become no scintillation but creation itself a shadowless light blinding amazement. The sea of loathing evaporated.
    Those who also saw an investment I can never repay though none was is expected. Taught the color of freedom saffron plumed. A Phoenix arising against restraints rent. Again, round and round about, to see those who cared as equally awesome more for their origins than their fact. Taught not the what but the why derived from only that we are unique, precious beyond the value of all measure. To be enabled passing along the gem an unfolding of more. A cosmology of no cat’s eye marbles, or pearls, so much as a milky way of them without boundaries.
    Dark mortality  be not vain.
    . . . love’s labor never deadly creating a world we would gladly give & leave behind

Candy
i should call her
after the first 2 pennies found and delivered upon the cold marble countertop of a Candy Store
like buttons endless in variety and leading beyond my childhood sight into the dark
my face reflected slavering in glass which would satisfy my hunger?
how to choose just one
all i could afford
being four
&
like she
of emerald eye
i soar ever upward in astonishment
her name is more mysterious, metaphysical, mystical
unutterable manifold like all those of God
To Have, and Have Not
in the meantime ladies and gents
Step this way
a feast
on http://www.brainpickings.org/
i can’t send them money
but give em’ a plug
120424 0444

120422 20:21d
    Never in winter, there, remembered. Save the one aside a kerosene heater, naked in a copper washtub. Abandoned at five. She on her knees hands washing me, the whispering heat hissing. Christmas?
    No.
    Forever afterward--always summer.
    Out of school, into the Packard buried under trunks, crumpled on the back seat. Or in a bus. Or trains. New York so hot it sucked off my shoes crossing tarmac to a terminal darkly looming . Pennsylvania mountain crossing, air conditioning broken; a tag upon my shirt, ‘Do This If Lost.’
    Or ‘Found?’
    Alone.
    My maternal grandmother’s house, an imposing edifice. Red painted brick and white trim. Second Street, National Highway  Route 52,  passing through the night village in rain; truck tires whooshing. Upscale for that end of town closest to Cincinnati.  Same distance as the designator showing the way up river from the Mississippi leading southerly into a starry night sea. Heart quickened in sweet agony approach knowing the inevitable annual divorce. Snatched back hurled forward again.
    Barefoot or in shoes. “Get ‘um quick, slip in the screen door quiet like.” Stomping in the dark. She’d reach in, turn on the kitchen light; beneath my feet cock roaches scurried. Our excursions were seldom ended in darkness. Except for prayer meetings Wednesday nights in the 12 over 12 Methodist Church faintly illume with bug lights snaking from the dark above.
    Upon the pew back enthroned.
    “GET DOWN!” Stage whispered she!
    “no”
    I fell off thumping resonant in the gloom echoing through the nearly empty plain windowed sanctuary. She, leaning over my prostrate form, forming the fatal word, spelling “I’m going to ‘M_U_R_D_E_R’ . . . There was no ‘you’ just her crooked forefinger like mine, then and now, pointed between shocked eyes glazed upward.
    That night I danced circles around her chanting, terrified what was to come upon arrival her home; “Oh Mama Lu I love you” over and over all the three blocks way; my execution site, darkly silent awaiting, our arrival. light turned on, she laughed and holding my shoulders, no higher than somewhere between her knees and waist, she boxing, like paint mixing back and forth between cans, pouring her love in my face smiling. I was King once more, the only male child of her body in a generation of women.
    Married at thirteen, she the last in a family of eight with seven brothers ‘farmed out.’ The father dead from cancer. The farm hand married and took her. First birth at fourteen, second at nineteen--my mother. Fatherless at four she’d say only he died in a hunting accident.
    Later inquisition, of all seven brothers, indicated it was a shotgun wound to the groin taking twenty days to bleed out, self-inflicted. Perry Hill was otherwise a circuit riding Methodist Minister and an expert hunter.
    There was a darkness shrouding my childhood. Not only the imagined nakedly snow covered stubble field flecked red beneath the barbed wire fence shot gun rested against my grandfather slumped. My beloved son would die on the same date: December 10th later on.
    Unspoken legend: to survive Christmas assured another year of life to face other sudden departures.
    There were others there, in Ripley, Ohio, death taken, accident, shot, fallen, mysteriously. Children roughed, men somber women with flowers. Wakes open caskets. Small wonder I wander stone gardens of memorials for peace in perpetual communion. Here, now, Las Cruces, New Mexico, finally home, the cemeteries littered with memorial toys; tiny forms sleeping beneath. Special is this boarder place melding  melting cultures. Christ Crucified  limp in anguish scourged; dripping blood. Not triumphant robed in glory resurrected. Both traditions reside here birth, life, death, life renewed.
120424 04:07 final-final

120422 10:55
"Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was; and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it."
 
"There is but one blasphemy, and that is injustice." --Anonymous

    This attribution always brings a feral grin to my persona:
"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman." --Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
    The tuition payments, plus interest and penalties, is beyond counting, in THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS. Which unlike all other institutions of ‘higher learning’ is not, essentially, vocational.
    My orgy of reading began early, the public library my only refuge and sanctuary. The women Liberians, oracles, became fetishes in both senses. Now I have too few heart beats left to pursue the writings of those I adore fully save for their quotes as posies collected and encircled with fibers of those whose lives I’ve shared.
    I am now just past the advent of my third year volunteering at hospice. The gap within my journals & images, such as I have kept (very little) is yawing, silent, and now recognized as humiliation. What I was before, am now, will become, washed away. The fruit fly of me squashed against a headlamp of an onrushing train. . . .and humbled more by the love of those about to pass forever remembered in prayer and gratefulness.
    He lay there, last I saw, him unable to eat the food I would deliver. His face variegated and adorned with a beard reminiscent of Orthodox Icons of divines. I presume, but do not know, his passing yet. I am not allowed to record the specificity of his face but can retell the depth of “ . . . oh, you too?” discovered in converse.
    Perhaps, possibly, maybe, maybe not I write this in his honor. He is but one of many whose bequest to me is enormous, unspeakable, nakedly intimate and the only truth I now know.
    We die, each and everyone of us, the moments fled, appraised as glorious at the time when there will be no more seconds left. Not literary artifice, nor clever implication: My days are an eternity, each awakening, the dawn of a life reborn; new. Resurrection or reincarnation meld into a knowing explicit to my perception forged on the anvil by knocks, a sword become plow sheer . Grateful for them all, the blows struck, my hymn of Thanksgiving reprised.

"Virtue refuses facility for her companion ... the easy, gentle, and sloping path that guides the footsteps of a good natural disposition is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road." --Michel de Montaigne

Montaigne's axiom: "Nothing is so firmly believed as that which least is known."

120418 0002
    Toys from childhood; fondnesses recalled .
    A tricycle upon which, at 4 or 5, I would flee the oppression of a constant wariness. Speeding the alleyways of wartime St. Louis. Alone now and too long forgotten the joy and the little girl who, grasping me about the waist would silently enjoy the ride; sometimes.  She came to me in a dream riding it from the gloom into the light of us together conjoined smiling at me. (See C. Jung anima/animus. We are 51% dominant gender and 49% “other.”)

    A kaleidoscope, dented, cardboard, second-hand, carried well into recent years; now lost in another leave taking. The fright fleeing flight to anywhere but there left behind. So dependent upon the gestures, trashing's, sidereal glances of accusation that I was the problem.
    I think they may have been correct. I adore the phrase, “kaleidoscope eyes.” It is not what they saw in my somber appraisal 20/20 observation, leery of the woman who when not silent could explode; while dad was either comatose or indifferent. It was the internal mastication of everything and estimates of consequences. My consciousness recalled as being inside the dented tube; thought refracted in technicolor, silent save for the clink, clink of turning. I could read in her eyes the advent of killing me had I’d not known not to cry. But then, like the others gone now, she could kill with words as well.
    Odd how we can recover physically but emotionally only with an dedication to being whole. No longer broken inside and out. Or merely squashed like a speckled gray and white moth upon the snout of a Greyhound Bus.
    I was exiled to my maternal grandmother’s care. She lived on the Ohio River and behind her home was a huge tree amongst whose roots I played. Toy trucks, tanks, lead soldiers . . . I took and lost an image; the knees of wife and grandmother side by each. Returning I was grief stricken to discover the tree decapitated later on.

    Recounting the joy continued now. The tricycle was escape. The kaleidoscope still twirling refracting music, light, thoughts, conclusions possible exceptions now. Knees and roots, The Tree of Life, every leaf of consequence to the origins of everything falling and being recycled.
    My root is still there. All the elements in place. And only now do I know that though I am/was “Christian” the crown of the tree sees over every definition of prophecy swayed by what makes the Aeolian Harp musical.
    The scars are healed. Now I know no fear of death or dying, quickly or slowly, since all things are in their place and within is a place for everything. Peace and Love be with you. Too.
   
    An afterthought: Considering the current decimation of privacy--confession here--I too was the inquisitor of both parents as to the who, what, why, when and wherefore. Mom gave me the “Yha But!” She’d been told she wasn’t worth the salt in her bread. As for dad, “I didn’t know any better.”
    Children love unconditionally. It is not dependence it is the purest love I know, at least in this life. To forgive our parents their failings, then forgive ourselves for the contusions, concussions and convulsions we carry forward those things we endured have an end. The end is freedom from hate and indifference towards all life, no exceptions.

“Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.” --The Talmud

. . . The kindness we give to another may be the only kindness they’ll ever know. Inconsequential to us, but to the other it may save their life. As for wives, lovers, children and dogs they/we all should remember the kindnesses and forget/forgive the harm.

. . . a parting shot. Under the tree, after Sunday Supper, I’d play checkers with my granddad. The folding board  sitting upon our knees. The only time I won he rocked back on his chair and the pieces fell to the ground. I’m still laughing; even had a dream that he was God laughing at me. Carl Jung: Grandmother = Great Mother, by extrapolation, Grandfather = Great Father? In either or any case he always was fond of telling me, “You are as crazy as a--either--bed bug or June bug.”

120421 08:08
    If you read me, thanks, if not it’s okay by me, bye-bye. I take not myself serious for as found round and around I’m told we come from the same origins the rapist, raped and the lost never found.
    As for the Tree, The River, Boats Barges and Trains. In dreams of peace loving I return the origins of my perceptions trained by steam whistle and tow boat plash, stern wheel then both, fingering the night with their moan and light. The only home I’d ever known until Now. . . .between the knees the tree . . . whatever.
    . . . nowhere near Molly Bloom in a tutu

120418 15:53
    Of tides, time, and lunar cycles, I am well acquainted, but like a clam better served at high flood happy.
    I weep too easily for public intercourse. Regardless Mozart or Jimmy Hendrix. And for me to read 1 Corinthians 13 publicly I become incoherent . . . not squinchy eyed but wide in joy the tears flow.
    I am late in life to discover and fabricate a career. My voice finally free the censure or applause of others. Which well may be, for me, now--not fixed but fluid--a better understanding the koan “The Sound of One Hand.”
    “Monkey Mind” aside I’ve been dialoging internally since the first blows stuck upon me in childhood. Surprise overwhelms me  and laughter shakes the window sashes. My only companion Annie is accustomed and complains not. It tickles me to roll my eyes, wiggle my ears and flap the wattles, warts and jowls hanging from my skull like a damp threadbare dish rag. But when I stick my tongue out mimicking her kisses she stares wide eyed attention assured. We are each other’s favorite toy.
    To the point: I wonder why I do what I do, or anything, minus the obvious. But that is the filter through which flows everything around me coupling the things I cannot see or hear manifest/manifold in and to other senses.
    The only marketable skill I had was once mystical in the sense it combined a plethora of elements executed in milliseconds. A mash up melding technical knowledge, instinct, intuition, feelings and senses inseminating that frozen bit of time captured; a photograph. All this is now commonly available, like the Nickel Penny Arcade Masturbator dad and I would speculate about. We called her “Granny” in homage to Tom Swift. . . . kinda’ sorta’ like those photo booths, close the curtain and giggle unisex.
    I have no ambition left save for the play of words and images caught in time and briefly held. To float in empty space as I once saw in a dream, Michelangelo’s pietà; the end of everything. Its going to happen eventually, whether by fracking, giving the earth enemas, or Ritalin dispensed for the inconvenient child leaving their synapses aberrant for generations to come, should we as a species or life form still be around. The end by Fire or Ice is a lovely metaphor. All the while mercantile greed is hurling us stealthily and subversively into individual termination today thence the world.
    I judge myself by the same standards.
    It is appalling that The Thought Police are now covertly viral. A virus more insidious than Ebola devouring Free Speech. I’ve amputated my few associations with charity, or political protest, on the Internet, being it is a lost cause. Seen though my eyes, the powers that be, killing us, obliquely, are factory farming our psyches . . . slavery is the norm. We ciphers victims all of our own, self-congratulatory/self-revelatory publication.

1204 05:29
    Why am I restless, sleeping briefly working longer? I’ve been touched by several people, literally and figuratively, with their questions invoking my own. This continuance of the above; inspired by the image of myself as a lab rat, white, red eyed, whiskers twitching curious. Nay I’m more the church mouse filled with stored hymnals and prayer books just a nibble here and there about the edges--The Great Big Book--residing on the lectern . . . a cuddly ball of brown fur. Innocuous and benign; superfluous/supercilious. L.O.L.
    I could look up Voltaire and his wondrous remark about God’s laugher and our being too--and here I’ll ad lib; self-righteous to applaud and laugh along. Although in Voltaire, I remember he implied: terror/terrified.
    If whores and tax collectors were good enough for Jesus I’ll follow his lead. After all laws create law breakers exponentially . . . well . . . maybe not for those who clothe their crimes institutionally.
    Oh well just an afterthought.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPH:
    I am a closet painter, musician, poet, sculptor . . . well maybe, maybe not . . . any or all or none of those.
    The hospice volunteers had just been feted: breakfast and a movie--MIRROR/MIRROR. I waited to see, the credits,  who had participated in this slaying of Disney’s neutering of fairy tales; shear genius all told.
    As I walked to my vehicle I was approached by a middle-aged African American, sleek, muscular, well dressed. He approached me and said, “My mother died there ##/##. Thank you for your care.” I, in principle and in general do not advertise my association; I’d forgotten to remove my volunteer badge after the event.
    Lifetime habit, carrying a recording device, I looked down and reflexively annotated the moment, surprised afterward that it is habitual, this looking for lost pennies who resemble me. The interstice between us and the numinous is never as great as it seems. . . . and her angelic face is etched in the best camera we all have; the heart.

120419 00:37
    I am loved now, with a transparency inconceivable and lifetime longed for.
    There is no motive to redact, vacate or expunge past relationships. Nor to rationalize and thus avoid responsibility for not being able to receive the love proffered. Nor is it a clever recitation of Rumi’s recommendation, “that we seek the barriers within ourselves.” I humiliate myself, the greed for love, buried within my profess to others. Rendering my expression of love, seen retroactively, a manifestation of need/greed. Fill me please -- I’m on empty.
    The term, “inappropriate loyalty,” is not indicative of disloyalty to those loved and loved still--present, past or future. In point of order. I awoke filled with gratitude and recognition my ongoing love for the Anglican Communion, expressed in America as The Episcopal Church. That I have not attended ‘church’ in years does not mean I don’t still love it. My communion is with hospice now; the staff, patients and volunteers. Is it false to say that I celebrate peace and gratitude daily wearing that consciousness as an invisible skullcap or vestment? My sense is that of continual prayer not isolated to forty-five minutes one day per week. In the end if I am not accepted as loyal then I have less meaning or value than a grain of sand.

120421 00:51
    . . . that was then, this is now, the wheel turns grinding my vanity to a finer dust. The future lover, fact to face, will be God. The personage of many names who awoke me again with the simple sense/message that I adore writing. It is nearly obscene; the laughter and tears spiraling around in my head. My sense of humor is that I might just be ‘crucified’ chemically or at the very least incarcerated in The Cuckoo’s Nest. OM the ALL is primary yet there is nearly equal protest the injustice of the 6 Million and the 60 Million Russians and the millions of lives sacrificed to end the insanity.

    "Not being able to govern events, I govern myself." --Michel de Montaigne
   
    I need regurgitate, at least here, my snarky skepticism regarding the choices of those representing my nationality. My chosen vocation, as in “The Shoe Maker should stick to his last,” is tending my soul and the souls of those who care to follow the communion/community of Higher Consciousness.
    I am incited by a recently heard remark from a man whose dedication for justice I respect, if not actually admire: Elie Wiesel. Is that Snarky? Inferred or implied, given his age, a bit more antique than I, he will have words with God about the 6 Million. Ignoring completely the 60 Million.
    Free Will is not a comfortable dodge, nor is Democracy, in reality, not how we are governed. Neither is easy to take responsibility for, to participate or process . . . any more than it is easy to do the same for our self/soul/mind. All institutions and nations, in one form or another, solicit the franchise of God as absolute power and force. Prancing about vainly decrying their choices as justice retributively delivered.
    All God’s children are in the same sandbox with God. There is no “Let Mikey do it.”
    Those who profit from crimes against humanity, on both sides, miss the message: “Thou shall not kill.”
    And in closing may I remind us that God by any name, in recent history--the minor part of our recorded time on Earth--is essentially now defined as beneficent, slow to anger, merciful . . . go on read it, Paul said it better in: 1 Corinthians 13 . . . essentially Love not Retributive.

    “THERE IS NO GOD HIGHER THAN TRUTH,” Gandhi, who forgave his assassin.
 

120417 04:04

In times of parting I am suffused with grief

the moment our terminal separation

A child whose loss would be enormous;

ending the best real love ever known.

Once time remembered perceived most bereft

perchance looking into the azure ceiling saw

two children's balloons white tethered,

seeking heaven together.

. . . discovered later this date:
"Love possesses not nor will it be possessed, for love is sufficient unto love." 

"Sadness is but a wall between two gardens." --Khalil Gibran
 

. . . then remembered
"Learn the alchemy that few human beings know, that when you accept what difficulties you have been given, a door opens."
"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." --Rumi

Love is an astonishing experience, in that 'To Have & Have Not' is reverent to the origin of All Love. To die this moment from joy knowing this, i am quartet blest discovering there is no boundary in life and death marked. All definitions from gender to religion, or other governance, will pass away leaving Love, what we sometimes call "God."
. . . another level, this date: I have begun to curate flowers found, no longer by attribution cataloged since there is only The One who speaks through us. . . . in some sense I see us all passing vessels upon a night sea becoming Speaking Trumpets to one another on the way to oblivion; let us be kind to one another in the journey.

444px-Antelope_Canyon_Mittags

 

 

 

 

120415 12:54
    Nude bodies are engaging less so than naked souls, both seen by-the-eye seen/experienced.
    In my time, grown where planted, fortunate to survive, felicitous, the infant after me was not.
    Scrambled and flushed away--Mother nearly died--a hemorrhage, reprise the barbarians at gates of choice. She never told me. Dad did. But said she to me, he said he wanted, “The Virgin Mary (we Methodist/Baptist borne . . . Imagine?) and a whore.”
    i wonder not my love affair; sources/ideas/ideals, potent words copulating across blank all light white space

reams scrolling up/down the birth chancel seminal.
    You’d think that being old now I’d no longer keen either for fleshy intimacy or my androgynous sibling, dead before knowing either me, or i, it.
    But then too I wonder wandering these closing days, if 'she'/'he'/‘it’ doesn’t speak through me seeking the meanings of things measured & treasured? So too son and daughters much less the mother of them left long ago.
    Teeth fractured on stones, rending robe, ashes upon dust marked by the toe of Jesus before the woman taken in adultery to be stoned.
    Move over Job we’re a pair.
    Beloved sing me sighs that I may sign others equally, they are adored . . . .

“It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before... to test your limits... to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” --Anais Nin

of sorts & conditions
omissions & sins of commission
awry & absent permission to judge
prejudicially a critic unclothed

Amen

. . . rewrite or molestation? 120415 21:27 The Tax Man, rapacious Bankers, and Home Land Security wait their pound of flesh; slaves are we all.

all power the 99%

I remain my mother’s lover
though long dead she remains
a figure of fixated fascination
for her ejaculatory proclamations.

In Life Class, Art Students League
glooming North Light Lit
looming white flesh of woman.
I turned to a female student and
said: “qu’est-ce-que c’est?”
oblivious the question mark?

She replied, “qu’est-ce-que c’est?”
Our volley went back-and-forth
until in frustration I asked in English;
what does it mean?

“WHAT DOES IT MEAN!”

“The temple bell stops but I still hear the sound coming out of the flowers.”--Matsuo Basho

Never intimate emotionally or physically after a lengthy dry birth
i soon learned to never ask anything of a woman
personal until now

“Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.” --Erma Bombeck

. . . nonsensical but it made me laugh
mother & me that is, multilingual she was
i a pox of inappropriately tinctured seductiveness remain

xoj 4m

120415 11:22

http://my.opera.com/JackSpratt/blog/2012/04/15/what-does-it-mean

120415 03:20
    I am conservative in the sense of reaching back to origins and honoring them.
    Each of Mankind’s advances have convulsed, more like St. Vitas than logic, reason or compassion. Not  three forward and two back. but many. Then, a few advanced, subsumed  and buried in the sand. Mountains of vanity, cupidity and greed, beguiling and enslaving all life surrounding them; their monuments like mountains will return to sand, ashes and/or dust.
    Inevitable doom is inherent in all birth beginning at conception; biological or egotistical. If you will, these are the facts of life, not ‘Da Birds and Bees.’
    The prancing, preening, passion of ruling classes is always to rationalize selfishness. The obscenity of this posture, so actually unnatural, is it is most often, then and now, justified as “Divine Right.”
    The locus of conscious endeavor is to destroy anything that is OTHER. The institution, culture or civilization that holds and wields the most advanced weaponry is in timeless time, The King for a Day. . . . nakedly in eternity: a fruit fly.
    Who are your prophets?
    What profit do they aggregate?
    At what cost and to whom?
    In the company of those whose mission is to serve others--about to die, dying or dead--is a curious wisdom and joy. Truth is made obvious -- all life dies taking nothing with it. Those addled young people, veterans of war, who homeless wander our nation are more like Jesus than any person of rank, stature, eminence pretending to mediate between God & Man.
    Questions are more important than answers.
    Why is it the natural earth, water, wind and fire erodes vanity, destroying instead of saving.
    My faith is immutable in life, either way, absolute. Upon Sinclair, Huxley and Orwell are no more, nor less, prophetic than those the majority claim to adore.
    Irreverent?
    My reverence is total love for the origin of it all life.
    Thence to the divinity inherent in you.
    . . . Be it, the only truth that moth, rust and decay cannot not touch.

I am
what i is
a girl named Johnny
reborn this hour: Wanda June
dream angels neuter conjoined
internally eternally infinitely intimately
Sister Sun Brother Moon
Nancy boy girl Muscularity
Wanda Jack Jumping over Cat in a Hat
Wander Woman Wonder Man
Jesus Magdalen
Claire Francis
Teresa John

The child who first hugged me leaving her panties who knows where
over whom my father roared with laughter recounting her mother’s protest
Awoke me catapulted vertical
we two become One
Innocent @ four years old on a red tricycle
hot not then now dreamed reprise

 . . . could be an erector set poem?

 4m

 120413 23:34

120412 00:31
    “ . . if I speak with the tongues of Angels and have not love . . “ I am a fraud!
    Upon cats paws this dawn arose a simple truth. I was incapable of forgiving myself the pain, suffering and abandonment of those I professed to love. And who, in their way, and to the best of their ability, loved me. As for myself, until that moment, self-love was forbearance grudgingly given. Thus my “I love you” was actually  greed begging them to love me. True love will let the beloved go, to return or not. Love is what you give, a verb not a noun, unconditionally.
    In flesh and blood terms, how it works in real like, my relationships have been failures . . . in some cases attributable to me, or partially/mostly so. The forgiveness I sought and received seemed to lay the issue to rest. Add, I confess to a vanity, thinking in poetic terms, that I held those I’d hurt in my heart, mind and prayers.
    Not good enough.
    It didn’t work since I twirled, Dervish like, the nail not between my toes, but through my foot. The metaphor applies only to Sufi trainees. Think ‘spiritual training wheels.’
    Gentle as a vagrant breeze, or Annie`s request for attention, flew in this realization. As I’ve pondered it through the hours since, with little rest, I became convicted the issue was justice. And that beneath it all I simmered, enraged, blaming that which I could not change either for those I loved, others close at hand or the world. But most of all I resented deeply the injustice of it all personally.
    Ostensibly I’d transformed the process of “Being between a rock and hard place” to “Being between the hammer and anvil.’ As in swords transformed into plow shears.
    My “Nothing is for Naught” -- “Nothing is for Nothing” implies to me, the sacrifice of Jesus, was pre or foreordained; purposeful, had value, meaning and consequence. And that I would, if called, lay down my life for another similarly without expectation of applause, gratitude or affirmation. Knowing that The Author of Us and Everything intended my death to serve, at the very least to save another’s life, and nothing more.
    Another way of illustrating the same ideal is to say: “There are no accidents.”
    However I’m still laughing over: “I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road." --Stephen Hawking
    Thank God for my sense of humor especially when applied to myself. And i do.
    Farther. My reliance upon synchronicity, using the Jungian definition, equally implies that this morning‘s revelation was from the same source of love that all the rest came, and continues, even now, to come from. Add to which my first “conversion” experience centered in an Old Testament reading about a father losing multiple sons by execution.
    Having read, yet unable at the moment to recall accurately “chapter & verse” either the Book of Jobe, or Jung's writing on its significance. I remember, and remain impaled up, Jobe’s lack of outrage; the injustice done to his children, estate and himself; his faith remanded immutable. . . . I’ve just crucified my Self!

120410 09:31
    Writing, initially, was masturbatory. Furtive gratification sought in an outhouse. Toilet paper: the lingerie section of J. C. Penny’s Catalog--always best--but more often Sears & Roebuck. With my family reunion waiting their turn in the facility. “Are you okay in there?!”
    Welcomed and forgiven now: the parental edict, “too stupid to live.” In hindsight a gift, it kept me silent in an alchemical retort/a pressure cooker. My thoughts, desires, curiosity caroming and ricocheting within a dark cave. Later redeemed as prayer echoing amongst the stars. Answered.
    Angelica Huston, in my eyes a forever Stone Fox, once mangled ‘orgasm’ as “organism” in a film set in Ireland. Research fails me regarding title and author. That said, in a linage stemming from Norse Tribes transplanted to Scotland then Ireland: Orange. I find the Irish to have a better understanding of God than most other tribes global.
    Ala:
    “God asked Adam if he wanted to stand up to pee?”
    “Yes”
    “Fine.” Then turning to Eve proclaiming, “To you I give multiple orgasms.”
    Those first writings, a photography column at the Providence Journal, were harried by commitments to: staff photography, teaching photojournalism at the University of Rhode Island, freelance assignments for a variety of National news services &/or publications and family. The latter became my preoccupation. At the time of my son’s diagnosis with Leukemia I fell blind to all else.
    To paraphrase Albert Schweitzer; 'You don’t have to be an angel to be a saint.' I am neither and aspire to nothing more than witnessing The All/The I AM. Never claiming to be a ‘nice’ person, I only pretend to be to keep myself outside the ‘cuckoo’s nest.’ I find joy writing now not merely the brief ejaculatory pleasure of ‘a happy ending.’ In seeking forgiveness from those I abused and betrayed I have begun, over and over, to seek to forgive myself.
    And now I write to the self I was, as child and adult, as well as those, who like me, stand upon the trembling cusp of death ready to seek relief: “Stop the Merry Go Round I Want To Get Off.”
    “Take up your cross” is branded upon my lips. For better or worse I am wed to this self. Damned either way? I don’t think so since I am willing to live and die for my truth . . . least I offend our brethren, all fellow travelers in this pretty blue & white nest hurtling through space . . . my brand is the Jerusalem Cross.
    Yet as before and always I remain a dust mote traversing a soon to pass shaft of light, superfluous.
    The joy of God is endless grown from a time before time was noted . . . Not a once-upon-a-time pleasure to be held immutable or egocentric.

“ 14:04

    I’ve come to distrust those who know not of chicken excrement between their toes.

    And it is she of emerald eyes, barefoot racing through peary groves, who blest then ordained me

    So odd to be adorned in her presence bejeweled each confessing an obsession with common stones worn smooth in rivers flow or erupted and graven by hands so long prehistory

Peans to those who forbore this black hole event arising a new something unknown as yet gestating . . .
is this/that/the womb of God?

Poem & Illustration from Journal of Sacred Work http://journalofsacredwork.typepad.com/
120408 0521 Easter Morn 
    The ‘pearl of great price’ is you. It has no value to others save the source from which it came; and goes towards. And in this sense do I attempt to integrate: "We are all meant to be mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born." --Meister Eckhart . . . into this day and the ordinary of my life.
    I have never experienced success with the classical exercise or forms of meditation. Instead I fall asleep and ‘sleep the sleep of the ‘damned’ or ‘perchance to dream’? No I don’t think so for it more like surrender to me either way.
    I value river stones over gems. The metaphor is exclusive to life lived here on our planet which is equally our nest so dependent upon the work of water is it. For here we are all family; cells with in a whole body, no part of which is to be feared or despised, loved and accepted without exception.
    Virgin Birth, Death, Resurrection are to me like stones in the rock polisher of our soul; without gender or physical insemination. Here I am thinking of Confucius, a bit of Buddha, Mohamed I know to little of and obvious of Jesus who tumble together like stones in a flooding river through my mind consciously. More often than not empty, save for the flow of being awake or asleep.
    Eckhart implies the reverse of my sense of: St. Peter admitting us to Heaven; for St. Peter unlocking our preoccupation with survival (immortality, safety and wealth) and admitting Heaven into us.
    Sins of omission/commission are crimes I’ve committed and projected upon those against whom I protest or hold in angry regard. This is passing away slowly. Yet my boulder of prejudice and bigotry, though lashed and laved, remains rough, intransigent. If I can forgive myself perhaps the boulder will become the river. All mountains, in time, become deserts. We cannot change the world, or cosmos, only ourselves. “Nothing is ours except time.” --Marcus Annaeus Seneca
    I am not ashamed to confess synchronicity. To be led, as I experience, in joy, through gardens of thoughts tilled and expressed by others in order to better express my own. (paraphrase) --Michel de Montaigne

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Kumbh+Mela

“In the great scheme of things, what matters is not how long you live, but why you live, what you stand for, and what you are willing to die for.” --Paul Watson

120406 02:57
    My cheek on His cold bloody feet, I wept. He was human, could and did die, growing tremendous doing so. Vision, memory or imagining? Is His resurrection potent in us? I remain a gnat amidst giants. My footprint in eternity a mere two square feet. To celebrate joy we need suffer pain; near or absolute loss.
    As witness to my time I’ve fallen away from the celebrity of most rich, beautiful, hansom. Moving closer to the abyss I hear His words, “Not my will, but Thine be done.” In the dark starless night I rise to suffuse myself with quotes. There finding a common tread throughout recorded history traversing all boundaries even death. A common will to live with, love, compassion and mercy
    I remember being ill, not long ago, in need of intensive therapy, massive infusions of antibiotics. A fellow sufferer, a daughter, shared a story about her father.
    He was one of the very few surviving the destruction of the battleship U.S. Arizona. She went on to share her awe of his disregard of fear. Telling me of his insistence that she transport him, instead of an Ambulance with medical technicians when involved with a stroke or, perhaps, a heart attack.
    Of saints and sinners, the deranged and composed, I love them all, their transparent reality. Life lived tolerantly.
    When I stroke Annie’s fur I am reminded of the sound of snow falling upon a windless winter night. In turn I remember being transported to a distant Methodist Church at Easter to collect varicolored eggs and chocolate bunnies . . . the rich green lawn racing beneath my feet during the hunt . . . the dirty brown sandstone bricks . . . but best of all are memories of my mother and sister’s joy at the day.
    Experience His martyrdom and weep with me the loss. Resurrect the Love learning the joy of unconditional relationship, fearless. No exceptions allowed.

“Just as a flower, which seems beautiful has color but no perfume, so are the fruitless words of a man who speaks them but does them not.” --Dhammapada

“ 07:40
    I no longer cry or grovel when so led to see the above quote instantly leaving what I wrote. “Suffer the little children . . . “ no longer makes me furious in the Memorial Mass. If it was said then/there or was quoted by another priest to slake my anguish -- the lost children of my love.
    In these moments I become the child I was, redeemed and reconciled to the harm and pain I’ve committed upon those I’ve left behind. In body but never in heart or mind. I return to Serpent Mound, Randy upon my shoulders, seeing a six foot black snake he began to wiggle and plead that I let him down. He then squat next the snake hands upon his knees. Did he speak? Pray or commune? I’ll never know. But his quest reminds me of mine at four, same posture, discovering a nest of baby pigeons upon an alleyway, eyes dead beaks open, a rictus of hunger yet.
    Why oh why did they die. Resonant still the question unanswered. Being this broken vessel incapable of the commission i still ask why any/everything.
    The snake coiled  slept on. The nest, snake and question remain. A nodal point. Gyring higher and deeper the cyclone of love moves onward from resolution to experience.
    Our playground grows from one universe to another infinity. Onward the journey renewed.

--John Andrew Holmes
“It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.”

illustration borrowed from: Parabola Newsletter: Learning to See, April 5th, 2012

“ 21:11 . . . I am slumping towards exhaustion lingering in a sense of futility and molested words personal torn from the flesh of my journal. Do I publish or allow them to disappear into the Dumpster? Hell is for me noting more than waste. He lives on.

. . .  Surrender!

120405 02:58
    The Betsy!
    Happy Special Day, marking your birth.
    I remember you in pencil skirt, flats and books wafting through the edifice of Greenwich High School.     Unattainable.
    In my minds eye remembered as iconic, somewhat akin to Ann Marrow Lindbergh whose husband purchased a flute from my father for their daughter, I never saw her, or her parents either. Yet for years he would encourage me to pursue one like you, her or the adored one from third grade elementary school with whom I had a family; no more.
    But then I never had a family: biological, adopted or of any other description until hospice.
    Forgive me please, singling you out in this semi public way. Your affirmations weave me back into the days of our youth and your pages tell me of your becoming this day.
    Most men never grow up. Instead we become inflated balloons of our adolescence. As Adult as those cartoon figures floated above Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade annually in Manhattan. Goofy flouncing about hither and yon empty save for helium; modestly tethered and led.
    The only feminine presence in my life, 24/7/365, is Annie. A cat who, contrary to classical ideation, is a continual pest seeking my touch, attention, affection, resorting to laying recumbent across my keyboard or at the very least sweeping it with her vast bushy tail.
    It seems I am fated to be a solitary, completely inappropriate for human cohabitation.
    But then you are a source of sanity in what I now realize was a time when others, including myself, presumed me insane. At best an embarrassment. I apologize less now and rationalize never; externally or interiorly.
    My mother’s birthday was yesterday and my adored’s on the tenth.
    Einstein said, “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
    My mother did this plus suffuse me with music from conception onward. I made the colossal mistake of falling asleep listening to classical music after delving into one hundred, or so, pounds of laundry looking for summer shorts. I think I did sleep but in an alternate way lost in cathedrals of genius. A maze of glory. I sleep like a wolf anyway.
    I feared I’d made a snarky reply to your most recent ‘like.’ Where it not for your very welcomed terse affirmations--too rare in my experience, especially from a woman or anyone for that matter--I’d fold my tent and run away collapsing my participation in “Social Media.” For which I need not to detail my regard anymore than why I never listen to politicians. . . .Both seem so self congratulatory, akin to Mailer’s remarks about advertisements for one’s self; Christmas Cards in front of the Mc Mansion fire place or the latest model Break My Wallet SUV.
    Have I made my amends?
    Maybe instead of ‘like,’ a ‘yes’ would suffice.
    Knowing that you are a runner, you’ll appreciate my wholesale permission to knee cap me instead.
    . . . it seems I’ve always been attracted to terse, mostly silent women; think of bating the tiger.

120330 04:17

    Mere children, trained killers, boys mustering out in Mid-Advent; hardened and invincible. His voice, amid the murmuring rhubarb of 400-to-a-barrack at Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, a clarion call. I swam through the babble introducing myself as a citizen from his home town; clear to me given his lack of an accent. We became friends in that moment until he took his life leaving no note. I’ve suffered his loss ever since. Now reconciled the pain remains.
    I did not remember him until recalling my similar intentions. The topic arose from my “Spinning Wheel of Fortune;“ collecting/collected quotes; a prayer wheel in reverse: morning ‘meditation.’
    Love, as verb, meant we entered a sacred space of friendship. His choice to end life is, on this plain, the last right he, or any of us, can exercise. I simply wish I’d had to opportunity to let Jim know I’d allow him to die in my arms accepting his choice.
    I stood on a bridge railing, over the Inter Coastal Waterway, one Christmas Eve night. I was stayed by three distinct personalities: Jesus, J. S. Bach and Fritz Eichenberg. There were absent others  recalled as witnesses, voiceless then, but having touched me equally nonetheless. Stanley Elkin is one. I was able to express my gratitude face-to-face later on.
    I confess my dying son’s concerns were outside the equation. It was only later, when at the point of farther despair, separated from my family, I called ‘home.‘ He answered and asked, “Will I ever see you again?” My selfishness  was crushed, crumpled and spindled as if I’d been a fly swatted. There began my return to the life I had attempted to abandon and the journey to Now.
    At the last day he embraced me, voiced his love, then laid down to drown in his own blood, dying from Leukemia. I had intuited the moment at his diagnosis six years earlier and had fled in terror of it. My cowardliness: leaving work late on the day of his death intuited. He waited.

120403 07:13
    Time has reconfigured the night I returned to the Paradox and lay listening to fish nibbling her hull. Jim & Patti slept oblivious my sojourn with infinity. Ours was a trio of fetid revenge, one against the other; each male longing for the other never to return. Looking back I sense we individually and collectively sought rebirth in the southward warmer climate, fleeing from encroaching winter and consequence the previous dalliance: two women one man . . . no, more nearly a boy with two mothers. Now focused through the lens of forty years distance.
    Only now remembered, the previous ‘death’ by heroin laced marijuana. Were they there, we three? My host aboard Ishmael a purported friend via familiarity with my abandoned. Did I, or she, do the leave taking, fleeing one another? For their amusement I crawled in circle beneath a gigantic paw foot oak table crying against the prospect of being crucified again and again. . . . I’ve wrestled with the imagery of that ideation until I became more fully aware the execution of criminals. A  vastly more torturous, long suffering, death than that depicted in the Bible for Jesus.
    And what if it is an illusion that death ends suffering? Resurrection and reincarnation being roughly equivalent; my sense being that as a Christian we are each ‘called’ to be the, or at the very least, part of the resurrection. To fully know and inhabit one’s life is to enter into the suffering and know the numinous as present in all life. In some sense to become co-creators with the nascent kindness and compassion indwelling in all existence without exception or boundary finding and giving peace/love to others.
    Happily I survived, an implement forged between the indifferent anvil, my father, and the hammer blows struck by the smith, my mother. To be the wealth I am now, to myself, would to be willing to do it again thrice fold. I exaggerate since even then in infancy/childhood I survived through instinct, as I did in the five times drowning, I let go seeing the nodal point when rage become insanity. My parents long ago forgiven as myself for remaining as ever loving them.
    Would that I were nearly a gnats worth one might infer from the course I’m lead. We’re no different you & i, same, same, all the same, one-and-all of us alive. Happily I am a fool regarding the ‘how’ but wisdom courts me in the “why.” Truth is sacred to me. And while I’ve read the wisdom books in toto or partially, I remain enamored of the words spoken by those who like the river stones I adore are worn by time and not the press of weight like carbon made diamonds.
    Our lives are music, rending or sweet, sounding now in the silence following our song. I sense the relationship we have with Creation is: we are Aeolian Harps knowing not who strums our hearts . . . until then reflected the dark mirror surprised.
    Before closing I was led to the following . . . I am nowhere near all that clever to find these alone . . . http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/f/friedrichn101616.html

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
“When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
--Friedrich Nietzsche

“There is no refuge from confession but suicide; and suicide is confession.”
--Daniel Webster

“ . .  It is possible that a man may refuse to love anything on earth; he will prove this refusal and he will carry it out by suicide. If he lives, the reason is that, whatever he may say, there still remains in him some attachment to existence; his life will be commensurate with this attachment; it will justify itself to the extent that it genuinely justifies the world. .”
--Simone de Beauvoir

“Man does not simply exist, but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.”
--Viktor Frankl

. . . 120404 01:27 I awoke aware that I was remiss in this: I’d not mentioned the person who saved me from suicide. And I think her ‘last’ word on the subject bears remembering. “It is amazing what unconditional love can do/heal.”

120331 10:14 Newly discovered this date . . . love as a verb--intimacy redefined . . . .

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
                    --Ursula K. LeGuin

    Regardless of gender, race or creed: attraction, lust, capture, consummation . . . then what? The greed slaked is supplanted by mechanics of ordinary life and friendship supersedes in time, as in “. . for better or worse, sickness and health . .”
    I knew a man who, like myself, had a child in distress. His council was correct: Tough Love, abandon wishful/magical  thinking, engage the problem with all objective resources available. --(derived) His child was misdiagnosed and died leaving him with bills to pay and three jobs. I cannot remember the incident giving birth to the topic but he defined marriage as: “A daily renewable bond.” I intuit his marriage prevailed while mine is no more. Being a failure in relationship I have chosen to remain celibate yet richer than my most extravagant avarice for wealth in sex or money or power through friendship. In some sense it is like Sex Addicts admonition extended from 100 to 1,001 ‘dates.’
    How would my ideal work in real time flesh and blood for others? I haven’t a clue yet celebrate the “not dying wondering.” My urge to merge waning and personal choice to not use another for mere pleasure defines my transition from adolescence at seventy-years-of-age. But then I am merely curious as to what and why I do every or anything . . . and I watch people closely, individually, corporately and communally.
    Another way of defining what I conclude is to say that laws in general are more often against than for. They defend status quo at the expense of transformation. Lamentably I have found no vessel to contain my love; neither personal nor institutional save that in the energy I call Beloved Friend. Who seems to spread my small drop of oily life upon the modest communal surrounding me in this life. The metaphor meaning to still the turbulent waters of our time--one-by-one in intimate relationship.
    In solitude I sometimes fall into the abyss. Awakening from slumber, not so much a blank slate, as absolutely nothing. Yet in unspoken covenant discover the Mother/Father Friend who catches me . . . would that I were so noble as my thoughts in flesh and blood reality. I am impaled upon the last words of Jesus, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Emily Dickinson and Gandhi. In their words and deeds I sense where I long to be: reverent to myself, mate, friend and enemy. Fully at peace with unknowing. Unity and completion is only potential in ourselves individually our relationships are from my vantage like two galaxies separate but drawn neigh. I know heaven is within us. Merged we may save life from extinction on this our nest.

120401 09:45 Addendum discovered this date:
" The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength, each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving. It is even more deceptive to dream of gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable to create for oneself; the child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without being wrapped up in self seeks to transcend her own existence."  --Simone de Beauvoir