120816 11:09 reply to Ellen Flores Mohr http://culturalbook.com/
Re: 120816 07:25 loving men

Did you serve your country Jack? The bond that is shared among those who have is something that can only be fully understood/appreciated by them. Too often their courage/dedication/patriotism is belittled by those who do nothing for their country but "bicker" and expect all the benefits without doing anything. Then there is the media which is more concerned with profiting with stories that grabs the most attention rather than truly investigating the reasons/history behind it. I don't speak government for it is all a cruel game to me. I speak for every John/Jane that risk everything they hold dear for the sake of that uniform. They deserve all the respect in the world for without such integrity we would not be here today free to spill our souls to the world.

Dear Ellen,

if you mean, as implied by Winston Churchill, "those who stand in wait also serve" then yes I did serve our country. No where near as deeply or proudly as the confessions and request for blessings received by those whose friends died in arms weeping still for their loss. Years and years afterward on highways byways street corners bars and restaurants. 

Best. 

Long languorous listening in dark city parks where before they lay sleeping I came.

No. 

I am a wannabe warrior in what I call the Army of God, "God's Marines," or otherwise, "The Company." Of Jesuits trained yet equally divided between dropping into Hell running with sword or cross to either love my 'enemy' or by sword hack to death. Eagerly I await the opportunity to, face-to-face, inquisitively ask of St. Ignatius his intents and teleology now. 

I beg you to forgive my brief discursion upon a soap box; that which is more near and dear to me by witness of others than I care to confess as a conflict conflagration in my heart . . . yet I continue to with laughter and weeping wrestle this question between Angels and God. 

In the end it is an issue of desire, that of the 'enemy' to be healed or slain. And now it is no longer mano a mano but hair trigger instant extinction of the species and planet governed by fools I'd not trust my sandals to take to the cobbler for repair. And were I to do it all over again I'd be a medic or nurse healing both the vanquished and the victor equally no sword or cross visible

© 2012 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved

PS
"If anyone asks me why he should love his neighbor, I would not know how to answer him, and I could only ask in my turn why he should pose such a question...It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring." --Alfred Adler

preternaturally curious I sought sanctuary in the Perrot Memorial Library and still the librarians turn me on not the men but the women oracles but then too in the Ripley Union Township Library a Carnegie endowment otherwise he, Carnegie, would be on the top of my shit list with the war criminal family Bush

but at that time I was a child unconcerned for those who die fighting for 'their' country instead I sought the origins of those who wrote with conviction about anything and the All their inspiration inhalational blowing of God bowing the strings of my cigar box ukelele Aeolian licking the wounds of my heart 

"When a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world , the pains of this world disappear. For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists." --Paul Auster

how can it be that i am still curious after all these light years of soaring spatially beyond the known and unknown cosmos while being fisted by Thought Police invoked by G. W. Bush and his actual King Uncle Bob too grotesque to elect yet he did it to me, to us, to all full body cavity search enjoy your flight home to Auschwitz 

"The people of England (USA too in a tutu) have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster.-"Report on Mesopotamia" The Sunday Times (22 August 1920) --T. E. Elliot

now that I am a man with nothing left to lose lost life left hollow long ago by events leading to the School of Terrorism created and deaned by those truly named above I watch carefully the events leading to this election of those whores who will do and say anything to be elected or reelected and onanistically 44 or 45th lead us further into perdition -- "Hurl'd headlong...To bottomless perdition, there to dwell" -- My favorite sight gag: Grab your ass and kiss it goodbye while -- politicians violently express propane though their mouths pressed against the inside of the glass minds of the electorates television screens . . . and here all along I thought it Sports Utility Vehicles then cows who stink up the noxious air perhaps maybe, maybe not, we could place a siphon over the Capitol Dome and electrify the entire world?

120816 final 09:54  
© 2012 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved

a boy child wants love and wonders in return how to get now 
what an older man knows love is what he gives into the well bottomless his last tear

a boy 120816 08:25  © 2012 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved

& today is like any a good time to die

120816 07:25 loving men

I've loved a few good men for whom I'd do anything they asked of me,
get your head out of your pantaloons and back into your crowns, towards whom
I give my fealty  & troth since in all respects they earned it and of trust the absolute farthest reach they received it rivers endless oceans and universes are only reserved for God

And I as a lover before time began was savage and continue ravenous in love eating mouth hoof and tail my beloved until nothing left not even the sighs puddles of love slurped. Ah but that's the rub when push comes to shove and dying begun to leave a friend in battle is more than can be asked of any man for we fight for one another not God, Country, Mom's Apple Pie but men like we in harms way for any reason season or cause 

For this is as and for what I've been taught by leaders of men who asked nothing they were unwilling to do themselves thus the band of brothers as men in a cause loving the cycles of birth life and death willing to do it again and again apprehended with love's unreasoning courage

No knaves need apply for the fools they were and remain are hopeless ass kissers from beginning to end unworthy the company of men

vote with your life the balance is nigh

& today is like any a good time to die

© 2012 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved

120816 02:48 room
Since early childhood and I remember that time too too well. I'd have a room where I'd go to escape chaos. As I remembered before putting fingers to keyboard I saw a single occupancy barren unfurnished room in the Bowery . . . reminiscent of a short story dream -- in toto -- wherein I wrestled opponent after another opponent who always turned out to be one facet of me endless.

Yet the room of childhood and now is not barren but furnished with something else indefinable not love so much but sanctuary from which I can now easily escape but not then in my child's memory & it is for why i am alone with Annie who understands my "not NOW!"

In converse with M I told her of recent out of body experiences -- I refuse to watch television -- preferring the silence of time crawling across the wall night or day or one becoming the other slowly upon which I see things memorable then remembering the first time in St. Paul's Wickford Rhode Island when utterly changed I entered with high expectation those of the newly converted or born again and remember now the 'little old ladies' that paid for the lights, the open door and toilet paper who did not change while I had utterly. And I love them still for keeping open the next portal of change fondly remembered and weeping now for it no longer belongs to my then new eyes.

I'd been painting the assistant rector's banister pausing to eat lunch reading in the Old Testament of a father who'd witness the death of many sons all together Randy by then was gone or so I think time no longer of consequence then from beginning to end birth to n0w near death factually.

It was then that a light exploded inside smithereens my mind made against not the walls of my skull but reaching beyond the beyond and still expanding more so while awaiting the verdict of my current maladies. Still counting since there is no end to my ending now or when I am no longer anything but dust blowing across the desert a different kind of bird than the pterodactyl who flew these skies with me invariable a falcon upon whose head He/She places a hood for sleep now and then now.

2M 2U 4me i remember the finely braided steel net holding me to the nest silently weeping for flight a universe above unavailable.

This time tethered to the wall the bed and transfusion stand gallons of antibiotics passing through me to save what this withered wattled wrinkled old fart of a man longing to go home to God I now remember the not transcendental transformability self but the feeling of being extruded spun from brass wire finer to better sound the clarion call of Gabriel like Maynard Ferguson who knew then he was a disciple of George I. Gurdjieff? when I asked him to blow Yesterdays why do i cry now for all he lead me to know through his horn?

well maybe i was trained to be something else? a poet? a writer? a photographer? I still don't know the who i am or wannabe when i grow up no longer constrained by steel nets burned asunder by what? 

LOVE!

Boys & Girls right here in River City I gotta tell you you don't use the millionth part of you mind. Buried beneath what I am ashamed has become of church and state; governance what i once was

© 2012 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved

120816 01:11 why

. . . oh why am I awake this time?

I remember doing the samba with Joanne and then the sequence begins all over again ending with, not seen but imagined, her crushed broken comatose dying. The result of a drunk running over her car with a truck around Thanksgiving. Her children came to the door spontaneously and I cannot remember what I said. Or whether it was I or Susan they sought. Later Bob the husband and father asked, "How do I repay the kindness of the community?"

"Repayment it is not required, just pass it forward. Was there a "please"? 

Too many have I lost those I loved and still remember in prayer awakening in the odd hours after a moment or hour of rest and wonder why . . . and then . . . what can I do to make it better? And then I see the many facets of consciousness, a mind racing between the trackless void above starry or not in the night or the blue dome above with the night beyond the cloak of Mary -- day. 

At lunch yesterday with M the first in too long at time seeming months long yet not possibly more than fourteen days. And I've changed and scarcely know my new self now telling her we are the last of our generation who by common experience knew the totality of reality and how little I trust those who've never had chicken shit between their toes to which she said, "I prefer mud." 

I prefer bracelets to skull caps or pointy mitered reminiscent of inquisitional attire badges of authority and had given M one from the mountains of Tibet where the Nuns have been immolating themselves in protest the Chinese occupation.

She did say she preferred pebbles to gem stones. Something I'd written about unknowing whether she reads me or not!? And at that this bracelet was the second piece of jewelry after another from Darfur made by children and their widowed mothers from mud. 

In poverty now that which to them who made the jewelry would be wealth beyond imagining I give forth what I can for the children to follow us . . . not telling her I'd given Wikipedia two hundred fifty dollars; more than NPR even when I had the wealth mom left evenly divided between my sister and I.

I know the future short or long will be for them to deal with; the children need an education that we all belong to one another. 

Is that why I write?

or

"I dare say I am compelled, unconsciously compelled, now to write volume after volume, as in past years I was compelled to go to sea, voyage after voyage. Leaves must follow upon each other as leagues used to follow in the days gone by, on and on to the appointed end, which, being truth itself, is one—one for all men and for all occupations." --Joseph Conrad  

Today I will lunch with Walt Whitford, a fellow Rhode Islander, who knows my love of seafood. We both know there will be none from the soon dead seas.

Be well -- I learned from Bob -- and beloved be Beloved of God -- I learned from the author. 

Amen

© 2012 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved

By "The All" i mean the author of everything and all life.

120815 14:48 women powerful

The All is more apparent in the poor than the rich; equally so with women than men. By "The All" i mean the author of everything and all life. 

Recently, during a medical crisis, I was triple teamed by three of the most powerful women I know in a lifetime filled with woman, men and children. Yet as impressed with their insistence that live I remain essentially ready to go home by which I mean to die as I write and merely leave for a time to return or not. And by this I do not imply that I am The Resurrection but something utterly else or other than any illusions, sentiments, or wishful thinking you might have about Jesus or God about Whom I have no illusions or sentiments none whatsoever . . . guess who invented or created "Tough Love"?

There is a time to be carried, a time to follow, a time to lay faceless in worship and a time to walk beside. Then a time to die. I have yet to receive my marching orders or rules of engagement and as stated, for the nonce, will remain ready to die at the first opportunity to leave a bewildered assassin to mull the lesson in forgiveness I leave behind. 

Of the three inordinately powerful women, two are medical doctors and one a psychologist. The latter I love outrageously but knowing we are solitaries understand that we can seed more sullen rain clouds of rage with love separately. 

And we, my friends, are in a typhoon of rage instigated by the fearful who rule our lives. They have exhausted their source of pleasure and have no more toys or victims. Should they kill the earth finally extinguishing our species, some will remain to reap their reward while others, most of us, will go elsewhere and begin again this experiment in Love . . . to me Heaven is just another classroom. 

If not now, when? 

Will we stand up and be counted as equal participants in the course of our collective lives?

My thesis is well known amongst those who deal with power. It would be foolish to overthrow what is extant with more fools filled with fear driving competitively to destroy everything all over again. If we did nothing more than elevate women to equality it would be enough for a while and by chance a beginning of a new order of governance in this world of sorrow.

If you know nothing of your personal divinity then how do you expect to recognize Jesus, either descending from a cloud of radium glowing flashing lights -- an entertainment -- or when he asks for a dollar to buy breakfast? Otherwise should he descend on New Years Eve Times Square New York, New York with the glitter ball? Who would keep the crowd from eating Him alive?

We are lemmings ruled by more fearful lemmings than we. Their game is power; our's is life and love.

I would like to leave this merry-go-round with just one who finds the love within themselves to love others; as so many have I've seen with the grace of love in their faces to go forward. . . .Like any one of the three women mentioned above.

© 2012 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved

"I have no objection to any person’s religion, be it what it may, so long as that person does not kill or insult any other person, because that other person don’t believe it also. But when a man’s religion becomes really frantic; when it is a positive torment to him; and, in fine, makes this earth of ours an uncomfortable inn to lodge in; then I think it high time to take that individual aside and argue the point with him."  --in Moby-Dick by Herman Melville