Wounded in life, I seek to staunch the wounds of others . . . . --xoj

"Jack Spratt’s two centavo Guide to Redemption”
©2012 by Jack Spratt All Rights Reserved

God's tapestry, all creation, my greatest value an attempt to live/love for: in gratitude, mercy, forgiveness, regardless of Age, Race, Creed, Gender, Gender Proclivities, or Generosity . . . seeking to make redemtion salvation & resurrection potential in all unique, precious, individual lives, human, plant, animal, world. . . .through words & images - Jack Spratt ... KISS

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

to dream dying resurrected


I love America the vast fetid lubricious fecundity of it. Not apple pie, Gee Wiz Washington, the Flag. But the all of it. Hip Hop Rock n Roll Aaron Copland of it.

Love Boat being not a ship phantasmagorical lustful, or lost souls seeking sanctuary a la escaping Nazi Germany denied but a swan shaped floating conveyance meandering through a carnival darkness with James Michener groping his princess/Empress/Goddess who groped back giggling splashing her rucked clothes.

I love the hurdy gurdy suck and draw harmonica knee smashing cymbal/symbols doing the step and fetch it of it all: Camptown Races do da do da all the day long.

God Damn America the politicians, preachers, priests, teachers, Popes, the Presidents one and all of them save Abe. Good Golly Miss Molly I'm an Goddamned American too.

I am an emigrant tenant non resident fallen into the mud puddle muddle of it all and my soul ain't no white bread Wonder or Silver Cup crap slathered with fluffernutter. Tentative no longer wild child river rat from Ripley Ohio whose soul ran away with the traveling tent carnival circus sailing full and by down the Ohio down the Mississippi out onto the Gulf of Mexico and thence infinity all growed up. Going home. Read my lips, lick my library card, grab your ass with both hands and kiss it goodbye conformity of it.

On and on i could go but the subtext is: please dear God never ask me to read aloud 1 CORINTHIANS 13 ever again . . . next time I'll fall down and dissolve up in a puff evaporated nothing left but a wisp.

amen

130430 08:12 MDT to dream dying resurrected
© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved

could be discovery



could be maybe me a
collage pasted upon the night
floating in a boat nothing grander
than that mucking about stars
decoupage toe taged return to
sender breathless for the girl
to get the boy? why not they
get themselves first and last
magnificent together?

"Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness."
- Allen Ginsberg
"That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been."
- Charles Dickens
discovered 130430 in order
130430 06:04 MDT could be discovery
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

lallapalooza avid rabid



It was a lallapalooza of a dream, kinky, symbolic, a keeper. In the sense of no need to annotate: GREAT! Memorable. A cerebral terminal arrival (British euphemism for orgasm--'arrival' that is) unimaginable; a near death experience.

Muttering to myself, 'I simply cannot talk about this' as the coffee dripped, it became clear the fetters are coming off; regulators discovered then abandoned.

All systems go--LIFT OFF!

Poetry is best when attempting the impossible with words.

To/For 'Had She Said Yes'

thought myself too obvious
following you through hospice
caressing your posterior with my avid eyes
now I am simply rabid

. . . could it be that I seduce myself with my fabulously frantically imaginative mind? Yes. Of course I can, and this is an improbable affair, she being twenty five hundred miles distant, and me near penniless; thanks Wall Street Thieves! Worse it was revealed to me I am terrified of women; of being hurt yet again and again: 

Never say never--ever.
(afterthought: Never ever give upon on yourself)

Incongruous, oxymoronic, I discovered in my travels across the universe of words that Jesus saying, “Suffer the little children to come to me” implies: Least you see with the eyes of a child the wonder and potential of everything.

The issue for me is validation. Then collision with my personal bigotry, we are terrified of contra-genders, she and I. We talk about it openly salted with words like 'woo; and 'seduce/seduction'.

Again, improbable: she self-excised from a long standing dysfunctional relationship and I hopping on tippytoes, feet on fire, like a bear being trained to dance.

What was it the foxy astrologer said? “You push and push until she pushes back." Oh sweet Jesus on a hang glider burning I'm in trouble. Credible or prophetic?

Time heals everything. WAIT!

Clinically: Is this another invitation to dance?
The Big Show, the dance of life.

Floating through the flow, is a time bomb—a spiky mine twirling submerged. Realizing that as a writer, one must conduct the narrative, or drown. Disastrously or felicitously. Then, instantly thinking with a camera between us, it is the choice of the revealing moment that tells the entire story in one image. The nuns who taught me asked, on several occasions, is the camera a shield?

No.
Not really.
For me it has been a crowbar. Prizing apart God and Life. Investigating.
The saving grace, I think I have, is being a comedian; able to laugh at myself.
TRUE! It is not a win, lose or draw; for it is only in loss that we appreciate what was.

Anything you don't understand is dangerous until you do understand it.” - Larry Niven . . . first up on

Be well be good to yourself: LIVE!
. . . it ain't over until its over.

PS

Sometimes I conclude thinking is a cancer and writing a compulsion. Knowing that nothing is merely 'this or that', defined definitively by me, god or anyone else. With laughter I can live with that; dancing in the moon light head back. Crying, sighing, singing.

I will close here, concerned that my abuse of your attention, is at an end. Adding my sense: where I seduced myself, I was entertaining to women who were bored, but beautiful, or had pity upon me--taking me on as a project of transformation into their ideal man who could never fulfill their desire.

Yet I do, ever so much, appreciate a well turned sentence, phrase, poem. Equal to a that twitching posterior I followed, following still. . . .just an eejit boy for insertions. A clue.

130430 02:22 lallapalooza avid rabid
© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved

Monday, April 29, 2013

good lord willing and the creek don't rise

Don't know why but exiting the pool from water aerobics today
magical things have happened there before
I asked myself, 'Could it be that it is my fear of failure with women that holds me back?'
and then
and then
this and that happened
in the ordinary of this day

Sidereal time extraordinary, what we in the newspaper biz called; “It flew in over the transom!” Inspiration or collaboratively respired, I respond with potential implications.

Opportunities similar to my being swept down a roaring rain swollen creek, my friends laughing while my head pounded rocks, until, floundering, I found a eddy of peace and emerged unscathed but otherwise terrified.

Sincerely. I have no excuse for being alive, so many times I've been near death and survived.

Dr. Ballard, the discoverer of The Titanic ship wreck, talked about sidereal arrayed sonar and I knew exactly what it implied being a lover of light, which like sound can reveal objects otherwise invisible. He seemed surprised, while I was delighted with his talking car, from the back seat being the dummy; just a photographer with a reporter doing a assignment.

If you think me foolish for my inspirations, random associations and dyslexic understandings of things fixed and immutable. You should also know I wonder more often than I confess: just exactly why do I do anything; much less write.

The above clipping is from Parabola Magazine celebrating their 150th issue. From the image and by the words: it dawned upon me that I too was lost, now found. Cliche, I know, but, Amazing Grace!

To love, and be loved has consequence--astonishing . . . an unfolding that seems endless. Blossoming. As indicated elsewhere, by me, epiphanies continue. The problem being, to integrate them into some communicable form. Not for fame, acclaim or being a legend in one's own mind but to share, give away freely. For the process of renewal, being filled once empty, is continual.

Conspiratorial?!

I will labor to be more cogent and prescient. While inappropriately revelatory of my experience; current and historic. I sense it worth the potential of saving one life from desperation.

Tossing acorns, broadcast, across the WWW, growing a few oaks here and there, under which I'll never know the shade.

130429 17:18 MDT good lord willing and the creek don't rise
© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved


obturate/block/jam/impede/obstruct/occlude


The word obturate then a need to void awoke me now, well, actually long ago before making coffee and the first cigarette. Yes. I know: death wish. Logically but intuition says I don't care in my race to create.

Odd. First the word, need to pee, then the first quote of the day:

- Henri Poincare:
It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. To know how to criticize is good, to know how to create is better.”

And so it goes; at it again taping the keyboard. Not surprising since I don't know how to spell, punctuate and hate my handwriting. Easier to write on a pad otherwise, but now I cannot live without a computer. Farther, for that matter, I don't know how to write but why.

Gideon's proof, possibly, not a crutch, but works for me daily.

In sincerity; there was a string; a one-line poem of, sorts about stains and things constrictive in culture. Anal Retentivity ruling the world while the poor get poorer; consumed as whales eat plankton.

Obturate, near-sighted, glaring self-righteous rectitude, occlusion of all life made redundant; a stain upon the earth, the wealthy.

I am an ignorant person, self educated, unworthy of what I sense as grace. Thinking, at the moment I should be clubbed unconscious by what, and where, I intuit this comes from; squashed as a swatted fly mangled.

What the rich have done, historically or especially in recent history, is criminal. Avarice and cupidity beyond anything Nazi Germany ever achieved in their indifference the cost of their success.

And old man soon to die, leaving behind my shame for not learning that my heart belongs to the poor; until now. Amongst whom I see God more clearly than anywhere else. Laughter, I can hear the pontifical posturing of the rich and politicians shouting all the imprecations: lunatic, insane, fool, etc.

The first spreading of wings, reading, initially a great joy, now eclipsed by writing down what I never thought of listening to. Unworthy of annotation.

As an image maker (painting and sculpture) then image recorder (photographer) always suffused with music. I sense myself, convicted and literate in many modes . . . at the moment thinking the greatest thief is Bill Gates for simply destroying Word Star. Which even William F. Buckley adored. Gates is in and of himself a greedy man who in his avarice has cornered what I might otherwise had made some sort of living from: Stock Photography. My point being that literacy is shifting from word to image, both are merely symbols one requiring learning and the latter nothing but seeing.

Look at what you see. Simple?! But if applied with mindfulness it becomes a horror. George W. Bush comes to mind: facile, handsome, beguiling smile but that's all: zero content. Beauty is an internal and eternal quality. To me the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdock are grotesque on any plane of consideration.

What we have is tits and ass plus false toothed smiles; tinkle down economics. For the rest of us urinated upon there is less and less dryness daily. Always stormy weather, drowning.

Wealth is relative. In that I consider myself wealthier than any person, place or thing I know or can imagine. I fear nor envy no one. My personal ecology is a disaster, addicted to coffee and cigarettes, indicative of indifference to myself with a warrior's creed: “To day is a good day to die.”

I am reminded, frequently, what I write, are merely notes on a process of a life living itself. Taking a lifetime to discover it impossible to compel anyone to love themselves; embracing the best and worst elements within them. Integrated into a whole person beyond the dictates of conformity to any ideal. Which, in my thinking and conviction, is idolatry.

Whereas creativity is something available when we find the root of our self. . . .God knows this as all that is required. Or is it the beginning? Of what new thing we can become! Alive not subsistence. In all my travels abroad and within I have yet to discover anyone living who did not have dreams and ideals. Fanatics seem the most fearful people; regardless their creed, politics or gender.

My advocacy and appeal is to the few who sense a need to change and grow. Having suffered, I feared the process possibly suffering more, but find all my sorrow and grief resolved. Finding joy immeasurable.

As an ordinary person I recognize my foolishness. Folly and failure teaching me more than success; real or imagined. This, that I write, is derived from a personal journal, an attempt to write myself sane. Discovering in the process that to irk the ire of those for whom I have no respect is to invite troubles, sorrow and grief which I have had enough of for a lifetime.

I can be, and am at times, as lunatic and fanatic as those I call so. Not in judgment or anything other than jest. Everything has consequence as experienced. Where I find benefit being raped, mutilated and bankrupted, I expect no one else to join me. To forgive and forget or contemplate dismemberment.

Well acquainted with my own addictions I feel compassion for those who have abused me. Aldous Huxley said it well: "There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self." It is our world collectively, we are family, some more lunatic than others but still family; one body: humanity—we need each other.

130429 01:38 MDT obturate/block/jam/impede/obstruct/occlude
© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved

Sunday, April 28, 2013

escape velocity


Genius resides in all life, no exceptions allowed (a bumper sticker on a friends car). But then all the usual rules apply. Beginning with: you have to work it to make it real. Not what you do, or say, but are. Love, of course.

Laughter! I suddenly realized that I love and attempt to decorate others, always women, men being hopeless . . . never ever growing up but old and remaining infantile. Oink. Little piggy me has trouble not with booze but broads. Least I offend my Empress M who recently claimed; “you don't need me” I will, in reply proclaim: I love you because you are you and I am me, finally . . . or something like that. Or Milton's
"So dear I love him, that with him all deaths I could endure, without him live no life." . . . implied/infered 'him' being god as Jesus . . . the ineffable always I/Thou.

This impossible love I have is anwered in unexpected ways, tapping on my forhead in dreams, visions and adorations indescriminate; but too often cathecting to those women whose kindness, like Julian of Norwich, is obvious. Imagine a Christmas tree overlaiden with ornimentation cascading and smothering me. Both smothered by adoration.

But then I remember the few couples I've known, of many, who symbiotically grew one another despite the mechanics of, “did you clean the litter box?” Or. I won't do THAT! . . . I have a headache . . . mother said.

Milton also said:
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
    Paradise Lost (1667; 1674), Book I, line 254

My love affair with Milton, infrequently visited, was suggested by a mystical statement by mom saying: “We are less significant than a grain of sand upon a beach.” Later to find Thomas Merton's reference to being bereft of god/good/love upon a desert drown by a tsunami of it suddenly.

arroyo at flood
an undertoad
ribbit

There is no death for we who inhabit the future without us.

Do I imply the events monumental should not be made memorabilia. Trinkets or tombs? The winds of grace touch us all. Never to be held by anyone. Implying conspiracy inspired respired by grace. The elasticity of my mother's mind never made a difference in her behavior. Preponderantly given to violence. She was, as all women are, slaves to culture save wherein they are a cosmology unto themselves internally.

Until now this little piggy wiggling towards the trough seeking the slops of my mind's desires, actually lust, would give up the farm, the entire estate, immortality, for what?

Been there done that wearing the bumper sticker tattooed upon my forehead in reverse to easily read while shaving. It didn't do the trick regardless how well we fox trotted. Mamboed, jitter bugged, that double backed dance, recreational or for procreation sometimes; what girls and boys do. . . .then too boys and boys and girls with girls. . . .something like the love between myself and Annie when we talk. She being a cat and I being her lover.

Regardless of gender, creed, pleasure or joy, it all seems the same relationship issues arise. Escape velocity is only possible when we honor the being of another for themselves unconditionally. For me it was reading Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury, becoming apparent I wasn't alone. Later. It became clear, at least to me, acceptance was the base of love and all the rest was embellishment or aggression.

In another way of describing the same affairs of lovers would be to say that we gather together to create something. Usually finding I brought concrete and sand, you brought the butter and sugar. The resulting mess unpalatable. To stay together without working on personal truths and expectations: suicide. A living lie a death while walking/subsistence towards the ending.

As I am wont to do, wandering between collecting and writing, I saw her, a brown kraft paper grocery bag discarded face. Discovering "Growth is not concerned with itself." 
- Meridel Le Sueur

Love is sacrificial despite all the promises and wishful thinking. Regardless my longing to merge with another, love cannot be suicidal. Yet I think it heroic for most of us to love another in marriage. For me, for now, I must submit: my love is ferocious and more than I presume anyone alone can bear. Except to spill it freely in words concrete not cake.

Neither Nether a bonbon or prize I must be what I am
alone?!

I overheard the nuns who set me on fire, regarding me, as being 'seductive'. . . .I think I finally understand what they were concerned about.

08:16 after nap

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” 
- Henry David Thoreau
. . . bit of a piker, I'd say going home to mom for lunch. But then I'm a fair good I'd say.

Life's an interactive trip, and for myself I'm no longer astonished: the collisions and coincidence of falling over serendipity; actual synchronicity.

Knock and the interlocutor/author will open the beyond the beyond.
no accidents I mean.

oh . . . simply lovely: “co-occurrence”
ah
always capable of awe
slain by kindness

130428 04:45 escape velocity
© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved

perceived perceptions


The tail of my dream slithered away between gears whirring; nothing happened, no shriek, and the day moved on. It was one of those I usually flee from. Then while making coffee I realized the conflict was unwinnable. A turning point, not the gears, but my perceptions of what I live for; refusing to die a zombie.

Statistically the world is less violent than ever before. Yet predation persists by those who would sell us things unnecessary by psychological manipulation. Violent penetration of our psyche. Entertaining, until buyer's remorse sets in, wondering why I did that.

Highly adaptive, until I could no longer contain my distemper, apprehending death by rote. I've always had difficulty expressing my love; articulating adoration. Pleasant for awhile but then becomes fawning this inflecting of my perceptions of you.

Who you?
You all.

Otherwise it is which socks to wear with what tie and/or will I miss the game tonight? Addicted to crap food for the mind. Is that life? Small wonder I am a comedian: neglected, ignored, abandoned physically or chemically throughout life by those I loved, then and now, all forgiven--they and myself.

Mindfulness implies consequence to what I say, do and think. The fleeting dream from which I awakened, running away to escape, reminds me to engage logical consequence to my actions before committing them. . . .Engage thought before popping the clutch. For those innocent of ever driving a stick shift automobile; think putting it in drive: pedal to the metal. I'm that way but have found the right stuff to face the consequences.

Is my greed for your well being a replica of the lords of slums bored; thoughtlessly torturing their victims for amusement. But seen in reverse=obverse. The other side of a coin tumbling through time. Bright on one side dark on the other? Flashing then a no-see-um.

Since being excreted from hospice I have labored to understand what to do with what little remains of my life? Discovered: To hold the hand, not of the dying but the living dead, perchance to enable their dreams unconscious.

Another way would be to write fiction, plays, movie scripts or poetry but I sense there is so little time for me and we, the all of us.

Baldly conscious that everything has been said before, in most cases better, I began to examine the seeds of my curiosity; wandering the, as Montaigne said, garden of quotes. Even weeds are glorious once you come to know them. The will to life loving the light.

Where else could I find the freedom to laugh and cry? To sigh and swoon; for the love of being as crazy as I am and am becoming? Those who claim to judge insanity are simply insane doing the same things over again expecting different results.

Once again, and again, I've written myself marginally forward to sanity. Otherwise I'd die of boredom since boredom best describes our time. Control freaks lead us over the cliff of greed.

Read!

Unable to find a life worth living? Make one up! . . . something you're willing to die for.

The greatest good you can do for another is not just to share your riches, but to reveal to him his own. “ - Benjamin Disraeli

130428 02:55 MDT perceived perceptions
© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved

Saturday, April 27, 2013

From To 'Had She Said Yes'


Welcome is your kind, loving, warm and sincere reply. I had fallen, in the cold light of day, to confusion regarding all my intentions towards you. Fearing that in my honesty I would have potentially caused you distress. Learning in the process that I am more imperfectly flawed in my self than I had previously thought. I too have a longing to bond, to unite as one with another, secretly impossible by perception until now. Thanks to you and god. Add others living or dead I trust and consult hourly in the walk.

We are wed by sincere sharing, and for now that is wonderful. What will come next, on my side, is governed by my will that you be for yourself the kindness I have seen you so freely give to others. We, equally, have spread our seeds of kindness upon infertile ground; loving those who are incapable of loving themselves. I know this true of myself, formerly, and intuit it you. So much seems lost in the mechanics of life, expectations and failures to be the ideal. What, in turn, is impossible since we can never fulfill the all required and fall, as failures knowing it impossible. Failure being the better teacher than success.

Failure is no shame. Since by, and from it, we arise, renewed, going on. Keeping the formerly beloved in our regard without resentment but willing their highest good always potential in themselves.

Apprehending that we, at that time, possibly never, could or would, be adequate to the task. Yet as in me, so I sense in you. We love as children--unconditionally. Until the gift we give becomes catalyst for pain or shame in the beloved. Oddly it seems we have become partner in their crimes against themselves, their addiction to avoidance; where they find peace for a time; pleasure not joy.

In time I have come to define them as the living dead. Unwilling to do for themselves what they must. While clinging to what was: preserved, stale, a stain unchanging--apprehensive of change. We cannot save a drowning soul for in that we can drown with them.

Some of us wander across the stage of life until the mid point when it occurs to ask; is this all there is? Most, at that point of no return, gather more of prior success as happiness having no other ambition. While the fewer turn and face entropy, stasis and engage the enemy of life: status quo. Everything is in change, either expanding or contracting. Forgive, please, my sense of God as change; not fixed and immutable; an idol. Perhaps this not the venue for such a sentimental opinion?

We can change nothing but ourselves, in the process becoming free to give and grow something new. Be creative instead of slaves to what was. The tuition is very high, this divine school of hard knocks. All are unique and precious, even the sleepers who do awaken sometimes. If not now when they die. For now this is my imperfect sense growing minute-by-minute, attempting to find my job description, written in my heart's core.

I will close here and go on to something more personal to “Had She Said Yes.” To whom I may, or may not, recommend this. I will not use or abuse anyone as I was abused and abused myself in order to survive.

Discovered: I may as well have been writing this to my former self.

Above all things be true to yourself.

130427 14:52 From To 'Had She Said Yes'
© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved

administrators?


Administrators talk more than do anything, in the process disabling the doers. Those who walk the walk.

It is generally suggest that America is a Meritocracy wherein one can rise from obscurity and/or humble origin achieving something ideally noble like service to others. The problem, as I see and experience it, is that the obverse is reality; they merely, by and large, serve themselves. Advocate celebration of their evil abuse of power. Aggrandizing and richly award themselves at the expense of the servers and served.

I spent the previous three years volunteering at hospice. Where like, visiting Jesus in prison or in other extreme circumstance, lending a cup of water or comfort was enough. I wasn't too shabby about doing that. Much less becoming a legend in my own mind. The service was humbling and one I learned to pray that I had the dignity to serve and be received.

Since the initial days of being a photojournalist coupled with the illness and death of my children, I have grown a willingness to work for charity; another word for love. Becoming intimate, by intuition and curiosity, acquainted with the administrators. In the process learning much about myself and, life and death, in general.

One remarkable aspect about service, secular or religious as practiced; there are hundreds of ordinary people doing extraordinary things for zip income, acclaim or acknowledgment. In the trenches while administrators, our (fearless) leaders, strut and preen their specious pride acting noble/notable fraudulently.

Being a “people person” intuitive and experienced, now adding energy/force to my other perceptions: thinking, feeling and sensing; daily, methodically and deliberately. I am, was and will always be both, innocent as a dove and as nice as a coral snake in your breast pocket; lethal.

At hospice at some point it was requested of me that I take “portraits” of fellow volunteers. Many of whom I'd come to know via random encounters. We would share why we were there and had become more than acquaintances. When people ask me who I am, what I've done, I used to mention working freelance for The New York Times, soon after that: I am the parent of two dead children and one missing in action; ancient history on both counts. . . . All my griefs, sorrows and regrets resolved thanks be to god and M and hospice.

In retrospect I would rather have not had what happened. The resulting slide show was like elevator music; something in the background of a volunteer Christmas party. However the process of collecting the images was to me final vindication of all my ambitions slain when my son was diagnosed with cancer.

I was, and remain, grateful for the experience. As I was for the opportunity to serve others in more significant ways. Due to grief tendered by the administration I left; over copyright, who owned the “property”? Ownership of copyright is something of a joke when dealing with digital images.

I suggest the presence of an interlocutor in my life; awake and asleep. I am not alone in this, by historical reference. A lifetime impression of being unworthy of love, much less life itself, it has been difficult for me to credit or validate being the recipient of what I will call/claim as grace. I could as easily die this moment fulfilled. All that I begged, or prayed for, is given, received and I what attempt to pass forward. Do not be offended but know I now sense my address to those in living death unaware of dying. Who like myself, once, lived lives of quiet desperation.

The dream from which I have recently awakened was one of conflict, suggested in my too long preamble. My ambition is that you forget me and always remember your true, and best by God's will, self. No art, craft or other enterprise has ever given me such joy as this I do now: write.

Scarcely do I remember from day-to-day the day before, dying each night, reborn the next now. Happily alone, never lonely. I am by nature, nurture and choice, now, solitary and recognize I must fight to keep that liberty. The freedom to apprehend the vast fields of wisdom I receive daily and struggle to incarnate.

To close, it seems the most frantic, fanatic, zealous administration hides behind a mask of pretense. Its fear; no fame, providence or dying anonymous. Power and force are signs of addiction not health.

Freedom and justice cannot be parceled out in pieces to suit political convenience.” - Coretta Scott King

130427 00:40 MDT administrators
© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved

Friday, April 26, 2013

equivocal perversions

Equivocal to no one and nothing save the interlocutor. Who grades the roads within; scraping and plowing new ingress to my distress. 

“Had She Said Yes” wrote asking 'R U OK?' Chagrined. I discovered other interpretations of prior missives. At the time, after six hours of solitary nakedness, all creative juices roiling, I replied and now regret. What? My honesty? Sincere transparency laid bare.

No reply yet. Yet I am equivocal to the either way of it. Having learned, or was I convicted by experience to never announce a want or desire, especially towards a woman of obvious kindness and inferred trust. Do I not project upon others, the woman within me, with whom I cannot have congress. Consult oracles and flirt with cremation standing up crying eyes balls popping like grapes stepped upon.

What some call 'getting lucky' 'happy endings' or merely getting laid, is for me perilous since that time of castration at twelve by banishment irrevocable. That was The Big One all other traumas pale by compare. 

The dream just awoken from broke me down to the primary flaw: a wilting fern buried in a dark and fetid rain forest of grief. Anticipatory towards women. The switch mercurial between full stop and free flow; exactly what governs whether a seat beat holding you in securely, or allows you the freedom to scratch and itch on you ankle while driving; in most automobiles of recent vintage in America.

I love wandering the mirror maze within, wherein I allowed others to tell me who I was. Annotating each flight or fight, turning or turning inside out . . . do I mean self-betrayal? of course! And for all time thereafter questioning myself fleeing from the shoulds and oughts, the autopilot of culture: secular or sacred. The roads taken and those abandoned: choices.

They now seem, all relationships, to have been boxes full of marbles. But worse. Maracas shaken, cyclonic, in an Afro Cuban Jazz Band. I hear the screech trumpet going above St. Michael the phase and phrases just a few bars before my mind blows.

Sincerely were I able to describe the short circuit inside the circus of my mind you'd know what death is. Looking back and the strings and steams of words above I wonder if my desire, love or mere lust is more than any woman could ever handle; pardon me while I get the chopping knife to remove the source of my everything.

Laughter.

In childhood, well really nearly adolescence, I read H. L. Mencken's remarks about those who habituated the bleachers watching Baltimore Oriel baseball games. Claiming they should 'all be put to sleep like mad dogs.' And forever after, even now, I wonder should I not also join them in the final grand slam? The crack that launched a baseball into outer space winning history's eternal fame.

“Wonderboy flashed in the sun. It caught the sphere it was biggest. A noise like a twenty-one gun salute cracked the sky. There was a straining, ripping sound and a few drops of rain spattered to the ground somebody then shouted it was raining cats and dogs. By the time of Roy got in from second he was wading in water ankle deep.” -The Natural - Bernard Malamud
. . . read the book, oddly the bat "Wonderboy" was kept in a bassoon case!!??

There really is nothing so magical as inhabiting some sort of creativity—the cerebral orgasm of it. Not just once, and only, but the ongoing ecstasy of joy in it.

Why I laugh at the prices paid for Van Gogh these days or Stradivarius; to make such things is to touch God, the money paid is nothing but suffocation.

Then there are those times when I slump into the ordinary of my days. One, simply, cannot sustain a self on coffee, cigarettes and orgasms; or one long continuous orgasm riotous. My stomach rebels and desires coupling with lust carom and ricochet through my imagining and longings for a kind touch or embrace. Only ever really known with my grandmothers hand upon the back of my head.

My Achilles heel?

Kindness I mean.

In my near dotage there are only two women I have had such trust with. All prior remembered best for 'walking upon eggs' with me, while I was skating upon marbles with them!

I will go head-to-head with anyone or anything for a time, until it reaches that point best illustrated, for now or forever, by what it is said that Jesus said, “shake the dust off your sandals and move on.” Here and now I'm thinking the pearls cast before swine is me, little piggy oink oink. I refuse to use anyone as I was abused. Yet like a Samurai can kill without a second thought. Thus I am dangerous to myself understanding. . . .a Nazi and an Angel tussling throughout eternity. Leary of Saviors sensing we, not only I, must not trust the redemption/absolution to anyone. The bottom line regarding which prophet or wisdom figure I read is: That which I seek is inside--extant and inherent. Age has yet to make of me a castrato singing soprano. Add. I don't know how the Red Priest (Vivaldi) did it with all those nubile girls?! I am a fool but not so foolish as to claim redirection of my lust into words as he must have done with music; that divine language best speaking of all I seek.

An illustrative aside: The last time, before M, I was suicidal, I found a cat and loved him like nothing else in this world. And then moved in with a woman I presumed to be the ONE. He became jealous and peed on everything. A long time after this began, his marking everything, a thousand or more dollars spent on medication, etc. I gave up and had him put down; witnessing his death and the look he gave me in dying. I would rather knit a cobweb with my entrails, opening myself with a butter knife, instead of doing that to another life, now thinking of my daughter dying alone in custodial care.

At war with myself, in mortal/immortal combat, I resort to another woman I trust: Anais Nin; a great memoirist. Weaving in, via intuition, several other threads and streams addressing my conflict(s). The honest truth is that I give away my power, too easily, to women presuming them capable of making me not half, or enough, but whole. Only now occurring to me they in their turn may expect the same of me?

Given the opportunity several times in life, I stated, either published or implied; Savior your self. In the community of two, both being fully integrated making something else, greater, if not fabulous. Ideally yet by reality impossible to my quest. The only vessel, or chalice, I know capable of such passion is God. So regardless Ava Gardner, M or “Had She said Yes” I will remain celibate.

Celibacy like marriage is a renewable bond daily, if not minute by minute.
Besides which I am half way there; having only one testicle left and no prize when I had two.

Largely, all that I have ever asked for has been fulfilled experientially. 

Be true to yourself. 

- The Rolling Stones
“You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need”

- Aldous Huxley
"Chastity - the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions."

"Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what man does with what happens to him."

 . . . obviously, here, “man” applies equally to both genders. As in the whole commonweal, the entire family of our human kind.

- Paul Tournier
“Acceptance of one's life has nothing to do with resignation; it does not mean running away from the struggle. On the contrary, it means accepting it as it comes, with all the handicaps of heredity, of suffering, of psychological complexes and injustices.”

“Nothing makes us so lonely as our secrets.”

130426 14:30 MDT equivocal perversions
© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved


freedom value it



To sail cat's paws half way cross Narragansett Bay with a dragon fly resting upon your shoulder is to understand the meaning of freedom. In those moments turned hours, find love beyond speech. We were, he? her? and I? One. Driven by the wind.

In the worst of times, doubt would abort my everything, and all my thoughts as being unworthy of having habitation within me. Occasionally I still visit that dark fetid state; but know it now for fleeting instead of being burned at the stake.

I am the worst assassin of myself. In a nation given to killing anyone/everyone for making ripples in the pond of conformity.

I discover myself filled with myths and metaphors, omens and portents--tared and feathered with them. Or, at the very least, cockle burrs clinging to the whole fabric of my days. I am apprehended by my sense love resides within each, every and all of us. Waiting to be let out. Thinking now of Francis remarking that perfect love is to cross the dark night in November raining soaked through knocking at the gate of his home and there being no answer. Could I be wrong in my advocacy of knock, ask, say yes, and it will be answered? Since I now sense, experience and live what is within knocking my heart asking to be let out.

Empathetical, I wonder what it was like for the young women beheaded in neighboring Juarez Mexico. The AIDS orphans of Africa, India and China. The disappeared and those found divided into many parts spread across abandoned fields.

Submerging into rest I asked what it is to advance human consciousness and saw a Chinese Dragon dancing at the head of a celebratory parade while its tail remained motionless. Then a pile of plates stacked highly and the top most blown away while the base stationary. War is profitable while peace is not; the 1% gain while the serfs bleed and die. The 1% colonize our minds with fear taking wealth from health wholesale. Even love making is politicized.

03:02

Predawn, falling from my perch, I soar over the abyss of my gratitude; the vast array of those whose kindness grew my wings.

Of instinct, courage is the better, not fear. About myself I know the pros and cons as in confidence games: charlatan, swindler or mountebank . . . why I so freely call what I see in others fraud. Possibly I should or ought not to do so since it works both ways: to love as I do. Is, I sense and experience, in M, a curse. But being a beast of burden I take it as it goes; from day to day, minute by minute and know the nature of love is reverence requited or not.

To have or have not, to be or not to be . . . do I inflect, impose or infect with my love. Momentarily astonished; to realize that the loss of my children compelled the adoption of all children; regardless their ages. To irk the ire of the pretentious is a pleasure and play for me since they factory farm us. Much ado about nothing. Public servants abound serving themselves exclusively. Seemingly, the fox rules the hen house deciding who is next to consume. You cannot love someone into loving themselves, but that is precisely what she does did continues to do to me. But then, there are these precious hours alone! Loved as God loves us all unconditionally.

Like the assassinated women of Juarez, in whose memory I am possessed, I must ask, is it worth being myself? From first to last, regardless the torture, length of dying slowly or swiftly. Sacrificed upon the alter of American greed for escape the indifference of our leadership. There seems a remarkable similarity between the fanaticism of free market avarice and that of those who would destroy what we think we should export to the rest of the world. It ain't all mom and apple pie you know. Who's a terrorist now?

At the risk of being stomped like a cockroach I'll say; after one thousand and one “dates” with M, our relationship defies all definitions I am aware of . . . thinking of Francis and Clare, Teresa and John of The Cross . . . chaste making marriage pale. Lovers of another kind.

My version/vision of what I believe Jung implied; the great marriage is inside. And at that its only value grows if only given freely away.

If I make neither literary or literal sense remember these are only notes on a life work in process. Finding a reason to take another breathe.

. . . could it be I am addressing myself, the eejit who never knew what poetry was/is? Too pragmatic to try and fail? After all, in all things, I am as empathetic to the predator as prey.

And so the parade goes on and I wonder less why those I adore forgave their executioners. All monuments erode but love grows.

To close: A memory seldom considered; mother gave me a book about, but never read; Heloise and Abelard. I was then an adolescent and consider now her bequest of that, implied/inferred, greater than her quarter million dollar will stolen from me by the gamblers on Wall Street. . . .My fault really since I thought myself too stupid to attend either fortune. Possibly why I find myself in a frenzy to know myself differently? Sincerely, I am torn between a desire to dismember them joint by joint, then resurrect them to do it all over again. And merely forgive them, as I pray God will. And mom, forgive me the loss of your wealth.

“The perversion of the mind is only possible when those who should be heard in its defense are silent.” - Archibald MacLeish
"The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves." - William Hazlitt

130426 01:57 MDT Value of Freedom
© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved

Thursday, April 25, 2013

ribbit the company of men

In the company of men, as a soldier, I learned by example and experience, what leadership is: to train those lead to replace you instantly. That was a fact, or ideal, as impossible then as C. G. Jung's advocacy that the last phase of integration is to address mortality; abstract fact then, but imminent now. Not for me alone, but all of us.

Death is a conviction inherent in birth. I have a sense of having little time to wander or wonder about what happens afterwards. Yet have, in time become aware, that kindness, love, joy, compassion, empathy are values I am willing to die for. Not ever having served in combat I intuit that troops live and die, not for a flag or ideal, but themselves as family; for each other. That is the brotherhood of men/women who commit and participate in what is real.

There are light years of separation between aggression and assertion. The peril I am aware of has nothing overt that should concern you with. My intention is not alarm but to suggest that you, as you are, are precious and should sell, donate, or sacrifice your life dearly. Commensurate with the value I see in our family of mankind; uniformly and equally. (Later added: collaboratively?)

My truth is not a brand, governance or religion since I sense nor discern none adequate. Save in the universal rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

KISS = Keep It Simple Stupid

Laughter. Amongst photographers there is a saying: “Unlike doctors we cannot bury our mistakes.”

07:19

At an illogical stopping point, between wise guys and wisdom gals, prophets, poets and authors, even a few statesmen--too few at that--I came to sense something ominous; putting it on the pillow with my head.

Where I live there is a season of wind; upon us now. In my headlong plunge seeking to balance my perceptions, informed by thinking, feeling, intuition, sense and instinct: what I decide my personal reality is or is about as actionable truth. I fell to disquiet blindsided by, from desperate resources, an aeolian harps distress. Humming my synapses, the only thing equal to light, perhaps faster in travel.

Here, in this season, the wind will suddenly raise dust to the extent one would be ill advised to travel about, since vision is constricted as severely as a blind fog or enveloping blizzard. Dust, like water, filling every void; extinguishing all conceits, presumptions or ambitions until it is over, scourging all life. Drowning in air?

There are too many of us, and I will gladly leave, but tarry a while for the children, who innocent of death, teach us to be at ease dying.

Never sure of being a curse or blessing in these times, I slump into silence (rarely) yet nattering on. Humiliated and humbled.

I still wonder what I will be when I grow up?

I lie. Words, mere words, build and destroy me. Thinking I was finished my eyes fell upon:
To keep oneself safe does not mean to bury oneself.” - Marcus Annaeus Seneca

. . . it is a way, not The Way, but works for me, this that I daily do when alone . . . just a rogue thought crossing my attention now: escape and evasion is constant motion, if captured forgive your executioner. Did not Cicero say to his assassin; “Strike!”

If you would hear God, listen to God's Children: All of us.

And should you think yourself God you are not.

PS

What I left out of the previous post, or posts, can't remember now:

I realized that the deepest spiritual lessons are not learned by His letting us have our way in the end, but by His making us wait, bearing with us in love and patience until we are able to honestly to pray what He taught His disciples to pray: Thy will be done.” - Elisabeth Elliot

14:08

And then another nap, in which I dreamed most salaciously, myself as venal. Immoral! Okay! I say let me see myself as I am, not as I would be. Unethical! To know one's self and accept that as . . . what . . . the light year gap between ideal and real.

Be careful of what you consume. As for myself. I am just as capable as anyone (thinking of politicians) phony baloney. Just for laughs.

What I dislike about writing, versus image making or capture, dance or stage event, is that when you review it, I, at least, discover vast vistas ignored. Pregnant with potential. And wonder should I go on or delete it; or myself? It is an odd task this that I put myself to: solitary, arcane, obtuse (laughter thinking of my bitchy muse amused with me squirming. Twitching and writhing upon this vivisection board) what I knew moments ago utterly changed. A foundation become quick sand.
And Yes! I love it more.

ribbit

130425 02:12 MDT the company of men
© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved