molting

By all signs, portents, personal myths and proclivities, it seems my choice best to stay with her; whom I have for so long loved. Yet, at that, it remains a molting, shedding the skin of what was to become, something else, at least new. Rarely did I mention the drama trauma to M since it seemed, initially, so futile . . . she then seemed up to her eyebrows in quick sand and a relationship with a man consuming her.

With her now I understand my intuition was correct yet the longing and love remained across the years. It was and remains innocent of all sense of possession; the crime we do in love calling it whatever, it becomes commercial. Subject to the vagaries and darts of legal vicissitudes. The doings of Kings & Queens, false leaders of everything.

But then. What of the children?

I was a child—once long ago—too well remembering the: ‘do not speak unless spoken to directly, go away and I’ll find time for you somewhere or time in the future.’ It never came—that promise. Yet I made it happen here and now. No. Not I alone; but of several influences beginning with “TAKE ME WITH YOU!”

Pervading all that has passed between us beginning (or was it renewed?) not long ago, there has been this slow dance towards one another, ineluctable as inevitable as an earthquake

23:15

Familiarity brings depth, a closer knowing; she too thought of molting; removing the outer skin to grow larger. Perhaps better described: neither of us is what we were before but different and becoming more intimate . . . larger woven into a continuum of a seamless cloth. This world is actually very small both by comparison with other places in our galaxy and the entire universe but also my current sense of service. A nurse from ‘our’ hospice visited today and I knew of, but not, her until I saw her.

Long ago I stood on a neighboring vacant lot awaiting the dawn arrival of a traveling tent circus. When I arrived there was a man, bag in hand, who explained he waited to rejoin them moving along having tarried there in my town and state for a time. I have held a sense now realized that we who serve in whatever manor are travelers not settlers of any given place but always following the need; theirs and ours to be what we are.

Then too, there are those of us, stationary, who travel vast distances, within and without, crossing all time. And for whom time and death have no meaning and nothing can hold captive.

130531 03:44

For The Interlocutor. I sense myself able to say yes or no. Knowing that were it otherwise I would remain addicted to the idea/ideal/idol of what is good, etc., not subject to decay. There is within any belief system those who would teach by rote what must be experienced if to have any value at all above control of the masses.

Reflecting, retroactively, similar circumstance/opportunities—remembering the frenzy and being riddled with doubt, I wonder now where the fear went?

. . . the thrall that held me captive for most all of my life . . . while fabulous also filled with suffering and grief. The latter certain to revisit me and mine since we are spiritual being in biodegradable packages for now but not forever.

"War is the science of destruction." - John S. C. Abbott

. . . discovered in this morning’s search for quotes. Of comparable value to Kurt Vonnegut and his reference to ‘death by mechanical puncture’ . . . rape of another kind?

Standing alone in the dark Mary’s robe of stars made dim by dawn smoking another cigarette, I am fraudulent to suggest that you do no harm, first to yourself, then another, but that’s me. I am a whore for words and images that demand my attention, remembering whores perform a service and politicians, in general seem only to serve themselves. The most obscene are those who so richly reward themselves at our expense and then worse, cataclysmic, are those who suggest that heaven is available only to the children, women and men who destroy themselves with bombs carried in to the midst of public concourse . . . but then there is always the terrorism of commercials suggesting the want of things versus the need of peace and sufficiency.

I will continue to protest the rape of us, we all, the family of mankind . . . it is a good time to be crazy

130530 EDT 05:05 molting

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved

loving love

How to say the simplest thing is merely to say it: Love is loves reward.

I used to ask; “why me?” Echoing back a faint sound answers ‘why not.’

Want not.

What more could I ever ask for?

I awoke with Ginger’s head asleep upon my right hand, covers kicked back, windows open at 02:00 or thereabouts. The visions of versions of love mine alone since they were as innocent as Ginger’s love. Ginger is a, approximately forty pound dog of uncertain origin. One of the few elect from a pack of several, perhaps, I sense many extending back across Pam’s life protected and loves as I am and she beside me having at that last gasp between awake and sleep I asked that she never leave me . . . then blessed sleep within which this dream, these visions, and finally, first and last, I knew myself loved and safe.

It is true of me, I am incapable of reading aloud 1 Corinthians 13 without my voice breaking tear streaming and the feeling I’d fall to my knees or face down . . . instead I write and still cry attempting to say what love is actually.

Maybe now, marginally, nominally, better able to describe what it, love, is.

Love is everywhere, Love is everything, Love is ALL.

Love is what we all seek having a genius for it within.

Obvious.

Only now.

Love has no fear of anything.

My customary methodology has malfunctioned. At least insofar as my desired expectations. Instead it leads me farther, deeper into the swiftly moving river of concern and care for all of us expressed by others . . . always careful of what I ingest except, of course, for cigarettes and coffee . . . my physical ecology being a shambles.

As with M, so with P, both are difficult for me to define definitively. Either for or about. Yet there is about ‘us’ collectively: a sense we have shared separately savage grief and suffering. Then, touched by grace, been healed.

Oddly, flashing as explosive, a dawn unexpected, I saw the sense it might have been mom’s intention to make of me the father she’d never had. There is, at the moment, a similar component to my love for Pam or M equally for them as my children, my parents, my lovers; multidimensional—other—in all respects. Yet equal and innocent in that love lives between us. Above all gender difference.

There seems, at least to me, for now, a host of potential beyond all understanding within each and all of us. A vastness knowable as extant but unmeasurable and frustrating for me to attempt the expression of or description. Yet the attempt impossible as it may be worth everything I can give to it . . . a process seamless as a whole fabric being woven and we all within it related. There is no “Law” of love save in my sense, so far, for now, that we must be ourselves: unique as created and/or evolved . . . always pushing the envelope of our aware understanding, experience, expectations. Education never ceases.

130529 23:26

At the end of one thing another is announced. It seems I’ve lost track of the energy contained above. Had I awoken just now at the airport I’d just go back wondering had the whole thing been just a dream? But at that I wonder what happened in those secrets whispered the terror of two children facing the unknown/unknowable together siblings . . . and then thought how could I say goodby to myself?

Looking at now, looking forward, I don’t want to look or go back to what was then waiting to die. New England in Spring is riotously fecund. Especially here in St. Johnsbury, VT: the mists, rivers, rain, cold become lucid then ideal. Today I realized God is much this place as all places, in me and all of us equally, only not recognized. Actual, not ideal or idol.

And I will stay sacrificing all except Annie that which was me back there. For here I am better something else more. Love no longer a stranger to me.

To close. There is that which we can change and that which we cannot. To know the difference is to be more human than inhumane; more for life, as experienced and lived by all, versus all life beaten into unreality. Love creates while the opposite, indifference, breeds death.

130529 EDT 0212 loving love

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved

rightly tightly

In myriad ways, insignificant but telling, we have forged a bond. Not yet ready to say we’re married and such, but in all intents and purposes so. Equally aware marriage, as all life truly lived, is renewed daily: or more often by needs. It follows that I am especially aware between us there are no secrets hid and with each Audition or personal step more has been revealed. Daily expanding is my sense we are joy for one another rippling outward.

There are times when she protests the rarefied air atop her pedestal but then draws me up with a hug and kiss and I’m there too! Stretching up to reach the stars.

11:06

Eating when hungry, sleeping when tired; I die and dream in my rest periods auguring, laughing and crying with the All. Boundaries between times cycle rapidly and prevision or symbolic visions become more vivid and frequent. The dreams seem best described as for all instead of me alone. Déjà vus has happened on several occasions and while looking up the word (spell and definition) I am sad to realize it equally used to describe boredom. Instead I recoil at the realization I may have envisioned her world by conversation long distance.

In play: I doubt that I will return to Las Cruces NM. Leaving behind the life I there, except for M, nothing of sufficient value to move being less in value than the cost to do so. In a sense, in a way, it is dying and being reborn. The essentials sharply drawn and refocused as highest values; what I brought with me and myself of course. Annie, my rescue cat companion is obviously important to me and we’re making arrangements for her here. I have been in similar circumstances before. In writing the sentence I recognized the exile to my Grandmothers for the summer school vacations and many other leavings. Significant now, this move is similar, in that I am leaving behind reference materials. Equipment, computers, printers etc., some in unopened boxes. Conjecture and/or intentions never inhabited. Roads not taken, forgotten and/or neglected for this, my greatest joy, writing.

Typical of me to work things out via journal keeping.

15:51

Awoke from the far side of midnight in time to have those two dogs sleeping upon, around, beside me arise and bark in chorus with neighborhood dogs. Aware there is similarity between M & P both are lovely, kind, loving, generous and attuned to animals like this who writes.

Within dreamless sleep I sensed an new order born; everything in its place shipshape and . . . in this case: St. Johnsbury fashion. As close as I’ve been to death, my own and others, I’ve learned not to sweat the small stuff. Remembering an Estate Sale in New Hampshire for The New York Times, long, too long ago. Wherein a man of accomplishments, his life displayed in awards, degrees, mementos and trivial valuable to someone else: now he was gone. So as for me it is actually as if I had died and been reborn/resurrected/reincarnated mobetta. Actually: Mostbesstus.

130528 EDT 08:08 rightly tightly

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved

any way you can

To love, be loved, becoming best friends ever, is to become touched by grace

Genius

. . . and this peace pervading me is untouchable by any event imaginable or otherwise since grace suffuses and imbues me with itself peace that is beyond all understanding like the air I breath and what breathes me.

Were I able in other ways to give you what I feel save in these abased words I would—but would you receive it, the peace I mean.

I have no sense of permanency since peace like love must grow as a renewable bond/covenant/contract preemptive and higher than what law implies since law is remedial and I bore myself repeating it while love is fluid like the seas washing away the shores of conceit.  

“Measure yourself by your best moments, not by your worst. We are too prone to judge ourselves by our moments of despondency and depression.” - Robert Johnson

23:31

At night the stars are as bright here in Vermont as any I’ve ever seen anywhere absent the pollution of cities. And standing upward gazing I remember the point of sail called Broad Reach; the wind a quarter between the beam and stern snoring across the sea blind confident in peace the course ahead. There is nothing about what lays ahead between myself and Pam but a sense of being right to be together. Yet there remains certain practical issues cats and dogs back in Las Cruces and less import choices that we must work out and within there is this peace I cannot believe of me or us.

Caught between tears of joy and laughter I write these words because I want to remember this time and confident sense having passed Audition Number Three, or is it Four? How many ahead?

It seems we are a we and there remains only the details about how to affect the closure behind and forge ahead to whatever will be with us for the foreseeable future. The ship of us rooting into the seas to come joyfully.

130527 03:23

Between myth metaphor simile and myself / the effort goes forward upward through a van obvious cyclonic / drawn for now shrouded in the Moose Rivers constant rushing and fog. She sleeping amongst two dogs and a damp sweaty vacancy from which I fled feed with dreams now vaporous. What remains, obvious, that soon or late I will return beloved. Still joking about the next Audition. Love’s laughter and lust slaked yet again. 

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

No small crime this suggesting that you read if nothing else – as I – the ruin and runes of your heart as well as those of others more famous. Watching the gyre—ruins returned to embodiment. 

Neither madness or silliness I am stunned to silence with awe this date these quotes on Wikipedia. Embraced swallowed whole within the belly of a boa looking like a thin brimmed hat with a high crown myself inside laughing in joy! Crescendo the sense I am not to quote you quotes or explain my sense of them but merely to attempt to say in my own words what they imply to me. Imparting to you the desire to build not destroy. To love not kill a forms of life not regarding their esthetic value or what culture tells you is good and whole but what is itself like everything that concerns me a portent of good. What is not subject to corruption lasting far beyond our meager lives.

Each of us sentient is a crystal refracting meaning unique to us seeking concurrence contemporaneously with the life force of our home this planet which for me at times is God but as God always more than I can embrace. 

By meter or rhyme I am poverty stricken when it comes to poetry but of a poetic sense/aesthetic I become, daily, more aware. And for one I refuse to allow we the people to succumb to images inarticulate seduced. Mikey seems to indicate we eat our own cereal the substance of our origin and future to digest. 

What folly to ignore the song of your heart deafened by noise and dilutions/delusions?

04:41

Dawn slowly looms loving the metaphor for both the tapestry and dawn to come. Birds sing in chorus day break. The Presence is continual whether dark or light or in-between and eternity in a heart beat as dead meat the soul fled. Tenant in life or death heaven and hell within. 

130528 EDT 00:48 

This love I live / actually a duet only now discovered / become a chorus / several like minded / who sing together a building the world anew / seen for all of us / equal and none better than another.

For her I abandon all past definition of what life was, is, become will be—future: two trees roots racing towards the core of things. Buttressed by truths transparent given as our being vows souls intertwined.  Watered by deep aquifers unquenchable.

130526 EDT 05:06 any way

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved 

“So! Does this mean that I’ve passed the first Audition?”

“Yes! Two dogs!”

Laughter

Later on I awoke and saw the nape of her naked neck and wept for joy home at last

enveloped in love and freely home, Good God Almighty, Free at last!

A girl and boy together as one and free at Last!

Ones

into two

become one both at home together free at last!

And so it goes right here in St. Johnsbury VT home together growing more together and love actually!

92 degrees in Las Cruces, NM

34 degrees and snowing in St. Johnsbury, VT and snowing!

Happy?

Yes!

“To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

130525 EDT 17:07 fait accompli

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved

quickening

An observation about solitude and creative/artistic endeavors. I have no literary friends with whom to qwery the good or ill of what/how/why I write. Leaving me with my head in the toilet singing lullabies to myself. A masturbatory exercise.

Considered from another point of perception, these being the happiest days, hours, minutes and seconds of all. Are expansive to places where no person has ever traveled except in their heart.

Ecstasy.

Why would I risk losing that to be with a person when I, at whatever hour arise, besot with dreams, messages, dialogs, ideas and ideals? There has never been for me someone as affirming specific to what I’ve written since a friend looking at a painting of mine raised his arms horizontal and screamed. Cause and effect intended, later I was see him crushed beneath a car straddling his motorcycle looking at me as he died.

Reality is far more fantastic than imagination.

The Interlocutor is silent, for the most part, lending me clues as serendipity, coincidence or synchronicity; what has sustained my solitary singing in the commode.

Inspiration: being breathed into . . . and Pamela Joyce — I love calling her that — there will be other terms of endearment later on but for now . . . my love for her, however expressed, of needs is adequate. Add. Of course I’ve always been incapable of expressing either love or the need for love effectively anywhere near my sense of its majesty . . . that is until I began to play in orchestras and bands, then paint, the photograph and now write. Which initially was a method of finding sanity in an insane world; i.e. No one listening to me — me learning not to listen to myself. Early on learning not to ask for, nor expect, anything; taking whatever was given . . . like many — if not most or all — scared by the experience. My writing this, as most everything else, is addressed to those of us, who like me were — or are lost — without voice or comprehension of what to do with abuse, rape, death, mutilation or merely loss/grief.

Recently I have used J. S. Bach and “fisting” to analogize the experience of Pamela Joyce’s response/reply via insertion or play within my self. Rude, crude, inadequate to the fantastic lofting she gives me: specific to my intentions suggesting an interest in more.

In a way, a sense, I could die this moment ecstatic in her love. She in me. And, we’ve not yet kissed or embraced outside dialog . . . simple conversation.

At first meeting there was lust of course. But more. Some ineffable intuition that she was desirable on a multiplicity of levels and facets. Now my feelings are; then, now, and future, there is more. For which I would fight to gain. I have a reason to live outside my solitary self and a sure conviction that there will be more than anything I could possibly imagine or makeup . . . something so vastly beyond: attraction, lust, consummation, boredom, death.

Of suffering and death we both know too well from hospice and in ourselves. This moment too precious to waste. Being so. This minute becomes eternity and an endless eternity until Face-to-Face with what comes next

130523 MDT 15:23 pace quickening

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved

ain't no

ain’t no jack-in-the-pulpit, pussy-toes, posey, poesy, poet (ry) writer but red poinsettia knocked silly by it: knotweed! Clubbed senseless where I growed!

Poetry that is.

“Genius will live and thrive without training, but it does not the less reward the watering–pot and pruning–knife.” ~ Margaret Fuller (born May 23)

. . . and so it goes right here in River City FOLKS gotta tellya we got troubles and we got joys! Choose which ones you gonna pay and play or pay/play attention too.

Long-long-time-ago-more-longer-than-I-wanna-remember; he was a student in my Adult Ed Photography Class — a Navy Air Commander Pilot — then friend — he and his family adopted me and I remain their child; a member of the family. He did archival matting, mounting and framing of photographs. Specifically those of Robert Mapplethorpe (One-Man Exhibition Museum of Modern Art, NY, NY, USA) and I had the dubious then – but privilege now – to have seen the originals up-close-and-personal.

Fasten your seat belt we’re going in!

Not for the faint of heart!

Pamela Joyce & M, & I believe — have faith in — am confident God — all touch me intimately within . . . maybe soon physically too RE: P? But less important than ‘fool-in round’ is the intimacy between/amongst friends. Transparent, more than naked, souls dancing, singing, poetry, prose, moaning in joy — love actually manifest. Manifold & incarnate — life inhabited absent reserve or precondition . . . and gender ain’t got nuffin’ to do with it.

Violence is the NEW PORNOGRAPHY of which—seemingly—there is never enough to slake addiction to it. While the prissy prudes of us call imagery of people acting as if they were having fun/recreational sex; PORNOGRAPHY! . . . is the video of a legless child bleeding to death — or so starved they seem pregnant pleasing?

Oh! God forgive me! . . .Or Jesus homeless asleep beneath a bridge covered with newspapers for warmth — aflame incinerated by passing 1%ers for their amusement? Roaring away in their “Fing” Escalades!

Moving right along, Upward hopefully not downward.

FOLKS! . . . I gotta tellya when Pamela Joyce wrote me last this AM she touched me in ways implied by Robert Mapplethorpe’s images of men fisting . . . initially about the sex between not between men — I was appalled. Nothing about sex or men/men/women/women disturbs me. Sex, to and for me, is celebratory: touch taken to its next level — more specific and personal.

I think now Len Hartnett (Archival Products, N. Kingstown, RI) wanted my opinion, stunned not knowing people did that — akin to discovering a related to me child was chained in the attic for want of mental health care — I was silent. But in reply, now, understand better why some only know love as pain.

She, of sorrowful eyes, after telling me she only “Liked Bad, Bad . . . Very Bad, Boys” said her dad had used her sexually from age six until that form of affection — being the only attention or expression of fondness/desire/approval/acceptance that she had any right to live/was worth the salt in her bread / so to speak — Well FOLKS gotta tellya it stopped the minute she sought him out for more publicly.

DO NOT CONFESS TO ME!

In turn I will absolve you and pat you on the fanny knowing you will heal, not by me, but between God & Yourself. As I have been healed & growing following, nearer, seen more clearly, DAY-BY-DAY . . . otherwise all bets are off: i’ll make poetry, fiction, faction, prose, screen plays whatever because it is my nature and nurture to communicate . . . anyway as writer, photograph, comedian: Imp Clown i am R.

. . . & I will bless my assassin(s) knowing there is God somewhere within them lost buried beneath zealot/fanatic like the man who with phallic sniper rifle shot the abortion doctor in his home . . . merely meaning I pray for both continually

. . . if hell bent for election to hell i’ll go knowing the reprise of my evils

. . . do most own guns for penis envy like Sports Utility Vehicles? Sortakinda merging agression/assertion in one whole idol.

Be well beloved knowing god bless/blesses you as he/she does us all

{Notes} I’ve been around the world too many times, in various conveyances, but mostly airplanes. Which I now understand are more like flying coffins than ever: buried alive, sardines packed for profit — but upon survey they are merely, to me, more like cattle cars carrying starving Jews to Nazi Internment Death Camps — yet ever much more so.

We only value, it seems, what we lose afterwards.

It is not my discomfort, distress, boredom or death I am concerned about. For in truth I’d do anything asked by either God, M, or P save cause harm, injury or death to another: Annie or ant.

I know death and suffering well thinking now of that costume jewelry people wear He wear a diaper not for modesty but for the simple fact that in death most excrete bodily fluids and solids . . . why did I think of this now . . . hugging His bleeding feet of course.

Be well and careful what you consume; any ingress

PS Pamela Joyce when you pick me up at the airport, if you run over me, and back up to do it all over, again harder; i’ll understand you like your SUV & I don’t want to walk either.

130523 MDT 07:46 ain’t no

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved

latter future

Beyond the Beyond, sometime in the latter future, maybe billions of trillions of years, but who’s counting, by what measure, from now: the language and those who speak/hear it may be gone but the experience of joining Creation will remain. Or mainly what tommorrow will be, of equal measure for me—the many years implied—I’ll be for another what I imply Heaven; that is. Or Whatever will be—will be—of us: two people becoming one and then and then and then.

Pleasure flickers, joy remains ever-after, complete whole holy. Remember nothing of me but of yourself remain beloved & love is preemptive while law remedial; what is given grows.

Sooth teller only of myself. Able to change nothing: myself—the collective—the Universe—except my perceptions of its experience / the verities hammered within and upon ‘me’ / veraciously / voraciously / ferociously—Ruth beloved.

"It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods." - Notes from Cambridge, Massachusetts (July 1842) published in Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852), Vol. II, p. 64

Beauty, to me, is not in the eye of the behold but the “I” of experience. And my mission: the equality of the feminine of God or any woman as child, adolescent, nubile fecund or not, or crone. Experience the wisdom inherent absent the form in which it comes to you or as sought.

In an ineffable sense what we rape, murder, steal, destroy does the same to us becoming the victim. What goes around comes around and in truth nothing is hidden forever. I ain’t da JUDGE but curiously sense I know the one of whom it was said ‘vengeance is mine’.

Humiliation become humility in me.

It has always or nearly so been near impossible to express either my love or ask for it in return. Looking at the tree I am wondering at how the branch’s grew why that direction that extent. Bemused that at my age antiquity I still grow fractures in the sky silhouetted mirror wisdom leads into infinity . . . forgive me please my analogies comparable to His resurrection in each and all of life potent potential but it started this recent growth with sitting across of my beloved M the Sphinx of green emerald eyed infinity who rolled back the rock covering my intransigence . . . so she is nearer god to me . . . watching to see what will happen . . . if so and then . . . Pamela is Jesus calling forth this Lazarus now singing, “Let’s Dance”

I ani't nothing at all and don’t care a fig what you think of me, what I write, my sense of grace. However I care deeply and sincerely what you think of your (precious to me) self. Love that is, real. Confident that should you love yourself all bets are off about the future: mobetta.

I love these two women equally M&P yet one, in essence says; “no way Jose.” “Had She Said Yes” P for Pamela Joyce in saying yes is now dancing we together—for both I can only say thank you for sharing the Universe with me as your audience. Laughing, clapping, sighing, twitching, crying for sorrow and joy, dying, reborn again.

What more could a man want? GOD! Well of course.

130523 MDT 05:20 latter future

© 2013 by Jack Spratt—All Rights Reserved