representations

I represent no one except myself. Neither The New York Times for which or whom? I worked as a free lance photojournalist for forty years; I am told I remain upon theirs roles as still available for assignments. Nor “God” or any institutions claiming to represent Her/Him . . . never IT.

For now, while I still live, by my low esteem/estimate, I am a Pop Corn Maker in an abandoned movie theater and town, in the Southwest, busily making hot, too salty, overly buttered noise.

Happily alone. Save, of course, for Annie, my beloved companion, a cat, who like pornography never talks back or says, 'not now honey bunny I've a headache.'

However, that be as it may, I continue to be blown away and apart . . . blown up? Popping by discovery: apparently random collisions with words. My mentors and myself are old and aging aware of the trembling of life soon vacated as the darkened theater abandoned the stage and screen left dark. I remember others so loved as them whose suggested eternal vacation rendered me helpless and hysterical if not overtly at least within.

During a recent visit to the reading room randomly opening whatever fell to hand I discovered the following:

The White Lilies

As a man and woman make

a garden between them like

a bed of stars, here

they linger in the summer evening

and the evening turns

cold with their terror: it

could all end, it is capable

of devastation. All, all

can be lost, through scented air

the narrow columns

uselessly rising, and beyond,

a churning sea of poppies--

Hush, beloved. It doesn't matter to me

how many summers I live to return:

this one summer we have entered eternity.

I felt your two hands

bury me to release its splendor. - Louise Gluck

and then:

“Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.” - Michelangelo

. . . jabber guffaw slathered sigh vibrating with what energy is this

nevermore? precious life of us all so touched!

10:33 on the other hand:

"If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic." - Thomas Szasz - Schizophrenia", p. 101

. . . add: Why I seldom date or request: "Not to ask is not be denied." - John Dryden . . . oddly the desire and ability remain even now at my age!? Better descriptor of me life long . . . it seems I love too deeply to risk and fail. The passion/compassion is, of course, outrageous; sadness unbearable.

Celibacy is a bitch, splayed as I am, vivisected. A frog, between vacant parentheses, light years apart, empty, merely a toad after all. Gee thanks mom!

Be better than well, be your best self

and true of course.

130423 07:57 representations

© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved

outward appearances cellar door

Unless you are a student of people, versus a voyeur, we would seem ordinary people enveloped in an extraordinary bond as friends.

He said; “I think we are going to be fabulous friends!” This was after I had spoken in a meeting of Adult Children of Alcoholics.

And so we are: Mentor/Mentee, teacher/student become friends. And he, like M, are two trustworthy people I can call at any hour, day or night, for a 'reality check.' While standing upon the crumbling cliff of suicide, or other matters of lesser extremes.

I betray myself for I have not had such a relationship with the several friends and peers who took their lives, or died by disease, or accident, before I began this long journey from darkness into the light.

Surprising! This spooling out cobwebs of words finding oneself naked and real; loving and loved. Especially when I consider that I never listened to my heart before the beginning of keeping a journal. And, obvious now, between secrets and agony so profound it seemed a poison to speak I refused to even listen to myself.

She, M, said yes to my request that we have coffee after cardiac rehab. So began not only the saving of my life—i was suicidal at that point---but making a life possible for me. Transcendent; no longer fearful to live or die. There seems no parenthetical boundaries to describe or enclose love for another as the best for them.

130423 03:33

“It is customary these days to ignore what should be done in favor of what pleases us.” - Plautus

At lunch yesterday – M seems to favor public places curiously – surrounded by young men and women attentive to electronic devices, instead of one another, we swapped anecdotes indicative of the criminal consequences. The Plautus quote I discovered as I am now want to do, at times bouncing between my thoughts and the thoughts of others. Or should I say weaving? Conscious, now, of my firm attention to serendipity, or synchronicity; vastly more frequent now. Could be merely coincidence? These collisions between concerns and potential answers; but not divination as a magic trick. We, all of human kind, use so little of our minds otherwise endlessly seeking pleasure instead of joy.

Sleeping as a wolf, or, sleeping when tired, I returned to rest and dreamed again of resources from childhood. Which, in truth, was not entirely bad. Mother did read to me early on and I remember snatches of stories that mystically beguiled and delighted me. Otherwise I should have ended my life long ago.

Periodicity has little meaning to me; suspended between a sense before and after times measurement. Less and less daily now. Plautus predated the common era by two hundred years. Again and again I return to the collective consciousness I sense common to all ages, races, creeds. If not actual at least potential.

05:33

Would I be a savior, or champion, of women? Or as we all need, both genders, to be saviors to ourselves. I speak not of one woman but many, all loved, in ways uncommon for themselves--WOMEN. Who seemed to have been touched by violence; enslaved for being gentle. Kind. At heart, or by my expectation? And they not for themselves but as object/subject of lust; a convenience raped and soul murdered. The rub being we all have towering within us something that is hidden; creation stronger than destruction. Ill defined and traded away for what? Safety? Or is it covenant, convention or delusion. Men have never interested me. Seeing them, like my once self, as puppets to their rage over being separated from Mother or never having one. Courage is in neither gender but both; always potential. In too few realized, manifest or published.

Happy Birthday Willy Shakes! (William Shakespeare)

"To thine own self be true." - Polonius, in Hamlet

“To find the point where hypothesis and fact meet; the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality; the place where fantasy and earthly things are metamorphosed into a work of art; the hour when faith in the future becomes knowledge of the past; to lay down one’s power for others in need; to shake off the old ordeal and get ready for the new; to question, knowing that never can the full answer be found; to accept uncertainties quietly, even our incomplete knowledge of God; this is what man’s journey is about, I think.”

- Lillian Smith http://www.sayingsnquotes.com/quotations-by-subject/life-quotes-proverbs-sayings-32/

Beauty, like God, is not a thing, but a feeling inside. An experience

remember the chrysalis

thank you Wendy Gold; creator of the globe

130422 23:02 outward appearances cellar door

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/cellar+door

© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved