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

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wikiquote:Quote_of_the_day/April#27

130427 00:40 MDT administrators

© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved

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.

http://classiclit.about.com/cs/articles/a/aa_abelard.htm

“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

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

welfare drag queen

Prized above all is the gift of awe!

Unlike the portrait, cellular phone in hand, of the young man who videoed his room mate making love (having sex?) with another man. Leering in awe, a voyeur, mindless with glee. I, for one, identify with the roommate plunging into the Hudson River; not quit wet but soon to be.

Frankly, for my part, Republicans don't have a prayer, for I see in their specious flatulent posturing; not glee but death. I'd be a drag queen for my below poverty social security, in their view of things. Democrats being nominally 'better' after the Rhodes Scholars definition of sexual congress as in not having it via oral sex. Then aiding, abetting and praising Credit Default Swaps. Followed by The Boy Bankrupter, Howdy Bush with Uncle Bob Chaney whose arm up Bush's posterior flapped G. W.'s yap.

The Great “Decider” indeed!

Forgive, please, my venomous infliction or infection. In the course of things, as I practice it, I discovered a quote that simply tore my heart out; cutting my spinal cord in half. With regret I did not annotate the discovery in my last post. It, being too Christian.

My version of Jesus is: He was a pain in the sit down and an anarchist in His time; still is--at least to me.

Speaking of Jesus: Jesus! I wish Barbara, G.W.'s mother, had done the job, instead of he or her husband. Forgidaboutit: sneering Uncle Bob Cheney.

Too many rubber chicken and canned pea dinners listening to the obscene burlesque of politicians to take either they, or myself, too seriously. What me worry! It will all be over sooner or later. I no longer wonder why it is possible to see God more clearly amongst the poor.

Oh! I did fail to mention Jesus too!

Humble, meek, in tattered fatigues, wrapped in newspapers sleeping under a bridge.

So. No. I'll stay as I am remembering: "Do not wish to be anything but what you are." - Saint Francis de Sales. The devil I am, and in the details, may be necessary to what, I don't know. But I'd love to see what Jesus would do with The Congress of Baboons throwing over their secret bank accounts and smug self-congratulatory rewards for failure. Convicted. Nothing is lost to eternity. Stupefying, their posturing.

130425 00:03 dubious

. . . but reverent about all things actually. I awoke thinking about being helpless, loving the process of inquiry and debate. Then thinking: To speak about, or of God, is like being a glow worm flitting in the dark compared to the Sun.

Obvious, to me at least, I love God. Above and most of all--more than life itself. So too M, at least nearly so. Who long ago expressed her prayers for my highest good. Weeping then and again, and again, even now the memory of such a gift conditioned by the closing thought I decided not to quote; “Not my but thy will be done.” (Actually it was the last: Thy will be done.)

It is not so much what I say, or what I do, but what I am. Wearing a Jerusalem Cross. Conscious of a dream wherein one was pressed to my lips; a white hot brand. It is a symbol derived from experience. Homage paid. And become emblematic, but not an exclusive idol or fanaticism, of an expression best voiced by others universal; at least insofar as we can see and understand it. For I am as much Buddhist, Janis, Dow, Islamist as Christian since I see within my time “God” spoken of in many languages; as universal and the origin of what I consider the Collective Consciousness to be by origin.

Can I say simply: The will/choice to love and create versus destroy; or slump indifferently before adversity? I see no seams in the whole cloth of this, spoken of, here, then there, across all time.

Did I mention considering myself a Jew? Standing beneath the shower heads expecting water and receiving lethal gas. I see divinity everywhere; either overt or hidden. Yet I was, am, and remain a poor spokesperson for my love.

I reserve the right to be an eejit, a dunce sat upon a stool in the corner with pointed hat and bells attached to the pointy shoes I wear; a jester. Creative and eclectic to a fault, I see my function to collect and refract information as light with levity or not. Wearing motley panties or not.

130424 05:35 welfare drag queen

© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved

what would I give?

To myself I seem, ofttimes, too pompous or not substantial enough: insubstantial. Then supercilious, a scrivener, scribbler, dilettante, defacer of public toilet stalls; furtive, fervid, fetid, frivolously fanatic secrets boldly told.

Absent playing with words, I'd simply die of boredom, having no resources to go forth and continue photographing the world at large. Which, oddly now, I consider poetry all by itself: wordless. And at that I am ready moment by moment to step off the stage becoming dust in the surrounding high mountain desert here.

So this is a sincere thanksgiving for those who read my wanderings.

There is within me a balance between joyous laughter and grief, crossing the chasm of unending chaos, without balance pole or thin wire, nothing but air. This, the time we mutually inhabit. The Ark of Earth with no trustworthy leadership visible; no captain--all crew.

Dearly beloved, hear me clearly, I seek no sympathy; or memory of anything, save yourselves. Or. Better. More Better Yet. Savior yourselves.

Accustomed to silence I did not trust it as praise for prayer until The Gettysburg Address. Add, I do pray, not for me now, but all of us. As Horace said; "He has not lived badly whose birth and death has been unnoticed by the world."

Sensate in all things sensual; especially those erotic. In converse with my male mentor regarding iced coffee, I mentioned in passing that the wonder of having it delivered by Big Brown were those nubile young women whose posteriors I'd love to fondle given they were wearing nylon or satin panties. Well. I lie I'd take them any way they'd allow, just the sight alone is sufficient once in a while.

My point? Merely it is well that so few, if any I know, read me and slap me silly. Imagining had mom caught me with her panties I'd been long dead before now. . . . However that was in the “Good Old Days” before clothes dryers. She'd send me out to retrieve them occasionally from the backyard clothes tree. Did she notice me slavering, eyes spinning like cherries in a slot machine?

Despite my depravity, fetishes, celibacy, all things feminine, these remain the very best days and years of my life.

130424 01:53 MDT

I seem to be wandering randomly in the penny arcade of literature trying this game and that voice. Awoke thinking finally that nothing is all one or the other but both in varying degrees; wonders never cease.

I adore vernacular speech: zoot suits, a child of my time, branded by dad's references to his youth and Big Band Days. Wondering betimes, now and then, did my birth abort his. In his best moments recounting those he admired, if not actually envied, ambition seemed his fall. For in all he told me was measured “Good, Better, Best.” By that rule I did hear and see life for decades afterwards. Until now, when in all voices, good or ill, I hear a longing for something greater than the self who speaks, or acts, painting a self-portrait for this moment, a blink, considering all of creation.

We seem woven into a single tapestry of stories, all who I meet, yet more so, some within my neighborhood. She asked that I take her for pie, being her favorite; her son is a published poet of some reputation. I said yes and when returning home she looked at the stars above and said; “in 40 Million years our solar system will merge with that one” pointing.

Early in John 8 Jesus is described writing in the sand with a finger. I weep now as I did upon first reading now more affirmed my truth: love is preemptive while laws are remedial and only temporary. All things and people in their time and no other?

I hear music differently now with my own heart's hearing. So too the faces and places I traverse sensing being written upon air; we the dust of creation and stars mixed with water as mud coming from and returning home always.

I know nothing of how this came to pass, the journey from placental sea to placental stars, knowing an unspeakable peace; joy everlasting.

Being by nature eclectic, gloriously so, I will wander from pinball to fortune teller eying the posteriors of passing women wondering cotton or satin? Laughing always with my eyes. An old toad croaking.

What incites me most, is not the exterior but interior of a woman; her mind and heart.

At birth I was expelled from the placental sea of tranquility? into chaos. Of mother I can only say, from then forward, exiled, the only thing I could touch of her were her panties; absent of herself--of course. She was until quite recently a mystery, volatile, mercurial; confessing, later on, wonder that at two and a half I touched her cheek and wept inconsolably. My fetish, common amongst men, like most fetishes incurable. Worse is distrust.

Leering between worsted thighs around skirts I thought him only a painter describing the starry night starry skies . . .

“If only we try to live sincerely, it will go well with us, even though we are certain to experience real sorrow, and great disappointments, and also will probably commit great faults and do wrong things, but it certainly is true, that it is better to be high-spirited, even though one makes more mistakes, than to be narrow-minded and all too prudent. It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love, is well done.” - Vincent Van Gogh (The Letters of Vincent van Gogh to his Brother, Theo 1872-1886)

. . . fancy that, I still have both ears and unlike Beethoven at the end can still hear, no longer thinking Anais Nin and Henry Miller merely pornographers.

Dear God! Why does it take so long to become fully alive?

. . . born of the stars returning

Home at last

free

130423 11:52 MDT what would I give?

© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved