light years to travel

Light years, of needs, travel before I rest as dust upon the desert.

Perchance to arise in another form or merely lay decayed, finally mute.

If now I depart it is fine with me for I trust the process leading me to this moment.

All seventy-two years of it.

And in that trust is my peace, the only I've ever known, alone or together, in the world. . .

this that we call “life.”

Neither life nor death is my enemy.

A lover once asked that I never change. It was the death knell between us. More killing than her telling me herself pregnant with our child. At which point I fell silent, the tryst ended, the friendship never. My son dying after his sister was compelling me. In a sense or way to kill us both; the lover and me.

Khalil Gibran suggests that our children come not for us but through us—for themselves. Obviously, if you know me, a problem for all of them lost. Regrets? No! Since the child who writes this is borning.

Change, or Process, is the true nature of Nature itself. Slow revolution. What some might call evolution. And for me it is the solar winds that I sail. Not being, a two dimensional cutout cardboard figure in anyone's ecstatic play. And those I love remain beloved, ferociously, savagely, in my silent regard. A conflagration of prayer. Not for me, or us, but they; the best of all the cosmos intentions.

I am not this body, these thoughts, those feelings, but gossamer, a spider web woven daily anew. Yesterday and all days before it, trivial. Future unknown—unknowable. Now is glorious and sufficient. What is blown away, apart, vaporous; not timorous any more, ever again.

Resilient/Resolved

Imperfect and unconscionably rude, towards many closest to me, I wander on seeking nothing discernible save that I give birth to what I am now. Caring not a wit about tomorrow.

Abuse?

Yes!

But that was then from birth until yesterday. Now levitated by a new understanding of who, what, why and when it happened to me; no one but myself to blame for allowing it. Thanks to M who, when asked, twined two fingers of one hand, indicating there is no effective difference between sexual and emotional abuse to the victim. In consequence a life bent, mangled, contorted by an on following attempt to define and evaluate the why of it. When, most of all, it is not because of anything other than opportunity for a moments amusement; entertainment for the vacuous and bereft of empathy or compassion.

Formerly I was intuitive to a fault. Not a flaw. But prone to magical thinking. Speaking/Writing before engaging the several other faculties available to all of us in balanced application. Requisite: to place phenomena in context of hard facts. What some call evil is often merely biological. My enemy is myself if I do not engage my antagonist learning his/her perception of me.

We are what we consume by food, air, water or information. About which I am indiscriminate giving credence to random associations within me. So I am not writing a gospel for anyone other than myself and understanding. Merely annotating a process available to us all, as refracted through our individual perceptions, understanding and capacities.

We are legion, myself included, abused, disaffected, disenfranchised, throughout our lives. Until we discover that the violence done to us is not always physical, penetrative, but emotional as well. Leaving us helpless in fear, attaching to smoke and mirrors; promises of safety. How our “rulers” manipulate us into voluntary slavery having never known what freedom is: to be ourselves unique. Unwilling to take responsibility or participate fully in this, once and only life, precious, our only wealth. As for those who “rule” most, if not all, seem now, from my point of view and perception, to hide behind pretense their fear of being inadequate.

“Let 'Miky' do it!” Or “Be All That You Can Be” Go to war and come home in a bag or scrambled emotionally and physically then abandoned by those who promised to take care of you.

"If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works, with all the misconceptions, the omissions, the failures that any finished work of art implies." - John Dos Passos "Looking Back on U.S.A.," New York Times, Oct 25 1959

Here I am thinking of advertising intended to sell you not what you need but what you 'want.' Topical but true throughout history. We have life that we be free and not slave to anything or one including the author of everything. (at the moment of proof, edit, rewrite I am equally compelled to examine my own words and at that, naked of the original enthusiasm clothing them.)

Hell's Bells and Twinkle Toes, I ain't even a slave to myself. But now attempting to close there is always a question to publish or delete. Thinking that like, prayer, words change nothing but the author; am I cynical or skeptical?

Conjecture:

Power: A mask that fear wears, and force, in proportion to inner terror, else why is God silent allowing free will?

Frauds passing in opposite directions, shouting equal salutation, hell bent for election; towards glory or perdition. Never say of another what could as easily be said of yourself. One is called projection the other self-possession. If the truth fits, wear it.

130415 03:27 light years to travel

© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved

credit capture: Mike Brodie “A Period of Juvenile Prosperity” about which I can only say I am reverent but not sanctimonious and inordinately appreciative of his vision.

once, only once; never again?

Validation is difficult to come by, especially in these times of Mass Marketing. Wherein it is not impossible, but exceedingly difficult, to know the difference between ‘need’ & ‘want.’

Of course there are other couplings: Love & Hate, similar but better understood as the contrast between indifference and sentiment. I think, no, I know, that I could write on love until the end of everything we, the universe and our cosmology are become dust and never see the end of love; the longest unfinished story ever spoken of.

My continual affair, innuendo intended, with words began in childhood. Where, in silent reply, to my mother’s often extreme swings between silence and violence, I took for granted the parsing and triage of what it means to be human, alive and what values might be applied. Looking back I now sense my mind was an alchemical retort in which words ricocheted back and forth annihilating, not me, but themselves. Contemplation in chaos; in an enclosed pressure cooker.

I have two mentors, a woman and a man, both senior to me by years. People I trust who I can call when suicidal, seldom these days, being confident that they will remind me: it takes more courage to live than die and why. The male called yesterday about this and that then asked me what I was going to do to replace my volunteer time at hospice? Implied and inferred: it was good for me. I did not express my sense that it was, at the beginning, an exercise in being needed. The gifts received from medical staff and those about to die taught me otherwise. Since my separation from hospice service I have come to think that writing addresses to others what they, essentially, remain oblivious of. Their once and only once precious lives. A regard for which I now hold no exceptions.

Learn as if you will live forever, be prepared to die tomorrow—if not right now.

Easy for me to say, being my age, coupled with experience of those I loved: gone.

I am savage with and in what I write: what, why and about. Foolish at times, perhaps more times than not, yet well aware of my former indifference to the waste of time. Laughing, at my formerly held knowledge of The Gideon Bible in No-Tell-Motel nightstands ignored.

Eegit Boy, one of my all-time-favorite self-descriptors; possibly preemptive in defense of what mom & dad said of, and to me. I am intuitive, but not exclusively so, laboring to train the other preceptors to stand up and bark, or quack, or whatever. Wondering if I am the only reader of: “WRITERS GONE WILD,” by Bill Peschel, capable of laughing so hard that I fell of the porcelain throne in the reading room; I hate to waste time.

I am, as born, a child of my time, and poor, still so or more so. Remembering that, in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, USA, my parents house was next to the Sewerage Disposal Plant with a dancing light flickering night and day; methane burned away. Dad and me, or is it I? Raiding The Boy Scout Christmas Tree Lot at quarter of midnight for a free tree and all the trips we made to the Highway Department to steal sand for the cat box just a block away.

I am, if nothing else, as common as dirt and nearly as stupid as stone, or ignorant, which ever pleases you dear reader. My intention is not acclaim or fortune so much as to address those like myself wondering and wandering through life looking for a reason to take another breath. Reading, obviously, has saved me from eating a train—they ran behind my parents house—or swallowing a hand grenade with the pin pulled.

Nothing arcane, secretive or esoteric bout me.

Laughter. Lots of laughter!

Writing is now the next best thing to learning how to read. Even better than those kissing lessons from my sixteen-year-old baby sitter in a white nylon slip. Whose nylon panties winked at me on the way to elementary school each day. In the good old days, clothes dryers hadn’t been invented yet.

So much for “deathless prose.” Can’t take myself seriously. I know what happens here when we die. They, the crypto-facist, shovel everything into the dumpster; save that which might have resale value at The Good Will.

Add. Please. My sense of the fascist who control the button to extinct all life. Who’s a Fascist? All of them who rule the world. My parents included?!?

Think United States of Oligarchy . . . Anal Retentives Uber All, Inc.

130414 08:52 MDT once, only once; never again?

© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved

credit capture: “A Period of Juvenile Prosperity” by Mike Brodie

off ramp

tippytoe walking the crash barrier between opposing flows of traffic wandering wondering to cross it or not don’t think so bury my my dust beneath the off ramp sign a dust mote blown hither and yon otherwise

Oddly discovered just now:

- George S. Patton, General

"Courage is fear holding on a minute longer."

“If a man does his best, what else is there?”

"If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking."

“In forty hours I shall be in battle, with little information, and on the spur of the moment will have to make the most momentous decisions. But I believe that one's spirit enlarges with responsibility and that, with God's help, I shall make them, and make them right.”

"Live for something rather than die for nothing."

"Success is how high you bounce when you hit the bottom."

"Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash."

“The fixed determination to have acquired the warrior soul, to either conquer or perish with honor, is the secret of victory.”

"There is a time to take counsel of your fears, and there is a time to never listen to any fear."

"Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men. It is the spirit of the men who follow and of the man who leads that gains that victory."

But maybe not so odd at that. The process has become, sometimes, an interplay between quotes discovered and affirmation rendered; tender these free associations collisions of images inconvenient but fun/funnily decisive.

An education of sorts uncommon to those boring days in school learning conformation for slavery: On The Job Training. Misery loves to rule bending minds to perform like rubber toy bears with armatures inserted through red plastic pedestals cranked by the 1% We’re factory farmed from birth to death.

Be of good cheer on your way to the gas chamber thanks to Exxon.

- Bertrand Barere

“The tree of liberty grows only when watered by the blood of tyrants.”

. . . were I a rich man would I speak so? Living high on the hog, a life of rude 

salacious dissipation

130413 09:55 MDT off ramp

I checked my email before rest, discovering my intuition was correct, at least in so far as her reply implied. She deserves the best, what she so freely gave to others in their last moments in life; what I witnessed. Who like M is trustworthy and oddly safe in a world about to die. It follows that I awoke certain that it was/is/will be for them and those whose lives touched mine now gone. I am not ashamed to admit loving men who equally hold this extraordinary quality.

I have broadened the net of my curiosity. Using whatever falls to hand to capture all that I can contain eclectically. Chagrined, astonished, at my ignorance, prejudice, bigotry and longing for my sense our world, time and species ending. Not The End Times, foretold but different by trinkets, tensile, ornament and toys. By which, not alone, but other consequential details. For example the too many of us to sustain life collectively. e.g. the sewer we’ve made of the seas. The air, and/or of ourselves, chemically.

About the men and women who I am most attentive there is a simple quality: Kindness. Which, like love, is preemptive and grows; while the obverse makes all things mean and small. Cruel. In sincere honesty I know these things by the experience of them in myself. I change hour by hour growing less definable. I have no desire to be a prophet, a wise person or Messiah; seeking not to follow but find that which those people we attribute such qualities to sought.

Loving kindness has wrought this in me as a gift from real, ordinary, people: miraculous and astonishing.

All things being equal, like a tuning fork, I hum a note between weeping and mirth. Helpless to change anything other than myself. My “self-ownership” is nominal. Something sort of, like, lend-lease, a tenant not the landlord.

If I continue to write it is merely because it gives me pleasure. Masturbatory? I think not since beneath the joy is a consciousness of all who passed before me, soon to join, their silence knowing that nothing, is lost.

Do I lie?

I still have the interlocutor and friend to answer to.

Laughter, much laughter.

A fool for love am I.

Otherwise grasp your sit down and kiss it goodbye.

“Making love was never about you and me in a bed. We made love whenever we held hands.” - Ian Thomas

To close: I would paraphrase the above with the following “. . . we made love whenever together or light years apart

Amplifying, for now, a simpletons sense that were I to describe “God” it would include all of us not just the wise or just, but sinners and saints and all between. I cannot otherwise be a person who loves as loved, judging others worthy or unworthy of life and love.

130414 02:12 MDT before rest

© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved

bequeath bequest

Odd to so arise thinking the tide between folly and wisdom, both, neither one or the other.

Not and/or but and/both.

A nodal point.

Momentary peace lasting. At last.

When the light is right, the darkness of innocence, all the impermissible events line up and fall like marbles straight down not bouncing but becoming an order, a spine straightened. Enlightened? Not sure. But better said, and simply, set free.

Chuckling quietly in the dark the friend says yes, and yes; and yes wordlessly.

Twitching, writhing, groaning beneath the reptilian cold belly, a millstone really, ground to dust by my own misapprehensions

Returning to my youth run away at seventeen standing beside a barren tree truncated in Ohio reading about, not from, Baudelaire

Now I see being tightly woven in a blank tapestry with Jesus in a dream manacled to a similar tree in miniature

anarchist together laughing Oh Dear God Almighty! Free at last!

Along came an ancient Chevrolet coup filled, a family to headliner, of migrant farm workers making room to carry me forward towards my goal from which I boomeranged; returning to the oppression I had fled from trying to change it.

Sometimes – remember – we are made of majestic stuff like the star we orbit evolved from a source before everything else. Heaven/heavens within sacrificed for a bowl of stone soup.

130413 03:33 bequeath bequest

© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved

credit capture: A Period of Juvenile Prosperity by Mike Brodie

should-ought-interlocutor

In dreams we are able to enter a state of balance between what is and what we think should be. The metaphor is somewhat inappropriate; it is more like balancing a check book. When an imbalance is discovered one should find the source of error. Either arithmetic or excess spending in futile endeavors; resources cast away.

And one’s life is, in health or otherwise, our greatest wealth.

When I was a child I sought/thought and did childish things; with gratitude to St. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians. My childhood now, at near seventy-thee, is ending by the dream from which I have just emerged. Indicative of what we all have and hold dear: the will to live.

To have a friend, one must befriend themselves, then the Great Friend emerges, and truth is possible. Nothing is exclusive if you begin to sense this in others independent of gender, race or creed.

M once said: “you can heal.” As uncertain now as I was then: bewildered. Years later I asked if she said this to/of others? “Yes.” More uncertain now then ever before I think I may have misunderstood; initially hearing “heal others/heal thyself.” My quibble is, now, as irrelevant as any sense of jealousy regarding her relationship with others. She is a wise, wonderful and gifted healer; generous beyond the limits of my understanding: and contagious at that. No one is perfect. Yet in our friendship perfection for us is now. Perhaps I misspeak in the sense that I cannot speak for her experience; only mine.

Truth will set you free. Your truth interests me more than mine; in life or death. This cosmology is ours to inhabit.

I sense that your truth can be found many ways: in meditation, prayer, creative activities—and here I’m thinking of dance . . . myself lurching about laughing for example: alone.

- Dick Eastman

“Prayer reaches out in love to a dying world and says, "I care."”

14:52

I think myself a scrivener annotating personal events to perchance share for another who like me lived in fear forever. Sensing, within the last 24 having lived more than all the seconds, minutes, hours before. And still. Nothing whatsoever is lost in eternity. Yes I have ‘lost ‘ a great deal and know others having lost more.

Today, bereft of M, I ate lunch alone. She is well I trust, living, and there will be more moments within the ocean of her emerald green eyes. Sometimes still in gaze, others dancing in delight or mirth. But for now I am alone, as I was a lunch, listening to an elder explain God and Holy Days to a youngster, wondering how can I name the friend who visits my dreams and days? The interlocutor.

Find your own and be well,

forever more.

130412 01:56 should-ought-interlocutor

© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved

in particle or whole

Some seem in particle or whole, to incarnate, something/someone, vaster then themselves.

By good fortune, fate, or wives, lovers and others who did protest my desire to do with photography as I did with paint, clay or stone; capture the beauty of nude women. Eventually, as in the end days of my actuarial life set free by M and the love of another impossibly young and two thousand miles distant. I find myself chagrined recognizing that though I longed to, had I done so, I would have known a greater remorse. Always chary of women, by birth from mother, lending them all greater powers then deserved. Nude, naked, near or far or clothed in a circus tent these two have made of me at long long last a man by intimacy of soul, personality or self revealed. So, gladly, have I found what I sought all along; filled to overflowing.

I am not nearly by fractions imaginative, save for what visits me in dreams. Lending me what little winged tongue of the poets I admire leading me to speak. Always a mentee, the mentors most memorable of late have been women. Actually. Always. Since long back. Alone and bereft of any desire; thinking myself unworthy of love. Something lost at birth yet found in old age. It seems what is lost is desired too highly until perception is contemporary with truth glorious. Healed.

She who visited me in my last dream. A whippet with well proportioned protuberances. Red hair coiffured, elegant, poised, impatient. Indifferent to me. Who had been commissioned to photograph her in any way possible, just another celebrity. My heart stopped. I awoke certain that she was the younger sister of a childhood friend who had visited me carnally only days before her wedding.

I didn’t know. She had been then a stick figure in childhood an annoyance. Then an airline stewardess and flown in for a few days romp, then flew away. And I drunk with guilt called to ask her to marry me. Her mother answered telling me of the marriage days ago. Did I mention: Glorious!? All women of any age are so for within they are The Mary.

Decades later, we free for the moment, I asked her again oblivious of my sot with women declined. Abused mercilessly by her, by then former husband; she was, returning to her children impossibly.

The University of Hard Knocks, from which I seem to have graduated a Doctor of Suffering, is a strict teacher. Add that I never was a prize nor will be; so far as I can see backwards, forwards or now.

“There is no worse evil than a bad woman; and nothing has ever been produced better than a good one.” - Euripides

Possibly—I think not—being born and lived in the time given. Bewildered: the young women who splay themselves. In derision, laughing at men who in reality are mere little boys, or begging for love, attention and acceptance? The Earth groaning beneath the weight of us, so many, how do we meet and mate becoming not lovers but friends; two equal halves of a greater one?

“Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more, Men were deceivers ever, One foot in sea and one on shore; To one thing constant never.” - William Shakespeare

There was another red head, face fallen, eyes pools of sorrow. It is not that I have a THING for red hair but women in whom I see something vital. As our friendship evolved she said she was drawn to “bad boys – very bad boys.” Later explaining her step father had used her from age six until twelve when she sought it, being the only attention she knew; as a sex toy. Even later she sent me an image of her at seventeen, voluptuous, whippet, scintillating, vibrant superficially—eyes mirthful. Later, again, she died of brain cancer.

No one is superficial save those superficial to themselves.

We, who are so indifferent, unable to create, destroy. As it was in the beginning so it extends beyond now unto extinction. The exception being when we as men or man understand the term generic for we the family of humans. All combined and equal.

An afterthought: with time and devolution it seems afflicted I sought affection now wondering was it I who infected them or my greed and addiction to beauty my undoing?

Destroyed and reborn thanks to M

credit capture: Mary Ellen Mark

130411 06:22 in particle or whole

© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved

he sea oh the sea

In my dreams imagining sailing the cosmology, a heart alone in love with it all the sea of stars. A sailor born to be, planted four thousand feet above sea level, an oar become a tree for the simple glory of being alone in ecstasy.

He whose vessel I helmed lays now deep in the North Atlantic in a jar, his ashes there placed in honor by the U.S. Navy. And from sleep I arise having visited him again and again for he is the only other who witnessed we sailing through a pod of whales far off the coast of Boston spuming us for having not a collision but been awakened by our passage across the midnight sea sharing.

Zig, Zag and Zig again guided by intuition. A primeval forest of ferns fetid aroma rose; soaked in celebration of life, magnificent, the gift of it.

They, the sea of stars and we upon it.

And the devil-may-care boy with a girl sailing the angry Ohio before the wind with an Indian blanket for a sail uncaring whether, or when, return. Disremembering the girl remembering the feeling of glorious indifference to harm or hazard or how or why we ever returned from the sandbar destination. An island in an always remembered summer.

Dream catapulted from slumber by once again sailing fantastically fast. Surrounded by rich white boys who laughed in glee while I meditative said merely; ‘must be at least fourteen knots by wind alone driven.’ To no one in particular. Save myself.

All those I sailed with are gone beyond, only I remain to tell them why and what for is life glorious. But then surely the must by now know or else my deepest intuition is a fraud. And whether cometh the dreams sailing me away?

In the hours after my son, the only one, left me a ruin, rubble, no past no future I wrote; “Thank you God for allowing me to sail a teardrop across the palm of your hand.” To which the priest said ‘heresy.’ Then the mother became one – a priest I mean – and I fled.

To be a tree bathed in star light alone upon the high mountain desert dancing.

“A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.” - Leo Rosten (born 11 April 1908)

130411 01:55 the sea oh the sea

© 2013 by Jack Spratt – All Rights Reserved