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

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

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

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

to dream dying resurrected


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

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

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

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

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

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

amen

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

could be discovery



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

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

lallapalooza avid rabid



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

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

All systems go--LIFT OFF!

Poetry is best when attempting the impossible with words.

To/For 'Had She Said Yes'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time heals everything. WAIT!

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

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

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

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

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

PS

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

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

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

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

Monday, April 29, 2013

good lord willing and the creek don't rise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conspiratorial?!

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

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

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


obturate/block/jam/impede/obstruct/occlude


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, April 28, 2013

escape velocity


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

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

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

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

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

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

arroyo at flood
an undertoad
ribbit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

08:16 after nap

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

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

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

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

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

perceived perceptions


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

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

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

Who you?
You all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read!

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

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

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