I Have Noticed and I Have Seen

    When wisdom has become the least of these (after a long period of low demand), heart and knowledge. Clean. Free. Clear. But nothing’s yours. And nothing is mine. Discretion and understanding have become a menace. Simple observation is not encouraged.

    What about us? Here where we live and breathe. Where we buy our groceries and go to church.

    We must be unoppresed – free to lift ourselves from every yoke. My head without, my soul still hungry. Goodness and all the day’s security. Dark-dwelling in the house of the Lord. The hungry, cast out. The naked, thrown down. I notice my own flesh too.

    When will we see the word as written?

    We are teachers without questions. We are leaders without strategy. A nation with a soul for greed, for power. We are investigators without a clue. We are travelers without a map. These are all variations of the same story. News without media. Politicians without honor. Is this the family you’ve always wanted?

    Do whatever you need to do, but keep in mind that I am not a theologian, not professionally. Neither am I a doctor, a priest, or psychologist. But I have seen the finger writing on the wall.

The Absolute Grounds

    The absolute grounds have shifted and we have fallen.

    The threat of arrest and/or assassination – we’re in this together. All of us implicated. All of us complicit. My discouraged mind dissents. My hovering hand falters, my wounded heart … my heart… Oh, God, my heart. A serious exchange for a tedious response.

    Trapped by inaction into inaction. Submission.

    No. No. This cannot be real. This is not the reality I recognize. But this war continues with or without us. Drags us down into the abyss. We are wrong. We are wrong. We are made guilty.
    
    Daily missile attacks. No access to food or water. Flash bang. The head jerks backward. Eyes roll. Alarming video released to the press. I cannot talk about it. Transformed. Unlived. I need… I need… I can’t even say any more. The words have been stolen. Abducted. Murdered in the street.

    A serious exchange for a tedious response. Don’t try to force it. There’s no accounting. Shortened time. Fault lines. High explosive gunpowder, blueprints and plans. Twenty-five minutes too far. Shot down. Crash and fire. Fire! Fire! A fire, a fire…

    American troops. Iranian mothers. Gazan children. Israeli ambassadors. My son. My daughter. My brothers and sisters everywhere. Knocked out. Upside down. We’ve lost the horizon. We’re going to crash. We are going to die. 

Wake Up Dead

We wake up dead at once
not a course correction,
but coarse correction, dammit!

These are just words, no doubt
and no one is listening to the half truth tongue
of the Orange Deluder, Satan.

How many lost friends, still trapped in foreign airports?
Unfriendly times and closed-circuit spaces
with no fortune, no future.

How many of us are trapped in the devil’s realm?
Polluted water under an old bridge

Choke the air
Torch the rivers
the soil and the sky are poison.
The moon is red with menstruation.

The pine tree appeal to heaven
where your spirit connects to infinite knowledge
in the flag waving heavens of heavens

Kairos tripped unstable, untrustworthy.
The lying spirit of God gives us pressure
gives us pause. Gives us doubt.

Insectoid mouths with seven unholy words
Seven mountain buzzwords
and dog-whistle, code-word thinking.

Mark the unholy alliance of this reality
and the shadow valley
an abandoned stadium, a drifting destroyer.

Begging for a deal. Badly
Negotiating with death,
from the right, from the left
death from above, from below.

Who can know the secrets of mindful walking?
Who can speak the horrors of daily waking?

We wake up dead at once.
Even not believing, I believe
O God! I believe. Help my unbelief.

That Which Is Lacking

    He wiped the sleep accumulated crust from his eyelashes and yawned over his first cup of coffee. He’d slept late and long on this, his day off, and felt refreshed. The weariness of the work week fallen away. “The sun rises, the sun sets,” he thought “and in between I need to write.

    Other things needed to be done as well, of course. It was his day off from work, yes, but there was still work to be done. Laundry and grocery shopping. Vacuuming and dusting. The cats would need fed and the litter box cleaned. All the daily and disgusting chores of ordinary life. Still he was writing and that was a pleasantness to be enjoyed.

    He was writing and had written much already, the bulk of the project already completed, but his editor wanted more. Always more. Of the writing of books there is no end.

    But his notebook was lined and crossed with false starts and thoughts going nowhere. Dangling participles and sentence fragments. A void of returning problems. Problem. There was only ever one problem. All editorial effort, all creative confusion came down to this: There is nothing new...

    The blank page

    He flipped through the pages of his notes, looking for a way in. A way into the words.

    “Mysterious alarm…” No.

    “Toxic potency…” Not quite.

    “Rumpled heartbeat…” No. “Rumpled heartbeat? What is that?” He crossed it out and wrote again. “Rapid heartbeat…” But still no.

    His cell phone rang, interrupting his lack of progress, a call from his editor. “Good morning, Lester,” he answered. “It’s a bit early to be calling to check on me, isn’t it?”

    “No, no, no” the editor pleaded. “You misunderstand. I don’t want to… But if you could give me an idea, an estimate… how many pages?”

    He sighed. “That which is lacking, Lester, cannot be counted.”

Preadvised and Disremembered: A Memoir and Confession

     I was doting on old associations, old friends and ex-wives, thinking that I had not advanced among my peers. Neither first in any domain nor new thought. I was too long preadvised toward the same old gospel with the same old averages and I went into the gateway for a bad cause. I went about the city established and forgot the boy. Night came with alcohol and I disremembered all I had ever been.

    I went on living and laid down with old excuses. Living and laid down with the devil of mysteries. The Devil king of Babylon praised the gods of gold while I was practicing with stones and no doubt. I read too much of the vain and learned writers, candid writers. I was Hercules in Egypt. I was Horus among the Romans. Lost.

    The labels warning about the health risks standing in front of divinity were there for anyone to see. The hazards associated with the consumption of too much gin. Worn threadbare. Operating machinery after drinking. Head first. But I went on undeterred. If I should disobey orders and ask for Cancer, at least I would know that it wasn’t consumption.

    Later, when accused of imbalance, with every kingdom in desolation, every city, every house eliminated, bacteria and dysbiosis, inflammation under the influence, and the oxidative stress of pagan free radicals I would come to question the warnings ignored.

    Body specific. And Divinity recedes into memory. Focusing on what I had missed. The esophagus eliminated. The liver removed. No doctrine. Dabbling in doubt for nearly fifty years. The boy I was was lost; the father I became, agnostic. But my mouth, still confessing Christian. All social aspect and interaction. Invited to summer places, he followed on without argument for modern errors. Always preaching the same thing: He that believeth…

    It doesn’t have to be philosophical question. It doesn’t have to be the power of God. I’m just looking for the open door in this land of murder, bloodshed, and the uproar of fire. A thousand years of hope untapped. A broken heart crossed out.