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.

The J. Carterman Catalog

 A Vague Paranoia

    Raul left home when he was eighteen. Worked his way across the country – ranch hand, taxi driver, deli-clerk. Whatever. But no matter where he went, no matter what he did, there was a sense that something, somewhere was just about to go wrong. A look from a coworker, a headline in the newspaper, an unidentified sound. It all amounted to the same. With one eye over his shoulder and one foot on the wheel, Raul was forever on the move.

    A Vague Paranoia  (No. J83752) – one hundred percent natural anxiety. Hand woven. The deep wine color infuses the whole ensemble with a splash of personality.

An American Irritability

    “There’s nowhere to go,” Sam thought to himself. “Nothing to do.”

    He closed his laptop and sipped his lukewarm coffee and sighed. The music, if you could call it that, on the radio grated at his nerves. The people in the café crowded too close. They smelled of cigarettes and sweat and garlic. Garlic, gah!

    This European vacation was a mistake.

    An American Irritability (No. J 73114) – hand painted on silk. Mother-of-pearl buttons at center front and cuffs. 

Mild Seasonal Despair

    It was the smell of wet, rotting leaves and cigar smoke that reminded her of her father. His leather jacket. His cheap aftershave. His many varieties of moods for a variety of weather. He could shift and swing with the wind. He could sing all the song s on the radio. But he was gone - twelve years gone. ‘And,’ she told her therapist, ‘this winter has gone on so long I’ve forgotten the sun.

    Mild Seasonal Despair (No. J99341) – breathable fabric. Size S – XL. SOLD OUT.

Now For War

    Now an apocalypse of our own making.
    Now an apocalypse we can use.

    We are bombing schools for the cause of Christ
    And the Christ, Inc. shareholders approve
            (but deeply regret the inevitable, but very necessary, tragedy)
    of bombing hospitals.

    Appointed, anointed
    and the self-aggrandizement
            of worms who are not men
    to light the signal fires in Iran
    to cause Armageddon
            explosive encounters
    to mark the return of Jesus
            false face actor of a
            grotesque eschatology,

    crude bones unsubstantiated
    and the groping swagger
            of insatiable egos
    flaunting the marks of its colors

    burn gold, silver, and precious oil
    your greater condemnation
            revealed in fire

    the Earth groans murder
    under the villainies of your theology
    the fires of signal men shriek faster
    and strip flames from the doors of hell.

    Now for war.