The Punishing God

More than one theologian has remarked on the way man’s perception of God, or perhaps God Himself has matured over the centuries. God growing up is actually an issue with God as He manifests in Europe and the Near East. In the Far East the apprehension of the Divine took a deeply sophisticated form at least from 600 BCE. The Buddhists of that day pointed out that God was not actually required for a spiritual practice to make sense. God at His most mature departs if we wish His departure. That is what makes room for science. Intellectually honest scientists know and admit that the issue of God is not resolved by science. Instead the statements concerning the place of God in things really go more like this:

It is axiomatic in the scientific world view that nature takes the simplest course possible at every point. That is truthfully not very damn simple in lots of areas, for example in biology. The axiom still seems to hold, even with these admitted instances of holding entropy at bay in some local systems. Thus we as scientists find the God explanation for things at least one layer more complex than necessary to explain everything. Furthermore there is the risk in positing a creator God that we introduce an infinite regress into things. This is to be abhorred in logical discourse. Risking infinite regress and more complexity than necessary does not rule out the existence of God, whatever that may mean. Instead it reveals with clarity that the idea of God lies outside the scope of science.

The rest is politics on both sides.

The evolution of God in the West is an interesting story that involves the demand that God enter history or else God makes no sense. He must really manifest concretely on the planet. This demand is different from the older human concept of God as manifest in the before time, the Golden Age, the world of the ancestors, in the world of myth. Even Jesus made this distinction when he spoke of this world and of God's World, or the Kingdom. Christian church, the kingdom of the saints, is an attempt to honor this distinction by drawing apart as befits the Children of God. A God in history must evolve, just as we do. History is by it's nature evolutionary, going someplace. Christianity demands Eschatology, a theology of the culmination of things. To have God actually present on the planet as He is in the story of the Jews, in the body of Christ, in the life of the prophet, is to have a historical God. Such a God can indeed change, grow up.

The Punishing God

I stood up right then,
where you said God sends disease
as retribution.
I would fire a God
like that, and go hire someone
on the divine list,
waiting for a job,
promising to do better
than that teenager.

April 29, 2009 12:36 PM

Follow The Curve

What is it I heard? The Large Hadron Collider is up and running and they have sent protons (hydrogen ions) into each other at energies three times as large as ever before. That kind of energy is not found very many places in the universe now but is in the core of stars of all kinds, perhaps, near black holes, or in them, and most especially very near the time of the big bang. They have already collected years of data, so many people are going to be very steadily busy, searching for things never before recorded. You can’t say seen. We do not see anything. All this is far too small for that. But we can record the events and their aftermath and see in the data around the invisibility corner.

Imagine that. We are creating events and recording the aftermath of things that happen smaller than the amplitude of light waves. Thus they are not visible because they really are too small. Light misses these events in the wiggle of its own waves. We have to use electrons and other smaller things to measure and record what happens. Their amplitudes are not too small. Then we use translation programs sometimes to simulate what we could see if we could see using these other particles (waves). The data is more useful in other ways, much of it going into computer analysis.

Apparently there was a break down and they had to repair stuff earlier when they first started up. This is only the beginning. They are tuning things up. The energies achieved will be greater than this. Hooah! I've been waiting since the fifties...

Follow The Curve

If I fall this time
will it be along Newton's
old straight track smack down
into the planet,
or shall I go with Einstein
along the long curve
of space time, perhaps
miss everything local
and find my way out?

This might take some work,
some heavy incantation,
a wee bit of help.

April 28, 2009 1:13 PM

Losing You

I am most days okay with the fact I am like this. I am trained. I have the psychology, the philosophy. I even have big chunks of the theology. More than this, I have been in the trenches in AA, quite intimate with realtime recovery as it plays out day to day. I have watched and experienced and can advise and consent with effectiveness.

All that I have written is in place and still I grab hold tightly and must enter the discipline to actually let go. When I lost my last lover, a big piece of me was pretty sure I would not have another. That’s what happened to my mother and I believe she was close to my age when it happened. It is now several years later and I have discovered I neither want to put myself out to get a partner, nor am I willing to settle for less than what I had last, and finally that I am okay living alone even though I believe I wish a partner. If I had another lover, I know that I would grab hold even though I know better. Hmmm.

Losing You

If I look at it
straight on I can often let
you go. Instead I
stuff my cubbyholes
full, in this room and that one,
pieces and things, sure
I dare not let them
leave my space or leave my heart.

But when I get square
with the world I know
I will not lose you like that,
not so easily.

April 28, 2009 3:43 PM

A Crow Story

This I swear is a true story of a tree near the condo we rented in Lake Grove, a wooded area of Lake Oswego in the greater Portland area. Lake Oswego is an upscale community focused on the lake, a largely manmade and man controlled body of water that can be totally drained for maintenance and is volume controlled in all but the worst drought years. There are mansions on the lakefront.

Lake Grove is a little lower in the scale in many neighborhoods. My wife and I moved there when we returned to Portland from Newport on the Oregon Coast, moved into the condominium. It was there that I sat and used my electric typewriter to write my way into my BA degree, sat at the dining table.

There were tall evergreens everywhere in and around our condominium complex. One of them on this particular day in late spring collected a huge number of crows, literally hundreds at least, with many coming and going. I have never seen anything like it, have no idea what it was about, but it made me a little nervous to have those crows so near, so many. They were definitely noisy. I don’t know when they left or where they went when they did leave, but they were no longer there the next day.

We liked living in Lake Grove so much that we put earnest money down on the condo when the landlord decided to sell it. Then we found the house in Willamette that had everything we had listed on our wish list, a fireplace, an attic, two baths, a garage, a small but landscaped yard with not much grass, a master bedroom big enough for the king sized water bed, a deck and a covered patio, and a study off the kitchen, away from the main part of the house. So we bought it and gave up the earnest money.

A Crow Story

A murder of crows
appeared one day in a tree
across the back street
and down below from
my balcony where I watched
in true awe as they
came and left, and came,
a circulation of crows,
convention of crows,
an entire city
of shiny black beaks, yellow
eyes and discussion.

I felt they were there
to judge me, to speak of things
I mustn't ever
know.

April 27, 2009 7:58 PM

Trespass

What is it about me, I want to be involved in these things? I somehow think I have something to contribute. Maybe I do. As a young man I was beat up by a distraught husband, but he was not very effective and that mainly because he was in the wrong and he knew it. He broke my watch. I was pissed. Actually over the years, I have gotten some practice and some wisdom. Mostly when I get in the middle like this it more or less works out. I do not cross intimacy lines without invitation.

Here I watch myself perhaps.

Trespass

I walked in to see
you and found you engaged,
serious effort,
I could tell, you pale,
eyes wide open, hands like claws,
you receiving her
embrace, while she cried.

I had no notion what that
was all about but
I was sure I had
no business in your place,
not at that time.

April 27, 2009 3:56 PM

The Scavenger On The Beach

Here’s a slice of life. I have things in my life like this. We all do. Some of us have lives that might seem more interesting to some. Here’s an example, my rock musician friend, who travels so much because that’s where the work is. His home is here. His band was a Detroit band in those days and some band members are still back there. He goes back to write music with them as well as they fly in to Las Vegas for shows and stuff like that. There is a seasonal aspect to this because while they make a living, they are no longer big names. Really for him it is same old, same old. The way he talks about it, I know this is true.

You could be the guy who chose to make a life following the surf. After some time at it, I know it would be as hard to get out of that as it is to get out of anything else. I was really lucky to find a relatively interesting way to make a living. Most of it is grinding work though, just like everyone else’s. I am completely grateful for the part where there is no time clock. That didn’t use to make a big difference. Now it does.

If I lost this thing I do, ready or not, I would be forced into retirement. I have no way to start again. The energy just isn’t there.

The Scavenger On The Beach

It's the way of things
to make choices and live them
for years after that.
No do overs, no,
not very often. Look back
then and see the change,
how it locks you down
and now you feed family
as if you want that.

April 27, 2009 12:28 PM

I Have Met My Match

Life is difficult. Water just wants to join with itself and seeks a straight path to that. Unfortunately for water, there are serious obstacles and demands along the way.

Most water stays ocean bound. Some water gets sucked up, drawn away from itself, shanghied as it were. It is forced to travel high in the air and fall someplace it might not choose.

If it is really unlucky water descends in the far north or south, or high enough up that it might get stuck, perhaps exiled. If it is more fortunate then it falls where there is more chance to find the ocean again. That is what happens so long as some crack in the earth doesn't catch it and store it for aeons. There is some water that gets waylaid by biology and cycles through the interactions with complex hydrocarbons. Some water may actually spend some time in the hydrocarbon cycle or even get stuck in petrified bones for aeons too.

I think water prefers staying in oceans over all the alternatives. If it is taken up by the heat of the sun, then I think it prefers a quick return.

Maybe this is an ecology poem.

I Have Met My Match

I am a river
that met its match at the cliff.

I have fallen off,
turned to a cascade,
a mist drifting on the wind,

can no longer float
your boat as I wish.

Consider this your warning
to get off my back.

April 27, 2009 12:03 PM

Standing On One Foot

Sometimes I feel really different. Sometimes I just want to come home, even on Friday night, even though my friends have gone out, even though I would enjoy it. No. I just want to come home. Actually I am accepting two things. I am older now and I am required to take six different pills every day around the five o’clock hour. That is the consequence of needing an angioplasty and a stent placement in my heart last May. By Friday, I am too tired to really want a gathering of 8 to 12 people. That would be too harsh, too hard to track. So they all feel the need to huddle and cavort. Me, I feel the need to quiet way down. I can’t find more energy, it seems, no matter what I do. I will be resting tomorrow, pretty much what I always do on Saturdays, basically nothing. This is not a complaint. It is acceptance. I have to work, so I have to get this tired. To recover, I have to rest.

Standing On One Foot

You tell me to use
imagination, and how
that happens, I start
to sprout stork feathers,
keeping one foot down, standing
on wet river ice,
drawing my other
foot up next to my belly
to warm it, thinking
"Should've stayed south, yup."

April 27, 2009 11:28 AM

Watching For Hawks

I love this power, these words, the true incantations found deep amidst the raw red of the hot rocks as they lie poised and waiting for the next eruption, the next ascension into air, into light.

An Icelandic volcano is demonstrating right now how to make new land, fire and ice. The Americas and Europe are getting ever further apart at a stately pace. No words are needed there. The evocation there needs no words, and stating protection in the face of that fire will not work. But here, here the words are singular and stout, present and deep and they rattle my bones until I find a new shape.

My brothers in Siberia read the maternal line, the mitochondrial code from a finger bone and found out that another man came out of Africa earlier than we did, and drew away from us a million years ago. This is too new for Erectus and Heidelbergensis. They drew away 2.5 million years ago. This man was not like us in his lineage but we might have known him anyway. He continued on the planet to at least 40,000 years ago, perhaps later. So now there are four different groups of Homo coexistent 40,000 eyears ago. Sapiens, called Cro-Magnon, Neanderthalensis, Floresiensis, and this new fellow we have just learned of and not yet named. All tool using, all probably speaking, all living in tribal societies and wearing jewelry, all probably burying their dead, but all coming from Africa in different migrations and reaching far away lands on foot. I pray it wasn’t us that killed them all off. I am afraid it was.

Watching For Hawks

I am riverine
watching for hawks when I see
you walking the bank.
My old heart catches
at the sight of your long legs
and my scales glisten.
I remember you
sister from before and yes,
that's when I leap out
to see you better.

April 26, 2009 3:55 PM

Counting Pile, 1981

Here’s a knocking indeed. That’s a line from Shakespeare. It’s the Porter’s line.

A steam hammer rigged up on the leads of a crane sufficient to lift the hammer above eighty feet of composite steel and creosoted wood or full length steel pile. The pile used to nail the dry crust to the compressed mud beneath after twenty feet of the mush of the Yaquina Slough, tidal water in the the Yaquina River upstream of Yaquina Bay. The steam hammer chuffs and blangs, driving a multi-ton hammer head against the giant nail we used to nail the land together. This is required to build any structure on that land, land you can drown in if you dig too deep, about eight feet. When the pile hits this layer it just drops for twenty feet.

Chuff, blang, chuff, blang, chuff, blang…and me, I stand right there in the spray of the steam and in the horizontal wind and rain. I have a stick for measuring a constant height by swinging off my foot against the pile and a piece of chalk. I watch the foot marks already scribed on the pile cans until the pile comes up and slows down to less than an inch per blow. Then I start marking and counting, looking for eighteen blows per inch. I get that and I cut off the driving. If I don’t and we run out of pile, they have to drive another beside it. That’s about one in fifteen.

When I was scribing foot marks on pile cans I was very near the welder. That night I got flash burn reactions even though I didn’t ever look at the welding directly. The day that I write about here, I was in a full blown gale, a winter ocean storm come ashore, just eight miles inland. It was very cold and very wet. Everything was wet no matter that I was in full slicker. I went in to the engineering office and sat at my desk on morning break and wondered how I was going to go back out there. I had no one to spell me. Wearing hard hat and steel toed boots and hearing protection, none of which would really matter if things came apart, so I am trusting the contractors and closer in than the pile bucks except when the setting the pile for driving. That hammer is in my face, literally at the critical time, and that means the pile is resisting the most, so everything is at its most explosive. Shit.

I never had to do that job again. I am proud I did it though. I created the record that proved the foundation for that building was going to be safe. That’s the kind of thing comes up when you work in engineering for a paper mill.

Counting Pile, 1981

Winter morning with
sideways rain, in full slicker
with my tools, a Write
In The Rain pad, chalk,
and mechanical pencil,
with hard hat and ear
protection, many
layers hoping to keep warm,
I stood next to steam
and noise so big it
hammered me and the pile cap
equally. I froze
in the winter rain.

April 26, 2009 4:03 PM

their attitude toward me has not changed

This is the feel of it. I argue with my silent partner and try to get a rise out of him. I poke and prod. I have been known to misbehave badly just to attract notice. I have quit that for the most part, though I am still capable. I still misbehave for somewhat better reasons these days. I try not to argue with the half wounded, though.

Today was not a good day. They were too fast for me and I lost my cool. Twice. And then the primary asshole wanted to know why. That is a useless exchange. I have tried before. He does not see it my way at all, will never see it my way, thinks my way is beneath notice basically. I have been that guy myself before. I know. End of story. I am powerless in this situation. I run preventative maintenance on it, but as I say, it tightened up far too quickly this morning. I was left raw and bleeding and angry. I was quiet but it was not over this afternoon and there it was again, different issue. Jesus.

My twisted beady little head actually believes that I am such a nice guy everyone should recognize how freaking valuable and wise I am and they do not. Amazing.

their attitude toward me has not changed

But I have changed, yes
changed so long ago, my bones
rattle loose in me
and take me along
for night rides, caught unawares
until I'm too high
to now call a halt.

Consider my shaky verse
as cries for release,
as arguments. God
knows I argue, keeps silent
as I continue.

April 26, 2009 12:41 PM

We Come And We Go

This poem speaks for itself, plainly enough.

We Come And We Go

Shall I be strong here
among the few of you who
shift and grow today
and hold together
in this odd bog of good words?

Will it change so soon?

Someone comes, then goes
for sound reasons could I know
but I am not told.
If this is like love
then war is closer to love
than I care to know.

There are so many
places to go in this swirl
of light, as just now
I found another
circle like this gathering
with their own true glow.

April 26, 2009 11:48 AM

Modern Magic

This is not a poem about all of me. It is a poem about a part of me. This part of me held sway for awhile…Dances With Words. I was smart enough to not attempt the thing I did with music though, thinking music would somehow save me.

I remember how that was, how I would go to the coffee house and Paul Zeigler would be singing and I learned all his stuff because I wanted so desperately to be him. I sat there night after night and learned his repertoire, not only the basic song but his phrasing.

That desperation was the source of the determination I had to learn the guitar, so I could be him. I got there. I did it. I still didn’t have his life and knowing his music didn’t work for me. I was blocked. I had powered my way in and pushed past the tough parts and I was at professional grade in the things I did know. There was a universe of music I knew little about. I realized I would have to deconstruct and start again. I didn’t have the stomach for it.

I had worn my guitar out, literally. The frets of a brass alloy needed replacement because the steel strings over six years of intense work had worn grooves in them. I had torn the finish off the face of my guitar around the pick guard learning to use a flat pick. My cigarettes had burned a couple holes in the guitar finish too.

I put the guitar down. Back when Frances fixed my guitar for me, in gratitude, I picked it up and recovered the music to a point. I started learning new things too. But I had the keyboard and that is what I work with now. During that time I had returned to singing in a church choir, how I met Frances and through all that began singing in community college choirs too. We had the opportunity to sing with professional orchestra and the Christmas program was challenging and wonderful.

The point is I forced it and believed I could turn into something I am not and in the end it caused me to walk away from the music for decades.

Now these poems come from Dances With Words but I know better. When I began blogging a blog friend called me Johnny Applepoem because I was dropping poems into the comment sections of other people’s blogs all the time.

Modern Magic

I chase the learning,
modern magic of this age,
the incantation
in the deep of me
rising out of my hunger
to know all, all, all.

I believe words will
save me despite all the wounds
of my raw old life.

So I dance with words,
with so many pages, forms
in the teeth of things.

April 26, 2009 9:44 PM

The Holy Shock Of The Kill

I return in some sort of cycle to all these subjects of mine. This is rather bare bones here. I am beyond my depth when I face certain parts of life. I want to step out of myself and stand aside. I want to travel to the throne of God, and there wait for audience. I want to demand an answer to the “WHY!!” that tears my throat and throws me against the wall, there to slide down sitting on the shit fouled rug of the drunk’s bedroom.

That last sentence is an actual place in my life, as I watched my life being torn apart.

I have holy rage, how it feels to me. I know I can kill from there. I have traveled across the planet and there is nowhere truly safe on it. I say sit anywhere and draw a radius out to maybe ten blocks. Then sweep it around and make the circle. Everything that can happen is probably happening to someone inside this circle if you include all sentient beings. Life preys on life. If it is in the city you do this, then all you need include is other people. Someone is for this moment happy and someone else so sad that their life might be threatened. People blithely say feelings won’t kill you. Wrong. I have witnessed that. Feelings do kill, and it can take years of suffering for feelings to succeed at it.

This is all one side. But it is real enough just as it is. I made a vow many years ago that when I am happy it will not be because I have swept this part under some ragged and dusty rug. Real happiness has to survive this, rebound, and rise up again and not in spite of it, neither in spite nor because it is now gone, hi ho the witch is dead. That is because this place is never that far away no matter what you do. Real happiness keeps full awareness of this so that the pain and suffering of others is not slighted in the least when you encounter them in their moments.

They are never far away. Suffering is never far away.

Neither is the beauty of the sun setting within the clouds of the clearing storm far away, nor the beauty of the woman singing to her newborn.

The Holy Shock Of The Kill

What happens in my ancient
blood when I see the young
chicks or pups or kits, see spring
delicacies of color rise new grown
and all fresh things, what happens then
is the memory of the fires and the paint,
the preparation for the hunt, and the eyes
of the newly killed - for we have to eat.

What happens is
the holy shock of the kill,
knowing this pleasure is so deeply right
when you're the cat, the bear, the wolf,
and eagle screams in holy triumph.

But rabbit screams differently, as does doe.
Fish flops and gasps on the bank.

When I was a boy I would kill like this, practice.
No one becomes hunter without practice.
This is not and cannot be clean. I remember.
The play of it is real, more real than food,
I realized how close killing is to sex that way,
the holy shock of the kill.

What happens as I remember, my bile rises
at the shape of my own heart.
I cannot hunt now even though I still eat.

I have become the man who would break the perfect
predatory pounce if I could, desperately sad,
even sadder that I would be wrong to do it.

March 24, 2009 12:59 PM

An Artist's Dream

“On the night of the Buddha's enlightenment, he is said to have understood that everything is completely interconnected and interdependent. Therefore it is impossible for anybody to go on retreat from the world. Everybody knows that when you go on retreat, the whole world, no matter how tiny your retreat cabin, is there, in terms of your experience. And the purpose of retreat is precisely to transform the world.”
- Richard Reoch, "The Path of Complete Engagement" tricycle (Winter 2004)

I saw the interconnections once. I tried to find my way back for several years. There is only going forward, what I have done for decades, ever since I realized I was not allowed back. There are ways that moment is still with me. Some people are saying lately that I have an unusual mind. I say, “Not really, but I did have an unusual experience.” That changed my mind. I am still interested in transforming the world, as I have always been. Like God, I honor free will. I would never compel anyone, not ever, not for any reason except perhaps saving them from immanent death. I have dropped the dime in that situation before and would again. I will let others take on the burden of the coercer, the trickster. It is not wrong to coerce or trick people into their own good necessarily but it may add to your future karmic debt unless you are simply impeccable at it. I know I am not that skillful. I have no interest in adding to my karmic debt unless God commands it.

An Artist's Dream

When East knows spring comes
she gives crocuses to North,
purple ones and gold,
sends the Western man
into fits of bearded glee
to know the kindness
of light and song, sun
and fine Southern exposure,
all an artist's dream.

April 24, 2009 11:02 PM

The Offering

The Core of Practice

"The core of Buddhist practice is the transformation of suffering (dukkha) and its roots into wisdom and compassion. As the Buddha pointed out, we all experience physical and emotional pain. We all get sick, lose people we love, and each of us will die. Our practice is not to try to get rid of this pain, which would be impossible. Rather, it is to avoid constricting around our pain, or blaming ourselves or others for it, or lashing out when we feel attacked-somehow believing that by so doing we will get rid of or resolve the initial hurt.

This cycle of reactivity is called suffering. The task of our practice is to transform such reactivity and the greed, hatred, and delusion that fuel it. It is to realize that it is possible to experience pain without suffering, without passing on the pain to ourselves or others."

-From Donald Rothberg, "Present Moment, Urgent Moment" tricycle, (Fall 2004)



There are so many I would be willing to sacrifice for. There are so many others I can barely tolerate. I search through my soul and must confess that I do not find it in me to love everyone. I am simply not built right for the notion of universal love, of agape. I do better with the part of love that is called compassion. I can wrap myself around that and feel fairly sure I am not disguising pity. I am fairly sure I am not aiming at some kind of codependent overprotection or something. Love your enemy as yourself. This is not possible for me. I can however show mercy.

There is a man in my local circle. I have had trouble with him for years. I cannot seem to express myself in a way that he doesn’t take offence. He usually goes away and stews awhile. He carries a grudge. In my last real conversation, it ended with him informing me that I had judged his ability to choose his investments wisely. What he was talking about was at least a decade old. I really don’t remember. He never brought it up until a few weeks ago. I am amazed that his stuff lasts that long, amazed that he is that touchy about such a subject, when, if I was in that area with him, I am sure I was joking or at least light hearted in my intention.

I cannot love this man, not after at least fifteen years of this crap. I have known him for most of twenty seven years. It is best for me to hold my distance peacefully and wish him well from there.

Situations like this give me the signal of how far I have to go. If I am to get out of here with a little added elevation, then there is much work to do. I follow the Bodhisattva ideal. The only hope I have for coming close to that ideal, I throw myself on God’s lap in a radical way and work with His Presence and Power. There is no other way open to me. I am starting too far back in my own rebellious spirit.

The Offering

I shall offer for
the moment, for you, golden
petals joined by stem
and scarlet center
by count fifteen and five more
all a dream, a song
calling you from pain,
from the chemistry, the ache
of your emptiness.

April 23, 2009 1:18 PM

The Curtain Rises

Have you ever been with Taurus? I don’t know about the men but the women seem to have drama, something like you would expect from Leo. I was raised by a consummate actress, Tony Award caliber, one who could direct as well. I mean this literally. She acted and directed. There is something about it. You just sit back and watch sometimes. Trouble comes when such a woman enlists you, demands that you perform. It’s for your own good, you know. I wound up defending against it on all sides. Finally my mother figured out that she didn’t want to test our relationship that much and she backed way off. She didn’t have any choice. I made sure her choices for me turned out terribly. I was a really unpleasant teen.

I have matured. Now when I run into a woman like that I just enjoy the show. I notice however, that I am not about to easily follow suggestions that come like stage directions. My last girlfriend is a marvelous example of a lady capable of producing a show. She possesses the endearing quality of not usually demanding participation. So often, what she was doing was wonderful and I freely wanted a part of it. She became the choir director for a time of the church choir we were in. She also bought for her house a Playel grand piano, in part because I can play. I loved having the chance to play that. Her best gift to me was to go into my closet when I didn’t know she did that, pull out my guitar, a 1966 Martin O-18 (parlor guitar) and go get it completely refurbished so I could play it again. She did that for my birthday in our first year together. That is the best birthday present anyone ever gave me. I had stopped playing in 1973 when I had no money and had worn out the brass frets over seven years of hard play. This gift got me to return to playing and it pushed me forward into other musical things too.

I should say about this drama thing, it might mean what we call a drama queen but it doesn’t have to. For the most part my mother was not a drama queen, just sometimes. My last girlfriend was nothing like what you would think of as a drama queen.

The Curtain Rises

The brightness reveals
you, not so bright that my eyes
shut tight in white heat
but more like stage lights
and make up would help reveal
your dramatic truth.

You are dramatic.

I hold a box seat, season
tickets to your show,
purchased at full price.

April 22, 2009 3:45 PM
modified
March 17, 2010 7:07 PM

Intentions

I am very pleased that I can write like this. When I sit at the keyboard and play my music, that too pleases me. Sometimes I am sure I am only a channel, that I really am not able to do any of this. If not this, then as a channel, I am pretty good. Pretty good for a bozo on the bus. This was another unfinished poem. The last half took extensive rework in the middle of the night.

Intentions

A rhyme and scheme, scheme
beyond meter to story
and beyond that too,
my liege, my lady
sets her intention within
the words to build it,
to build the walls and
seal the roof, ignite the fire
blazing in the hearth,
and quicken my words.

April 22, 2009 12:45 PM
Modified
March 16, 2010 2:44 AM

Divine Predicament

Occasionally, the Whiskey River blogsite publishes passages by writers who express one or another of the cores of my spiritual walk, gifting me with the understanding that I am not alone on the planet. I am not alone even though I have gone my own way. Here are today's quotes on the truth of things. Amen.

"There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's a perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest point between the heart's muscle's close and open - an instant of keenest living when you're momentarily dead. You can rest there."
- Mary Karr

"The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock - more than a maple - a universe."
- Annie Dillard

This is my opinion. Don’t read it if you have your own strong opinion.

The gaps are essential and are central to the notion of the presence of God in a world filled with free will action. We live in the main on the surface of things, only dimly knowing of the deeps unless something special happens or else we enter into disciplines designed to change normal consciousness in fundamental ways. The gaps are those kind of doorways.

We tend to complete things, finish them, close the circles. This means we tend to enclose ourselves in the self will of our freedom. We value this. However the gaps in things are so fundamental that no matter what we do, we cannot completely close things. Even so, God has a covenant with us to not violate our free will.

We can’t succeed in closing things off but we can refuse His Presence, unless something is so important to His Work that we are disregarded. This can happen but it is really rare that any one of us is so essential to His Work that He cannot find anyone else to do it. In a world of alternatives, He does not have to violate free will.

The more of us there are on the planet, the more completely free will is the rule. That will be true until there are too many of us and we begin to limit each other in overcrowding. The gaps are still there, not far from us no matter what we do. That is the special privilege that the Buddhists refer to when they say we are in a special privileged position in all creation. We are in the position where we can actually access the gaps in things and enter them. This is not true for other sentient beings. It is a matter of spiritual scale. Some beings are metaphorically too small and others metaphorically too big. This does not mean that getting access to the gaps is an easy task, just that it is possible.

And my poem for this day is about some of the stuff that could be happening in the gaps…

Divine Predicament

When two goddesses
meet I hope I'm not the one
they've decided to
discuss in minute
detail, as if I lay on
some forensic slab
divinely opened
to precise judgmental view.

Perhaps instead I'm
bathed in vinegar,
curing and marinating,
being readied for
next week's stewing pot.

April 22, 2009 12:25 PM

Our Planetary Doom

I have posted before that C.S.Lewis wrote that our planet is a quarantined planet and a receiver of rebellious souls in an otherwise peaceful universe that lives in accord with God’s plan. I don’t think current astrophysics bears out his vision but I certainly understand his sense of things. I believe that he was more than half serious writing like that.

Welcome to daylight savings time, all you to whom this applies.

Our Planetary Doom

Look what happened when
I finally took courage
and said it to you,
not the damn questions
but the fact of them, always
lurking as they do
near the stars' night roads
to our planetary doom,
to the fate we earn.

April 21, 2009 3:32 PM

Yaquina Bay Gale

This is a real moment in 1976 or 1977. The central part of the Oregon Coast is subject to high winds and horizontal rain. They would call it gale but the winds actually reach hurricane force in the gusts. Our apartment was the upper floor of a duplex apartment in a line of four. Our view was facing south, the direction most of the weather came from. We were on a hillside overlooking the bay, a magnificent view. On the day of the boat parade people wouldn’t bother to ask, they would just show up at our place.

This particular wind was blowing across from west to east some of the time. At those moments the aligned apartment buildings acted like the top of a bottle, only the hoot was really deep in the bass range and actually shook things. Then the wind would shift and coming from the south would push and flex the walls in its force. Ann thought it just meant that the wind got in past the windows. She was partly right, it was leaking in also.

I pointed out to Annie that the wall was actually bending in enough in the wind force to cause the curtains to come away from the wall and then swing back as the wall straightened up again. She paled, went, “Ohhh…” and then went to bed in our bedroom that was at the back, the north end of our apartment. That was as far away as she could get.

Yaquina Bay Gale

Watching the walls breathe
with the big gusts that blew past
the side door entries
creating bass notes
that just shook everything.

When the curtains fell
away from the wall
you thought it was wind getting
through. I said it was
the wind bending walls.

You went to bed then, escaped
the gale force, dreaming.

April 21, 2009 1:00 PM

Like A Shattered Glass

I shall let this poem be without much comment. It is very close to a true story. I know it belongs to someone if not quite to me. I added to it for posting, replacing the last original line with four other lines. I found I had not finished it. I wish I could have a special place to put such things, don’t you? - like storing nuclear waste. Instead, my stuff tends to leak out of any container I devise and cause deflections. Windage is required in my aim. I can still strike the target but I must constantly check how the sightlines are skewed today. This is tedious and since I don’t always check, there are lost opportunities for better precision in my life. I guess I might do better if I tackle things more straight away. This is good advice. I am terrible at taking advice, even my own.

Like A Shattered Glass

Like a shattered glass
I reflect indecision
found at my crossroads,
the spot where I keep
such questions unasked as this,
Will you marry me?
Shall we emigrate?
Will I die before, after?

I keep these questions
in holes in the dust
left by the plague of rabbits
who once came this way.

April 20, 2009 12:59 PM

Last 4 lines added
March 12, 2010 5:15 PM

They Went Back To The World

This is a real world poem. There are enough stories. There were many people who got caught up in all the different attempts to humanize inhumane situations. This is what we do. This is of course my generation’s war in Vietnam. I have no real clue if things like this are happening in Iraq but somehow I doubt Islam makes good street women. This poem came about in sympathy with something Cat shared about a Thai girl last year if I remember right. There were many street women in Thailand too. Are? Probably. I wonder and don’t know much about what is happening in Vietnam these days.

They Went Back To The World

There were men intent
on saving the young street girls,
saving the beauty.
They would begin like
all the other customers
but then pay the rent,
play with the children,
figure ways to get them out,
usually fail.

I wonder too what
happened to those men when they
went back to the world.

April 19, 2009 11:26 AM

Faith's Remembrance

My mother never packed me a lunch with something special in it. We were poor, then we were under tight budget and such things were not budgeted. I remember other kids getting such things in their lunch. What did happen, I failed to observe anything to get all envious about in that scenario. The kids took their little presents so much for granted that they were bored with them. I never put it together that that should be something to cherish. I imagine now that the kids who did cherish such things kept it to themselves. They would have been teased otherwise. That’s what I remember so clearly about childhood in my neck of the woods. We all were pressed to avoid the possibility of being teased. For my part, the first two years of high school were bleak because I was a target. The last two years I got my growth and stopped being an overt target but I was not well liked by any means. I never had a real girl friend in my school. Instead my girl friends came from the church group I was associated with, or neighboring schools.

In this poem, I would point out that “turning to depart” doesn’t have to mean for good, perhaps just for the day, and “journey” the same, maybe even as small as going to the store, or like a kid going to school.

Faith's Remembrance

To find particles
of your passing through my life,
like finding kisses
left under my cloak
when I take it up to wear
on my next journey,
I remember you
as you stood in the doorway
turning to depart.

April 19, 2009 11:05 PM

After Lift Off

I still hold hope for lift off. I know how it is though. The hope is all tangled with the fantasy of desire. The reality will perhaps have in it enough to sustain the dream. I still practice music, still write poetry. I wrote my first serious poetry in 1967. I was invested in serious music earlier than that, singing in challenging choirs, musicals, barbershop quartet and madrigal in 1962. I had to quit singing two years ago because my bronchials and allergic nasal drip are not letting me control my voice any more, especially in the winter, which is the heart of the performance season. That broke my heart. At least I still have my keyboard. I fear the approach of arthritis.

After Lift Off

More than glass between
my shadow and yours, gleaning
as we do, distant
worlds with the cold void
that beckons the last breath out,
no inhaling left,
not after lift off,
not after giving notice
of our departure.

April 18, 2009 5:24 PM

Approaching The Holy

On the way back from East Pakistan in 1969 we traveled west. First we hit Karachi, then Beirut, then Istanbul, then Athens. We stayed three days in Athens and on one of them we went out to a Greek Island but I don’t remember which one. On a small day trip we went a little ways out of Athens to Delphi. I asked a question but I didn’t get an answer.

In those days I weighed 155, my dope weight. That didn’t change until I hooked with Annie and she started cooking for us in 1972. Annie was a good cook and she believed in it too.

I wrote a poem way back then, trying to do justice to some of what I felt climbing up that slope. I recall the broken shaped columns on the grassy slope. It was quite steep and there wasn’t much to see at the top, just a little indent in the ground. I think big changes took place since Delphi was a going concern. I wish now and know I wished then on that summer day in 1969 that I could have rolled back the time 2300 years or so.


Approaching The Holy

At Delphi, climbing
from the road, north and then east
up the slope devoid
of all but grass, all
but weary gray toppled stone
and me so thin then,
looking for the next
thing to do in the late sun,
searching for the truth.

April 18, 2009 4:58 PM

Making A List

This is real enough. Often I pray about my single life, asking God to interpret my need for me. The result is I live quite nicely, me and my old cat - yet I sorely miss the high of new erotic love. I miss the long term settling in. I miss the conversations. I miss the partnership. I have the chance for pieces of an old love from time to time and I think it amazing that I can settle in within minutes as if we never stopped being partners. I am grateful when it is time to part once more that the parting is easy, as if we were never more than friends.

Making A List

Each year I wait, count,
list your appearance nearby,
wonder if you will
come to me again.

I write cryptic notes like this:
-in the garden, and
-again under tree
I add the time and date.

Then I search the place
where you were, looking
for some sign, feather adrift
bent twig, a footprint.

April 18, 2009 1:45 PM

What Holds Me Back

The erotic part of life is not logical, or rather, it has a logic all its own. I don’t really know what to do with it all except to move through it as it comes. That was then, this is now. Then I was a philosopher, all disciplined, later an engineer, patient with the needs of the design, then a member of the club, playing on the team, and now, now I am transported with the presence of your scent.

Sometimes I lack courage.

What Holds Me Back

I am aware how
this is so messy, a herd
of cat-like desires.
If I were to touch
you right there, I fear you would
turn blue hot flame, sear
my soul from this near,
change me to a dry dead thing,
show me as I am.

April 18, 2009 9:11 AM

Telling Lies

This would be the Gray Jay I met in Canada who tried to steal my sandwich as I was sitting there with it but looked away for a second. He did a fly by and missed but not by much. He did not look dangerous at all before he tried. This would be the raccoon on my roof. This would be the possum who lived in my garage for quite a long time until I figured out how he did it. I knew he was there, just not where. I was cleaning up his poop all the time. This would be a basic strategy amongst all the kingdoms. It is only we humans who put great stock in what we call integrity and think there is a code. The rest of our partners come by integrity in very different ways. And they have integrity. There is no question. I love them for it.

The magician is a liar in his way. So are all the fantasists who entertain us. The carnies name us marks and take our money and we don’t seem to mind. I love pro wrestling for the blatancy of their shtick. One of the more fun sites on the internet is the one where you get to learn the lingo, the way they talk about their stuff and about their fans.. Once you learn the real rules, you can relax and enjoy the tremendous gymnastic display. Those guys work really hard to make what they do look dangerous in one way when it’s not but avoid the real danger that is there. You can’t be a pro wrestler unless you can take the pain. If you get that far, listen to them talk. Many of them are actual educated men. I guess I have this attitude because my uncle was a pro, may he rest easy now. He was also an artist, a good one. So when you look at lies and liars be careful. There may be areas in your life where you really depend on the lies people tell.

It may actually be true that we cannot live without at least some exaggerations and minimizations, white lies, we call them. I think they are quite necessary in most marriages, but in the best marriages they are tools of last resort.

Telling Lies

I love telling lies
to you, great windy pillows
where you rest your trust
while I stroke tender
places you've left in my care
for my purposes
for my advantage
as I keep my eyes ever
peeled for more chances.
I keep your eyes off
my plans with my distractions.

Don’t you find me out.

April 18, 2009 8:35 AM

I Am Peeled Back

I am caught in the mystery of change, how it approaches, how it recedes. I have been studying lifelong ever since that singular moment where everything changed for me and I was given life. I was intent on philosophy and psychology, so when I returned to school that’s what my major turned into and along the way I found other things that needed attention. Two of them, astrology and I Ching also became long term works. I came back to the states in 1969, and returned to school. In 1970 I started the study of both astrology and I Ching along with my college work. While overseas I had studied both philosophy and psychology on my own so I was ahead of the game in school.

Then early in 1972 my world exploded. I had to upend everything in order to stay alive and I left college behind with about 24 credits left to graduation. I took astrology and I Ching with me. In my flight, I ended up in a hotel, where I met my future wife. She was desk clerking there. Later I moved in with her, and still later we went to Oregon so she could get her Masters in Social Work. I began my career in engineering design to help fund her way through school. I also met a man, a clinical psychologist in private practice who was fascinated as I was with astrology and I Ching. He was teaching an astrology course and we quickly found out I knew as much or more than he. We decided to partner and started a group therapy setting where we would practice and teach astrology in Dane Rudhyar’s Person Centered format. We developed a way of using astrology as a tool for exploring consciousness. We began going to conferences and offering our work both to psychologists and astrologers because we were doing actual work that straddled both fields. We met several serious astrologers including Dane Rudhyar himself as we brought them to Portland and put on our own conferences.

Later, I turned all this and my work with I Ching into the rest of my college degree.

I did all this chasing change. I did all this as a way of looking at time and timing. I am a musician and music relies on time in essential ways. In poetry the way words flow also have fundamental connection to timing. I know for a fact that in order to really “get” a poem you have to read it aloud. I am not much into word art. I am too musically oriented, too time oriented.

I hardly touch astrology any more. I don’t know many people who have a degree in it however. Heh. I Ching is still in my life.

This next poem is about that weird moment of change and its departure.

I Am Peeled Back

I listen to you,
your high keening lululu
at departing fate
and within the spin
lowering sound of your loss,
within the oily scent
you found spilled nearby,
I begin to fall away,
peeled back like onions.

April 17, 2009 3:22 PM

Holy Waters

I guess I was in a mood. This poem was written on my wife’s birthday, though she died in 2001. I don’t think I was consciously thinking of her, and I have no idea if I had thought that day her birthday. Now it seems sort of obvious.

Huh. My internet connection is really sluggish tonight. I have not yet been totally driven off, even though this often happens at home. At work, I have a real 56k connection. I could live with that. I am frankly really turned off by the pricing of high speed. I simply don’t do enough computer internet things to justify the price. I also go for cheap cel phones. I have texting blocked on my phone because I was getting spam and it cost me money. I make my living using the computer but I really don’t want that much to do with it as a lifestyle. As a man who has written a book length document (283 pages) on an electric typewriter and many other school documents on a manual typewriter, I will say that word processing is without question progress. Now I can write very close to the speed of thought. The editing is beyond priceless. I do not have a problem, not even a little one composing a poem at the keyboard on the fly.

In my work life as a designer, I have both won and lost in the switch to computers. I was a damn good hand drafter, able to organize and scrub my errors as I went, so that very little red ever showed up on my check prints. I had peripheral vision for errors that bordered on psychic. The computer wipes all that out because the screen is tunnel vision. I can’t use my eyes the same way. Editing power probably makes up for the loss and then some. I got laid off today after a month back. There is a problem with the money flow.

Holy Waters

My insides take shapes
just like the symmetry found
in crystal faces
joined to each other
in the soft light of your eyes,
washed in morning dew,
in the hope of day,
in the holy waters love
gives to ease the way.

April 17, 2009 12:14 PM

I'm Already Taken

Here’s a poem about commitment. I wonder how many other things it is about.

I'm Already Taken

The wind and earth fought
over me but I belong
to the pale moonlight,
to starry rivers,
to the morning shine of sun,
to your warm rose heart.

April 15, 2009 12:58 PM

Midnight Encounter

They said that Robert Johnson, one of the greatest bluesmen of all time sold his soul at a crossroads in order to get his licks. I imagine an accidental encounter. As for me, the biggest decision in my life concerned my own accidental encounter. It did not speak for itself. I had to decide what had happened. The immediate experience was overwhelming, but the aftermath was mute and the challenges were quick to appear. I was neither permitted a return, nor any reassurance. I was left with the need to learn and learn quickly if I could. I was left on my own. Doubt and fear and the clear fact of others’ disinterest combined easily and grew my distrust.

It is a famous challenge. Was that God or demon? In modern terms, was that divinity or insanity? A decision was required of me. Should I choose to follow or choose to defend against this immersion? It was far more than vision, this movement of heart and soul.

I made my choice. I have kept my faith. I have done the work. What is left are my sunset years and my passing.

This next poem contemplates how I might have come to some other choice.

Midnight Encounter

The bright moon reflects
off his high top shiny shoes,
black like I'm told of
his empty sour soul.

His eyes too glint in the moon's light.

What am I to do
confronted this way?
Questioned intentions and hopes
fall shattered by his
presence in the night
found between the beats and breath
of my frantic life.

April 15, 2009 12:31 PM

I Have Lost My Breath

What I write here or something like it has happened more than once in my life. I assume that at the last it will happen again. I come from the neck of the woods where the doorway to heaven is broad and all inclusive. I hung out with Unitarian-Universalists for over ten years in the 90s. The Unitarian side claims there is no exclusive truth of God and that personal conscience is fully capable of discerning truth if only one chooses to look with education and without prejudice. One can seek and find in most if not all traditions a true path. Jesus is optional. The Universalist side claims that in the words of my friend so long ago, “we either all go to heaven or we don’t.” These ideas are challenging in many places but accepted in many others. The Bahai, the Mahayana Buddhists (the majority), and most Hindu philosophy schools (there are so many) come to mind. That’s a big chunk of humanity, many people who all think somewhat alike in these matters.

From time to time people try stuff to bring this kind of thinking out in the open in Christendom. A fellow by the name of Matthew Fox (not to be confused with Emmett) offered us a controversial reversal and placed Original Blessing in place of Original Sin, claiming that this whole thing was severely misunderstood. He got in trouble with some people over that. Back a number of years Pere Teilhard de Jardin decided that Armageddon should be replaced with what came to be known as Omega Point theology. He got in trouble with some people too.

In other words, there is among many of us an urge to frame spirituality in a more positive light somehow. This is also the thrust of New Thought religions, which are a reframing, a rereading of the Gospels in a Neo-Platonic light, bringing the highest Greek thought contemporary with Jesus into the gospel message. These people claim that John is representative of this tradition, that it was fully present then, and so strong that the Church Fathers had to include his book in the Gospels. It is arguable that Jesus was educated enough to know this material, or if you want, as God incarnate was very familiar with Truth of which Platonic ideas are a strong expression. Eric Butterworth taught me to consider New Thought in this way.

I Have Lost My Breath

Inner space tells me
I am too weary to go
one more step this way
and I fall face first
as if I had no truth near
my old swiss cheese soul,
and none with true gift
enough to send the white light,
to illuminate
my dusty life.

Then this flock appears, angels
who give me more than
I deserve.

April 15, 2009 10:25 AM

Tired Of Waiting

I am an itchy person. I don’t do well at stand up parties because I squirm. I squirm in lots of ways. One of the reasons the women in my life will think of me as a bear, I use walls and other pointy stable things to scratch my back. Just thinking about itching is not good. I notice that these days I do sit more still. I think it is the blood pressure meds that do it. I don’t know if it is good that I am less restless. This planet has earned my restlessness, I think. I used to drink. The world deserves a drink. Now that I don’t drink, what can I do??

It’s a problem. I looked to the experts. They offered a solution. I don’t like the solution. Now what?? As my friend Vivian says, "They offered me door number one. They offered me door number two. There are only two doors. I want door number three."

Tough shit.

Tired Of Waiting

I am so restless,
impatient, tired of waiting,
sure you said you'd come,
soon you said. How come
you're not here right now, damn it?
I need to scratch now.

I have no choice, none.
Not without you, not without
your damn permission.

April 9, 2009 3:41 PM

It's Monsoon Season

I had the wonderful chance to spend real time in Bengal from 1967 thru 1969. Known as East Pakistan at the time, this part of the world is now known as Bangladesh. I spent most of my time in the city of Dhaka (spelled at that time, Dacca). In this part of the world there is a cooler dry season and a warm wet season, the Monsoon. Bengal is fronted by the Bay of Bengal, and at the back are the Himalayas. The wet air is pushed inland hard up against the cold mountains, forced to rise and falls back over the land as over two hundred inches of rain basically in six months. That’s just over an inch a day. That’s wet. Remember that not every monsoon season day was a rainy day. It often rained several inches in one day.

Remember in Forrest Gump when he talked of and they showed the rain in Vietnam? It would happen just like that. There were strange things that happened too. There is so much energy in that kind of weather. There could be hurricanes. There could be tornados. In high winds the corrugated tin roofs held on huts by bricks and such would take off flying. That was not good, not good at all.

I once tried to return to work after lunch and stepped out into a chartreuse colored sky. There was so much electricity that the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I turned right around and went back inside. A tornado touched down shortly after in another part of town. That storm that day broke our papaya tree in half. It was a young tree, only 4” diameter.

I am writing about another common vision. You could be in bright sunshine with blue sky overhead watching a storm cloud complete with lightning and downpour only two blocks away fly by. I just loved that weather, the best thing about living there.

Over 40% of that land is under water every year. Without the monsoon it is the most crowded country on the planet, and every year Bangladesh loses 40% of its land to monsoons. In my poem, I say I will drink. However, in Bangladesh, all that water is better left on the ground. It is contaminated by overcrowded human presence for thousands of years. It might be right to observe that the yearly monsoon bath the country takes is the cleansing that allows humans to continue living there without being sickened by their own waste building up on top of itself. It all washes into the bay.

It's Monsoon Season

The darkness and storm
is headed down the side street,
couple blocks away
from me and I'm parched.

It's monsoon season. You might
not understand how
that relates but when
this is all over I will have more
than enough to drink.

April 9, 2009 12:47 PM

Taking Direction

I keep discovering my humanness. It is awkward and often painful when I do this. I have trouble living on the planet. The world certainly deserves a drink, I just don’t take it and haven’t for a long time now. Oh yes, certainly there is great beauty and loving kindness and art and all that. When I wake in that grimy place I know so well, then what I know beyond question is that even with all the beauty, loving kindness and the rest, it simply isn’t worth it. I am grateful that I am not often immersed in that place. Most of the time I live in another place, the one where you just get up and do it again, looking for those bright little moments that make things worthwhile for a little time. I had one of those today, a fresh little moment of excellence that nearly hit perfection. That’s like the times when my music hits the groove. I will walk away from those moments pretty sure that they almost balance things. They would balance things, I muse, if I could reach those moments more easily, more often. But I know better. I know that you get used to things in the new way and soon, where ever you go, there you are.

That’s why the age of miracles is over, I mean the big ones, the manna in the desert, pillars of fire and like that. We get used to anything and then it’s just ordinary. So if God wants a miracle, He has to slip it in any more. It has been well established for a long time that we are unimpressed. We need the circus and we need it constantly. Miracles are far too ordinary. Only fantasy works. Heh.

Taking Direction

So you said to me
I am to live in the now,
not planning so much,
but then you said, wait,
I forgot you have no clue
what's right or what's wrong,
so for you, you said,
planning might still be required.
Guidance might be wise.

Now I'm pissed at you.

April 8, 2009 12:22 PM

To An Old Love

Here is a poem about agreements, about the inner life of agreements. The scene in the poem is made up. In a way, however, my marriage ended like this. It ended in agreement. A lawyer was needed to cross tees and dot eyes. The lawyer was retained by my wife, not by me. I looked into getting my own, was advised to get one. I had a meeting with one and on the basis of that meeting, I decided to risk not retaining a lawyer. My wife told me at one point that she had to argue with her lawyer because the lawyer wanted to get more from me. Ann knew what was right already, and so it went, just as we agreed.

This marriage began and ended in agreement.

To An Old Love

You crossed my mind on
yet another of your walks,
the ones that lead you
further from my path
as you go your own sure way.

I remember this:
crystals, sun catchers,
the seven you insisted
were yours. You would take
these, you said, just these.
I agreed though my heart broke.
I watched as you left.

Now I weave old souls.
In the warp and weft of things
They shine, inner light.

April 8, 2009 7:50 AM

My Garden

Really interesting. This life never fails to amuse me, if not today, then tomorrow. Tonight is better than last night was. I am much less exhausted. I am struggling to keep my blog visits though. I don’t have the time at work or the energy at home. I have a reader. I get the time to read, just not the time to comment. So I am happy to report to my blog friends, I am staying up with you, at least a little.

My Garden

I am not a real
gardener because I leave
stuff alone, where it
finds root without me
and call that good enough, then
defend as if I
chose those plants in those
places, as if I could plan
better than God plans.

April 7, 2009 11:07 AM

What Happened Just Before I Spoke

I have gone and slipped between worlds again. I spent my day trying to untangle the information left me to do the final set of drawings for a modernization we made to the Premium Cracker line last fall. I am working on the power and control drawings, the wiring and equipment involved. These drawings are called “as built” drawings. This is very tedious work. Soon I will go to the chiropractor and while there I will get a massage. Right now I am contemplating this poem I wrote last April, in the morning. I wrote this in remembrance of other times and places. I guess I was feeling my oats, as they say. I am certainly too worn out to be the mage of this poem today. I have had better days.

What Happened Just Before I Spoke

My incantation
could do deep harm, as you say,
and I shall take care
when I utter words
of power. I stand firm in
my concern that worlds
will not be shattered
because of me when I speak
in tongues of bright flame.

You walked away. I
began. You shook your shaggy
mane, your tail at me.

April 07, 2009 8:50 AM

Choosing My Way

This weekend was tax weekend for me. I am grateful for my good habits. It mainly means working Quicken to sift my records. This cuts the time in tenths I believe. I get done in one day what would take ten. My other good habit...I don't chase money. Even though I get money back and know I do, I don't need it to live. I am not rich but I am also not broke. Thank God. This lets me ease up completely. I am not squeezing the dime, not cheating because I must, not even a little worried.

I did all the readying of the program, getting it up to date last week. I did all the dirty work this week. I didn't have time to finish. I will efile next week. The money will become my retirement contribution this year. That's the end of that.

There are people would shake their heads at the way I don't maximize every last dime. I find my wastage completely worth my peace of mind. Fuck money. Let my boss be the half crazy millionaire with all the big stuff and latest gadgets. I will make my wage that is good enough and let it go.

I would rather not have to deal with this shit.

Choosing My Way

I can tell you've gone
into the back woods again
by the tracks you've left
as if placed for me,
thoughtfully, or else I will
follow young ravens
you sent here for me,
trusting they will call the sun
to give me your light.

April 6, 2009 12:42 PM

The Consequence Of My Promise

There is a woman I have met while blogging who loves the images of stones. I will leave it to you to guess at all the ways stones are metaphors. I have found from time to time that her stones creep into my poems. I find they fit just fine.

The trouble with commitment is that you have to do it to find out if there is a blessing in it. You cannot guess. I knew this so completely on my wedding day and my stress at the risk I was taking was so high that I tried to get drunk and could not. I drank many drinks and ate psilocybin ‘shrooms. All I got was calm enough to live. Of course the night before was so drunk that I was just sick sick sick with alcohol toxicity. Stuff happened, not bad but interesting and truthful. I wound up talking with Ann’s older sister for a long time that night while we got drunk. The outcome was good for Ann, maybe not so good for Mary. Mary was difficult. I didn’t think I would survive my wedding day.

I went for years swearing I would never do a wedding ever again, not from the groom’s position. I never have. I would not be against it should something come up now. There are, of course other kinds of commitments, other promises.

The Consequence Of My Promise

When I promised love
and honor in your service
I did not know then
I would soon become
an altar upon which you
would place your true stones.

In this way I am
now more than I was as you
add to my essence.

April 6, 2009 12:23 PM

What It Was

"We fall into a story about enlightenment - about life, in fact - and we can get trapped in it for many lifetimes. I wonder more and more how well any life really fits a story. What if our life is not this, then that, in a flat and sensible way, but is equally round like a globe, like the earth itself? Maybe our life never did lie flat on the page and read from left to right, from the fifteenth to the sixteenth of the month."
- Susan Murphy

I am a sky pilot. I am trapped in my story about other worlds. I dress them up in spiritual garb. I want to fly. I dress my story in romantic garb. The romance and the spirit is a guidance for behavior.

Behave like this, my story says. My life consists of doing what I must to make room for my story. In my story I am a poet, a musician. But really these are things I do. I did not always do them. When I was young, I resisted the music, because my parents wanted me to do it. Not until it was difficult and rebellious did I dive in. Then I quit because I started all wrong and hit a wall. The poetry is late in life, although there were pieces of it life long.

What I really am, I met God and that saved my life, but I had to decide that's really what happened. It's a story too. The carrot of meeting Him again is out there. I have some things to say. I want to say them, not here but there.

All these stories. My last girlfriend thought I was brilliant but a little tedious and not active enough by far. But that's her story. Here's another story.

What It Was

I was a happy
drunk who fell down stairs smiling
and loved to dance on
when he should lay down.

I was a careless drunk who spent
life so handicapped
that he lost normal
things to bizarre dope fed dreams.

I was the sky pilot.

I pay the old price
still, the way my life is now
echoes off bottles.

April 3, 2009 9:06 PM

Building Harmony

I don’t know how many of you have been blessed with the love of a genuinely talented person, who really could dance, who could sing or act or otherwise produce. What happens to real intense love when it is backed by real talented art is indescribable. Or perhaps it is just me who gets round heels at that point. There is that moment in the movie, Men In Black when the heroine discovers that she is actually an extraterrestrial queen, and she cries. It rains. She learns that it rains because she cries, because she really is a queen. Love and art is like that. It is hard to know what is causing what when they are so close together. The love affair turns into a romance because it is art. Because we can do it. Because it’s right to do it. It would be wrong to leave it in the mundane world of every day when our wings make flight possible. Love as play, love as a play, is it tragedy, is it comedy? You cannot know the outcome, even when you do. That is a truth. Even when you do know what is going to happen, it doesn’t matter because you know as well that you cannot know that. And then it happens that way, and it is a complete surprise even though you can say, “I knew it would happen something like this.”

Even when it ends a tragedy, you say, “This was worth it.” Romeo and Juliet both die. Ask their shades. “It was truly worth it.” You might know that you wouldn’t try to do that again, but you know as well that if you were the person you were before and your lover appeared just like that, you would do it the first time all over again every time. You would hope for Ground Hog Day. (A Bill Murray movie reference, for those of you who don’t know.)

Building Harmony

That you sing of me
in the rain that falls around
your heart gives me hope
you will find your way
from the edge of things, tuning
up to the true tone,
building harmony
from warm voice, profound alto
notes anchoring us
both in this sweet rain
in the key of love's finest
dance and poetry.

April 3, 2009 2:29 PM

Staying Afloat

One may fall in love but one decides to love someone. Really there is no honeymoon on the decision to love. One falls. We often will call that an infatuation. We will say it is a dream come true. That’s precisely what it is. I fall in love with you, a dream come true. I fell for my dream of course, not really for you. Within that space, I may decide to love you. Then I set about to find out who you are, who I have chosen to love. If I am unfortunate I will confuse the dream with the reality. If I am blessed, I will get to keep the fantasy and still navigate in reality. That’s where the swimming comes in. It takes great skill, no?

I just heard tonight that one of my favorite couples is divorcing. Too bad.

Staying Afloat

If I were stone still
in the moving tide of you
I would be submerged
and would have to grow
gills, so often do you rise.

But I can swim, dear,
and I do, the crawl
and the butterfly, back stroke
and side stroke and I
can tread water as
well if I must. All of these
I need loving you.

April 3, 2009 12:38 PM

Questions And Answers

Home from the corporate wars. My porch cat thinks that if he polishes my concrete I respond better. He rolls in the same spot, uses his back as a polishing rag. I figure he will wear my front walk down a bit in a couple decades at this rate. Long before that, I am sure my concrete will get a shine. He has gotten fat eating at two houses now.

Here is one way God answers prayer. Erk. Why is He so damn enigmatic?

Questions And Answers

I hear you call from
halfway across this old world
as if from my heart,
the same kinds of things
I lay in the lap of God,
demanding reply.
He does and says this,

The questions are important,
the answers are not.

April 2, 2009 3:57 PM

The Antique Vase

I am too careless. I don’t really fit here. It is not that I am not athletic. I do all right when I am paying attention. I was okay at tennis. I played football in high school, but only because my Dad insisted that I do one season of team sport. I have a mean pong pong serve and this means the more subtle motor skills match up with intensity. So it is not that. But. I am also just terrible at fixing things of any complexity, have to hire all that sort of thing done. I hire it done with gratitude there are people to hire. I can’t pay attention long enough. I tend to spill when I eat. I can’t seem to break that, really don’t want to. So much of the physical stuff of this planet is just not what I want to pay attention to. I have a head that actually thinks it can kill my body and still survive. It wants to. It’s not that I am not erotic in the largest sense either. I know that works out for me. Still, I don’t want to attend to the world that much. I grit my teeth most days at least once, saying the traffic or the whatever is not worth it.

It is the normal everyday stuff. It is the shopping. I don’t go to shows because I hate the parking hassle. I like the shows. Every time I go I have the same reaction. The show was worth my time. The parking hassle wasn’t. Portland is not bad either. I will do without stuff easier than I put up with the hassles. It is just like that for me.

I break things like relationships in part because I never want to do anything, because I hate the hassles. Pretty sad.

(INTERMISSION)

So here is how this happens. I get done writing this and immediately (as I am late) go to an AA meeting where they decide to talk about expectations. I get to rant and poke fun at myself and my defiant attitudes. I’m all better now. Heh.

The Antique Vase

The vase finally
shattered. I was too careless
for you, I know this,
as if I broke you,
not the pottery, as if
I meant to do it,
as if it was an
ancient Greek treasure instead
of the garage sale
derelict we bought.

April 2, 2009 3:19 PM

In The Hall

The stuff you do, the stuff that happens, all of that so often doesn't make sense. So many of us, I have heard this, say, "I must be here for a reason." It's an article of faith. I am not so sure that there's a reason, like some one thing I must do nobody else can do. I don't know if I can make it make sense there's a distinction, but I do think I have a destiny, a tendency to end up in a certain shape so I head out of here in the right direction. It's not what I do specifically that matters but the style, I guess, with which I do things. Character is destiny, some say. I take it even deeper.

That's sort of the view you can get from astrology too. No one comes in a blank slate. We are bent this way and that from the gate. This is my Mom aghast because she really disliked my real father and so much of my character was like him that she had to kind of like him anyway because she really loved me. He wasn't around much my whole life and still I was like him. The genes.

Destiny is like that only instead of a push from behind like inheritance it is a pull from ahead. This is a really old concept. Aristotle made this kind of pull one of the principal causes, a logical category. Science doubts this kind of reversal of time's arrow, or the presence of eternity nearby, either being the source of the pull. I am science enough to understand the argument, but poet enough to know better. What am I here for? Why did I come back? It's a matter of destiny. It is not a reason. That is simply bad science. I am not here for a reason, some specific thing I am to do.

How do we see the unseen? In Zen, they sometimes whack you. You go sit in the hall, the meditation hall and that's what you get. Sometimes. Not often.

In The Hall

You are all of that
and you tell me I am too,
flea bites and the rest.

You strike me, bamboo
slaps across my bruised up back
to drive this closer
to my aching head
while I wonder what I'm here
for, why I came back.

April 2, 2009 12:44 PM

The Unmade Bed

Huh…I tried to post and Blogger ate me alive. I will try again.

I do make the bed. I wash the dishes too. My job.

This has been a hard week. Every work week is a hard week for me any more. Then I went for a massage and chiropractic treatment. I feel mauled but good.

Tonight I miss having a lover, even though I would not really be good company.

The Unmade Bed

The way the bed looks
when you leave it on mornings
when we don't sleep in
is precious to me.

It's my job to make your bed.
We agreed to this,
as if you're the Queen
Mother and me the worker
bee buzzing around.
I am not a drone.

April 02, 2009 12:14 PM

It All Comes Out The Same

I am pretty happy with this one. There’s a voice here. It’s not really mine. That means, if I can do it again when I want to that I might even have a novel in me. I have always claimed I can’t do dialogue to save my life, but many of these poems are dialogue bound, headed that way. This one is especially so. That’s why I like it so much. Technique.

It All Comes Out The Same

I am not graceful
and you tell me to dance but
I'll fall on my ass,

so I says to you
that fat men can't dance so well
and you say so what
because it all comes
out the same in the end, hey.

That's what I mean, you
old fart, you just don't
notice who I really am
when you pass it on.

April 1, 2009 1:26 PM

The Gerbils In My Head

Yes, indeed. What if they get out? C’mon…this is serious work, deep, allegorical. There is an esoteric spiritual meaning. This poem took decades to get the experience to stand on. I wrote it standing up wearing my hair shirt and cilice. I wrote it at the high desk in the ink I ground myself, writing by the light of a tallow candle flickering and sputtering. I muttered as I wrote, a kind of breathless prayer that He who left me here would support my hope. The poem I would rather have written is fathoms deep, embedded in the words of this one. See past the gerbils if you can. Or not. Heh.

The Gerbils In My Head

It was bad enough
when I had gerbils running
on the little wheel
in my caged old head
all night long but then they got
loose and are chewing
new holes in my brain
where I don't need any holes.

What if they get out?

March 31, 2009 12:37 PM

Bird Questions

I have as I am sure I have written before, a bird feeder right outside my kitchen window. It hangs under the eave, far enough down that squirrels can’t get to it, because it hangs under and that means getting back to the roof is very difficult for them. They would have to drop to the ground but there are far too many cats for squirrels to care for that very much. So they leave the seeds alone. It is much to high for cats. So I get to hang out in my kitchen with the birds, who still prefer it if I am not there at all. The “he” in this poem is a house finch or a gold finch, fat little things who have a route. My feeder is on that route.

Bird Questions

He came and asked me
what's with the glass? He sometimes
forgets it's there. It's
against nature, he
says adamant and angry, but then
he admits we are
better off inside
where we do so much less harm
than we otherwise
might.

March 30, 2009 12:36 PM

A Fat Icy Ride

This has to be allegorical, I don’t have a bike. There is no ice in Portland at the end of March. I wouldn’t be on a bike at this point. A few years back I got a wild hair and decided to try for a recumbent bike. They gave me the chance to test drive it. I was doing okay but then in turning I took it too sharp and then corrected. I stuck my leg down as I am used to on upright bikes to guide the turn but it didn’t work the same. My leg folded up past me into the position it takes in the jazz splits and I came straight down hard with the bike beneath me. A recumbent puts your leg out nearly straight. So with my right leg folded up under me, my left was stuck out straight and I really did do a jazz split with the bike under me. I slid, bare right ankle grinding the pavement for several feet this way. When I got up something didn’t feel right. I picked the bike up and tried to walk. My left leg folded up right out from under me. I had hyper-extended the ligaments in my left thigh, and partially tore at least one of them. That was the last time. I will not try to ride a bike again.

As a child I was one of the guys who could ride long distances, no hands, using balance to make turns.

A Fat Icy Ride

A hard ride is ice
on the bike you gave to me
though I admit it,
I am far too fat
for riding and my bike screams
for mercy with me
grinding it into
the ice just by pedaling,
by standing upright
and bearing down, and
pulling at the handlebars
when I push again.

March 29, 2009 8:50 PM

Spring At My House

The dates are getting closer, though a year apart. Do you notice? I am nearly caught up with myself, not even two months behind now. The dates will start to get confusing, maybe. It is not yet spring but it is really close now. The trees are thinking about budding out. I am no longer writing enough poetry to replace what I use. I have posted 638 poems to this point, this being the 639th. I have 377 in place waiting, including this one. I have 53 poems stored in the not posted folder. That is 1068 poems in less than two years. If I never write another poem that is still a credible portfolio. I wrote three poems this week. I imagine that I will continue at a rate a little like that. Right now work is too much to allow taking the extra odd fifteen minutes out to write one of my nine liners. I still get around and read you guys, just don’t have the time to comment so often. :(

Spring At My House
The crocus came out
again, a weedy color splash
beneath the dogwood,
itself beginning
to stretch out above lilies
who are waking up,
and the gold finches
never left but their color
faded in winter.
The boys are growing
brighter now, bolder, louder,
calling their mates close.

March 29, 2009 8:16 PM

What The Rain Can Do

Some people don’t’ take me very seriously. I can’t help that. As an adolescent, I nearly died of it though. I was an emotional cripple, unable to grow up, desperate. I knew something was way wrong and had no idea even what question to ask. I went through changes that cost me but saved my life. Part of that process involved no longer caring that some people would sooner pick on me than bother to get to know me. I am just too strange for some. Adult society is far more civil than adolescence though, at least it is if you stay out of bars and jails, stay away from 1% bikers and related users of violence. That too has helped. I spent too long in the pressure of illness and ostracism though. I am convinced it is a message of destiny, formative for a reason, revealing a personal truth. I take these kinds of things seriously and my childhood and adolescence is first among such equals. I was isolated by illness in certain critical parts of my childhood and ostracized by some in high school, especially in the first two years. When I took up drugs it was with great relief, nothing short of salvation. The drugs saved my life in very real ways. That was also the cost.

I love the rain, still. I never complain that there is too much of it, even though I am in the temperate rains of the Pacific Northwest. I especially love the storms that approach hurricane force. Once in East Pakistan the monsoon pattern brought in a storm of sufficient force that a tornado touched down on the other side of Dhaka (then it was Dacca). This storm put joy in my heart even while it broke the young papaya tree in our back yard in half. Just before that storm broke, the clear sky overhead had turned chartreuse colored. I have never seen anything like that since. It lifted the hairs on my back and neck.

For years after I returned to the States in my twenties and early thirties I would say of myself that I would sit on the roof sipping brandy watching the monsoon storms pass nearby. I never actually did that, but I still love the image today. I also said I did the same watching the revolution. There was one. We left East Pakistan not long before the successful break with West Pak. that made East Pakistan Bangladesh. That bit of roof sitting never happened either, but what a satisfactory image this is.

What The Rain Can Do

I live so lightly
on the planet that stepping
into dreams is just
what I do. I breathe
and go somewhere else where rain
turns into mirrors
reflecting the truth,
calling me out of myself.
I become a mage.

March 29, 2009 12:20 PM

Human Nature

Here is something that is really true. In music, sad is a bunch of things and one of them is slow. This means that anyone learning to really play actual credible music will tend to develop sad songs first. This does not mean that sad songs are simpler in general, but that up tempo adds a whole tier of difficulty in this one way: up tempo music happens too fast for the mind to guide things in any conscious way. Up tempo music requires the complete training of the body mind. This is especially true when a musician adds the lyrics and voice which will often be similar to rubbing your belly and patting your head.

There's another piece...sad is the minor keys. It is easier in the minor keys to stumble around and accidentally make music-like sounds as long as you stay in key. The rules are more rigid in the brighter major keys. Here again the structure of things favors sad music because young musicians like the grace of making mistakes that don't sound like mistakes. The sad keys are in this way easier to play. It is even easier to play in the major keys but in the minor modes.

So want to sound like you are a musician? It is much easier to play slower in the minor keys. I know this from experience. :)

Poets have the same experience. You can write a sad poem that has credibility and feels real far easier than the happy poems. Writing happy and avoiding sappy is just not that easy.

Why is this??

Human Nature

If I thought, only
me, the only one who feels
empty just like this,
it would be too hard
to live even one more day.
That's when you write me
a few short lines that
show me I am not even
remotely alone.

Have you ever thought,
wondered why it is so much
easier to write
the empty sad songs
than the brightly wrought dances?
I truly wonder.

March 29, 2009 9:18 AM

What I Do

Things get a little weird out my way. Here is a little story that illustrates how it is…

"Once Huangbo and another monk were on pilgrimage. They came to a wide stream, almost a river, and planted their staffs, standing on the bank silently, watching the water go by. Finally the monk hiked up the skirts of his robe and walked across, gliding on top of the water like a sailboat.
Huangbo muttered in disgust, "If I'd have known you were like this I'd have never agreed to go with you!" and he turned around and went on his own way."
- Norman Fischer

Recently time has come up, as in not enough. We know that the very fabric of space/time is expanding, that things are getting farther apart on the largest scales because this is so. It is said that no matter where in the universe you stand, if you measure things you will get the same result, that everything is moving away at the largest scales. Not only that, the farther things are away, the faster they go. Even worse, for the math and science to work, there had to be an inflation in this process, where things moved much faster, then slowed down. That happened early on. Now it appears that the rate is stable. Things farther away appear to be going faster because every location in space/time is expanding. The rate everywhere seems constant. What is behind this is what is called dark energy and it is a very large portion of all that is. The reason that things farther away are going faster is that we see these things through longer expanding space/time distances. Farther away equals more expansion equals higher apparent velocities. These velocities are so high that light is shifted toward the red. That means that a significant percentage of the speed of light is involved in the velocities of the farther objects. There are no blue shifted objects except for those within our local galactic cluster.

There are people who speak of time these days and suggest that time is speeding up. This might be related. However there are others who suggest that we are heading down a funnel of some sort and time is being compressed. Something like that. They say that 2012 is the smallest part of the throat and then time will start easing off and we will find the pressure come off us a little, maybe a lot, if we survive.

Here is another way I know to not have time. Things get a little weird out my way.

What I Do

If I had the time
I would give you such complete
love you would lift off
the ground just amazed
at the lightness in the air
and the glow of me
as I hold you up.
But I don't have any time
nor any money,
nor do I have breath
since I smoke so much, and drink
and get thrown in jail.

March 28, 2009 2:21 PM

Finding Comfort, Finding Salvation

Adam Zagajewski...I never heard of him but ran across this quote. In this quote he refers to the writing of one of the French existentialists who said, "Hell is other people" in one of his works. I quick perusal of Google, Zagajewski is an internationally renowned Polish poet. I didn't have time with my slow Slow SLOW system to learn more tonight.


We find comfort only in
another beauty, in others'
music, in the poetry of others.
Salvation lies with others,
though solitude may taste like
opium. Other people aren't hell
if you glimpse them at dawn, when
their brows are clean, rinsed by dreams.
- Adam Zagajewski


The way he puts it, that's the reason I am not a monk. I see you guys this way too. I know this life makes it hard in precisely the sense that I wrote the other day...it is hard to remember your original intention when the alligators start biting. I have that challenge every day in my project work in corporate-land. But it is a general lesson. Here is the basic form. You have to catch us all in the special moments, the brief ones, to see the holy beauty without confusion.

Most of the spiritual walks on the planet ultimately demand community even when they claim that the highest path requires relinquishment in the end. I won't argue all that, just want to wish you all, "May you be rinsed clean by your dreams, over and over again."

The Evergreen

This poem is about a tall evergreen that grows on the property line, probably more my tree than my neighbors'. His house is just about minimum distance to the line as is my garage. This line is defined in the front and side by a fence buried in ivy and overgrown with a stand of bamboo. Then toward the back, this tree towers over everything nearby. It has dropped branches occasionally, sometimes on my neighbor’s house and once in the yard between us, more or less on the bamboo. So far it has not dropped a branch to my side. This may be because I am to the southwest of the tree, the side that gets more sun. Perhaps this extra light makes healthier branches.

Oh yes. I did dump the next poem as I said I might. This is the one after.

The Evergreen

I fret. The tree is
too close and it has twice now
dropped branches safely.

Someday it will drop
a dark arrow through my roof.
I can cut it down,
save my property,
but that squarely puts the dart
deep into my heart.

You told me real
fearlessness is the product
of a tender heart.

March 27, 2009 12:37 PM