Drinking New Wine, I Think Differently

I doubt this next poem expresses wisdom. It certainly offers passion. It also in its way is a metaphor for what happened to me. I assert that something like this saved my life, that I was offered spiritual drink and I took it at a critical moment. I knew I was dying. I did not know anything about spirit. I mean that quite directly and literally. I knew about church, nothing about spirit. Church without spirit is a dead thing. So I drank. I drank spiritual wine. Eventually years later, at the end before I got sober, I drank white wine from boxes, two or three a week. That's 10-15 liters a week.

What happened after drinking new wine in 1966, I began a lifelong unabashed quest for wisdom, sure that this yearning was God's gift to me, and it happened literally overnight. Sophia is my lover.

Drinking New Wine

I would take and drink new wine
even from the farthest goatskin bag,
to raise it above me and let the stream
of life spout out into free air, to mix
and mist a bit, flash in the sun
of my hope, the heat of my wild
and mutated life.

February 6, 2009 10:01 PM

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I truly do want to know how the four footeds and the winged people think. I have lived intimately with cats most of my adult life and much of my childhood too. I know they think, and sometimes what they think. Given sufficient motivation, some of them will plot too. Now I am watching birds. I am convinced that if you figure what interests them and also factor in the way their sensory systems work, you will begin to see sensible behavior out of them too, the logic of biology. Far deeper and older than our upstart rationality which creates disaster as often (more often perhaps) as success.

I Think Differently

I am pretty sure
I wouldn't want to roost there
on top of that pole
which goes to show me
I just don't think like eagles
or ospreys or storks.

This disappoints me.

February 7, 2009 8:38 PM