Category Archives: shards

September 11, 2017 · 3:03 pm

some ideas on what god is

Some Ideas on What God Is

An old man with a beard, easily confused with Father Time.

A white rabbit in a magician’s hat.

Lord Shiva in full battle dress, twirling the head of John the Baptist on a bungee cord.

A personality disorder split into three parts–a wrathful father, a son with an Oedipus complex, a white dove.

Malcolm Lowry at the tail end of a drunk.

It came to me in a dream the other night that god is a cosmic suicide and we are the ongoing aftermath. I’m pretty sure that is a whole new take on god, and I’ve hired a lawyer to file my claim. He’s working pro bono.

I suppose I should run it by Snopes first. Some people think Snopes is god, but Snopes is a husband and wife team working off a laptop. It’s also a character in a Faulkner story.

God is the Wizard of Oz, cloaked in a veil of mystery. Pull back the veil and there they are, all our shortcomings rolled into one.

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· 2:58 pm

sons of adam

Sons of Adam

OST. OSS. SOS. CIA. NSA. Join the cause. Fight the fight. Root out the enemy.

A pinch to grow on. A cauterized wound. Germ warfare, sterilized gauze, a good cause, good luck, spin the wheel, pull the trigger, write home to mother, tell her you gave it your best shot but missed. Just do it.

The red cross, the red menace, the red army, the raging bull.

You first, I’ll be along presently. Keep an eye out for trip mines.

Stunned disappointment, clobbered defeat, watch out for the maniacs, pop some pills.

Shake and bake, roll the dice, cut the corner, cut the crap, call the coroner with the outlandish stethoscope to get a read on your broken heart.

Vengeance is mine said the Almighty to the Five-star General. Let’s make a pact and go after them.

Bang-bang and the moment passes, the cloud cover lifts and in come the fighter jets to level the playing field.

None of this precludes growing tomatoes, potting your plants, hedging your bets. Let the word go forth.

Are you listening? Are you paying close attention? Have you got your sleeves rolled up? Are your temples pounding? That’s a start, now the real work begins. Twice around the courtyard and then down into the tunnels. No, you can’t bring your flashlight and your compass. Are we going to do this thing or not?

Rush forward, sons of Adam, into the raging inferno.

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September 3, 2017 · 5:51 pm

mcnamara’s band

McNamara’s Band

The moon struggles for position in the windy sky, and the wild mice scurry thru the fertile fields. The clock sweeps the remains of my life into a tidy offering to the eternal mystery, and the mystery offers new life in return.

Now I ease into the Grand Acceptance that takes me on its knee and says, “There you are, little Johnny Jump-up! Won’t you dance for us?”

And I’m back in the old Irishman’s living room filled with soldier sons home from the war and their girls and their wives, my wise Irish-Indian grandmother looking on with great pride and love as they gather round and clap their hands and stomp their feet while I dance my young heart out to McNamara’s Band, a scratchy recording played on a Victor-Victrola.

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September 2, 2017 · 4:42 pm

eating out while the valley burns

Eating Out While the Valley Burns

Corn with seasoned rice and tilapia. Black coffee. Raging fires. It doesn’t make a dent in the Muzak, the fact half the valley is burning and the wind is gusting at 40 mph. Nothing makes a dent in the Muzak. Muzak is impervious to change.

Think of the look on a Christian fundamentalist’s face when out of nowhere it hits him like a ton of bricks that quantum physics looks more like god than a crucified Jew. Still, the Muzak rips away at the cerebral cortex of truckers and tourists. Still, the wild fire rages.

Well, there you have it. Connect the dots, create your own maze. Splash in some color, and after they’ve gone to bed, plan a future for your children who are quantum physics in motion, experiencing everything simultaneously as if it was the natural thing to do, until you send them off to school.

I refuse to be beaten into submission, by disaster or Muzak or a well-planned future. I refuse to play the violin while the valley burns. I refuse to sweep up the body parts and create my own monster. I refuse to pretend that we’re going somewhere.

I’m into erasing the days from the calendar. I’m into spontaneous healing, spontaneous death, spontaneous resurrection, spontaneous anything but spontaneous adaptation. How to you adapt to something you’re an inextricable part of?

The big mistake they made in their efforts to sever me from a childhood overflowing with magic was to destroy my ability to read and write in the first grade. I tumbled back into everything. I became a smear of probabilities. I survived, and then I took back the words and went after them.

Stop laughing. Stop sneering. Stop feeling sorry. Stock reactions from a world stripped of imagination and locked down in a rigid probability that gets passed off as reality.

No one blinks and reality stinks and the Muzak rages on.

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August 30, 2017 · 2:02 pm

siegmund freud’s bad dream

Siegmund Freud’s Bad Dream

One predicament crashed into the next, and the hot sun baked his wool sweater. They took down his shingle and he spun off into a doomsday scenario. His life’s work had been shot in the underwear. Something made him shift gears, something outside the text books.

He hit the streets. He stole the Elephant Man’s mistress, and she gave him three star-crossed children, not a one with his eyes.

By this time he ate his meals in the mission and slept on the grassy knoll, waiting for someone to shoot.

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August 19, 2017 · 4:24 am

rained-out happiness

RAINED-OUT HAPPINESS

One Option Beyond the Inevitable

This is a running start without legs. The whole thing is crumbling like ghost cookies – the early promise, the wavering illusion, the one-eyed hope of a bright future. Rained-out happiness.

However you arrange it, dress it, pretend to understand it, the more tangled it gets in the barbwire of time. Things cease to rhyme and a gray silence closes in from all sides, like an ocean. But you keep on doing what you’ve always done until you no longer know what that was, or what you thought it was, whatever it was.

Your routine gets whittled to shavings. A shrinking repetition.

You either shut the door or let it ebb away. Suicide no longer seems outrageous. It no longer matters what anyone thinks.

This is something no one knows until they get there.

I pick up my pen and make a final declaration.

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