eight twenty eight

I put a piece of chocolate in my mouth and glance at the coffee’steam. I glance a thought at the ways God moves and put another piece of chocolate in my mouth. Sipping carefully.

I know that in the sea of things that God thinks, I’m a very tiny boat. But when he glances a thought, like sea-breeze, and I scramble to pull in the luff, even scrape my knee, it’s like a piece of chocolate in His mouth.

And I agree that sheep like we have gone astray, that we like sheep bend knees and neigh for greener pasture and for stiller waters and God’s posture is often taciturn.

Dear Swiftness,

Meet me in my daydream and show me the Way (Home).

Yours etc.

right before band of horses played.

god when i wake from sleep

god when i am moribund

god when i've got more joy

and feel it's on the increase

make me throw my bed away

make my grave implode (or something)

make me know that i've no friend like you

(and you no longer call me slave)

as the sun begins to shy from day bright

as the streets begin to lax from day drives

as my heart begins to scuff and drag

down the shore to water's edge

evoke in me a merciful revival

evoke in we a fast forgiveness

evoke in all our little hearts

a journey towards a resurrection

as sin sets on approaching hill

as doubt creeps eerily nigh

as my weary vantage

overshadows every single good thing known about self

insight a riotous evac(uation)

insight faith that will eclipse

and reminisce beside this weary boy

the great lengths you strove to bring me peace

by tony hoagland, a really great poem.

America

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud

Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes

Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,

He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them

Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds

Of the thick satin quilt of America

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,

or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,

It was not blood but money

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills

Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were

Clogging up my heart—

And so I perish happily,

Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—

Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad

Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes

And I think, “I am asleep in America too,

And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”

And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

“I was listening to the cries of the past,

When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable

Or what kind of nightmare it might be

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you

And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

Even while others are drowning underneath you

And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to be your own hand

Which turns the volume higher?

tom wudl meets jan van eyck meets vero meets helplessness blues

And of course a weekend in vero beach is as it has always been- slow, uneventful, tiring as hell, full of frustrating (in the best way) conversations. My brother is moving from vero in a week’s worth of days so he’s been wrapping up a year’s worth of classroom rules, lesson planning, assignment grading, student and faculty relationships, you know running the gamut that is correctly labeled finishing well.

One of my fav things he did during his last week before his seniors graduated was host a meal during his morning period classes (which they called the 2^nd and 3^rd thanksgiving. He had students organize who would bring what and they ended up with skillets making pancakes, bagels getting shmeared, and coffee flowing like tide (I wasn’t there but his description laid out a royal spread). On top of it all was somewhat of a class finale led by mike where he handed out awards that he created for the most memorable moments, shared laughs, but also awards for students who truly put forth effort. My personal fav award was the “Kenny Award, (or the reason why snacks are not permitted in class award)”. Kenny was the fictitious student spoken of throughout the year that always made a mess of his desk whether that be with a bottle of orange juice or baggy of dorritos; I think the award actually went to a girl who brought a large box of ritz crackers, knife, and a jar of pb and was creating an outrageous 10 o’clock snack one day when Mike was at the board with his back turned. After ten or so of Michael’s awards, students took a few cracks at letting their teacher know what he had meant to them. Of course, all that I recant in this blog is second hand, but I just really got the picture that it was all beautiful resolution to a long and taxing year for students and teacher.

I’m not sure if she received an award in his class or took a stab at the round-the-horn thankyou session, but a foreign exhange student from Germany wrote Michael a card that has been sitting on the desk in his room since I arrived. I either physically pick it up or just remind myself of its charm near every time I walk thru his door. It’s a simple card, no extravagance in design, just pure genuine thought with a date, greeting, and salutation in respective predictable locations. However, attached to the other side with scotch tape is a cut-out, most likely from a national geographic magazine, of a painting by Tom Wudl entitled, “The Birth of Jan Van Eyck and the Extent of His Influence…1988-1989.”

Of course a good deal of my present and future appreciation of this painting is due to the fact that Michael’s student took the time to scribble a letter on the back of a thin yet sturdy white 4x7 sheet of cardboard attaching the ng cutout to its posterior, nevertheless, I believe it would have slain me had I stumbled upon it in any circumstances.

Wudl’s painting, the pasted and cropped (sadly) photo overhead, places Jan Van Eyck at the smack center (I will not attempt even the slightest of serious criticisms on this piece in this blog though it is something I do intend to do at some point (most likely via wikipedia)) and with 6 arms outstretched in varying positions, his eyes near closed as if he’s reminiscing a thought he’s hoping will break the silence of the mind of whoever views the piece. Eyck is standing on the base of a mountain, lightning crashing overhead, baby falling, air balloon rising, cityscape, waterscape, mountainscape, treescape, every strata of society zoomed in, broken off into squares, spliced in till one can hardly imagine any motif…rockets...ornithology…sailboat (full career). All great stuff and again, no serious criticism here, but I just want this. I want to get really deep into the way of living and influence that this painting epitomizes, emulates, encourages. I want a full-orbed glance at all the beauty there is to find in this life.

Our weekend in Vero presumably came to a close this morning, after daily happy hour visits to Waldo’s, chucking the Frisbee on the beach yesterday, hanging till late with Josh, Mike, and Kevin. breakfast this morning at the French diner will cue our exit this afternoon and my eyes will cringe again on Tuesday morning un-rested and unsettled discontent and malaise with frustrated eyes careening this way and that at the lives everyone else has figured out, after spending memorial day painting a fence in pompano, I’ll wake and perform my duties all over, as “a [dis]functioning cog in some great machinery serving something beyond me,” (fleet foxes).

i wrote the above entry three weeks ago and never posted it, thought it needed more editing, it did, but i'm not going to do it. mj leaves tomorrow for el salvador and as he heads out to work with a school and church i think of Van Eyck and his charismatic look at life and living well.

link to view painting in full beauty http://www.lalouver.com/html/group_08_3/05.html

wendell berry, "the mad farmer liberation front", new fav

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.

Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

five twenty one eleven

it comes in waves unattached

to location

in brain

and in heart

daytime trains barreling thru cerebrum (no one understands how)

in the heat of day- with black earth caking my sunburnt skin (head to toe)

it starts three inches deep

between my sternum and backbone

and it moves down (sometimes slow, today quickly)

around the outer edge

of an upside down spire (with the upper part where the lower part should be)

reaching the base (as it only can in the inverted case)

then returns skyward

it is in lover’s epic smile (the postlude to a colossal fall)

or the face of child (realizing the bubble gum at the bottom of the screwball)

(not yet) knowing the certain fullness of the state we’re in

it is not the luff, the leech, nor foot

nor any composite hoisted for ardent haste

rather

it is the wind

the breeze

the oceans sister

moving above, moving down from Fa(r)ther above (pronounced like love)

moving down from the clouds till right above the granite ocean

sister loves brother

yeah (with aspiration) it’s true

breath that in deep (then pause)

they work together

and brother loves sister

that’s also worth breathing in deep

they make mother proud

Father is chock-full of delight

hokey pete!

jack kerouac, on the road

"we were on the roof of america and all we could do was yell, I guess - across the night, eastward over the plains, where somewhere an old man with white hair was probably walking toward us with the Word, and would arrive any minute and make us silent."

a rambling plea

thank goodness

my blood came back to the opposite side of toxic

so i can shovel caffeine

till all my poor, late, last night decision'ing

gets covered over like a dredged beach

like a dredged beach

so you can't see the coral reef

so you can't see what's underneath

truly, what is under me?

what is underneath?

deeper than benthic panoply's

these pixilated maladies

this veneer of confidence

i glue to me

to ambulate these city streets

that don't know my name

though their staight lines and their curbsides

have more veracity

than this white washed glamour

my pretentious mendacity

to say what's odious

obvious

in confusing pleasantries

these brutal vagaries

that claim a banner year for poetry

what's underneath?

can i go deeper?

gosh, i just want for all these rambling pleas

to cut me off once and for all

right below the knee

so knees are all i have to use for asking

so that maybe just maybe i'll find myself enthralled for good

by the freeing arms of Loveliness Extreme*

he calls me brutally beautiful*

in ways ear plugs can't stop me from hearing

knowing

my hand-written heart beat...

is from his son

*gertrude stein penned loveliness extreme

*buddy wakefield is responsible for brutally beautiful as well as something very close in word and meaning to the last line. oh and i suppose he makes me think about ear plugs as well.

when he lived in broward 2

Leaning back against the roughly finished stucco wall in the courtyard of a downtown bar his heart was rain gear hanging in a warehouse on some beach in Alaska’s Shelikof. His hearing came and went with words like ‘200 in sales’, ‘killing it’, and ‘lucrative’. Surviving in a new part of town with his friend Jon, living with a roommate was not what got stuck in his craw, rather living with himself, and the adjacent conversations weren’t exactly remedial, as he’d hoped.

A crowd of men a few years his junior encircled one who spoke in narrative with an arm bent outward serving as a prop in certain parts of the story. “And so I’m fucking her right,” he overheard as the young gentleman’s volume knob crept obnoxiously clockwise. He hadn’t heard the context of this eloquence but judging by the eyes bugging, ashes flicking, flat billed hats re-adjusting till right above the eye brows, it was all sensationally titillating. “She stops me for a second and says she can hardly take it,” he does some nebulous gesture with his bent arm. He dodged the rest of this dialogue, less because it boiled blood more for the planks it turned in his own hollow eye sockets (like empty catchers mitts), more because of the personal malaise it framed, his own identity, different yet all together inglorious and he had no choice but to swallow it whole.

“You done with that?” he said to Jon, motioning with his own empty glass, with the pair he made his way down a corridor swelling with attractive women all dressed in varying shades of black and white. They seemed to communicate a trilogy of postmodern epiphany- ‘I have so much money’ and ‘I don’t need money’, and ‘I’ve never seen a dollar’. And he knew like Elie Wiesel's boyish arms knew no one familiar on a nazi-poland bound cattle car that though their eyes and smiles were fixed so contentedly, their perfect feet could hardly bear the weight from having to carry the entirety of that image.

A band, equally skilled at noise and not practicing piped up the second he opened the door to head inside. He careened toward the bar to close out and threw a few darts as he awaited his bill. “Thanks man, really good times,” he told the bartender as he signed away his twelve dollars. That’s an hour of patching dry wall he thought pushing the pen and receipt back toward the man.

He met Jon and Yoni out front and there they three stood for a bit shooting shit about food-trucks and Yoni pitched a line about the previous night he had spent with a friend, "and the new guy she’s with.”

His neck craned back, like blue jay did with bull ant that morning (only minus the Marlboro this time), and he stayed his eyes on a big ficus strewn with an angled array of street light strays. He tried to picture her face in the light and dark leaves of the tree’s canopy. He smiled and near cracked a button sized laugh when he found himself, in that instance, incapable of recalling her appearance. He thought it was sort of unlike himself to forget a face, especially one he had once found mesmerizing, but he stopped shy of remorse, and though it seemed pharisaic, he chalked up ficus leaves as a very good omen.

when he lived in broward

I heard about this Japanese Samurai who was neglecting his duty of guarding a sacred painting. In his neglect, the room where the painting was kept caught fire. The sight of smoke awoke the young Samurai. He dashed into the room, grabbed the painting from the wall with now furtive hands but found all exits barred by flames. Without hesitation, he ran his sword vertically down his chest, wrapped all his clothing around the painting and pressed it into the hole he made in himself. After the flames subsided, others entered the room to find what remained of the samurai’s corpse and the unharmed painting that it contained.

__________________________________________________________________


“A painting, regardless of style or method or description is a collection of color(s) on canvas that displays an image,” he thought as he paced about the downtown gala. He wanted to live and needed work. His most revered peer with a beard, named Jon, an unquestionably Kerouacian Joe who claimed Chicago, with roots big enough to take a seat on and just tall enough to catch your heal while working on a backwards walk kept telling him with persistence and posture that there’s more to being human than being in the right place.

He left the gala with a mind to bolt home, “ohp, see you,” he threw out with a waggish peace sign to the lady behind the counter near the door. Once in car, he realized that Jon was right and that he needed to get himself home to make calls to schedule or cop work (however you want to look at it), the under the table kind natural to the sons of small business contractors . Car started first go and without having to apply foot to gas pedal. He patted the old girl on her pristine dash and started for home. In the move he’d lost a charger for the zune a buddy had given him, and being that no one has zunes, or zune chargers, and that no one gives a shit to learn how to configure the thing, he was in the process of giving up on charging it and for that matter using it ever again for musical enjoyment. So he reached for cd’s and pessimistically hoped in what he’d find. He mind’s digital reader board spelled out with big high-school gymnasium bulbs- “JOHN DENVER, SHIT NO, SINATRA?, THAT FUCK, RADIOHEAD…” He broke the mind drama and slid the cd in flipping a three sided verbal coin in the car's cab- “rainbows it goes, kid a it stays, scratched out the window (other than the last clause everything rhymed, unintentional of course and silly as it was, it pleased the poet in him ever so mildly, smile cracked (size of a button)), he hit a quick drumroll on the squishy steering wheel snare, then crashed on the blinker as ‘everything in its right place’ and his new neighborhood cued simultaneously.

The song middled as he pulled into the shell-rock driveway. Slinging his canvas side-bag from the passenger seat he spotted the pack of smooths his buddy had left in the center consul which he grabbed unhesitatingly, walked a few paces toward a front porch slash over-eave and lit up. “Last for sure, “ he assured himself for all the wrong reasons- he didn’t want to flem-hack anymore or fear cancer-coughs in dehydrated sleep. He hummed and his eyes went catacomb peering up at the Norfolk pine pressing against the neck of the Australian’s higher branches in closest proxy. Power lines set horizontal stripes in the foreground, “how vogue,” he thought and squinted hard as his depth of focus kept auto-resetting on pine and power line and quickly made his mind go loopy. He tilted the neck on his shoulders slightly to exhale smoke like he’d seen a blue jay do with a bull ant. He pulled a moleskine from his front pock and jotted frivolously, “I’ve always known myself to be slightly irrational but love it like tao enlightenment when blue ants taste like Marlboro in the throats of bull jays.”

Reluctantly for sanity sake, Ryan called (he was also quitting the smokes (once for all!))

“hey,” said ryan.

“hey man, I’m smoking,” he admitted.

“good for you.”

“thanks, how you doing?”

“really good actually.”

“nice.”

“Marlboro makes this pack of snus that sells for two ninety-nine. After exercise then breakfast I threw one in and now I bet I’ll be craving free till at least one, maybe two.”

“nice.”

“but yesterday I was out of snus and bummed a red off a guy in the shop when I had a craving…”

“oh no.”

“…yeah, skoal and camel snus are either four to six bucks and these Marlboros are six-packs and more mild.”

“that’s the ticket then?”

“yup.”

“well.”

“what have you been up to this morning?” ryan asked.

“just writing a little bit…oh and, went by an art gallery,” he said.

“nice…well I better go, thanks for calling,” ryan said.

“oh sure, yeah, see you tonight then.”

“oh yeah, right, pick you up at six thirty.”

“nice, do it.”

“um…later then.”

“yeah, peace.”

He craned his neck back again taking in the playful norfolk and australian, staring as long as he could until the swaying limbs fell from focal prominence to the dark and permanence of the power lines in broward.

Catacomb’d he looked away and at a dirty chair and thought of Jon for the simple memory of what he had said for the third or second time now on his way off to a meeting, “that’s where cat sits, I mean cat’s sit.” He stayed his thoughts of Jon and Jon’s fellow human laugh which tended to bubble out of drollery like a panoply of sunken vessels resurrected.

He thought of Jon’s trip with a friend and how they’d seen Hemingway’s house, the southernmost point, and “every street in Key West” as Jon said with the start of a laugh before moving onto some other detail about riding bikes or eating pies, rather pie pieces, or drinking beers, or telling stories. And he wanted that, not the trip or the sense of adventure; he had similarly eventful trips to Key West, that wasn’t the point. He wanted his life to be true is all, like the Avett’s song, he wanted naked truths like Jon was good at telling in semi-lit living room conversations, ‘round midnight with topics such as confessionals on the rocks, he wanted what he’d seen imbuing the lives of inventors and architects, Okakura Kakuzo and Frank Lloyd Wright, in artists and friends, the Avett Bro’s and Jon, he wanted a hole in his chest to await something valuable. Perhaps more selfishly than for pride’s sake, more for possession of goodness than heroic legacy, more for purpose of admission of duty neglected (he lacked a more concise explanation) and active repentance thru coming to senses and making good on wrongs, get this though, he wanted the gospel to get all set in his irrevivably charred corpse, he wanted something like rose buds beside thistles and thorns. He wanted, minus the sword, headband, and other outlandish garb, all that he’d seen in so many angels but without these eyes that always seemed to catacomb, he wanted to be a collection of colors on canvas that displayed an image, like the samurai.

through the ember

now that the solace of the pencil tip
is all bored into
by the times
i close up
embracing the warmth of the back of my eye's lids
washing aways the footprints
the stomp of dirty shoes
on my pharisaic dormant
doormatt
temperament

but the lids are embers also
that know moving on
means maybe
moving on

and i've seen growth
once i saw past the smoke
rising
from the cinders of my ravages

i saw hope
in a younger brothers beautiful song
hope through inspecting so much history
that grandmothers
and grandfathers closest brothers
never heard
while walking in their earthy skins
but then
with newly fashioned ear canals
which knew no more of lamentations
and heard it all
and wept
because it is okay to love those still running
or pacing
while awaiting
a survival

strafing toward the east i peer
and hope with a boneless neck
atop shoulders bent boyish yet
as death-tolls and nuclear statistics
are all i can get my hands on

were i
numb on suffering overseas
less callous about real injustice
were i
seriously
forced to own the facts
that sign the dotted line of ignorant contracts

(citizenship)
i'd have no choice
but to take a machetti turned sideways
and drag it across my western swaggering
think-tank mind
and move one inch
closer to the real divides
the swinging alaskan noonday tides
while peeking through an ember
locked away from and by this skeleton

found this today, it was written by a brilliant old roommate and shoved inside an old collapsible chess set

advent
by tucker lux

milk and honey here

and not here

one who soaks all
tears,
here

and not here,
but tears can be wiped
and there are glimpses
unseen

in waterside
prayers and healings

in (sk)eyes

in lips

of a lover
like the gospel

something to dig

"...make love to me, like you know i'm better than the worst thing i ever did, go slow ya'll, i'm new to this, but i have seen nearly every city in the world from a rooftop without jumping, i have realized that the moon, it did not have to be full for us to love it, that we, we are not tragedies stranded here beneath it, that if my heart really broke, really, every time i fell from love i'd be able to offer you confetti by now, but heart's don't break ya'll, they bruise and get better, we were never tragedies, we were emergencies, you call 911, go ahead, tell them i'm having a fantastic time." -buddy wakefield

bad question, good answer

should I give money to homeless folks or beggars?
by the (clai)borne identity (deal with it)
from thesimpleway.org f.a.q. link

Jesus said give to everyone who asks. that’s a tough command. sometimes we wonder what Jesus would do in the calcutta slums or in these heroine-haunted streets where folks ask for change on every corner. what we can say with confidence is that we are to give something to everyone who asks – dignity, attention, time, a listening ear. sometimes we may give money, sometimes not. but we can always give love. and there are times when giving money can even be a way to insulate ourselves from friendship or the messiness a real relationship might demand. so you can toss a few coins to a beggar or write a check to charity precisely as a way of insulating ourselves from relationships (and still appease our consciences)… but at the end of the day Christ’s call is to relationship and compassion. when Jesus speaks in matthew 25 about caring for “the least of these”, the action he speaks of is not about distant acts of charity but personal actions of compassion – visiting the prisoners, caring for the sick, welcoming the strangers, sharing food with the hungry. better than sharing money is sharing life, a meal, a home. having said that, most christians need to get taken advantage of more. and we can usually spare some change. sometimes folks say this question about giving to beggars and panhandlers with suspicion, speculating that homeless folks will just use their money for drugs or alcohol… which happens sometimes. but we don’t always ask what ceo's are doing with our money when we give it to their companies (and the recent events on wall street raise some flags about how responsible they are!). in the end, if we cannot take someone to dinner or give them a ride when they ask for money, we might as well give some money. it’s better to err on the side of grace than on the side of suspicion. and we doubt that Jesus is going to reprimand us for giving too much money to addicts… more likely, we will discover we could have been a bit more generous than we were.

songs…

growing out the tips of tree branches
rising up from the pavement after a rainy summer day
pouring in through colonial style windows
pelting car hoods in some fluke of a hurricane-esque tirade
winding through chain link fences
(hiding eternally from the scorn of weed wacker)
pummeling sargassum
circumventing skyscrapers aft of sunshine- creating all black wings
waving to the frequenter of coffee shops on week days
careening over the piled up tracks- all of flagler’s dying wishes
hesitating to cross the street because momma’s hands are both pushing a publix cart
rising above the fear of breaking down and stepping on the gas
undulating in the steam o’ertop a pot of boiling rice
jumping across tables and saying, son you love well, grandson you love well
waiting as the door closes (before locking) to make sure I’m out safe
running out an mp3 playing device so my ears don’t bleed from radio hits

it wasn’t until these songs jumped back on the mind’s radar did I make for my khaki pants, my grandpa’s shirt (again), and my quattro pro hat. It’s weird how perspectives grab you and tint your eyes until all are drab forces, all are simply leaves, waves, hail, and birds and you can’t hear what’s really going on, new days without the song are on par with impacted fingernails trying to scratch off an ingrown toe hair, don’t do it.

from the ragamuffin gospel, by brennan manning

the way we are with each other is the truest test of our faith. how i treat a brother or sister from day to day, how i react to the sin-scarred wino on the street, how i respond to interruptions from people i dislike, how i deal with normal people in their normal confusion on a normal day may be a better indication of my reverence for life that the antiabortion sticker on the bumper of my car.

we are not pro-life simply because we are warding off death. we are pro-life to the extent that we are men and women for others, all others; to the extent that no human flesh is stranger to us; to the extent that we can touch the hand of another in love; to the extent that for us there are no "others."

today the danger of the pro-life position, which i vigorously support, is that it can be frighteningly selective. the rights of the unborn and the dignity of the age-worn are pieces of the same pro-life fabric. we weep at the unjustified destruction of the unborn. did we also weep when the evenoing news reported from arkansas that a black family had been shotgunned out of a white neighborhood?

one morning i experienced a horrifying hour. i tried to remember how often between 1941 and 1988 i wept for a german or japanese, a north korean or north vietnamese, a sandinista or cuban. i could not remember one. then i wept, not for them, but for myself.

when we laud life and blast abortionists, our credibility as christians is questionable. on one hand we proclaim the love and anguish, the pain and joy that goes into fashioning a single child. we proclaim how precious life is to God and should be to us. on the other hand, when it is the enemy that shrieks to heaven with his flesh is flames, we do not weep, we are not shamed; we call for more.

the sensitive jew remembers the middle ages-every ghetto structured by christians, every forced baptism, every good friday pogrom, every portrait of shylock exacting his pound of flesh, every identifying dress or hat or badge, every death for conscience's sake, every back turned or shoulder shrugged, every sneer and slap and curse.

with their tragic history as background, it is not surprising that many jews are unimpressed with our anti-abortion stance and our arguments for the sacredness of human life. for they still hear cries of 'christ-killer!' the survivors of auschwitz and dachau still feel lashes on their backs; they still see images of human soap, still taste hunger, still smell gas. the history of judaism is a story of caring: they are not sure we care for them.

the pro-life position is a seamless garment of reverence for the unborn and the age-worn, for the enemy, the jew, and the quality of life of all people. otherwise, it is paste jewelry and sawdust hot dogs.

two/eight/eleven

with cup of coffee in hand
i’m already searching for ways to desert
my plan
it didn’t match up to ideals in my head
like the withered orchid (covered with segmented ants)
prostrate on the countertop (beside my keys)
wishing for soil
but i took it inside
to offer me its scent
at my command

dear God
jumpbox me grace
or lay me on top
of a stretcher with handles attached
and carry me down
to the prophet in town
when you find that it’s packed
tear open the roof
and hurl me down
before the man
that makes good wine
thirteen point five
at least
who saves the best for last
and knows how to deal with lameness

it’s not that I’ve begun numbering my days
rather that I’m sitting thick in malaise
and it’s always in tomorrow’s paper
which I received again
today (upon first waking)
and fear I’ve got to catch a train
that’ll lead me
and dump me
closer to the truth
than any route i choose on whim
and con off as the result of prayer
to dear God

junior league baseball

i found myself walking out to the batter’s box with bases loaded, coach gives the signal for swing away (which i think was actually him twirling chest hair, mouth agape, if i remember correctly). the signals were always more of a distraction than anything else, and though on that hot sunday afternoon in boca raton i had no trouble understanding the horrendously disgusting and confusing signals being thrown my way, i lacked the confidence to carry them out the way he intended. the last bit was the most crucial part, the way he, my coach, intended.

a little context would surely cue reader to my amped frustration on that day in boca raton.

to play little league ball in lantana a kid could not exceed 12 years of age. i hated this rule. i was completely out of control in lantana’s little league. i was so thoroughly dependable on a number of counts. i could steal any base anytime. monsters eat people and cars, i ate stolen bases. i hit through the gaps between in-fielders so consistently i made their team mom’s shake maniacally- a team mom is a mom who has nothing else to do, is overprotective of her child, or loves baseball but lacks coaching skills, or a mom who wants to have an affair with the coach. defense, a no brainer, i played every position- i pitched, i caught, short-stop, center field, no shit i was unstoppable, a legend among lantana little league baseball playing adolescents. but the day i turned 13 my entire life changed. i was forced to retire from the little leagues and join all the other 13 and 14 year olds in junior league. tryouts were horrendous. i was small. i didn’t have a gold necklace, no sweat bands, no big-barrel bat, no hair under my arms. goodness it was another world. i kept looking over my shoulder, back at the old world, the little league field where i reigned supreme, wishing i could trot back there, hop the fence, and re-take my throne. i couldn’t. i got picked up by the mariners, coached by bob brackis (who was married to beverly brackis, and together they owned the boca based towing company known as b&b tow yo butt anywhere ). bob was the italian father of bobby brackis, also italian, 13 years old, and played my position and though he also hadn’t hit puberty yet and was a good deal shorter than myself, he had a tow-truck driver for a father which meant he had shoulders like a logger and could swear like the godfather. he and i were apparently the only two who hadn’t grown like all the other boys did in the off-season but somehow i just knew that he’d would be playing short and i’d be on the bench. i thought correctly.

down florida drive lived a buddy of mine, vaughn parker. he was slick on the diamond as well as with the middle school girls (i know because when we were on the diamond he would tell me they were always calling him after school). he slapped line drives and he was fast, had a good arm so he pitched and batted whenever he wanted. being his parents were divorced and he an only child, he received anything he wanted from his father...anything, bats, gloves, batting gloves. he got hooked up so often i received some pretty sweet hand me downs. but his father was cool though, he drove a big truck and smoked marlboros like bob brackis did, but he thought me worthy to ride inside the cabin of his truck whereas bob thought of me on par with one of his pornographic mud-flaps.

vaughn's dad and bob brackis started a traveling baseball team, and based on my little league street cred alone they asked me to join. we were the d-a-w-g-s, dawgs. we played in weekend tournaments all over the state and kicked ass. we were promised professional baseball careers if we could just kick enough ass. and i was one of the smaller boys still but, i don’t know, somehow playing with vaughn, and riding to practice in the back of his dad’s smokey pre-quad cab chevy truck made me enjoy baseball again even if i could no longer play short-stop or confidently stand in the batters box.

back to the day at hand...

who knows why but i found myself walking out to the batter’s box with two outs and bases loaded. i watched vaughn parker's dad down the 3rd base line nodding his head at me, twirling chest hair like a mad man. i stepped inside the box, took a strike, stepped one foot out of the box, and did something i’d never done previously. i called a timeout. coach tilted his stern coaching face as if his entire universe had just downshifted without much clutch, each step i took was a brash grinding of gears. i trotted down the third base line towards coach to share a plan, one i had just wipped up when i should have been swinging my bat. he knelt and with, marlboro and morning breath pervading into late afternoon boca raton air he asked,
“uhh, what’s the deal, wha-what’s...the deal?”
“i’m going to bunt.”
“what?”
“have the others run, i’m going to bunt,” i explained.

his initial reactions were confused. but the longer he looked at my pre-pubescent face he knew i lacked every strand of confidence needed to hit the ball. he coupled that understanding with my cast-iron compromise of baseball stratagem (bunting with bases loaded and two outs isn’t common). he gripped and scratched the back of his neck with his left hand and started pointing at me with a wagging right pointer. he rolled with my plan and threw a few discrete signals to the boys on base. i walked back and knew what i had to do. if i went for the bunt down third, the guy coming home is done- he’ll be strangled by the simple 2-1 scoop, easy underhand from pitcher to catcher, inning over. but, i poke it down the first base line a ways the pitcher will go for it, and being he’s right handed he’ll have to made a crazy turn to make the 2-1 so he’ll go to first with it making the out to end the inning (x-factor- he doesn’t know how ridiculously fast i am). plus, if i poke it far enough the first baseman will also confusedly try to field the bunt as well.

play resumed, as planned the runners left before the pitch was released. i pivoted my toes and set the angle of my bat for a text book first-base-line bunt. i got my bat on the ball, it stayed in play but it sprang left instead of right. i watched it as i ran figuring the pitcher’d tag vaughn who was running home. but vaughn was nearly home. then he was sliding into home. the pitcher hesitated. he had pumped the throw home but then realized he’d better try to get me for the 2-3 sure out. i was but two strides off first. he rushed, gunned the throw and overshot the first baseman. the right fielder was behind him and after a few seconds tracked it down and threw home to hopefully stop the bleeding. our second runner was already in the dugout and the guy who was on first was barreling for the plate. the ball joined the confluence of runner and catcher just in time but the runner slid very heavily into the catcher. the catcher fell over backwards and the ball was flung into the backstop. by this point i was rounding third with coach parker doing cracked out signals all the while. the catcher gathered himself, threw off his mask and scrambled for the loose ball. it was too late. if vaughn was too fast i was way too damn fast. i stomped the plate, picked up the bat and walked back to the dugout. my team (my fellow dawgs) the stands, and coach parker were stupified with cheers, laughter, and an overwhelming upsurge of high fives. an absolutely unanimous balls to the wall uproar, the stands went psycho ape for sure. it wasn’t the final inning or anything but those runs were game winners for sure. my grand slam bunt won the game. holy crap.

from blow

"so in the end was it worth it, jesus christ how irreparably changed my life has become, it’s always the last day of summer and i’ve been left out in the cold with no door to get back in. i’ll grant you i’ve had more than my fair share of buoyant moments. life passes most people by while they’re making grand plans for it. throughout my lifetime i’ve left pieces of my heart here and there and now there’s almost not enough to stay alive but i force a smile knowing that my ambition far exceeded my talent, there are no more white horses, or pretty ladies at my door."

sony atrium in manhattan, for ryan

the conversations we hear,
the ones we make,
the personalities we take in,
the identities we put on,
they sit in atriums around circular stainless tables
and make us spin.

if our eyes displayed motives like holographic baseball cards
displaying the connection of ball and bat plus reaction
i doubt we'd walk away unaffected.

keys jingle beats to the beat of my redemption
as i walk from who i was an often innocent convict
and i confess my time was often wasted as a derelict.
so batten down the hatches boys this ship is going down,
check my pockets once you check my pulse
and change it in town for train tickets.

soap and sponges

she is beautiful
and i am myself
so i flit and bumble like a dragonfly does
at the end of the day, when the words are all said
and the water looks black and calm
like the edge of the world
in columbus’ restless daydream
wishing her to walk along beneath the stars

when plans are only cities and streets
i walk about in my size 10 feet
in tattered borrowed shoes
and make endless scattered paths (like ficus roots)
beneath the ground
of my hometown

when thunder clouds appear
in the north and western sky
i pack my tools away
call it a day
and make the drive
back to where i ate my breakfast
where i had my latest sleep
and think about tomorrow
making plans that are all pending
rainless skies

my life is all but soap and sponges
i hope my brother knows how much i love him
in that distant land with trees
and 95 too far to reach
to make a swift strut
into my neck of the woods

the day on the wharf

The day on the wharf, that day I’ll not soon forget. I’ll not soon forget the day on the wharf and all of its simple beauty. Behind retrospect’s veil I can hardly see that moment at the intersection and our inability to assign a captain or cohesively decide on a direction for that matter. I only recall sunlight, sangria, the Hudson, the wharf, the vending counter, and a third party eating cupcakes at the table beside ours and eventually them giving one to Patrick. Moving toward the vending counter where I saw people buying buckets with fruit around the edge and scattered throughout the contents. Candice told me it was sangria and asked if I’d ever had it. There was a moment when I thought to myself, “that’s too much to spend on a pitcher I don’t care how good she says sangria is,” and I nearly turned back, nearly settled for a bucket of Heinekens…nearly. And something now tells me that all that day hinged, and had we not sangria our memories of that day would have slid quickly into that violent abyss, the one with the rotting sign posted a step outside of its descending northern wall, the sign reads- days forgotten (written in blood-colored ink).

It was grace that said “carpe fucking-diem”- shell out thirty dollars for sangria. It, grace, alone knew I’d need that taste to store that memory deep and long enough for a morning like today when I’d wake up fearing that hope is lost, like Father wouldn't take me back smelling like pig-shit and slop.

Pat and I sat back and threw questions like frisbees with limp wrists.
“How’s D.C.?” I’d asked.
“It’s good, how’s Florida?” he’d asked in return.
We obviously didn’t remember to hold them frisbees level and flick, we used too much arm, we tried to muscle it the way kids do when they’re just learning how to throw. And I wonder why even at twenty-five it felt like the right thing to do; like quality or longevity depended on anything but a gentle, level, motion of the wrist to the right, the release of a disk flatly held.

Thankfully our temporary brooklyn resident friends remembered what makes the earth stay in orbit. They knew to enfold one another, to be unrestrained about living well amidst the pain of prodigality. And we all walked on, down the wharf until pat and I took our loving friend's cues about sharing honestly, revealing what lay shivering beneath the surfaces of our frightened minds, letting all of it get bathed and slain in a blood-red sunset.

in these shoes

In these shoes
I gotta walk on stars to keep them looking bright
and one time I kicked and I shattered the moon,
it became those trillion white specs in blacktop
and now when the sun bends ahead of the earth's curve
It instead reflects upward
and illuminates the dark parts of my night

I'm glad you allowed my fingers to be the broom
that sweeps the hair from your eyes
what I didn't know was that you'd not need my sweeping
until some other froze you paralyzed
leaving your face with water-logged eyes
what you didn't know
was that my bristles stick together at times
and far from pleasant are the feelings I don't share
when I see your gaze stare… real close
but just to tantalize… my hopes… of sweeping round the clock
when winters freeze,
and summer's heat,
and fall leaves
beneath your toes weave
a carpet
but you only permit me to be the rake
when I'm willing to come embrace
whatever tapestry you make
and shake the dust (I borrowed that one)

I define forgiveness as hands full of glass shards
Let to fall
while time moves backward at a redemptive pace
to the tune of amazing
And then back forward to the beat of newness
To the tune of grace
Realizing it had been playing all the while
and the glass doesn't fall it fireflies
overtop the black desert of Kuwait's nights
until oil-wells get poked into the earth's crust like light-brights
like a trillion candelabra dropped to the floor
from the ceiling of one of God's corridors
falling into a bursting oil fire from
oil rigs where the shards disintegrate
into whatever it is we become

and these shoes
ah man I'm going to keep walking in these shoes