Postcard 64

I woke today to a discomfited world. The air hung like coal grease and the wind, when it came, was too warm and from al the wrong places: refinery wind, desert strip-mine wind, smelter and kiln wind. I filled myself with this taxing air and my body responded in kind. My back and palms were damp and tacky - what had I touched? My armpits and crotch began a great primordial cultivation, little white pustules and an itch that grew angry with scratching. I got dressed. The news came on like a broken gasket faucet: disease, pestilence, starvation, (I could not turn it off) mass murder, corruption.... My sock fell into my shoe. Great institutions fell like pussy denigration. Leaders cried out like the squirm of eels, leeches, lampreys. Figureheads were the flies on the face of maddened beasts. There was grit in my ear. There was grime and stiff bristled hair in everything I touched, dark and crimped. I went outside but the sun was burning. I felt the cancer crisp up on the rims of my ears. I scratched the inside of my nose and pulled out blood. Death was everywhere, and worse still, pain, and beyond that, discomfort. My loved ones were weak and spiteful. My confidants were liars and cheats. Avarice and malice coated their actions like tar.
Did I ask, where is God in all this? No.
My pulse quickened at mention of rape. My knuckles strained for violence and my spit boiled to tear down.
Not where is god. Where is man?
These are the days when try means try.
Where am I?

Postcard 56

Politics, ugh. What short-memoried hope. Does anything trickle down but fear and hate? Look to the person looked down upon: whom do they look down upon and why? The racist poor, misogyny, well groomed cul de sac households terrified of far off mud hut dwellers. 

The only thing I can hope with is love.  The only thing I have to will is love. The only bravery that can exist is love. Well then what the fuck is love? Its people are persons. Consider the corruption of power. I've always read that from within a group, that power leads to graft and fraud and violence, but those are all external actions that affect the group or the polis. What is really corrupt, like a worm gouged fruit, is a person. A person who, having achieved what they have sought, is pathetic in the insecurity of that false goal. Poor helpless sucker who must resort to ever more desperate, ever more corrupting shoring up of a crumbling edifice about them. If that sounds familiar, it should. On some level that is each of us. 

What the fuck is love? Read The Secret. Just kidding, don't read that crap. But understand it is an exploitation of a real and true and universal thing. Confirmation bias doesn't do it justice. That assumes we are always making judgements. I would say the secret is more of an input filter, a screen or strainer. The world is a horrible dangerous place. So it is, inarguably. The world is an interconnected web of symbiotes. True! The world is inexplicable spirit. Of course! The world is a series of chance probabilities. You are clearly right. But we see one and exclude the others and start rattling with cognitive dissonance like an old car going too fast down the highway. We are all fooling ourselves with certainty and its terrifying to not. 

What the fuck is love? Its right in front of you. Can you vote for it?