Postcard 85

When they came for me, it was late night like always. They awoke me from a recurring dream. Do not ask them why they don't sleep nights. Inquiries only makes them hit harder. I do not care if they have guilt (if they did, they should quit).They have only been waiting for the freedom. Law makes for insipid morality.
When they threw me in the room, I was happy. That bright windowless room. I wanted to lick the walls. I wanted to taste the blood, the sweat, the piss of my dream family. Only the worthy pass through those rooms. Only the worthy are pulled out of bed, are stripped, are truncheoned. Only the worthy are up to answering their impossible questions. They may be dumb as pigs, but somehow they can sniff out the worthy. I could not lick those slick shining walls, chained as I was to the table, but when my teeth flew out and onto the floor, I grinned.
I was the least of these. The beauty of a true pride, the confused, the innocent, the weary fighters, the blood-handed and the bargaining.
This is the recurring dream that wakes me as they come already, not yet arriving. Every bullet, every rubber hose and pipe, every noose, every cane field, every open airplane has found its true mark on the best of us.
Is it true?
I sit up in bed and turn on the bright lights and look around at the history that flow and I swear that I will do whatever I do, and I will risk, as I must, with love. The only thing that counts worthwhile.

Postcard 79

We are always dying down in steerage -- have always been.
Here's another myth: The captain goes down with the ship.
You travel both on the backs of stevedores in sweat-black walls,
and star-eyed dreamers in sky-less holds,
fire bolted and contained,
water always finding seams.
We are down with the steam.
We are always dying down in steerage --
Hatches closed on water persistent.
Hatches closed on fire unloosed.
Hatches closed on bursting boilers.
Hatches closed on our echoing songs.
We see sky when dead on deck, when over-rail dumped.
Who are the uncounted numbers and who are the names?
We are the heartbeat down in steerage, the piston thud, the hum of driving screw.
We are whomever you call rat: the dago spic queers, the Jews, the junkies, chinks, fags the blacks.
We are the fire behind the hatch. The fluid and the flame, the artist fighters, the exposed wires.
Always dying down in steerage -- always have and always will,
but this ship is a ghost ship, and we hold sway behind hatches
where we hide your wonder and the power,
behind hatches where wanders your desire.
Behind and beneath in the coal-black fires.
While you move over waters, we move through seas.
We are always dying down in steerage -- may always be,
but we are living ripe, dying but pregnant, alive but oddly free.

Postcard 78

What am I to do? 

What am I to do? 

What are we to do in the aloneness of survive? 

Screens up, bags packed on that old tendonitis shoulder. That old to the wheel soreness. The queue wraps upon itself and its the same old faces by the time we are at the front, by the time we are at the end looking back at that old tempered glass just waiting for a blast, holding all that old energy, just waiting for a blast. 

What are we to do? 

All the pillars, reinforced, are burning slow inside with rust. It takes its toll to be alive - did that face just say? There is a final rest in being gone, but here we are moving , moving along. And that other face - is it not as tense as glass, as weak as rust? 

Us survivors we survive and wonder at reasons why, or what or how, or even who - who will survive us now? 

A bank of fire is rust sped up. A shattered glass is tension let. And these old bones must hold up skies, hold up the whole old firmament. 

What are we to do? 

Take off your shoes, you're at the front, pass through. 

These uniforms hold nothing back - each face the fractured wonder and the grief of survive and why? and why and why and why

Postcard 75

The woman had made empty promises with an honest deceit. To each other they had a scratch-deep desire. He walked away from her, internal in the tumult of the carnival. She was rich on his fingers but cool in his heart. Somehow, after blocks of ambling, his friend Joshua found him. How did he find him in the crowd and chaos of carnival? It is one of the indecipherable mysteries -- perhaps God's own hand, perhaps random chance, fate and coincidence, perhaps the bond between best friend beloveds. "He's dead," Joshua said, "come." Without explanation, he turned and the young man had no choice but to follow. They entered the gate, the old wood door and climbed the stone steps to the study. There, the body was being prepared by four priests while a wizened old rabbi looked on. The young man was shocked. It was not the old Rebbe, but Joshua's father who had died. The young man felt himself standing, alienated, outside the stained glass temple doors for the elaborate funeral ceremonies. When the doors opened and the procession to the grave passed him, the young man made the sign of the cross toward the body. It was as if he did not exist. Later that night, while Joshua mourned his father, and the young man felt helplessly adrift, the old Rebbe came to him and took him to kneel by the fire. From his robes he produced many esoteric objects foreign to both their faiths. He uttered strange quiet words and preformed subtle ceremonies. They sat there, upon their knees, genuflecting before a small fire in a cold dark room full of useless books. The young man began sobbing. He sobbed and sobbed desperately. Though they did not speak, the Rebbe spoke without speaking, "This is our atonement."

Postcard 72

There was a woman who spoke only music. I say 'was' because she is gone now. I say 'music' because that is what came out of her, not words sung, no words. Not just humming, though hum she did, and whistle and click and clack and spit and sigh and warble and sing in any way you might imagine a person would make music without words, and many you would not because your imagination is not up to the task, bound as it is by words and syntax. That is how she would communicate, call and respond anyway. Her teachers, when she had them as a girl, were more than sympathetic. They were not martinets and she filled them with awe and wonder. She's not doing what she should, they would say, but we let her be, so unique and wondrous a child. The system of school, however, could not tolerate her and she was made to leave. Many people could understand the girl, a young woman by then. People from all walks of life: teachers, children, engineers, trash-men, doctors, fast-food-window workers, it did not really matter. Some did, some did not. There was no rhyme or reason, just a facility of reason open to her tones and rhythms. So it was perhaps just a series of misfortunes that led her through the people who would decide her fate, destroy her. The first was the social services worker who decided she needed to be evaluated, and who grew more resolute in her decision as the singing woman voiced her dissent in angry stochastic melody. Next was the evaluating clinician who could hardly be blamed for her evaluation, for her subject's songs grew confused and dis-harmonic in response to the dizzying evaluation questions. Of course, one could blame the sadistic operators of the institution that held the woman, who's neglect and torment tortured angry bellowing opuses out of her, filling the halls and rooms with ominous climbing and descending adagios. When they broke the woman, when she took her life, only the ignorant laundrywoman heard the haunting song.

Postcard 65

One of these mornings, some fine morning, we're going to go down. Down on to those waters, yes we're going to clean those waters like a swarm. Oh, we're going to filter those waters like oysters, like mussel clusters, like a host of shrimp. One of these mornings, oh its gonna come, that fine day, we're gonna go down to that shore. We're gonna give that boatman. that old ferry man, we're gonna give him a brand new silver dollar not to take us anywhere. That ferryman's gonna leave us there. One of these mornings we're gonna dig down in that mud with our naked toes. We're gonna lay down a new foundation . Oh we're gonna dig down in that mud like clams and lay a new foundation with our bones. Oh that lovely blessed day, we're gonna put up new walls smooth and white. We're gonna put up bleach white walls, pure and bright. Bright as that new day. One fine morning, some fine morning, we're gonna go down. We're gonna go down to our new houses shining in the blessed sun. Our star-roofed houses will have many rooms, each bigger than the next. Oh on that day, our houses will be ours. One of these days, we'll toss that poor ol' ferryman a bag of pearls. And then, oh then -- one of these fine mornings coming down, we're gonna lift up that house. Oh, we're gonna lift up our homes in this world. We're gonna lift up our new homes and we're gonna walk right on away.

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 48

I, too, am a member of the cult of fear, the cult of death. I go to the movies, stare at the glowing palloring screens numb and disinterested, play solitaire, watch the news, vote. 

I'm camping in the Serro Alto, a strip of coastal California wilderness. It is raining and the mighty Pacific dresses the rain with fog. The night before, I dreamt of my family and me, together, in a car on the highway -- in a car getting slowly crushed in a rock-slide. The next day, I drove ten miles into town to get some dry fire wood. My phone chattered to life. 

David Bowie was dead.

With dropping stomach, I considered the context: he had recently opened a Broadway play, I had celebrated his sixty-ninth birthday at midnight days before with the First Church of the Sacred Silversexual, and he had concurrently released an album I had yet to hear! 

Here is what I dreamt that night as the nearby stream muttered like barely audible voices in a slightly off-balanced mind: I was there as I camped in that valley. The stream and the steep high hills were there and night had fallen, moonless. Satellites traced faint paths across the sky and bats did likewise, like dark empty meteors. Then, the void of the bats condensed and thickened. The dark silhouette of the skyline gained an awful substance like the idea of a pit of tar without the tar itself. As before, the sky remained indifferent and filled with stars. Red lights rocketed to exotic planets: desert planets, cities, fantasy planets. I could hear their rumbles. A huge and grotesque form grew out of the dark and empty skyline. Bulky on tall spindly legs, it slouched toward me and grew. I felt like a small animal surrounded by fire. Freeze or flee, both in vain desperation. I froze. Perhaps it would not notice me. 

And then, oh then, one of those rockets grew brighter and burned not red, but electric blue. It flew right through the horrible vacancy which shattered like tempered glass. Light flooded me, blinding as the ship landed. The hatch steamed open and out stepped David Bowie, beckoning. 

"I have left," he said, "Come with me." 

How I yearned to go with him. 

"I can't"

"Come," he pleaded with love but without desperation. 

." You killed yourself. Its alright, but you killed yourself and I cant go with you."

A classroom of kindergarteners was murdered today

Tragedy is a word I've heard a lot today. Its not a very powerful word, comes standard in news broadcasts and political recognitions. Aside from its acquired vulgarity, it is an individual experience, as I understand it. There were twenty eight tragedies dealt quickly and countless following that. I am searching for a word, something that indicates the ragged gash that was torn.
An anguish. A cluster of anguishes.
I sobbed all day, the newsman reporting over the radio sobbed, the policeman in charge sobbed, the president addressing the nation did too. The sobs were an admission that it does not matter. It does not matter that the president stopped leading the world to recognize a local horror. It does not matter that the policemen were securing schools across the state and securing warrants. It does not matter that a reporter pried for details to deliver up to the minute about an event that was finished. It does not matter that a man's heart was broken for hearing it.
It does not matter because it is done. A roomful of the most magical brightness and promise has been snubbed out by one person who must surely have lost all that and been in so much pain. I hope that the poor young man gets to a heaven where each of his victims come to him to forgive him before they all melt back to the infinite.

As for the living, we remain. Twenty sets of limbless parents with impossible tomorrows. Classrooms full of miraculous brightnesses tarnished. Teachers returning to do what they do not know. A community grappling with shameful relief and clumsy support. Policemen searching cause for reasonlessness, seeking to punish a ghost. Politicians, perhaps honestly, expressing empathies doomed to course policy scufflings.  And even the killer, someone must have loved him and if not, someone surly should have.

A man across the nation, trying to bypass the bromides of sympathy, trying to find scope of an event that has affected him but that he cannot affect. A common man sharing common feelings. Trying to stop sobbing for a blip of horrors amongst horrors, knocking together a crude assemblage of words for what?

I have a message, and it is not mine but it is in my own words:  With compassion, you cannot know a person without loving them. It is our reason in this world, to seek that compassion always, to strive. And it is also our duty, good people, to strive to be more easily loved, but mostly to endeavor to love those who do not or maybe can not.

Well, I was the Chappy

And I probably took it too seriously and not seriously enough. Not sure for whom - but that's my impression. I'm totally fine with that self -assessment.
I started by thinking about where I was  going and who would be there - the redwoods with a bunch of UU's. I am not a UU. UU's are interesting folk. It would be difficult to make many generalizations but there are definitely some broad impressions that I wont make here. UU's in the woods. The woods are gentle sentinels of a medium permanency and a solid hint of decay.

Day 1 - I have to do opening circle? Oh crud I forgot about that! Public speaking, round one, in the round, unprepared. You try it.
Day 2 -Well, work with what's on hand. Take comfort in trees' place of primacy in my personal metaphysicilology. Trees, each growing as it grows in its place and time, each its own potential perfection reached as each is able. As we should aspire.
Day 3 - And then they bend down and die, as we all do. What terror - we walk around on decay and consumption, we squander life on trivialities and avoid death like public speaking. To what end? What will be a reason in three or four generations, or planetary generations, galactic. I bet it doesn't even matter - shiver. The horror is our true place and mystery. What do we do with that? How the hell should I know, but we are not served by ignoring it.
I did a memorial service that day. It was easy to prepare for, as I recalled my grandmother's service from two weeks prior, at which I spoke briefly. I said similar things. I don't mean that flippantly.
That day was emotionally exhausting
Day 4 - Carnival - I take that meaning to heart. Speak on non-sense, as nonsensically as the attendants might tolerate. I would have produced some dada had I the moxy. Revel in the new moon, warm lodge, general feeling of abandon, and what I am going to just refer to here as a mythic. Self made Bull mask is well served and served well.
Day 5 - I missed service. Heard it was good. Dammit, had been laying in bed rewriting the entire thing and time got away from me.
Day 6 - Closing circle. Well prepared with new service from day before. Might have figured something out about Liberal UU and Faith. The word makes them uncomfortable but they have it. Its the response to the solitude of individuality, to the the awe and terror of indifferent nature, to the absurdity of things that is either comedy or tragedy. Faith that our actions matter. We are more than digestors, procreators and consumers. We are actors in a drama that may have no other audience than us, but us is enough and what we do matters and we know what to do. We do the best we can. Sometimes how is muddled but the what is pretty clear. Faith that we can do good and that it matters.

So that was that. I got all my books back - hopefully with some interesting notes.
I heard a podcast today that I thought did a much better job of everything except corporeally being in Mendocino at the appropriate time. I cant figure out how to link it up but its worth a listen. Its a speaker from the Personal Theology lectures held at UUCB (swear I'm not UU) from back in 2010. The speaker is Sam Keen and the title of the lecture was Elemental Sacred Emotions. I agree with every single word he said and would have said them if I could.

You Can't Have It All (but you can have quite a lot)

My Daughter woke up crying this morning about five - maybe a nightmare. I had spent the evening prior with a bottle of wine attempting to revivify old vital fluids, so it was not the most welcome. It was redundant however. The wine had failed and I was already awake nursing the anxiety attack i went to bed with. We had our morning together. The anxiety was about my inability, so far, to find purchase in the material world, and to secure for my family their place and safety in it. There is a part of me that sees farther than that, that knows security is as illusory as survival is luck. But a broad perspective does not feed mouths. It was a growing anxiety as I realized I had to do something to make my day move foreword somehow toward something but could not grasp - grasping as I was - what I could do. So, without direction we started our day. It is astonishing how a two year old can focus you to the moment. The moment does not feed mouths either, but it keeps you going.  Thank you my toddling little beacon of light My sister called me early into that day. She sounded quite down as she often does and I am glad I did not make a crack about that. She was calling me because my mother was unable. My grandmother had died; my mother was shrouded in grief. Thank you kid sister for your compassion and bravery. Eventually I spoke with my mom. My grandmother, who had suffered a stroke a bit over a year ago, had run a bath and gone unconscious with the water running and had drowned. My grandfather found her. My mother expressed concern for my youngest brother who is finishing his last month of college and lives alone. You all, my mom said, have people who love you for support and he is all alone. I offered to finish making calls to siblings and did so. Everyone loves each other. Everyone seems to be feeling the current of the inevitable and the helplessness to help each other. I am grieving in such a subtle way I barely apprehend. My grandmother is gone. She was fortunate to have lived so flu and long and to have made such a big and loving family. I have been fortunate to have had all my grandparents with me into my thirties, to know my children in their first decade. I am being visited by memories and by my slight perception of her as a being. She danced on couches with my mom singing "step in time", she accompanied my grandfather on missions and trips all around the world, she took me up to her sewing room at every visit to see her magnificent quilts and jars of buttons and water colors and stained glass and whatever else she was tackling with the effortlessness of a savant, she played cards at the table andante on walks in the woods and had a little mountain garden and knew the frogs that would come out of the frost each year. She was the wry and round little (5'1") grandma with the drawer of sweets. The subtle feminine play and creation to my grandfather's masculine godhead. We write our own myths with our own inhabitations I am worried about my grandfather. They were married for over sixty-five years. I will not see him until the funeral and I fear he will be a different person. I fear he will not remain much longer. He has had his life as well, so that is my fear. I worry about my mom, the baby of the family and the black sheep, losing her mother, one leg from under her and my little sixteen year old sister trying to shoulder that. and my brothers and I wanting to be what we all imagine we should be, the steady bind, beside our own grief, support for everyone, not from machismo, but from love that everyone should be able to actually have their experience with abandon over the safety of a love. So not machismo, but the hubris that we can handle it so that others don't have to. Thank you my daughter again and my wife for going on a bike ride with me because I don't know what could have been better. Thank you wife for the poem - You Can't Have It All
by Barbara Ras
But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back. You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August, you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love, though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys until you realize foam's twin is blood. You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs, so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind, glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness, never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you all roads narrow at the border. You can speak a foreign language, sometimes, and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead, but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts, for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream, the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand. You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed, at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise. You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump, how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards, until you learn about love, about sweet surrender, and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you, you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept. There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's, it will always whisper, you can't have it all, but there is this. In the scheme of the world the loss of a grandparent is not so much, and it is a gift that it is not, because I am not in a wailing tomb of despair. I am seeing the little lens that I have of this one life in my life and the magnificence of it and I am seeing in the little lens of my loss, the great losses of others and can shed that love on them. There is not so much to grieve for me - a well lived life, long and full of losses and regrets and love and creation and many many people to grieve her. Thats quite a lot from our meagre grant of time Thank you grandma for being the only person you could have been. It was pretty amazing Also, she loved John Denver. i have been listening to that all day and also rediscovered eels album I lost in the fire.