sonnets & vignettes…the ghosts of gnosis…collateral damage…prose, prozetry & leftover poems on love, nature, the passing scene…sometimes mystical, sometimes philosophical, largely agnostic.
Lions don’t make war
on gazelles – although they could.
They’d rather just have ONE for lunch
.
That irresistably beautiful tabby
you love with all your human heart
has no compunction about eating
the runt of her own litter
.
Man fances himself
wise and kind-hearted
but is he even as intelligent
as a cat?
all my life
I’ve heard diverse preachers preach
that every man’s born wanting
to reach out and touch
some piece of truth or other –
that we all have this need to believe
.
well, if’s that is so, I think
y’all should know that that
makes humanity in its entirety
pretty damn vulnerable
to exploitation concerning
diverse brandsof horsefeathers
.
we are a race of easy marks
for the charlatans and the sharks
.
There’s a sucker born every minute?
P.T.Barnum’s brain was reptillian
so his calculation mighta been off
by as much as a billion
.
.
It is primative
beyond belief
to imagine that
in order to survive
everything else
must be wiped out,
exterminated –
that negotiation
is inferior to
annihilation
.
I believe in Goodness –
or call it Love
or Understanding…
Intelligence, whatever…
the antithesis of evil
.
Temperance
is its prophet…
among other
sacred attitudes
of moderation
.
Kindness is better
to honour than
some divinity who seems
to never answer
.
To think a tree
has less right to exist
than a fruitless
you or me…
or a goat, or
a foreigner
.
The naming of things
the separating –
compartmentalization –
is the origin of alienation;
for in so doing
we’ve ripped the thread
that is ourselves
from the tapestry
.
Hubris originates
in so-called monotheism:
the insistance that
words on a parchement
are god and my god
can piss farther
than yours.
.
.
Time’s twisted shank
eternally out-of-joint –
rank, the stench leaking through
russet blood-stained sands
spilled out a cracked glass…
and rape a globalized sport
.
Hopeless women
helpless shadows –
mere smudges
but for sighing complaint
.
But I will not sham decree
man’s consort any better
’cause they ain’t!
So soon do they offer
their loins for future rounds
of the Flanders Field game
I feel they put the mindlessness
of masculinity to shame.
.
What a piece of work is Man ?
a fervent butcher, bone-cracker
meat-packer to the jeering crowd
turning every Eden to stockyard
nailing a victim to a barn door
like some hapless owl. . .
and women are no less foul.
.
§
.
Noted in the margins: it grows daily more difficult
to believe in my own species!
Did you know those Italian guys
who called the cop in the skies Jupiter,
also called their emperors pontif?
Kinda makes ya wonder, doesn’t it..a
nd if it doesn’t it should!
.
Popes, princes, rajas –
is any not an oligarch?
and every sort of crowned
and uncrowned monarch
supports the status quo –
part of the job, you know,
their shared vocation –
to maintain their position
by reinforcing subjugation –
and history shows
they were all of them pros
at the trick of collective hypnotization
.
Religion keeps the poor man on his knees,
even the out-of-a-job treated like employees
and terrorized by assorted divinities,
while clerics appease with hollow promise,
ridicule the sane (hence, doubt-filled)Thomas.
They unrelentingly sow fear of annihilation
throughout every goddamn congregation
.
Divide and conquer; divide and rule
Religions are designed and used as a tool
and if you don’t see it – buddy, you’re a fool.
.
§
.
Noted in the margins: I know: I keep saying the same stuff over and over!
.
.
A sort of eulogy for those who have died prematurely
It was when Roz died that I knew
I no longer believed in god.
Not that god anyway –
The resurection thing.
.
Going over it in my mind
I can see her death as the final nail
in the theistic coffin – belief
had finally taken hold (somewhere
in the bowels of my being)
that ashes to ashes was it.
Period. No second go.
No Easter bunny bullshit.
.
There is a reason for everything?
No there isn’t. A cause isn’t a reason.
When a pig lines up behind a chicken
one has not produced the other.
.
Lapsed catholic meet community-shifting Jew:
we had found each other in protestanism. Litterally:
a kids’ summer camp in Pennsylvannia.
I had the better voice, but I never sang holy holy holy
as good as she did. I think she really got off
on bellowing the god-in-three persons bit.
.
So much more could be said, but I’ll leave it
with Nietzsche: without music
life would just be a mistake
.
§
.
Noted in the margins: spoke three languages,
played more than one instrument, worked for several
humanitarian causes…why is she gone and I’m still here?
.
.
.
No no, that’s not what I meant he said, as he looked and saw…
saw that it was Not-Good-At-Tall. Hadn’t been what he’d intended for quite awhile, in fact, and now here were all these dreadful dumb creatures just ripping the shit out of each other… and where it stood now, the biggest was uprooting everything green just to feed his fat belly! So The Inventor grabbed the nearest stone [a pebble the size of jupiter] and hurled it down, down and that was the end of that version!
[These things just come to me, guys, no more believeable than any other freaky revelation – but no less either, I’d say. And at least I haven’t got epilepsy…far as I know]
And so it came to pass that The Inventor left to give his chosen planet time to cook up some new species. By way of natural selection, of course. I mean, he didn’t have time to dream up all the kinds it would take to make a world! Too busy working on those black holes the wannabe inventors move around in. Lissen: the oldest covenant was with the deathicists. A Virgin-Covenant-type thingy. The next covenant would be more a more realistic Eternal Life concept.
The first man to even half understand that last covenant was a semi-literate tradesman from a hamlet near a body of water rather pretentiously called a sea …but then the lame always do outstrip the blind, don’t they. He was the first born into this virgin turf. He tried to tell everyone about things but they got nearly all of it wrong and dozens of people falsified and anyone with any real power could see the advantage of latching on to this idea – and you know those Flavians, eh: never pass up a chance at a scam.
The original ideas, of course, were scrapped in favour of a heavy reliance on unverifiable promisses: more unverifiable than this is, like, housing lots in Florida. [What? You’re dead and nothing happened? So sue me!] Anyway, the Virgin idea became a virgin girl because…they all forgot that the so-called unclean girl was just another ribdame and everything gets mixed up with coded names and earthly covenants and deathicist demons. [Please. Don’t ask me to explain further or we’ll be here all day.] In that covenant – The Inventor’s virgin covenant – it all had to do with an uninterruped survival of virtual identities. of people. dogs. anything slick enough to even have an identiy. dolphins. elephants. but mostly monkeys…
Ya know this stuff just gets played out in slight variations over and over.[and over and over] One day. Maybe. They [He? She? What do I know.] will get it right.
Order into chaos is the law
of everything there is – or ever was.
That cloud on the horizon is its paw
the giant paw – and we know what it does!
.
Relentlessly, it drawe us like a claw
Order into chaos is the law
and strips us of illusion ’til we’re raw
and ready for its unforgibing maw
.
The gnashing of its teeth, the hammer jaw
that grinds us into dust to blow away
Order into chaos is the law
So do not waste a single precious day
.
Look around you and do what you can
try to live in peace – in love – in awe
or waste your time – poor sad, deluded man
Order into chaos is the law
.
§
.
Noted in the margins: there is a name for this dropdown form,
but I’ll be damned if I know what it is.
the greatest story ever told
beneath my sternum lies
beside it, all the laws of physics
seem so patently less wise
.
the breadth and depth of this one
TRUTH, lies dormant in the hearts of men
the love they share yet do not know
until they’re truly born again
.
no, do not wince – no reference here
to politics of any stripe
[the rubbish that is spewed in church
is truly so much awful tripe]
.
I speak of that which rules the earth
the planets – all that is – of LOVE –
the force that holds the stars in place
much as a hand fits in a glove
.
It’s not romance or wedding rings
this quantum glue that is concealed
within all seeming separate things –
Know that, and every wound is healed!
..
It’s weird to know, yet not to know
that we are one – though kingdoms fall
There never was a rising sun
that did not set on one and all.
.
The closest that men come to TRUTH
does seem to be a union blessed –
but that is just a clue to more!
[I do wish man would seek the rest!]
.
§
.
Noted in the margins: **from a poem by e.e.cummings
My father was a pinko
and my mother (who worked
in Manhattan and had riding
boots but no horse) well, she was
whatever was chic that week.
I was born in the Bronx
so whenever a Jew tries his
You don’t know what it
means to be a minority…on me
I’ve been known to say:
Blow it out the other way.
The only other goy in my class
was the Irish Catholic super’s oaf.
Green teeth and thick as a brick.
Azoy…azoy..and lately I’ve been thinking
my native language is really yiddish.
Until I was ten, I thought the lions
in all those wide-screen epics
had finished off that breakaway jewish sect..
.
And in a way, they did. With the
possible exceptions of Francis of Assisi,
Gandhi, and a handful of
Quakers in sandals (who travel like
a school of fish and are often seen holding
candles worthy of a sabbath seder)
I don’t know any serious followers
of rabbi Yeshoua.
.
§
.
Noted in the margins: me? I’m the last of the red hit Ebionites.😎
.
.
Counter-catechisms 