On Fear and Love

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love. 1st John: 4:18 NRSV

Fear and anxiety run rampant in my family tree and I'm no exception. I've struggled with these dark impulses since my earliest childhood. When these impulses are turned inward they result in depression, when turned outward they usually result in violence towards others, and quite often towards those who are closest to you. It can also show up in non-physically violent ways, but emotionally and mentally/spiritually destructive passive-aggressive behaviors. I'm a black belt on that front.

Fear based decision making is always short term, but typically has long term consequences. When you're raised in a chaotic and unstable environment, whether economically or psychologically/sociologically, you constantly make decisions to help you get through the moment. You don't have the time or energy to think further than that. That's just one more luxury you can't afford. That knot in your stomach or the stress migraine in the back of your head are there for a reason. It's your body's natural and normal reaction to real life stresses and threats happening right before your eyes and ears.

In one sense of course fear is a fundamentally natural and necessary part of being alive. Without a healthy fear of real dangers we'd all die very quickly. Being entirely fearless is to be completely foolish. It'd be the same as being unable to feel pain and subsequently becoming infected and losing more and more body parts to leprosy. I certainly don't suffer from that. The scripture I quoted above deals with one aspect of fear, the punishment side, which Evangelicals and Fundamentalists are expert at. They like to joke about how Jews and Catholics are so similar because they're both so driven by religious guilt, and of course there is some truth to that. But Evangelicals and Fundamentalists are experts on fear; fear of hell, fear of heterodoxy/heresy, fear of a vengeful god holding you over the pit of hell like a loathsome spider, fear of Satan, fear of our own bodies and human desires, etc., etc.

Fear of loss runs throughout my family, myself included, and with good reason, but with terrible consequences. I've lost housing and experienced homelessness. I've lost many friends, including the love of my life Gwenn, to untimely deaths. I've even lost multiple opportunities because of a fear of loss. How ironic is that? One of the other devastating side effects of a fear of loss is hoarding. After being homeless for five months when I was 21 I always swore I was going to live as minimalist life as possible because I saw what hoarding looked like with with my depression era grandmother and my mom, neither of whom could bear to throw anything away, to the point of looking like an episode of the reality TV show Hoarders. I have an old friend who cannot stand to even accidentally catch a glimpse of that show because it's physically painful for her to watch, because she sees herself in those characters.

Hoarding as a reaction to fear of loss isn't just a physical behavior of not being able to let go of almost any object, it can and often does lead to emotional and even spiritual hoarding. The threat of loss can be as suffocating as someone trying to strangle you to death; it's that physically tangible. My mother who I loved deeply struggled with every aspect of this fear of loss. Not long after my birth my father almost strangled my mother to death, but the times being what they were, he wasn't arrested for it. Instead she ended up in a psychiatric hospital for months, getting barbaric electro-shock "therapy" to erase her memories of his brutal abuse. I can't watch the film One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest because of how close to reality it is for my family. For years after that I would ask my mother about various famous/infamous events from the late 1960's and she'd repeatedly tell me that she had no recollection of any of them because they'd all been erased from her memory. No memory of the Moon landing. No memory of the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy or Doctor King. Very few memories of even my own growing up in my earliest childhood as I went through multiple surgeries to correct my cleft lip and pallet, learned to walk and talk, attending my first days of school, etc.

It was a several year long mental black hole for my mother. And even after that period, the ECT was replaced with multiple years of brutal psychiatric drugs combined with her newly developed alcoholism. When you've been traumatized this badly, you sate your pain anyway you can. I still remember the look and smell of the psychiatric hospital we'd go to when she would attend her monthly out-patient follow-ups. Sometimes she couldn't take me when she needed in-patient care, and my older sister would look after me at home. One time I screamed so loud and kicked so hard as my mom walked away from our house that I broke my sister's toe by flinging the pair of old metal roller skates I was wearing. I understand why ECT is sometimes necessary for many folks because of how indelibly these memories are imprinted in our minds. They never really go away.

Anyone who has gone through therapy or any 12 step program (I've done both many times) knows all too well about the many different coping mechanisms we use to get through each and every day. Reactive behaviors are remarkably diverse; ranging from alcoholism, drug abuse, porn addiction, binge buying, hoarding, sexual promiscuity, over eating/starving, cutting/self-harm, suicidal ideation/attempts, emotional and physical violence towards loved ones and strangers, and the sad list goes on.

Obviously this isn't unique to me or my family. This is a massive social problem cutting across class, race, gender, ethnicity and orientation. When I worked in social work in NYC, and later on in Michigan for a short while, I saw each and every one of these behaviors among my clientele. And I would dare to say that in almost every single case these men, women, trans, children and elderly, experienced one, or typically more than one, severe trauma in their background, and the earlier it happened, the more deeply and indelibly ingrained these reactive behaviors were in all of them. The traumas are just as diverse as the reactions to them. It could be homelessness, sexual abuse including rape (the vast majority of my clientele were sexually abused when they were young, both male and female), being in war, losing loved ones to suicide or murder, and like above, this list can go on and on.

The reason I'm writing this essay today is that I'm supposed to be in NYC right now getting a lay of the land about housing and work starting the beginning of next year, but instead I'm still in my soon to be vacant apartment on campus paralyzed by fear and anxiety about driving the five plus hours to Staten Island, NY and revisiting so much difficult personal history. That, and my writing is my self therapy which has literally kept me alive over the years. My mother, to her credit, also used her poetic writing to help her get through her darkest times. It was a life saver to her too. I've definitely inherited her poetic Muse, having written several hundred poems in the course of my own life. It's truly saved my life many times over and it did the same for her and some other members of my family.

Thankfully, there are also an incredibly diverse set of options in overcoming fear and anxiety available to us. They can be writing as it is for me and many others, it can be other artistic expressions, whether painting/drawing, dancing, music, hiking/running, meditation, service to others, belonging to various groups whether religious or secular (this one's hugely important), and yes, therapy and sometimes even proper medication.

Overcoming severe anxiety and fear is never easy. It just isn't. And sometimes you can't just "pray it away" in some facile way. In fact, that advice often has the exact opposite effect on the people most in need of help, insofar as when "praying it away" doesn't work, it ends up leaving the person in much worse shape, mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, because they end up blaming themselves and even God. Good Christians and other people of faith have succumbed to this despair and darkness because this leaves them feeling even more isolated and alone than when they started out. I know this fact first hand in my own life, whether my own dark impulses about myself or of many friends, near and far, some of whom have confided in me about their own struggles on this front.

And when I use the term "front" I'm being intentional. This is a war within, a war against yourself. But every war has two sides (at least), and you have within you another side to this war which sees you/me as loving and deserving of love. And there are people (and animals by the way) near and far who believe the same about you/me. Make allies with this part of yourself and with others who love you exactly as you are.

I love you and me. I need to remind myself of this deep truth. In the words of Robert DeNiro in Brazil, as the terrorist plumber, "We're all in this together." Also, this version works too.

Escaping Town

Stuck.
It's who I am.
Standing in the mud
immobile.

Like a nightmare dream
slogging and impossibly
immobile.

You're back there
never to escape
inexplicably trapped
in the same damned place.

You keep haunting me
every single night
Haunting Me
Every Single Night.

Stinky Footed Lover

I love you more than words could ever say

Every dragon imagined I would slay

Please stay, please stay, please stay



But your feet stink in bed and I don't think

I can find it in my heart to say

My nose is something you daily slay

but do please stay anyway.



Your breath sometimes leaves something to be desired

as I desire you more than anything I've ever known before

Your dietary desires often leave me wishing

a breath mint was in your vocabulary

But don't you dare go away.



Because you will always be my stinky footed lover

Silhouetted in the darker corners of my black and white world

Leaning into embraces filled with traces of color

Emblazened with a mutual history of mistakes

Known and unknown, we see through a glass darkly

Even of ourselves.



Somehow we still manage to see each other through our blind spots

Glimmering hints of who we are to ourselves and each other

As we lie next to each other alone together

Naked and afraid through this long dark night

of love and fear, holding tight to something we both barely grasp

And yet, as I lie alongside you in this thick darkness

Please stay, please stay, please stay my stinky footed lover.

Easter Sunday

She wore a very pretty dress, slightly revealing. The church lady commented on how it was slightly revealing in judgmental tones.
She was right of course, but that's what I love about her. Slightly revealing cleavage as she wore her skepticism out loud. She questioned her received Catholic wisdom with some trepidation.

Tonight we saw each other and knowingly glanced at each other again across the restaurant cash register. She's a registered voter now and asked about Tuesday's ballot questions. Her knowledge of the issues is incredibly sexy. And she asked me about my thoughts. I appreciated that from her. She's wise beyond her years.

She reminds me of Gwenn in so many ways.

Fragrance

Purple colors smell of your scent
Fragrant of the closeness of you
Close to me

Kneeling only slightly
Into you and me
As we lie together
alone

Skins of Animals

I wrap myself in the skins of animals
Enfolding me
Keeping me warm
In their Death Shrouds

Sacrificial Lambs
Worn and torn
Wearing thin
As the ages pass

Sheltered until the knife digs deep
Slicing away my skin
So someone else
Might feel my old warmth

Smile in your sleep
As you slumber underneath
My hide and seek hide
Sleeps

I'm Not Famous Yet, but Tomorrow

It feels so good to walk down the street
unimpeded by adoring fans seeking
my visage and signature.
Basking in the glow of my
imagined radiance replete
and supposedly complete.

But some day soon a viral infection
reflecting lack of self reflection
will flashback to me
with a modicum of self introspection
a sectional disconnection from
any intersectionality.

The Manipulative Poor Townsman

I'm a wise man, or so they tell me. I've seen so much evil in my life. The stories I could and often do tell are legion. I try to resist evil, I really do. My personal baggage is the wisdom those around me think they see. Stories. I tell stories. Over and over and over again. In most of them I'm the good guy. It makes sense after all. You'd do the same I'm almost certain. Tales told, or as my student friends and occasional acolytes like to say, "story time with John" is about to happen. That temptation is toxic.

He arrives at the wise man's door, pleading for mercy. And he needs it. God knows he needs it. He has a story to tell the wise man about his suffering. The things that have happened to him over his lifetime are beyond belief, yet all too terribly true. True tales, terribly told to ringing ears willing to hear.

A Lifetime of Experiences

Stories I can tell
tales of heaven and hell
None of them believable
yet all too true.

Murderers and saints
friends all

Every new semester
a new crop of
"Stories with John"
happens to the new initiates.
I learn their stories too.
And they add to mine
by being a part of my life.

Ridiculous and beautiful
every one.

Pretty Dress

I never saw you wear a pretty dress
slip slightly showing
sneakers on your feet
one shoelace still untied.

Your figure has always been
figurative
figuring you out has always been
inexhaustible.

You always knew that the jeans that you wore
with the holes were sexy as shit
destructive to my spiritual well being
for, well, you already know why
you already know why.

Pills

Prescribed to death
sentenced to an equivalency
of perspectival self blindness.

Milligrams sold by the pound
pounding down till the sounds
are drowned away.

Inexplicable explications selaciously
selling damnable explanations.

You sell heaven, but deliver hell
smelling of sulfur all too well.

Fragrant senses sensing smells tense
smell realities all too familiar.

Prescribed realities describe this diatribe.

Glittering Illiterati

Flagrant allegations insinuating
implications implicating
Failing flailing imaginations.

Falsifying notions of impending accusations
excusing evil never ending. Expectations flagrant expecting
expectations flailing about, situationally
unsure.

Certainty sailing forth
in the midst of lies.
Sailing in seas over the edge
of the existential falls.

Epistemic certainties fall
as every verity is called into question
and falsity is equated with truth
with every Trumped pronouncement.

Flagrant allegations insinuating
implications implicating
Failing flailing imaginations.

Falsifying notions of impending accusations
excusing evil never ending. Expectations flagrant expecting
expectations flailing about, situationally
unsure.

Certainty sailing forth
in the midst of lies.
Sailing in seas over the edge
of the existential falls.

Epistemic certainties fall
as every verity is called into question
and falsity is equated with truth
with every Trumped pronouncement.

Better

Sore throats sing
into infinity
Flailing into
Sucking into reality

Failing into death
Sucking into intensity

You better be better

You Better Be Better

You Better Be Better

Flicks abound
Clicks surround
Surreal notions
Fabricated
enacted.

You better be better

You better be better

You better be better

Unintended

You drip with antiquity
Shimmering darkly
Sparkling Flinging
Messages sent
Unintended.

We all just wanted to end up somewhere else.

Essays written
not quiet right
Grammar imperfect.

We all just wanted to end up somewhere else.

Clinging death, clammy so
firmly ensconced
Self denied, self affirmed,
but in ways unintended.

We all just wanted to end up somewhere else.

Anxiety is a sense which senses
entities inexplicable
Blindingly sensible.

We all just wanted to end up somewhere else.

Frequency equals speciality
Surety insures the insanity of us all
flaming into the sunsets of inexplicable
newness.

Frequency of Delights

Tiny tenacious intonations.
Inclined, flaming all about.
Exhausting all infusions.

You use me.
You lose me.
Lament me.
Lament me.

Inflamed lips
Ship lines
no international
lines
would ever sell.

You use me.
You lose me.
Lament me.
Lament me.

Fighting on every front.
Effortlessly light.
Less me and effortlessly
you.

Fame.
Inflame.
Infamy.
Uncanny incantations.
Killer intonations.

Felicia Tapestry

God's honest truth, her name was Felicia Tapestry.

Her fourth great grandfather was an impoverished thread bare curtain merchant. Since he came from a family which was known for this, the other children called him a serial drapist behind his back.

I'd rather not go into their various deaths. I suspect they also melted ants with magnifying lenses.

I'm a Calvinist. They deserved it.

But I digress...

Her name was Felicia Tapestry.

It was a hot sweaty day, a day I'd rather remember. The meat in the broken down freezer had already melted and smelt of death. The blood had leaked onto my kitchen floor and was surprisingly hard to clean up. Different bloods melt at different temperatures.

That was helpful advice going forward.

Tapestries are such beautiful weaves, interspersed with threads from every hue. Sometimes from simple cotton, sometimes from elegant silk. I prefer raw fabrics rough hewn, like Scottish clothing no one likes to wear, except to avoid freezing to death or starvation.

She was wicked cute, but in that dark serial killer way we all love. You know, like Christina Ricci like, except worse.

She wore her gown with pride, flowing across the floor, glorious in all its splendor. We each called each other fascinating. Yeah, it was THAT kinda romance.

The frame of reference of our romance framed us in ways we dare not share with others. After all, her name was Felicia Tapestry, and she was a death shroud comforting me with hugs. I immediately recognized that she had inherited the realm in her family line, filtering the flinty lilt of hints of bitter shrouds, hovering over us, against the light. Yet the darkness comforts us so. It comforts us so.

Nightmare

Muck and Mire
rarely inspire
except to remind us
of the mud we all share.

Trudging slowly
grindingly so
fighting the elements
like a dream nightmare.

Running but still
paralyzed and flinching
thinking you're inching
towards the eternal
unattainable.

Constantly grasping
but never attaining
gripping yet tight lipped
silently impotent.

Dreamlike maze
never escaping
waiting to awake
amazed
but sadly never surprised.

Approaching 20 Years

I still remember your hair
as you leaned your head
into my shoulder

The smell of your shampoo

Your hair
It was soft and silky
almost black in color

You were fragrant
with wildly beautiful
eyes
filled with darkness

Faint hints
of what lurked
behind the curtains
of those eyes
and lips

We each lived
in each other's
shadows

Fine Print

Microscopic inscriptions
listening in
to
fine print
signed
into law
by my
own blood

Signed in blood today
and every day

Sign your life away

Signed in blood today
and every day

Legalese
a language
its own
inexplainable

Fucked by lawyers
by nary a lick of
the tongue

Linguistic tricks
sticking it to
us all
by those far too
well paid
to get laid for free

After all
it's all part
of
the fine print.

Shoulder Leaned Into

Nestled is how I most think of us
leaning into each other
fascinated by each other
royally engaged entranced
playfully prancing with dignity
intact

Your perfume enflames
my sensibilites
sensing your nearness
shoulder next to your neck
my ear kissing your skin
beneath your ear I far too often
did not kiss

I Always Wanted to be a Cult Leader

Sliming my mind
twisted untied
tye died tried
curtailed mind
fractured by mines
surety assurances
Fixated on faces
assuring of certainties
inexplicable

I Buried a Chimney Swallow Today

I buried a chimney swallow today

He hung from the French lace curtains

Talons clung like finger nails

Wings sprung out, hanging low

high above my eyes.

Black and grey before my eyes

hanging, darting in death all across

our campus

Spread winged, hanging from a thread

French lace doors latched

capturing your natural talons

Interlaced, interlinked,

Captured, till death.

I prayed for you as I buried you.

The Azaleas sing your praises.

Wood chips cover you.

Tattoo'd in Invisible Ink

Scars show in all the most interesting places
Spink, dink, flinked, minks
in faux animal furs
curtailing hairs worn ages ago

Inked in ways I never really understood
Needle in the arm and leg
pegged
by assumptions
Impressed by impressions
driven deep
by Life experienced

Sometimes flexibility shows
itself to the sound of flesh
given over to the
ink master.

Tattle Tale

Many splendored dresses undressed
Expressed by dresses hemmed in by Pleiades
Gazing down from above staring in our
collective naked gaze

Ferrous metals mentally melting
into the solid waste of
who we are

Glittering into the nothingness
of existential reality
flaming out
flaming out
flaming out

Shame, no shame
flame all you want
shame
flame all you want
blame all you want
shame, no shame

Blame you all
not alone but me
alone along the lines
flicking the adulations
and adulturations
maturing, I hope

Loose Knit Straight Jackets

Flexible constraints maintain
wrap around realities and mentalities
S'plainin' explanations

Flailing about
Selling short
everything in our midst

Vision, after all
lost to all
falling to the depths
welcome to the Mall

Fabric of my existence
cotton of lies
truth be told
hold my arms
in lock step

Systemic
invisible to me
so ubiquitous
iniquitous
split like light
refracted

Blind visionaries
guide my path
touching me
all along the
graveling path

Deprivation sensory
blind spots
unknown even to me

Holes In My Socks

You drive the rockets right through me
Firestorm stinging
Intellectual fuckstorms entertaining
Every possible Extentiality

Music to my ears nears by
as the chorus screams
from every corner of my mind

There's no whisper here
There's no whisper here
There's no whisper here

Hinter and lo
the song sings
I never forgave you
Hidden, I yet find you
Afraid, so alone.

Sadness, yet so alive.

Judges

We fired the gas into the refugee camp

To kill them all and erase their memories.

Then we sent the prisoners to bury them

So that they would die too

Erasing them as well.

Then we sent the soldiers

To dig their graves

And their own.

Then we appointed the judges

to adjudicate them all.

Detris

Smoldering ruins is all I see all around. The smell is acrid, full of the stench of death. It exhilarates me to no end. By it I know I have life. We have hope for the future.

The year is unknown. The planet seems to be earth, but it's hard to tell from our perspective, being as we're so close to the ground against these old giants which once ruled our land.

Our shells are hard as the chrystaline stones we walk upon, but our insides, liquid to the core, pure in fact, cannot be touched by any outside force, no matter how large and seemingly powerful. We are purity itself, hidden in our shell.

The gods are instrumental and deliriously figurative for us all. This land is ours for now.

Shit. They have a bigger weapon than us again. Back to the research lab! Build them bigger and smaller till we erase them all from the face of this ground. They look nothing like us. Any similarity is purely accidental.

We must do everything in our power to gather the remains of their day so that we can survive beyond these small days.

God is ONLY like us. He has six legs and has omniscient antennae. Thus we mustn't ever be confused about God's nature.

Devouring the remains of the dead is essential to our well being, just so long as it's not among our own.

But the dead among our own count too. The dead always serve the purposes of the living.

After all, we must live.

Feedback Machine

I'm tired of the sugar
I need the salt
Filling my acrid tongue

Filter it down till I can understand

Filter it down till I can understand

Filter it down till I can understand

Blessed are the poor until you get rich
I've seen her type on the side of the road before
Piece of shit begging for her life
She's pregnant with who knows what
Hospital wrist band still on her hand
as I hand her a twenty dollar bill
with assuage in my death like grasp

Hello Jesus on the side of the road.

Wrists

Slipping my wrists
into the slits of your soul
Awakens me to the pain
of borrowed time

Slamming doors awaken me
to all of your days of old
Always trying to forget
the stamps of my own
daguerreotype

Splicing the dice
until we both rolled
our lives away

Splicing the dice
until we both rolled
our lives away

Playing for keeps

Blinded Visionaries

Blinded visionaries
seeking perceptions
Lids hanging low
by sights too hard to see
Freed by the weigh
of a thousand burdens

Poet Tree

You helped me to plant a garden of words
in the soil of my life
Seedlings of laughter and pain
sprinkled across my soiled soul
into the dried cracks soon
to be rained upon by droplets
of love and hate interspersed
with silent embraces with dripping
sarcasm filling the chasm
which sometimes stood silently
between us

Weeds sprout there too
but sometimes even they have flowers

196

The frequency of your posts don't make any sense to me.

Sheesh. It's almost like you make sense to me.

Written wrists slip across your wrists slit

Permitted to lists, sometimes insipid,
slitted inside my wrists.

Invisible wounds, seen by no one
except everyone with
Eyes to see and ears to hear.

Visions invisible to any natural eye to see.

Visible to every eye to see.

Sheesh, your eyes,

It's almost like I can see your eyes.

Frequencies can be a hard thing.

Betwixt and In Between

Bipolar opposites
swirling intertwined
Fueled by swirling emotions
Cued by instincts
intuitively inspired by
you and me.

Figuring the signatures
Signing away the rights
Flights flying away
to highways and byways
slighted and benighted
by signatories
always lying.

The Great In Between stands
in between the chasm of
what we all are told to believe
Dropping down to the valley below.

Visions of Gehenna
and Hosanna
intertwined
Voiced together
Sung in harmony
Various singers
stepping in and out
Deciding when to sing.

Until the song is finally
spent and sung
unintentially expressed
as chaos and a voice
betwixt and in between.

Nervous Nerve Endings

Inexplicable pain
courses through my body
An excited calmness
pervades my skin and everything within
Till all of me
all of me quivers within
With equivications
inexplicable
filled with pain.

Photos in a Suitcase

Your feet are drenched, smelling of the ocean water.
You carried what you could as you ran for your life.
But the smell of sulphur clings to your lips and nose
as you fled the missiles and soldiers seeking after you
selling everything, sometimes even yourself,
just to get away from it all.

The photos are wrinkled and terribly fragile.
Discolored by age and wear and tear.
Over exposed to the elements of the age
we all find ourselves in.

But we hold them close to our chests
fractured though they are from the wars
within and without.

We hold them close to our chests
fractured though they are
from the wars within and without.

Seeking asylum from an insane asylum
only to be looked upon as an invader
scapegoated, segregated, isolated
barely tolerated, constantly berated.

I can feel my humanity slipping away
as layer and layer of who it is to be me is taken
away from me, or at least I think it's me
I'm talking about.

But at least I have photos in a suitcase.

Abandoned Mall Stores

Walking in through entrance ways abandoned long ago
Service centers long left empty
Discounted realities long left behind
Bereft, with leaking ceilings
as signatories of capitalist deaths
Easily announced

Drip drip drip
as the stores stop shopping
dropping like flies
you know that it's obvious.

Retail tales entail emails
from executives entailing tales
of economic realities explaining
of brick and mortar deaths
physicality seen as economically
unfeasable.

My Last Breath

Stick those sticks into my soul
Inflict me to my dying day
Face me with an effaced reality
which even God would turn away

Don't you dare avoid the obvious
tension of what's there before your eyes

Speaking spittle into my eyes
isn't what I bargained for,
you see it for yourself
truth be told

Hells bells, it's the story
of my life,
told from far too long

A story well we all know well.

The breathes are shorter now
Heaving and shallow
I thought this ground was supposed to be
hallowed

Hallowed by thy name
Hallowed be thy name
Hallowed by thy name

The Witch

If only you could watch
a Majesty awry
Mentioning a voice
A Voice, a voice.

Visionaries bestial
connected. Vestigial
investigations.

Sure. So sure.
So empirically sure.
Slippery as silk.


Certainty, certainty.
Certainty, certainty.
Surety, insane.

She's not safe anymore,
conjuring
configuring
unsure,

Strangely sure.

Levant

A tissue of lies
Never tired
of tiring of lies
plied towards compliance

Issues none of which
existed.
Senselessly expressed
tested to ends unknown.

Perpetually true
yet not
unfortunate
Ann Frank kinda late.

Shh... Don't talk
can't speak
gonna speak cuz I can't ignore
You and me.

Speak, spoken.

Complicated Sentences

Surreal realities
interact
my realities.

Grammar
never let me go.
Fuck the present.

Intersectionality
is such a lovely sentence
Left alone, bereft.

Poetry is complex
sometimes
never enough. Yet,
my only language.

It's OK, I still Love You

I understand your anger
at least I think I do.
Anger expressed
It's totally understandable.

Go figure.

Yet I still love you.

Breathing in, breathing out
Existential expressions
Expressed.

Fundamentals.
Understandable expressions
Grammar understood.

And yet I still love you.

Go figure.

I still love you.

Wounds not withstanding.

I see you in myself.

No Blood No Flag

Heritage notwithstanding
Germanic ancestry obvious
by my last name. I'm a mutt nonetheless
ancestrally mixed
nixing the pick of the litter.

The flag lifted high
exalting the standard
of the Tribe extolled.
Blood and Flag bleed into each other
mixed and insecure
fluid and impure.

Colors discolored
as stars fall from the sky.
Flagging before our eyes.
Lying to us with ties
which bind far too easily.

Tight

I can't breathe.

I can't turn.

Oh bother, it's the truth.

No Pooh Bear can ever refrain from your refrain.

Your grip grips me around my neck.

A necklace of chains gripping me like a lover who hates me.

It's almost like you're an American lover.

Understanding Conspiracy Theorists Part 1

As I was researching various extremist hate sites like the falsely named "Jews for Palestinian Right of Return", most of which are run by the same people registering multiple sites which constantly reference each other in order to build a false legitimacy, it occurred to me that there's a slight but very significant difference between being a legitimate detective and being a fringe conspiracy theorist.

It's all about seeing patterns for what they actually are versus seeing patterns which aren't really there. The difference is one of degree, not of kind. But it ends up turning reality on its head, making the true, false, and the false, true. But how do we tell the difference between the two? That's the $64,000 question.

I think some key terms should be named here as we go forward:

Cognitive Bias

Epistemology

Research Methods

Gnosticism or Secret Knowledge

Logical Fallacies

False Conspiracy Theories

Criminal Conspiracies

Obviously this is a huge issue which one Facebook post isn't going to adequately address, but we can at least try to start the process of understanding what false conspiracy theories are and how people process information in ways that inoculate them from believing in them or towards believing in them.

In other words, this is both a cognitive issue as well as a sociological issue. I personally don't care much about individual conspiracy theories as much as I do about why and how people come to believe in them. Some are quite harmless, like not believing we landed on the Moon, while others are incredibly dangerous, like the anti vaccination conspiracy theory which costs people's lives.

Also, as I posted above, there are real criminal conspiracies which have happened many times throughout history and to this day, such as Watergate, Tuskegee medical experiments, the Holocaust, etc. So I'm not in any way saying that no conspiracies have ever happened. That's a charge which is typically laid down by fake conspiracy theorists in order to discredit anyone who disagrees with them. That, by the way, is itself, a classic logical fallacy. That's why I put the term in the list above.

Anyway, this post is already too long and I've got a lot more to address about these phenomena, which I'll be writing on my blog, and then posting here and on Twitter. This has been a lifelong interest of mine, primarily because I come from a family which leaned/leans heavily towards conspiratorial ways of thinking, and I learned early on how dangerous that is on multiple levels, not just cognitively, but emotionally and spiritually as well.

Lastly, the takeaway from all of this is this:

It's OK to not know everything. You'll be fine with your limited knowledge.

Whispers in the Night Air

Stop kissing me with your poison tongue
I don't need that kind of love
Some lisps I love, but not this lisp
Whisper into someone else's ears

You know I love my Icons
Holy and unholy
Reflections of my
fractured self

Bastard child of the Holy One
Slingshot sanctification
Unseen yet Wholly seen

Chord Structures

Breaking out of the trance is never easy.
Chord structures must be broken out of
over and over again
till the Siren is not silenced
but replaced by a better voice.

A Stranger in My Own Eyes

I never knew you.
You never knew me.
The quiet storm
never calmed.

The surface was seemingly tranquil
but the undercurrents
swept us both away
from each other
and ourselves.

I think we once wanted
to know each other.
At least I want to believe that.
You reflected me
in strange and dangerous ways.

The mirror we both looked into
was never warped.
The mirror was never fractured.
We simply reflected onto each other
the warps and fractures
we both shared.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Most folks today like to believe that they'd be on the side of Dr. King back in the Civil Rights era, but people conveniently forget that he was the most hated man in America when he was assassinated. The vast majority of White Christians thought he was a dangerous troublemaker, and of course, in a way, he was a very dangerous troublemaker.

But that's exactly what he needed to be in order to be faithful to his Christian calling. He called out and openly confronted America's racist history and continuing racist policies, both domestically and internationally. He also tied racism and classism together and recognized that the underprivileged and poor came in every shade of color.

Dr. King was a man of peace and non-violence to be sure. That was his trademark. But he was no passive actor in any sense. His commitment to justice for EVERYONE was fierce and unyielding. He struck the rhetorical ax to the root of evil policies across the board, from the backwoods lynchings to the Vietnam War. He was unrelenting in his holy calling to call evil by its name and overcome it with the power of love.

But you can't cure a disease if you refuse to acknowledge that it exists in the first place. We still are unwilling to do that, and so Dr. King's message rings as true today as it did fifty years ago. We must NEVER stop dreaming his prophetic dream.

Swallow the Pain and Exhale the Love

Everything sings pain into my soul

Everything slings arrows at my soul

It's easy for me to use excuses I use

to use, to use.

Musing on misuses of my soul

Inclined towards the pain

and away from the scars

away from the stars away

from the scars starred

in my scarred terrain

of pain.

Exhale the pain

and exhale the love.

Be Not Afraid.

White Man's President

Donald J. Trump allegedly called Haiti, El Salvador and Africa "shitholes" or "Shithouses" in a small meeting last week in the Whitehouse with several Republicans and one Democrat in attendance. Needless to say, this is shocking by any normal standards, but we gave up normal standards the day we elected a man who bragged about grabbing women by the pussy and getting away with it repeatedly because he was rich and powerful. We gave up normal standards when we elected a man who repeatedly has not only made openly racist statements throughout his life, but was successfully sued, along with his openly racist father Fred Trump, for racist housing policies in 1973 in Queens, NY.

I think what shocks people is the simple candor of his unapologetic racism (and misogyny and Islamophobia, etc...) and how his own staff have essentially become inured to these daily tirades directed scattershot at friends and foes alike. More than a few of his staffers now feel as though they're acting as babysitters instead of serious advisers to a sitting President. That's a truly terrifying prospect, similar to, but I would say is now much worse than, what the final days of the Nixon Whitehouse was like in 1973/74 when he was drinking heavily and having conversations with oil paintings on the walls. Thank God Donald Trump doesn't drink! Though I do suspect he's, considering his advanced age, taking a bevy of medications to help him get through each day. But that's only conjecture on my part based on his physical appearance and obvious erratic behavior as seen by everyone.

Now, my own ethnic background, strangely enough, is quite similar to Donald Trump's. My father's side is entirely German like Trumps's father's side. My German immigrant grandmother bought into the ethno-nationalism of Nazism and held to it till her death when I was a small child, very similar to Fred Trump's own Klan affiliation and arrest in the 1920's in NYC. But in my family's case, thanks be to God, my father became extremely progressive on most fronts (though he was terribly abusive towards my mother, I think in reaction to his own antipathy towards his mother, and I later learned that he inherited his mother's Antisemitism), was very pro Civil Rights, regularly had black college students over for dinner at our house in a VERY white neighborhood of Staten Island (terrifying our then racist neighbors that he was thinking of selling our house to a black family), tutoring Hispanic people in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in English. In other words, I grew up loving JFK, MLK Jr., Bobby Kennedy and listening to the protest music of the era as a daily part of my childhood.

But I could have grown up very differently. I could quite easily have become the mirror image of myself under only slightly different circumstances. It appears Donald J. Trump grew up under those slightly different circumstances. As noted above, his father was a well known racist (even Woody Guthrie wrote about him and his racism!), Trump was extremely unruly as a child and had to be sent to a military academy, where the extremely regimented and authoritarian environment was a perfect fit for his very bright social intelligence. He learned how to be physically and emotionally coercive towards underlings and that obviously served him well for several decades more. He may be incredibly unintelligent on actual knowledge and policy, but he's borderline genius when it comes to coercive rhetoric and emotional abuse. By the way, these are ALL classic predator qualities and that should concern us all.

Trying to understand racism and the many other extremist "isms" out there has been my life's work since my late childhood. What makes someone become a racist, after all? My exposure to this world began very early on, in my mid childhood when I learned that almost all of my white neighbors were racist and Antisemitic. I later came to call my neighborhood/town in Annadale, SINY the "Selma, Alabama of NYC" and it's sadly still largely the same to this day. But I was blessed by a combination of disability and disfunction which saved me from my environment, and I think my own story is a kind of mirror image of Trump's story in Queens, NY. The combination of my several ailments with my family disfunction forced me into interacting with people (kids) of color at a VERY early age. Though we lived in a upper middle class white neighborhood, my parents being separated forced my mom to bring me to the clinic instead of our family physician, and as y'all know, the public clinics are never in the good part of town.

The clinic I had to go to on a monthly basis (I was REALLY sickly as a kid) was across the street from the West Brighton projects, a notoriously dangerous public housing project on the North Shore of Staten Island. But through these constant visits I regularly interacted with other children who looked and talked VERY differently than me. They were black, brown, Asian, Latino/Latina, etc., and I loved playing with them each and every time. I even told my mom at one point that I wished I was black, much to her astonishment, because I liked how my black friends behaved with me in stark contrast to my white child neighbors, who mostly bullied me because of how different I was. Even as a child, I knew what it felt like to wear the skin of the "other", whether that meant skin color explicitly, or being targeted because of having long hair when every other boy had a crew cut, or not behaving in a masculine enough way for the other boys in my elementary school, etc...

I've never met Donald Trump, and by God's grace I never will, but he has lived an extremely public life, and so we can learn quite a lot from his public pronouncements, his many affairs while married, and his rare moments of speaking honestly about himself. The one moment of honesty, again extremely rare for him, was back in the 1990's when he admitted that he didn't like to think about himself reflectively, because he didn't think he'd like what he saw. That alone is unbelievably telling about his self perception and I would aver his deep seated self hatred, which, in denying (which he must), he can't help but project that self hatred outward towards anyone who looks or thinks differently than him, whether they be a wife, a child, a business associate, a self perceived enemy, and even an ally who doesn't serve his immediate needs of the moment.

How will this all end? With his impeachment by a new Congress next year? By his own staff pulling a 25th Amendment on his failing faculties? By us getting involved with a nuclear war with North Korea and potentially other nations, with millions left dead and dying from radiation poisoning? I would love to see him change and become a better man and turn this administration around and be more ethical on multiple levels, but I simply don't see ANY evidence of it anywhere. This Trump Regime, as I call it, is not only putting the American Experiment at grave risk, it's putting our planet's future at risk.

I watched most of the Sunday morning political shows this morning and it was remarkable to see almost all of them struggle with acknowledging the simple truth that we have a white supremacist/racist president and that the vast majority of the GOP is silently complicit as he rolls back almost every civil rights advancement made in the last 50+ years.

Barack Obama was our first Black President. Donald Trump is our first White President.

It's time we own this folks. It's time we own it.

The Girls In Bellevue.

A Buck Short

Clearing into the fields.

You are my mine field.

Shielded, we are.

Ridiculous, we all are.

Dollars, billed far too late.

By A Slim Margin

I was never your stranger
I was always you friend,
Frequently frequented.
Aspirated, frequently freaky,
always strange.

It's OK.
I understand.
You don't need a rhythm
or rhyme.

Time.

Rhythm.

Mime.

It's who I am.

Ignighted

Totally darkened.
Disparate.
16th Street.
Seeing and being unseen.

The Contours of Your Face

Gwenn

You were visually stunning.

Our last night together

will always mean everything to me.

I can't forget you.

You are my blessing and my curse.

A hint of heaven and a hint of hell.

Gwenn.

Minor Key Goddess

Why do I listen to you so?

Slippery lyrics, lilting, not so softly

against the hard edges of reality.

The cracks are obvious

or at least they should be.

Hellacious reality isn't the totality

of rhymes which don't have much reason.


But the Minor Key sings out to me

so strong and yet so weak

elegantly strange, absent

yet always present.


Tonal qualities resonate,

minor key hinted at

every single time.