When Blindness Smiles

When blindness smiles I can feel the curve of your lips.

When blindness smiles I can hear the wrinkle of your eyes.

When blindness smiles I can smell the whisper of your tongue.

When blindness smiles I can taste your pores as we nestle.

When blindness smiles I can see you and you can see me.

Glint In Her Eye

A young woman with deep sadness in her eyes served me this evening. I haven't told her that I've been praying for her in her semi hidden struggles, but I have. I just see the heaviness in her affect each time I see her and it weighs me down as well. I guess I am an empath after all. I don't see prayer the way I used to, sending some secret message to a sky god micromanaging every infinitesimal detail. I still believe in God, but not in the way I used to. I now see prayer as a common bond binding us to each other, helping us to know we're not alone in our struggles and battles.

That kind of prayer makes a miraculous difference.

True, If You Can Believe It.

An elderly follower of Jesus, half mad with hope, writes on parchment on a prison island, revealing the hidden. He remembers back, lo those many years ago, to when he, or maybe someone by his namesake, walked alongside a hard scrabble rabbi in the dusty roads of Palestine, teaching, learning, walking, talking and listening to what was and is yet to come. No longer hidden unbiddden images flood his eyes failing from age scribe by his side not quite believing what's being told.

Sunday Religion

I was talking with a young man who works with me at the farm about religion today. He mentioned that his father is moderately religious and attends services pretty regularly, but that he and his mom and his siblings go to church maybe once or twice a year and that his friends are exactly the same, almost never attending religious services. This conversation came up because of the influx of customers to our farm store around noon into the early afternoon. I shared that in West Michigan the Sunday routine is still largely governed by church going folks, only showing up to stores after services let out. Here in Cape Ann I'm more likely to see Starbucks packed full at 9am Sunday morning with people reading their NY Times sipping their barista tended drinks. He saw no reason to go to church, especially with everything in the news about the various scandals and corruption.

Nape of Your Neck

I lean in and kiss you and we embrace, smelling each others' skin and hair, neck against neck, breathe against breathe. Our heads kneel into each other as we escape into embrace, but for each other and ourselves. Beloved and struggling with love.

I will always love you Gwenn.

White Straight Jacket

I was born into a white straight jacket
trying since birth to untie the twisted knots
invisible at first, unbeknownst to eyes untrained
seeing nothing but flinching every muscle straining
to be free, turning and unlearning the yearning
bestial at best, certain the cloak worn
held a dagger to my breast.

Fantasies of freedom cut away from straps buckled
tightly to my sides just out of reach untouched
teaching treading settling for a buckle here and there
loosened by persistence undaunted and galvanized
by hatred and love intermingled together tangled
like strings impenetrable to the naked eye spying
loose threads as beginnings of an ending
unseen as yet.

And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?

Sheltering child within, womb covered by belly, bolts of cloth sewn to exact specifications, shielding the holy in the sacred darkness of human form. Forming child growing and groaning within, knowledge of the holy only known through mother's fluid bathing and breathing and resting, hearing only the echoes of an outside world, muffled brightness sounding like light wrapped in a warm moist blanket. Holy songs sung from without to ears only beginning to form. The light is sheltered in the holiness of shadow dwelling in solitude but never alone, presence permeating every ounce of being moving breathing not yet air, swimming in the womb of mothers' love secure.

Puppets in the Laundry Basket

Hand sells propaganda festive fetid astrid dimensions
Exclamations point to destinations festooned with pliable girdles
punching monkeys till they're deaf inflicting pinching noises on their noses
wrist bands holding back the pain flailing impaling and staining the brain
followers ever standing astride glancing sideways to elide
any misanthropic misgivings

Sensing reason might barge in glamour clamors onto center stage
random iterations gather up into explainable systems zeroing in
on the ones and toos and also rans spliffing to and fro
until the system is digested and dissected into oblivion.

Emblazened jackets snatch up packets of tea and cocaine
reputable upper crust with the lip getting thinner by the day.

Gnawing moths reminders of old worn uniforms formless and void
stained with invisible blood not your own.

Thrown in the basket and hung out to dry.

Soap and Toothbrushes

If soap and toothbrushes for children in cages aren't a part of your baseline of human needs, you've dehumanized yourself already.

Rain Coming

The scent of the deluge is in the air and the leaves are even turned inside out.
Charged particles caress my skin as chill breezes slip through the night air.
Blending my senses into the scenery surrounding me and all those within.
Partaking in nature solitude permeating the breathing air.

Sentenced

Prison walls dripping with tears. Cell block 1, always full. Empty but full of cacophonous screams unheard. Blame bounces like a tennis ball around and around and around. Dust gathers on immovable recriminations. Just waiting for the handcuffs. The hole is already dug. The key is in my pocket.

Freedom's Prisons

Tired and empty. Sober at least. I made two meetings last week, so that's good. Most of my dreams are still nightmares. Especially anything having to do with my family. So much anger and hatred hidden away, lurking in the shadows. So tired of this shit. It feels like it's never gonna go away.

When the Water Runs Out It Stops Whistling

When the water runs out it stops whistling.

That's the second most terrifying sound I can imagine. There's no one there to take the kettle off the burner. The metal is burnt black along the bottom edge. The calcified remains inside are white. The water around here is hard. All the faucets around here, at least the ones that work, keep the waste water treatment plant running constantly. The water is my friend and yet my enemy. I hate it with every ounce of my being. I guess suffocation runs in my family.

Nowadays they use the anodyne acronym ECT to describe what used to be the almost barbaric therapy of electric shock therapy. If you're lucky it scrapes away the bad parts, leaving that area tabula rasa. No moon landing, no RFK assassination, no MLK assassination, no miracle Mets. All gone, swept away, an empty vacuum. It didn't matter how many times I asked about those years, the answer was always the same. Nothing to remember. Ask others about it.

Nightmares don't happen in a vacuum. But sometimes the vacuum is the nightmare. It's kinda like Nixon's tapes. The absence is the proof of the crime. It's funny. She remembered all that. But that was after the therapy sessions were done and they relied on the drugs. They were never enough of course. Half a gallon Gallo Port was the almost daily mantra I quickly came to hate the sound of coming from her mouth to the local liquor store owner. He was always friendly to me. I hated him and never said a word to him.

The kettle is whistling again. Time to turn it off and make some tea.

Ocean Front Dream Apocalypse

As best as I can recall the dream began with me lying in bed with pop music playing in the background and possibly a TV playing random shows across the room on mute. I was dreaming of Gwenn while lying in bed, tracing the outlines of her body with my lips and fingers, caressing every inch of her I could. I still miss her terribly even after twenty plus years. Someone else was in the bed with me, but I don't recall who she was, just a bed mate as best I can tell. In my dream within a dream I was a little bit confused as to whose skin I was caressing for a moment, but it was always Gwenn's. The other skin was incidental and accidental, but lovely nonetheless.

As I was drifting in and out of my dream-like experience within this dream, I heard heavy rain begin to pound against the windows and roof of the house I was sharing with many other friends, several of whom I recognize from seminary. It's funny who become my dream housemates. I looked out of the window and saw and heard the intense rain, but the sky was blue at first, until I got up and looked closer as I neared the window on the top floor, which is where my bedroom was located. The storm was extremely localized and was right on top of us, with massive downpours and even iceberg sized chunks of ice falling from the sky into the ocean just outside of my house window.

I dashed down stairs from my bedroom to avoid the possibility of one of those giant pieces of ice falling through the roof and killing me on the top floor, running into one of my housemates, John, as we realized that something a lot more than usual was happening to us all. Not only was it torrentially raining now, but he ocean was roiling so much that creatures were being heaved up out of the depths, including a massive alligator which was coming towards the shore at alarming speed. Me and my housemates began blockading every open point of our house so that we wouldn't be invaded by these deadly creatures, especially the ginormous alligator directly out front our porch. Apparently we had a small alligator among the animals in our house and it came too close to an opening on the porch and the ocean dwelling alligator came up and snatched it by its tail and pulled it of and killed it. There was nothing we could do. We were helpless as he was dragged away.

Just to the right I witnessed a large dog being attacked and eaten by another very large dog. Both were mastiffs I believe. It was a brutal sight to behold. He was just being torn apart before my eyes as the violent waves crashed upon our house. There were much smaller animals in our house and even outside of it which seemed to not be affected by this violent storm on multiple levels, including cats and even small kittens, some covered in blood, but amazingly enough, still surviving and not affected by these violent impulses. I brought one inside to keep her safe within the house's barriers.

Next I saw many people running along the beach outside of our house, coming from the north. At first I thought I saw Peng, but it ended up being another seminary friend and her husband, I think a Korean couple instead of Chinese. And then I saw Kim and her father, but he didn't look like her father, but instead her uncle, all of whom I went to church with back in Holland, Michigan years ago. We gathered together as we came back towards our barricaded ocean front house (I had run out from the house to meet them on the sand even though it was still dangerous outside). It was only then that the worst of the storm and the rampaging wildlife seemed to be subsiding. Things finally seemed to be approaching safe again as we came back inside the house.

Nothing like dreaming while having a fever...