long road

residential schools

2012-02-16T01:29:00.006-05:00

amnesia is a self-inflicted wound. its the wound that follows the wound. in olden times, it was never the cut that killed you, it was the gangrene and the rot. black holes are implosions that suck in everything around it, so the physicists say, until even light can't escape. until you cannot see it anymore. we only know its there because its twisting everything around it, getting bigger and bigger.

a long time ago there was a big turtle. it lay in the middle of a big lake, happily gurgling the water and watching the world as slowly as it takes a cloud to drift from one side of the sky to the other. the turtle was so big and slow that grass and trees and even littler lakes grew on its happy back. every once in a while it took a walk around the lake and the animals used to roll on their backs laughing at the sight of those trees and bushes and little hills of mud rocking crazily back and forth as the turtle lurched on its lakey tour.

but mostly it just sits and breathes and watches the fishes go by.

and then one day the animals decided it was safe to sit on the turtle's back, and so they did and tested the ground. and then after a little while they began to make little dens and nests and caves. crows and foxes and owls and bears and deer and wolves and sparrows came. and they made children and soon enough the grandchildren of the animals thought the turtle's back as the best house in the world.

and one day, wouldn't you know it? the crows and the wolves and the deers and the bears gave birth to the little people, who danced and roamed around on the turtle's back and swam in his lakes all the while he gurgled happily in the great big lake he mostly half-slept in.

and the little people, swimming around, discovered the turtle's head one day, his eyes and his gurgling mouth and his fat nostrils. and they told their parents all about it, the land is alive! it's actually a big turtle! and everyone then was very careful how they treated the ground they walked on, so as not to disturb their benefactor.

and so things passed for a good long time.

but then one day big black boats appeared at the turtle's back. and other little people came onto the edge. some said they were from another turtle far away, others said they came from hell. wherever they came from, they appeared to be very lost, because they were looking for something they could never find. they were angry and scared. they kept thinking everything was going to bite them. and every time something didn't bite them, like a shrub or something, they laughed nervously and and kicked it and bit it and showed the others there was nothing to fear. and if something, say a mischievous wolf, bit one of them, they all gathered together and chased the bastard down as if it were the end of the world.

and they built towns and forts on the turtle's back and cut down many old trees to build the houses. and they didn't like the little people who lived there, and tried their best to make these people talk and act like them, so that they could trust them. but the little people didn't want to be like them and there were many problems.

and once the nervous people were strong enough and the little people weak enough, they began to steal their children and teach them how to be more like them. they stole as many as they could, and they stole many. they taught the children of the little people how to be like them, how to be not like their parents, and then they sent them home. it was a strange plan. but scared people do all sorts of strange things. for you see, they are so afraid of dying that they try to kill everything that will make them die until the world is full of death. and everyone has to put up with them and be changed forever by them.

and the children of the little people grew up lost like the nervous people. lost on their own turtle's back. and they were sad and broken, like the trees the nervous people chopped down. just like them. this went on for years, and all the while the nervous people built cities on the turtle's back and big towers of black smoke and green smoke, and they dug big holes in the turtle's back. and the children of the little people, running lost among the strange tangle of highrises and highways and open-pit mines, even though they were lost, so that they could barely remember the forests of the turtle's back, still groaned aloud when they saw the holes in the turtle's back.

and this is the story everyone tries to forget

the rocks

2012-02-01T01:50:00.003-05:00

the waves keep coming up against me, the riddles, the edges. the great ocean lurching, all the giants, a scared child, a billion scared children heaving forward, rocking back, over generations and generations, waves and waves. the now just a stick in the water of the great amniotic blue. i breathe the air of it, smell the water of blood and dirt and generations of trees, the grandfathers of these cedars, and their grandfathers, all in this dirt, the ones that stood alone and while the anishnaabe woman walked between them, the irish farmer against them, the drunken bush boys that punched each others' faces in the holy eternity of cedars.

i see the movements of people and trees, seeking peace and finding war. i see me (as in - us), swarmed with imaginary myselves, what could have beens, what weres, what i thoughts i wasses. the warm or cold days. the kid in the toronto jail "well, at least i gave you something to talk about" trying to make me or us something worthy other than a spectacular sorrow, because violence is funny to those because its funny because its true. these ancient romans disguised as canadians, these natives disguised as ancient history, these histories informed they are not present and should go home, even though they eddy around their legs. even though they flood the future.

but i have faith in you, the same kind of faith i have that these sleeping throbbing cedars will breed new cedars next spring; some among the coast salish say there are tunnels running among the mountains and the rivers, that connect this place to that. they find dead bodies of failed travellers at their mouthes sometimes. i feel old, like a stone in some valley with moss and dead bugs all over it, ready to turn back into rivers of fire a billion years from now like i did a billion years ago. but when that comes i'll be different, i'll be also all these memories of when it was now and young and rare and the skies were tangled in the planet's hair.

i am a thing that is moved by all the animals inside me and all the ones outside me. but a billion year old stone is a god in the river. i was once an ocean of fire that made all of you, and will be that ocean again. all i have to do is be still while i am walked across, you and a thousand wolves, and i am so still that when you pass it takes a million years, and the silence in me is an ocean,

light

2012-01-16T00:26:00.004-05:00

its one of the things, youknowandsaid, its a molecule and a force and a wave but its everywhere but you cant touch it yet it is captured by leaves a million times a day and encased in sugar and there you exercise it as energy and thus you move and feel and gesture and talk and form and if you were still you would cease to exist; it can be broken into colours, because each colour is just a different speed of light, and if there were no eyes we would feel these colours as heat and is heat is the exhaust of energy which can be neither created nor destroyed and heat comes from the transformation of one thing into another, and transformation is motion, moving from one thing into another, moving from one moment into another, when a plant grows it is moving very slowly, when you move you are growing very quickly, light is the part of the atom that broke off and veered off into spaceand it can be slowed down or sped up and nothing moves faster than light einstein said but he also said i made that up because its the only way everything i said makes any sense, and maybe there would be no you, no laughing, no thoughts, no pain, no bullshit or drama or paintings or touch or violence if there wasn't light, bleeding out of the sun omnidirectionally which means in all possible directions because it is a sphere and this is the world you sit in casually, and in the beginning all things were hydrogen which is the simplest atom in the universe and it is by smashing hydrogens together, they say, that you get heliums, and by smashing that together you get other stuff and so on eventually and all the time and every time the little simple atoms smash together they leave a little debris called light which is how we all move and essentially this means we are congealed light in complicated forms

rivers

2012-01-07T01:44:00.005-05:00

i'll never be a lot of things. mayor or president, for instance. and i don't believe in genesis, but i don't believe in the big bang either. so much for me, rootless. no gang to join. if they got me now there'd be no one to revenge me. ah well. speachless, speakless, spokeless. frozen river. i'm alone, i need a spirit to talk to tonight, some ghost. a man with a sparrow's head in a pinstripe suit. here he comes. he slams a knife into the table between us.

"buy me a drink?"

"sure, they're selling a local dark"

"tell them to bring it to me in a discarded coffee tin"

the bartender, with her crow's smile, never left the bar. she and the sparrow smile at each other. she dips the coffee can into the night and he draws it from the window, drinks it and let's the dark run down his face. a blast of noise burps above us, above the ceiling.

"where you from?"

"out there, no one invites me inside anymore"

"they forget"

"aha"

the ceiling bends down and it rumbles and it groans

"what the fuck are they doing up there?" asked the sparrow and lit one of my cigarettes

"it's a ritual. they turn their souls inside out" i explained.

"good idea. do they have to bust the ceiling like that?"

"yes, i think so. can you do magic?"

"sure, kid." he pulled his sleeves, showed the inside of the left one to me. i squinted down into it, saw a tunnel in it, underground rivers, water falling into caverns and bats and rats.

"that's some shirt"

"thanks, my mother made it for me"

we both drank quietly. a bunch of night spilled out the sides of the can, splashed little black forevers on the table and the floor.

"no stars" i commented.

"there are not necessarily stars in night" said the sparrow

"that's your knife?" i asked

"knives belong to those that hold them" he said

"god, it's true"

"can i come with you?"

"sure"

we left the bar, discarded the contents of our pockets upon the floor, sewing thread, radical pamphlets, shards of mirrors, butane lighters, cameos, bits of candle, lighting bolts, dry tears, stray tones, poison eye, crayfish claws, old keys, fish heads, stones that crawled into our shoes, somehow,

i took him along the river's edge, he played with little fires in his hands and threw them up into the air, watch them trail downwards like leaves, blue fires, red fires, purple fires. he danced around in circles, threw up a green fire and made a face

"the birds are all confused, have you noticed? they're flying north and west and only sometime south," i said

"they will find their way, i think," he said, "but who knows, with all these machines, what they will change"

"and then?"

"the green gods buried themselves far down in the earth, and they crawl around down there, filling their wombs with seeds, and roots, garbage, decomposing trees. they live for millions of years, you know, far beyond you and me, they don't care about hiding a few thousand ages, and look..."

he pointed up with one clawed hand at the sky, unsounding, where storms writhed around, big black night clouds, each one a fat monster bigger than a city

"once i stood on top of a mountain," i said to him,"and could see everything. groves, hills, little rivers, single trees and whole forests. and i saw a herd of wild horses. stallions and mares and foals, all fugitive and wandering in this neverending wilderness. they were grazing in a little field. there was not a road or anything like that to be seen. they lived in the foothills of the rocky mountains. i watched them, they couldn't see me, and i watched them breathe. and i adored them, and then, there was something no one heard, and they lifted their heads and ran into the forest, undulating in their running like a lake of muscles and wild sex. ran into the wilderness on an instinct. and it was this then that i learned i was a body, made of so much water, and stones, calcium for bones, iron tasted on a cut finger, carbon like a coal mine, like burned wood, like me,"

"you are so little" said the sparrow, and the moon gave birth to a salmon that swam through the aurora borealis like seaweed

the astronomical society

2011-12-03T02:17:00.008-05:00

tonight the river is fat. it rushes by in deep black water, it is rocking high against the breakwater. it must be because it rained and snowed in the last couple of days. what do we mean by what we say? to say the water is high, to say it rained in the last couple of days? we are talking about other worlds, or this world, and the water. the muscles of the water. to stop and watch it. to just stay put and watch it in the cold night. then what is in front of one's eyes starts to take shape. there is a branch between me and the river i had not seen. the branch with its buds bursting twisting out from the thin trunk (buds in december? this morning i saw mosses still alive, green as all hell, even now, with not a single leaf left on the branches, they won't die until the frost kills them)

i am trying to capture these thoughts as they float up and my eyes go to the next thing. any casual thing could distract me from these fragile thoughts and make me forget the minute ago. they say it took a thousand years before it occurred to anyone to ask whether it was true that two bodies of different weights dropped from a great height would land at different times. newton went and did it. and it turns out, the heavier body does not fall faster than the lighter body. they fall at the same speed. or maybe lots of people knew that, and the knowledge never made it into the books. or maybe no one thought to try. from what i've seen of people, i'm not surprised no one thought to try.

i've got not much to do, so i went to the astronomical society meeting in town. the average age was 70. a lot of grey hairs and bellies. i sat in a corner and watched them figure out the proceedings for the society. the president said i was lucky because tonight they brought coffee and cookies. they had an interesting meeting, trying to elect officers. it was hard because no one wanted to be secretary. the outgoing secretary had arthritis and couldn't type very well. he kept mishearing what people were saying as he was taking minutes. one guy who had a giant coffee stain down the front of his strange white t-shirt, stretched to the limit by a happy belly accessoried by a happy grey beard, was pressured into taking the post. he was not interested, though clearly he was a driving force of the society. he did talk of how spectacular the transit of jupiter was not long ago, how the little moon ganymede would cross the surface of the great giant and cause the pimple of a shadow to fall on the face of jupiter - all this through a telescope. they discussed putting on a big to-do for the meteor shower in august. they had an anti-light pollution committee no one wanted to be on except the one autistic 16-year old whom no one trusted in a position of authority. the librarian was retiring. the treasurer said they made $251 last year.

the president was a fatherly fellow who wanted to make sure people got together to look at the stars. the society soon glowed after its initial awkwardness with an easy warmth, hidden away from the rest of civilization. a very old man rambled on for a long time about how the streelights used to be covered to prevent light pollution for stargazing, and everyone listened, despite the fact that no one was sure when the rambling was going to end. it kind of drifted into silence and then started up again, coming out of him like weather. another very old man was not sure he had been nominated for secretary (though he was) but he declined anyway. i was surrounded by the most gentle animals in the world, and they wanted to gather together and keep warm and look at the universe from lonely dark towns in december, this crazy, vast, unfathomable universe they were in and call it spectacular when one blob of light eclipsed another blob of light through a crude telescope. what do we mean by the things we say? it is spectacular because we are seeing one giant planet move through the universe with your own eyes. you can see the universe move, like a giant mystery.

i am sure they have quiet but difficult lives out there beyond the cities that they try to make beautiful for the handful of people they call their families. they are far from the screams i have heard from a thousand heads. i love them. i wonder what it would take for me to stop being nice to people. i can't stop being nice to people. but they have been such atrocious egotists. i can't help but see all their fragile innocence, and i think it breaks my heart to scar it. i know this is a strength and a kind of foolishness, and if i had to be hard i would want it to be pure, but this purity never comes. i would only hurt people with truth, and i have so little of it, its easier to take their blows.

a woman laughs at the bar. amazing. in books, they always say, someone laughs at the bar. why are they laughing at the bar? why is this significant?

because it is an echo of a whole other universe of a person you will never know about. why did she laugh? did she mean it? what was the joke?

a mother that eats its children

2011-11-24T01:28:00.003-05:00

the old timer said there are spirits of things in the world. there is a spirit of the east. there is a spirit of the sun, who makes the spring by flapping his wings slowly across the frosty ground. there is a spirit of winter. spirits can act good or bad.

when you walk in the winter, you are walk on the insides of a spirit, its cold wind running its claws along your face is it touching you, but also extending in all directions, down away where you can't see, up in the hazy sky of afternoon cold suns, and winter has its own generations. the winter of last year is the same spirit, and its mother the autumn, the earth its father. there must be other spirits too, spirits that have only come to life in the recent past. spirits of nations, spirits of concrete, spirits of trafficlights.

i stood on the edge of the silent trail, overhung by cedars and dead branches, yellow reeds wrapped around my legs. looked across the black and gleaming water at the jutting subdivision on the far side, brand new, crawling towards the edge, silhouetted against the sundown of grey november. there is a bad spirit of suburbia, eating the land and defecating a hard row of new houses.

i got lost in a subdivision more than once. in small towns the subdivisions are even harder and deader, their spirit is strong. the sidewalkless streets have blank expressions. the people live in them in sick gratitude. they think - this is the good way to live, this is the only way. we live in a beautiful place. its hard not to suspect their hearts are rubble.

in my own opinion the environmentalists took the wrong strategy in emphasizing global warming. they did it so as to scare greedy and selfish people into behaving themselves. environmental destruction will lead to destroying the wealth of the world, so you should slow down or you too will pay.

it would have been better to tell them- you have lost your hearts. power has eaten your eyes. you can't see the living world anymore, everything you see is part of something that is controlled by humans. cities, computers, factories, ideas. long straight lines digging holes into the future, changing the earth. if you could see what you ate to make these things, you would fall on the ground and weep. if you could see the old trees that glowed in bare forests like great fat heartbeats, the spirits of the river and the country, the robin and the slow town, if you could see water, wind, trees and mud, you would have stopped. not because it would have benefitted you but because you loved the least blade of grass cutting out of the young black earth in april that you would have preferred civilization stop in its tracks. you would have lost all desire for control over the spirit of this bottomless land and fallen on your hands and knees in trembling awe and prayed for the privilege to die a bug hanging on a single leaf at dawn

of course, some assholes think that makes no sense

a dog barks and then

2011-11-11T01:05:00.007-05:00

a dog barks on the street. woof woof woof under a full drunk moon. you are still a mystery.

when grandma died it was last year, near to now. they laid her up in one of the old people's hospitals on the edge of town. her room didn't feel like she was going to die to me, it felt like any other room in a hospital. her life had been long. she had been thinking about dying for a long time, you could hear it in her voice, even if she didn't speak of it. even though she had like eight healthy kids who all more or less went on to live good lives and even though she survived everything you could do to a person, she didn't seem particularly impressed with the world. when they told her they weren't going to treat her cancer because the cure would probably do worse damage to her vulnerable body, all she said was "so that's it, then."

so then they put her on morphine and killed her. no one said it but it is done by wise nurses and wiser families. they kept giving her morphine for the pain until she didn't move, and every time she moved they gave her morphine. they overdosed her - a mercy and still legally a crime. it all had to be done without being conscious of it, we still living under the tyranny of hysterical people i guess. so her lying there was a cemetary, i feel like there is a cemetary in me, of all the people gone.

my irish side came in and did around the clock vigil, she was barely awake for most of it, but maybe the warmth of our mortal souls needed to be there. the eldest daughter was there as if some ancestry of her body demanded it beyond all grey advancements of civilization, the green hills of ireland drove her to motherly watch over her mother and the rest of the clan. grandma was barely alive for most of it. i held her hand often in the last couple of days, as often as i could, i thought that at the end was when the most of one's heart should show, but not in melodrama but in the most humble acts. so i held her hand. i remember my cousin holding her other hand and looking across the bed and our grandmother's body at her. she was pretty torn up, but we were doing the same thing. my grandmother's hands were so soft at the end. the most softest things, i have ever touched. there was no way to tell if she could feel us, we didn't know if she wouldn't have liked that, we were kind of imposing our love on her.

in good fashion, my uncles and aunts brought neverending supplies of beer and wine and whiskey. when she was awake, we administered whiskey to her in little doses of water. we were hammered most of the time. in the night, we all sat around her bed, like savages, drunk and serene. they made my sister sing jock stewart. she was afraid to because of the words. she didn't understand that drunkeness makes for instant immunity to indignity. so she sang

my name is jock stewart,
i'm a canny gaun man
and a roving young fella i've been

(chorus)
so be easy and free
when you're drinking with me
i'm a man you don't meet every day

i have acres of land
i have men at command
i've always a shilling to spare

(chorus)

so fill up your glasses with
brandy and wine
whatever it costs i will pay

(chorus)

well i took out my dog
and him i did shoot
all down in the county kildare

(chorus)

the star

2011-11-01T20:38:00.014-04:00

of course, while all this was going on the stars were out there, hanging in a big black void. i get born some years ago, and they were still up there, i learn to crawl, walk and talk. i learn to think. i hurt people and help people. they say that the distance of the earth to the sun is 150 000 000 kilometers, just a bunch of black space between.

ok, not just a bunch of black space. the black space is filled with light. how about that. but light is so weightless it might as well be nothing. its the shine. its the shine on the void.

but if i were to take off this body and step off this planet and walk immortal the 150 000 000 kilometers, i would arrive at the sun. well, i've always been wrapped up in the sun's arms. the magnetic field of the sun - it's pull, it's "come closer" extends far beyond the solar system. computers say it looks like this:

the god with it's arms wide looks like this, maybe.

but near the sun, i would walk into the corona. its just a bunch of hazy wind, hot, blind, wailing light waving like grass. get up in the morning, there is all that light hitting the apartment buildings, the strangers going to work, the effort to repeat, nothing - the sunlight hits wordless forests somewhere. the corona is gushing light, hot as hell, about 3 000 000 degrees kelvin. of course, a nuclear bomb is about 10 000 000 degrees, about three times as hot as the corona. if they set off any of the thousands of nukes lying around like apocalyptic driftwood, the earth could theoretically bleed stars. but all of that is just something you have to live with. the corona looks like this:

this is an eclipse. the sun isn't black. the sun is so bright that if you took the black disk off of this picture, it would blind you.

I can't send messages, my body is gone. i would have to ask the corona to trace words on the wall but the sun is beyond me. we have no language. i can't speak river or mountain, and they are just earth. the sun is an alien. i walk along the corona's lines and step onto the photosphere. this is the sun we see in the sky. it is cool here. only 6000 degrees kelvin. its like a big ocean on fire. its serene, red waves lapping up against my feet. dog dreams - serene. the sun with little changes makes the earth shudder with life. i cant remember the earth anymore. the sun's surface is like a big sea. prominences are bleeding out its back, curling high into the sky. the stars are gone

i walk on the surface. the earth is far.

then i dive down into the water. i swim downwards, and i guess everything is dark like in the water and glowing. im exagerrating. its more like falling through clouds. it black as night. the convective layer, the skin just underneath the skin, the sun is pushing big fountains of light to break at the surface and cooler fire is falling in big black waterfalls towards the core. if the astrophysicists made this all up it would still be the craziest and most beautiful lie ever.

but they have a pretty good idea. i swim down 200 000 kilometers, it takes me a few years, catching the falls of black fires down, see the bright fountains twisting up around me in the far distance, far away in the blackness like tornadoes on the horizon, glowing cinders in the heart of the fire, the core comes near.

you can't see. not even with these eyes. the core is about 15 000 000 degrees kelvin. i can't swim any further, its a perfect solid landscape in the darkness, a darkness made by too much light. molecules are crushing together, you can feel them trembling. the emptiness that makes an atom is shrinking, here is the heart of life, life - the things between the void. the little squeaks of light in a sleeping blackness, here they are squeezed together, and what do they do? hydrogen becomes helium, helium becomes carbon. things are being born. a thousand earths of little tiny things being born. all the time

occupy

2011-10-27T00:52:00.003-04:00

me and my sweetheart walked hand in hand down the middle of the street in the financial district, looking with slow eyes at each other. we were with about 2000 people, shouting, roaring, drumming, singing, sometimes crying but mostly feeling little fires come on in our bellies. they cleared the cars away like gentlemen - the volunteers in rags and orange armbands, like soldiers, while we our mob lurched and slouched down the street towards bay street. they called out to the bystanders the civilians the proles "come join us!" called out to the windows, almost begged "come join us!" most just stood there, half smiling, confused, one young skinny guy with a smoke dangling out of his mouth stuck his hand out to a streetcar driver who shook it "hey there, sir, i'm an anarchist and i'm out here every day fighting for your freedom and your society and i appreciate the work you do, just remember us" and moving on

at the head was a pickup truck driven by a 300 pound transvestite with blond hair with two gigantic speakers on the flatbed. a microphone dangled over the edge and a row of mohawk elder women sang sacred songs and drummed. these songs, i think, have never been sung in the financial district of any city, and the sound echoed through the streets - a declaration of the coming of the earth, the heart, the spirit - this is a declaration of the coming of the soul to the steel. the wailing and the boom boom boom of the drum like the heartbeat of a giant waking up crawled up the walls of the financial district, reverberated across the hard canyon of steel and glass and money and death. the echoes flew ahead of us down the long streets that were now mostly empty except for us, loping along, crashing into each other, smiling at each other, no violence in anyone's heart but a very serious willingness to go all the way i think, i feel. the flags that waved in front were twinned anarchist and mohawk warrior flags. the powerless are finding each other just when the powerful have begun to push things too far

this revolution or whatever it is has no words. this is its strength and its weakness. it comes from the belly into the world, learning what it is even as it begins to breathe. it is our guts come awake. it is what we always wanted, us becoming in charge of ourselves, us coming together against the nightmare of greed. there is a fear of politics - rightful too - because politics is so dirty and crazy. but that fear is only true if it is a fear of meaningless politics - heartless politics, ruthless politics, ideological politics. but if you run from your brothers and sisters when they are sincere, then your fear is unfounded, will sour into apathy, and you will miss a rare chance to feel part of a real justice on this wild earth

they won't let it stand, be sure of that. the cruel and the selfish always play this game better than we do. but we can be part of something that is better than that, in our heart of hearts we can know our lives meant something. but we have to believe in each other for any of this to mean anything

everything you'll never know

2011-10-20T00:34:00.004-04:00

if i cross the streets of downtown again i will wonder where they all are. a million faces going blank looking as if nothing beautiful lived but all that mattered was the great dreamless sleep of the roads, crawling and growing into the forests. its those types what make the world go round, what make the roads crawl. i wondering down the street, the cut up sky, the bad world out of the daylight. everyone always seems to be hiding so much more than what they are, the aortas of survival are in not feeling what you feel but feeling what you want to look like you feel.

they met their tricks, their dealers and their cops here, there they smashed his head against the tiles, there they were hungry and homeless and broke, on this spot they broke up, met up, forgot their parents, talked of tattoos and mutual hatreds. whole civilizations of junkies go on in hiding, there are crumbling sphinxes being turned into condominiums down the main drag.

masters of self-destruction, their each day was still like a great poetry that would make nirvana blush. it seems i knew so little about them, and i don't think anyone knew most of anything about them, their old days secrets they were wishing to make clear on their faces, which they did sometimes in scars. but no one ever understood the scars, least of all the little magicians that put them there.

and what about me? i always knew i was mortal. i always took the buddha seriously for saying that knowing you are going to die, how can you quarrel? for as long as i can remember, i felt with precision how lonely everyone really is, how they couldn't handle the warmth of each other even if they wanted to, and they didn't want to. the pricks rule the world, and as the great madman himself said, it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks. but i learned you could give parts of yourself if you always had a place to escape to. some put a sign up that says god. some just have kids.

i myself found the wind. it sounds like everything i'll never know.

so i left that back in the city. its what the city does. a few dozen poets who don't know it, but the ones who do know it usually get paid and it makes them ugly. i remember a lot of angels, unnoticed among a million blank faces, going about the business of building a world of roads that will carry the city into the last remaining forests of this world.

otherworld

2011-08-23T20:22:00.008-04:00

in myth, the stories make no sense, unlike our stories, which try desperately to make sense. men turn into crows, women are swallowed by witches and born again, coyotes pull the sky around them like a blanket. the myth was the news for longer than america has lived or will live, even if it lived three lives.

myth became the news. the story creates the world. the story never represents the real world, it represents the dreamlike nature of living in the world. the news becomes a myth striving for accuracy but always prevented by the nature of storytelling.

there is a new myth, that tripoli fell and gaddafi was defeated. a mad king gone down by swarms of young men with new guns and old shoes. its like present day archaeology. bombs were dropped from airplanes, but no one is sure where. men fought and murdered each other, but no one was sure for who. the pieces are spread out across the world like shredded newspaper. there are secrets and conspiracies, we only see their faces now and then dart from the edge of the screen into vision and back out again. now they cheer and cry out victory. but for what no one is sure, not even them.

a long time ago, old men and women sat among the young and told them stories of the world out there. the trees and the mountains and the skies and the plains made a great frontier between the home of life and the world that was bigger and aliver than all of them put together. They could see it out there, moving, waving in the wind, dark and wet and secret. unknown.

the unknown is so dark that it makes an infinity. darkness is the best light in which to see infinity.

the old men and women told them stories about what went on out there, in the immortal land outside their circle of light. where the stones and trees were alive like they were alive, where the animals were magicians. and that there is the otherworld, the world beyond us. because the great truth of the otherworld, of the land and the sky the universe and the bottom of the ocean is that it all lives, much more than we do. and this sense of a living, awake unknown suggests that we are small and unknowing, no matter how many roads we build into it. No matter how many walls of houses we surround ourselves with and say this is true. this is true and nothing else. this cross, this computer.

the mystery of tripoli falling is that it is a city in the desert. it fell because men in other cities pushed it over with their long arms. but none of them know what for. and the men with guns on the ground maybe seek only a paradise they know is not this, but not what it is. and the otherworld looks on. if only we talked to the otherworld as the haida did, walking across the mountains with their long legs and staring up into the wheeling stars and moving graciously like the land itself. i had a dream last night, of falling into the ocean and falling through progressive layers of fish, down farther than i could go, to where the water went black, and there were great whales and monsters passing by me, and i sank farther than that, and the fish still swirled around me, past surviving.

the idea of anarchism

2011-08-13T00:28:00.013-04:00

one of the things that attracted me to anarchism is that it is almost incorruptible. any time anarchists get a suspicion that things aren't pure, they get ornery and walk away. this also explains anarchism's legendary ineffectiveness, producing exactly one coalition government in the 20th century and a bunch of revolutionary cells that went nowhere. and even then, spain's anarchist roots in the andalusian mountains relied more on a peasant culture that understood anarchism as a somewhat spiritual mission rather than an ideological and economic programme.

it's hard to describe exactly what makes anarchism a political ideology. it's strength lies in that it is an ethic. you can hyphenate anarchism with just about anything, anarcho-whathaveyou. there are anarcho-libertarians and anarcho-communists. you can't find political ideologies that span the spectrum the way anarchism does.

anarchism is an ethic. it is inherently suspicious of power and authority. so you can be a libertarian that rejects corporations or a communist that rejects the Party. anarchism affirms the paradox that while everyone is an equal in the community regardless of ability, everyone is also absolutely free and unique as an individual that cannot subsume to the community. this is possible because in anarchism, what is good is not rooted in an absolute. The good shifts times, places and ideas constantly, and its spirit must be continually sought out. The individual's inherent authority over their own life must at all times be humbled by the elusiveness of goodness and truth.

because power and authority are facts of human life, anarchists are realists - no government is eligible for loyalty and obedience. at the same time, anarchists are mostly socialists because this ethic is rooted in being responsible to one's brothers and sisters: the community is an essential part of being.

realism is the idea that all human politics are governed by the interests of power. all states and individuals are in a condition of competing for power. the most simple analogy is, suppose you find a gun in the wilderness. you look around, not knowing what else is out there. to pick up the gun is to claim power over human life. to refuse to pick up the gun means risking that someone else will, perhaps someone with less good will than you. this is a dilemma with no happy answer. if you pick up the gun, you will be compelled to use it or threaten to use it, usually with very good reasons. you will be in a position to dominate. and it is there that the corruptive effect of power begins. soon, you are addicted to wielding the gun, because it becomes the essential tool for your survival. if you don't, you allow that you are risking something terrible to happen to yourself or others at the hands of another unpredictable, confused human being in an unpredictable, confused world.

anarchism faces this question. at it's best, it understands the gun. and it understands that one must never trust the man with the gun, even if it's you. maybe especially if it's you, because you are your own best deceiver. anarchism is an ethic rather than an ideology because it requires that nothing can have absolute authority, not even an idea, and so is open to being changed, rejected or renewed. there are fanatical anarchists, but they destroy the spirit of anarchism.

anarchism's answer to this problem is to take the gun and learn how not to need to use it. but to be a hell of a good shot

sirens

2011-08-10T22:39:00.003-04:00

people don't remember anything. sirens every night. they're sending a new satellite to jupiter. it will sail around a planet a hundred times the size of planet earth. it will see its red storms, storms the size of the earth. there is a sea of darkness that goes on forever between us and it.

i was walking the street last week and a young fellow smoking a joint who slept in an rooming house down on yonge street and was going crazy because there are no walls, just dividers and a tyrannical asian woman who scratched up his arm looking for crack in his gymbag, he said he thought something big was going to happen soon. i said something big is always happening. he said yeah but like the end of the world. i said it is always the end of the world for someone somewhere.

then we speculated that everything was run on electricity. if you cut off the electricity you could plunge the world into chaos. all some terrorist would have to do is stop the electricity. all the computers would go down. all the lights in all the cities. all the phones. bank records would be gone. the sirens would go silent. we agreed we would get out of the city as fast as we could. we would catch fish and hunt and learn to do things.

generators might run some things, but everything would be back in darkness. then there would be fires to keep out the darkness. then the fires would spread. nasa would lose contact with its satellites, and it would drift, sending back messages now and again, asking, are you listening? are you listening?

fiume

2011-08-02T20:49:00.004-04:00

"in this mad and vile world, fiume is the symbol of liberty"
- gabriele d'annunzio

In the last weeks of summer in the year 1920, the italian poet gabriele d'annunzio marched with a small army of deserters on the ancient city of fiume on the adriatic sea in what is now croatia. d'annunzio must seem almost drunken, raging in his world war one fighter plane, ranting about nietzsche and his heart pounding with the beauty that fascism might give birth to in the world.

when he marched into the city and confronted the van of the defending army, he demanded they kill him first if they chose to stop his army. instead he was embraced and he strode into the city to the adulation of the italian population, who flooded the streets like a mob of children.

d'annunzio was furious that his beloved italy had given up fiume to yugoslavia, but since his beloved italy would not listen to him, he mesmerized a brigade of the italian army to follow him there and seize the city in its name.

this strange conqueror created a state out of his own imagination. maybe for the first and last time, a drunken poet was the law of a country. in the constitution, a muddy, ecstatic contradiction of fascist and anarchist principles, music was a first principle of the state, dedicated as a social and religious institution, whatever that means. but choral and orchestral celebrations were held for free. freedom of religion and atheism were protected. in the constitution, there were guarantees for a beautiful life, the development of spiritual man, women were guaranteed freedom from husbandly authority,

the state was dominated by nine corporations, each one representing each of the major industries of the state, accompanied by a tenth for the "best people" reserved for the "mysterious forces of progress and adventure."

fiume was the island of the futurists. wandering down its ancient avenues, tyrannized by artists, soldiers drunk on the corner, the tyrants carousing and pleading with the people to take up the glass and the guitar into the late hours.

as the italian government in its embarassment blockaded the sea ports and pressured d'annunzio to abandon the city, he sought out and employed pirate bands to attack the blockade and raid towns.

by december, with the regular italian army marching on the city, d'annunzio capitulated. capitulation in war gets rough treatment. often it is the best of the worst, and saves many lives. for this d'annunzio deserves credit. hell, eventually mussolini made him a prince. the aristocracy in any given place rarely suffers. one can only imagine the jails of fiume were filled with many proletarian princes in the years following no one will commemorate a stamp or a statue to.

fiume, the tyranny of artists, was born and died in a season. in the autumn of 1920. one wonders how long it could have lived, one wonders if anyone worked very much. the world can be so easily changed with a single gesture, is so easily created. and just as easily collapsed.

the world was then as it is now, choked with the fault lines of empires, every wilderness dominated, everything living hunted down and cataloged. then, fiume was mad

the black bloc

2011-07-27T20:56:00.012-04:00

pretty solid tactics, really

every so often, in the hearts of the earth's wealth, where the humans keep their lights and their steel, in the cities, there is a demonstration by people against the tyranny of stockbrokers and chief executive officers. the demonstrations are occasioned by times when the suits get together to show the people they are making the world a better place. usually this means giving money to each other.

these people are not like you and i. they find five-star hotels commonplace. they sometimes forget they make calls on cell phones from the backs of limousines. they live in castles of the future. these are people who rarely walk down the street, who don't do their laundry and try to find the other sock, who only get on a subway as a novelty, and then not without a big ex-cop beside them. if then. with a nod they can change the lives of thousands of humans, take jobs away or confer them. annihilate whole towns with mining projects.

these people are real, you just never see them. why would you? you are nothing to them. plus, you couldn't get past the gates.

some people are offended only by the idea that such people claim the right to determine the fate of other human beings, that they can build Dubai and destroy a river, that they can tell us what is good and force your grandfathers into a cartoonish blue apron and hand out coffees like a teenager. that they can call themselves lovers of equality and close the gates behind them.

the protesters come as they are, hold a sign, wave a fist, and go home. work starts at 9am. kids don't feed themselves. there are others more serious, mostly younger, who come to fight. they come to smash a cop or the window panes of a bank. fighting is for fun sometimes. sometimes it just feels good to face your enemy for once, even if its some cop who just wants to bust bad guys and protect his city. since all cops are just people with guns, some are cops to push people around and some just to fight evil. since all cops are instruments of violence, they are exposed to and are purveyors of agony on a daily basis, until they are numb to it. they have to be. being instruments of violence, they are deployed by the state without being consulted, and must pathologically feel both powerful and helpless. At Seattle in 1999, I remember the riot cop, among a hundred exactly like him, suddenly sigh a long sigh that lasted the duration of the world. he thought he had to be there.

the black bloc go for a fight, hoping to run into a bullycop and get their hands bloody. they go to kick in the window of the bank that funds rapist businessmen. maybe they think it will do some good, certainly its better than sitting on the porch shrugging. of course it wont do any good, because its not what's needed. i admire them for having the balls to stand up to the cops, who are better armed and better covered in the newspaper. they are our only representatives in the streets. they are romantics, and i always stick up for losers.

what's needed? we have to profoundly change how we live. our gaze is compelled upwards, to the suits. we have to wrench our eyes from the overlords and turn them to each other. we have to turn them to the land, to the past and the future and not the amnesia of instant gratification. we have to be willing to take risks, face danger, try to build things. we have to learn to do things for ourselves, and then do them for each other, and stop praying to the god of business and elections to save us. or making demands from that same fickle god.

in this sense the hippies have it right, with their farmer's markets and their fair trade. they're building a whole economy that represents a power that the fat can only take by force, and the fat ultimately are afraid of anything that take wealth from them. until then they'll destroy the earth, and we'll wonder.

the black bloc know this and don't know it. they still look up to them, looking for a fight they can never win. but none of them plan on dying, and everyone is wellfed, or they'd bring guns instead of sticks. just like they do in Iraq.

fuck the word

2011-07-18T01:05:00.006-04:00

ah fuck the word. all these little symbols strung together, there is no harsh antiseptic definition for each one of them. each attempt at precision outside of the sciences is a lost cause. you must listen for the spirit behind the words, as if a monkey could gesture to a stone and mean an earth. the wordless often makes better speeches, usually when there's a good breeze. the word is a babble contrived to gesture to a spirit. take the word fuck. the word fuck has endless meanings. you can shout fuck and mean fuck(that is good) or fuck(that is bad). you can say fuuuck, (i am awed), or fuk (i understand). you can say fucking to mean sex, or fucking to mean emphatically so. and most interestingly, to fuck, to have raw sex, is the foundation. to turn into an animal and splay for pleasure beyond restraint, to fuck. maybe in our most abandonment we found a word that liberates us from the idea we should live in the appearances of our life. the surfaces of words are their least interesting features, unless studied like arrowheads or potsherds.

and i dont mean read between the lines, for christ's sake, nothing is more self-projecting than what we paint over dark spaces. Between the lines is mystery, pure mystery. And if you could see between them you miss the spirit of them. But of course lobotomization is a popular pasttime. not the words, not not the words. the spirit that flows in everything, including words. words are as much things as trees, stones, sky and water. universes are not made of units but of continuities. just because we're so small we have to figure out one thing sweetly at a time does not mean the universe is interested in our logic.

firefly

2011-07-13T22:51:00.004-04:00

the subway broke down between two stations. the lights went out. the only light were the bare bulbs from the caves outside. he was sitting across from me, rolled up a newspaper and lit it like a cigarette.

"wine?"

i drank from his bottle, it tasted good, like wild tomatoes. there were sirens in the distance.

"well, i feel safe" he said, and grinned a a grin of green teeth.

"there's not enough heart" i complained, drinking the smoke "there's no fight in these people. no wonder suits run everything. maybe nuclear war is a good thing, it gives everyone a sense of doom. you fight when you've got nothing to lose."

he flicked a firecracker down the dark alley of the train car, it crackled and left dying embers dancing against the windows like they were alive, fireflies.

he shrugged and traced a black hole on the ground. it looked an awful lot like a galaxy.

"it's a mystery to you," he said empirically.

"tell me about the war" i asked.

"ah well" he warmed to the subject "the War. well, the old man thought that obedience was a virtue, you know. like most old people. we should all be grateful or something. be glad i dont kill you, he would say. and i would say i'm not grateful for that. you little ones will never learn that way. you'll end up eating the earth. so we rebelled"

"i get so tired of this crap" i said and lit my eyes "the earth made us. made us like this. it made us all voracious. everything we do, its the earth doing it. we are just dirt and water, bones are dirt and water, so are brains. we are the earth, satellites that fly around saturn are just pieces of earth, sent out by other pieces of earth, the earth is evil. the earth is good, the earth eats itself,"

he got up and danced around in a spot, made a little moon bounce in his hand. he passed it to me and i put it where my heart is. nuclear bombs went off on my palm, six of them. they lit my gaze like a bonfire.

"more!" he shouted happily.

"the good earth is creation and destruction, destruction innocent like a puppy. good is beyond that. good is in defiance of death. good is endless wisdom."

a maybe

2011-07-12T00:42:00.005-04:00

let us begin here in this moment of the present. here you are, reading these words. we can see already that we are drifting away from the place where we began. the strangeness of the present is that it is this continual moment of creation, a continual giving birth to the future, and a continual death of the moment. we cannot stop at any moment, we are propelled, blown forward by the force of What? It seems so mundane, to just, wake up, to pause

don't worry, any time you want, any time you get lost, you can start at the beginning, and return to the present.

here is the irreversible thing about the present, it is a precipice, it can only happen once and then is gone. take now for example, you stand reading this on the edge of now, where an infinitude of possibles sprawl out before you, so many millions upon millions upon millions of futures. you decide to keep reading, or you get up and walk away from the screen, or you pause and wonder about anything. you can take only one path, and therein you have made an irreversible groove in the air, and in the same way you are given license to make many of these mistakes, decisions, wanderings.

once the moment has been trespassed, however, that present is gone, the world including you a bit older. you look back and that moment is behind you, burned into the earth and air in footsteps, irrevocable, permanent, forever. so back then, the world was full of possible blacknesses, unknowns, unmades. now it is a little more created. records are just shards, history just a ghost town, full of dead parts. the harm done, the good grown. what is done is done, the vanity of knowing what happened, well it happened whether we ever know it or not (and seldom do, despite our editors, the truth is real).

if you lived back then, maybe in 1784 and what it made you, all that history of 200 years was yet unmade, still could be's, no aeroplanes or launch pads, or televisions, still a possible, a maybe, a giant, universe-size maybe, but we always live against that edge, against the blackness of maybe, all the while a you a me, a me a you a maybe

wind and airplanes

2011-06-21T22:49:00.004-04:00

the clouds are all broken up in the toronto sky. pale blackness. the wind is a song, a talking wind. all the trees talking to each other. an airplane motors cuts through it. it flies over, faint and low, a-goes off over the city, becomes a star, moves, stops then is gone. flickers of white light like far lightning in the clouds it goes into. i dont know what they are.

it must take a million to run a city. i once figured out it would take you a month and a half to count to a million, one number a second.

the numbers on mental illness, etc. go up all the time. most people go to the hospital for nothing medical, they go for their minds or what have you. its true. i don't think its because people are more mental, its because it never counted before. if you were fucked up in 1895 you didn't go to a hospital or a psychologist, you went to a priest or you just walked around fucked up. the papers didn't know you and society just trampled over you while it built railways into the heart of the dene mothers. i guess they trample you over now but they say sorry and pick you up, send you to the mental ward, keep you off the streets where people might look at you and spill their coffee.

it's still better. and worse. if a kid gets molested and can't say so, they stick ritalin in their belly and tell them to do art therapy. that is terrible but in 1895 you ended up in a room with cardboard walls getting beaten by the landlord for owing $3.00 in back rent.

the ritalin kids are the shame of the western world. they all end up seeing demons and hiding in dirty apartments, so is it better? that we even know, certainly. that we don't care, same as before. that's progress.

these are all forces we can't see, and you can't blame the government, or even the fascists that want corporations to sleep with your mother. they're all just peons. rich peons, but still dumb as shit. all rich people think they earned it. no one single individual can possibly be worth more than $500,000 to society. and that would be like ghandi or einstein or someone else no one listens to. rare.

really, its not their fault. its all nature. we are mother earth. mother earth spawned us, gave bloody birth to us and dropped us in her verdant morgue. she makes em and chews em up. she made all the beauty and all the ugly. and maybe down at the bottom of the noose its all beauty and we can't make sense of the ugly. but pain is real, even if it is all in the mind. hurt is as real as the fabric of spacetime, and tragedy is real because people's hearts are intrinsically innocent, you can't tell me different because i've seen love gushing like blood from the stab wound of indifference, usually around 1130 on a subway between st george and bay street. but try to tell a businessman that and he'll blink.

and they say you should vote or you can't complain.

i hate voting.

viva zapata

2011-06-12T21:36:00.002-04:00

today: a writer, not me, but someone like me. subcommandante marcos:

We know What We're Doing;
It is Worth It

LA JORNADA, DECEMBER 13, 1994, PGS. 8-11

Zapatista Army of National Liberation
Mexico
December 1994

To Whom It May Concern:

" I am the escaped one, after I was born They locked me up inside me but I left. My soul seeks me, through hills and valley, I hope my soul never finds me."
FERNANDO PESSOA

I write this, while reports from our companeros arrive about preparations for the advance of our units, and as I burn a last stack of unanswered letters. That is why I write to you now. I always told myself I would respond to each and every letter we received. It seemed to me that it was the least we could do, answer so many people who had bothered to write a few lines and risk putting their name and direction on it hoping for a response.

The war is imminent. I definitely cannot save these letters. I should destroy them because, if they fall into the hands of the government, they could cause many problems for many good people and a few bad people. Now the flames are high and their colors change. Sometimes they are an iridescent blue which never fails to surprise this night of crickets and far-away lightning which announces the cold December of prophecies and pending accounts. There were quite a few letters. I managed to answer a good part of them, but I would barely shrink a pile when another would arrive. "Sysiphus (who was doomed to roll a stone uphill forever)" I said to myself "or the vulture eating the entrails of Prometheus" my other adds, always opportune in its venomous sarcasm.

I should be sincere and confess that, lately, the little pile which arrives habitually was growing smaller. At first I attributed it to the nosy Government agents. Then I realized that good people get tired..and they stop writing..and sometimes, they stop fighting..

Yeah I know that writing a letter isn't exactly an assault on the Winter Palace. But the letters made us travel so far. One day we would be in Tijuana, the next in Merida, sometimes in Michoacan, or in Guerrerro, Veracruz, or Guanajuato, Chihuahua, Nayarit, Queretaro or the Federal District (Mexico City). Sometimes we would travel farther to Chile, Paraguay, Spain, Italy, Japan. Well, so those trips that gave us more than one smile and warmed cold sleepless night or refreshed the heat of the days, are over.

Anyway, I have told you I have decided to respond to all the letters, and we the walking gentlemen, know how to keep our promises (as long as they're not a romance). So I have thought your generosity would alleviate my heavy guilt if all of you accepted one solitary and overwhelming missive in which you each find yourselves as the solitary recipient.

Vale, since you cannot protest or express disagreement (you could do it but I won't learn about given the mail and etcetera will be useless), I will proceed then to give free reign to the insane dictatorship which takes over my agile hand when it comes to writing a letter. What better way to begin than a few verses from Pessoa, curse and prophesy, which say, I think...

"The gaze, which is looking where it cannot see, turns: Both of us are talking What was not conserved. Does this begin or end?"
Such and such a month of the ineffable year of 1994,

To Whom It May Concern,

I want to say a few things about what has happened since January. Many of you wrote to say thank you. Imagine our surprise when we read in your letter that you are grateful that we exist. I, for example, whose most affectionate gesture from my troops has been one of resignation when I arrive at one of our positions, was surprisingly surprised. And when I am surprised by a surprise unusual things happen. For example, I will bite my pipe too much and the stem breaks. Then, for example, as I look for another pipe I find some candy and commit the grave error of crackling it, a sound which only cellophane-wrapped candy makes and which that plague called "children" can hear from dozens of meters away, kilometers, if the wind is in their favor. It so happens for example, that when I raise the volume on the little tape player to drown out the noise from the cellophane with a song which says..

"The one who has a song
will have a storm,
company,
solitude.
The one who follows a good road
will have dangerous points
which will invite them to stop.
But the song has worth,
good storm
and the company
is worth the solitude.
The agony of haste
is always worth it
though the points
are filled with truth."

In the little room (all these things invariably happen in a little room with a roof of tin or cardboard or grass or nylon) appears Heriberto. He has a face of "I found you". I pretend not to see him and whistle a tune from a movie whose name I can't remember. Anyway, the hero had good results with his whistle, because a girl, who was [as good-looking] as Cejas said, smiled and came closer.

Then I realize that it is not a girl but Heriberto who comes near. Next to him comes Tonita with her corncob-doll. Tonita, she who gripes about a kiss because "it itches", the one with the cavities, who is between five and six, the favorite of the Sup. Heriberto, the fastest crier in the Lacandon jungle, the one who draws the Anti-SUP-marine ducks, the terror of the large red ants and the Christmas chocolate, the favorite of Ana Maria. Heriberto the punishment which some vengeful god sent to the Sup for being a transgressor of violence and professional of the law. What, wasn't that it? Well, don't worry about it...

Attention! Listen! Heriberto arrives and tells me that Eva is crying because she wants to see the singing horse and the Major does not let her because he is watching the BEDROOM OF PASSOLINI. Of course Heriberto does not say the title of the movie but I can guess by his description which is "..the Major is watching naked viejas.." For Heriberto all women who wear a skirt above their knees or higher is "naked," and any woman above the age of four like Eva, are "viejas". I know that this is one of Heriberto's sneaky schemes to take the cellophane-wrapped candy which rang like the siren on the Titanic in the middle of the fog. Heriberto and his ducks are coming to the rescue, because there is nothing sadder in this world than a candy without a child to rescue it from its cellophane prison.

Tonita, on the other hand, discovers, a "mud-proof" rabbit, in other words it's black. She decides to submerge it in a puddle which, in her estimation, has all the necessary characteristics to distinguish it as a quality test.

Before the invasion of the "general command of the ezetaelene" I play dumb and pretend like I'm very absorbed in my writing. Heriberto finds out and draws a duck. He titles it irreverently, the "Sup". I pretend to be offended because Heriberto argues that my nose is just like the duck's bill. Tonita meanwhile, puts the muddy bunny on a rock next to her corncob and looks and analyzes them with a critical eye. It occurs to me that the results don't satisfy her because she shakes her head with the same obstinacy she does when she refuses to give me a kiss. Heriberto, confronted by my indifference, seems to give up and I am satisfied with my complete victory. Then I learn that the candy is gone, and I remember that Heriberto made a strange movement as I gazed at the drawing. He took it from under my nose. And with this nose, that says a lot! I am depressed and more so when I learn that Salinas is beginning to pack to leave to the "World Trade Organization". It occurs to me that it was unjust when he called us "transgressors." If he knew Heriberto he would know that, compared to Heriberto, we are much more law- abiding than even the PRI leadership.

Anyway I was talking about my surprise when I read those "thank yous" in your letters. Sometimes they were written to Ana Maria, Ramona, Tacho, Moy, Mario, Laura, or any of the men and women who cover their faces to show it to others and show it to others to hide from everyone.

I rehearse my most reverent thoughts to appreciate so many thank yous when Ana Maria appears in the doorway. Heriberto is crying and holding her hand. She asks me why I won't give Heriberto any candy. "Not give him candy?" and I look at his face. The tracks of the candy has been covered with snot and tears which have won Ana Maria to his side. "That's right" says Ana Maria "Heriberto says he gave you a drawing in exchange for candy, and you didn't keep your word." I feel like a victim of an unjust accusation, and I put on the look of an ex-president of the PRI who is preparing to take over a powerful government department and climbing to the podium to give his best speech. Ana Maria, without comment, takes the bag of candy where the original came from and gives it! all! to Heriberto. "Here" she says "The Zapatistas always keep their word."

They both leave. I am reeeeaaally sad because that candy was for Eva's birthday. And I don't know how old she is because when I asked her mother she said six. "But the other day she told me she was going to be four" I complained. "Yes but she becomes four and begins to be five, in other words she's around six", she responded firmly. She leaves me counting with my fingers and doubting the entire educational system which taught you that 1+1=2, 6x8=48 and other transcendent things, which, in the Southeast mountains of Mexico, obviously do not hold true. Another mathematical logic functions here.

"We Zapatistas are very other " declared Monarch once when he told me that when he ran out of brake fluid, he would urinate into the container and get the same effect.

The other day for example there was a birthday party. The "youth group" got together and organized "Zapatista olympics". The master of ceremonies declared that the long jump competition was about to start, which really means who jumps highest. The high jump was next; which really means who jumps the farthest. I was counting on my fingers again when Lieutenant Ricardo arrived and told me that they had gone to sing happy birthday at dawn. "Where was the serenade?" I asked. I was happy that everything was returning to normal since it was logical that happy birthday be sung at dawn. "..in the cemetery" answered Ricardo. "The cemetery?" I began to count my fingers again. "Yes, well, it was the birthday of a compa who died in combat in January," Ricardo says on his way out (the drag races were next).

"Good" I said to myself "a birthday party for a dead person. Perfectly logical..in the mountains of Southeast Mexico.." I sighed.

I have been sighing with nostalgia, remembering the good old times when the bad guys were the bad guys and the good guys were the good guys. When Newton's apple followed its irresistible trajectory from the tree towards some childish hand. When the world smelled like a schoolroom on the first day of class: of fear, of mystery, of newness. I'm sighing with true emphasis when, without previous arrangement, Beto comes in to ask if there are any balloons. Without waiting for my answer, he starts to look among maps, operative orders, pieces of guns, ashes of pipe tobacco, dried tears, red flowers colored with pen, cartridge belts and a smelly ski-mask. Somewhere Beto finds a bag of balloons and picture of a playmate, pretty old (the picture, not the playmate). Beto stops for a minute to decide between the bag of balloons and the picture and he decides what all children do; he takes both of them.

I've always said that this is not a general headquarters but a kindergarten. Yesterday I told Moy he should install some anti- personnel mines. "You think the soldiers will come all the way here?" he asks me, worried. I answer trembling "I don't know about them, but what about the children." Moy nods agreeably and begins to tell me about his complicated design for a booby trap, a fake hole, with stakes and poison. I like the idea, but none of the children are boobies so I recommend that we electrify everything and place machine guns at the entrance. Moy thinks a while and says he has a better idea and leaves me..

What was I saying? Oh yeah! About the candy for Eva which Heriberto took. There I am talking over the radio so they can look in every camp for a bag of candy for Eva. Eva appears with a little pot of tamales which "my mother sent me because today is my birthday" Eva says to me with that look that in ten years or so will provoke more than one war.

I thank her profusely and ask what else I can do for her, then say I have a present for her. "Whereizit?" she says-asks-demands and I begin to sweat because there is nothing more terrible than a look of "moreno" anger. Eva's face begins to transform itself like in that movie of "El Santo against the Wolfman", and all I can do is stutter. To make things worst, Heriberto arrives to see "if the Sup is still mad" at him. I begin to smile to give me time to calculate where I could place a good kick on Heriberto when Eva notices that Heriberto has an almost-empty bag of candy.

She asks him where he got it, and he says in a sugary and slurry voice the "Chup". I don't realize that he means the "Sup" until Eva turns and reminds me, "and my present?" Heriberto's eyes pop out when he hears the world "present". He drops the bag of candy, which by now was empty and gets near Eva to say with a sticky cynicism "Yeah, what about our present?" "Our?" I repeat as I figure where to kick him when I notice that Ana Maria is hovering nearby, and I quash my intent. So then I say "I'm hiding it" "Where?", asks Eva already tired of the mystery. Heriberto, meanwhile views this as a challenge and starts to open my backpack. He tosses out my blanket, altimeter, compass, tobacco, a box of bullets, a sock. Finally I stop him by screaming "It's not there!" Heriberto then starts on Moy's backpack and he is about to open it when I say "You have to answer a riddle to know where the present is".

By that time Heriberto was getting fed up with Moy's backpack and he comes to sit at my side. Eva does too. Beto and Tonita come near, and I light my pipe to give me time to measure the size of the problem of the riddle. Old Man Antonio comes near. He makes a gesture to point out a tiny statue of Zapata made of silver sent by sandal, and repeats...
THE STORY OF THE QUESTIONS

The cold is harsh in these mountains. Ana Maria and Mario are with me on this exploration, 10 years before the dawn of January.

The two have barely joined the guerrilla. I am an infantry lieutenant and it is my turn to teach them what others taught me: to live in the mountain. Yesterday I ran into Old Man Antonio for the first time. We both lied. He said he was on his way to see his field, I said I was hunting. We both knew we were lying and we knew we knew it. I left Ana Maria to follow the path and I went towards the river to try to find a very high mountain and Old Man Antonio. He must have thought the same thing because he appeared at the same place where I found him before.

Like yesterday, Old Man Antonio sat on the ground, and leans against a patch of dark-brown green and begins to roll a cigarette. I sit in front of him and light the pipe. Old Man Antonio begins.

"You're not hunting"

"You're not on the way to the field" I answer.

Something made me speak to him in the proper tense, with respect, that man of undetermined age and cedar skin who I was seeing for the second time in my life.

Old Man Antonio smiles and adds,

"I've heard of you. In the canyons they say you are bandits. In my village, they're upset because you are here."

"And you, do you think we're bandits?" I asked.

Old Man Antonio releases a huge puff of smoke, coughs, and shakes his head. I'm encouraged and ask him another question.

"So who do you think we are?"

"I would prefer if you told me" he says and looks into my eyes

"It's a long story" I say.

So I begin to talk about the times of Zapata and Villa and the revolution and the land and the injustice and hunger and ignorance and sickness and repression and everything. And I finish by saying so "we are the Zapatista Army of National Liberation". I wait for some sign from Old Man Antonio who never took his eyes from my face.

"Tell me more about that Zapata" he says after smoke and a cough.

I start with Anenecuilco, then with the Plan de Ayala, the military campaign, the organization of the villages, the betrayal at Chinameca. Old Man Antonio continued to stare at me until I finished.

"It wasn't like that" he says.

I'm surprised and all I can do is babble.

"I'm going to tell you the real story of Zapata".

Taking out tobacco and rolling paper, Old Man Antonio begins his story which unites and confuses modern times with old times, just like the smoke from my pipe and his cigarette which mingle and converge on one another.

"Many stories ago, in the time of the first gods, the ones who made the world there were two gods who were Ik'al and Votan. Two were one single one. When one turns the other could be seen, when the other turns the one could be seen. They were opposites. One was like the light, like a May morning in the river. The other was dark, like a night of cold in a cave. They were the same. One was two, because one made the other. But they didn't walk they were always stationary these two gods who were one. 'So what do we do?'. 'Life is sad like this', they lamented the two who were one. 'The night won't go' said Ik'al. 'The day won't go' said Votan. 'Let's walk' said the one who were two. 'How?' said the other. 'Where?' said the one.

When they did this they saw they moved a little bit. First by asking why, and then by asking where. Happy was the one who was two. Then both of them decided to move and they couldn't. 'How do we do it then?' One would move from the other and then the other would move. So they agreed that in order to move they had to do so separately. And no one could remember who moved first, they were just happy that they moved and said 'What does it matter who is first as long as we move?'. The two gods who were the same one said and they laughed and agreed to have a dance, and they danced, one little step behind the other. Then they tired of all the dancing and asked what else they could do and saw that the first question was "how to move" and brought the response of "together but separately and in agreement." They didn't care much that it was so.

They were so happy they were moving until they came to two roads: one was very short and one could see the end of it. They were so happy they could move that they decided to choose the long road which then brought them to another question. 'Where did the road go?". It took them a long time, but the two who were one finally decided that they would never know where that long road took them unless they moved. So they said to one another 'Let's walk it then" And they began to walk first one and then the other. They found it was taking them a long time and asked "how will we walk for such a long time?' Ik'al declared he did not know how to walk by day and Votan declared that by night he was afraid.

So they cried for a long time, then finally agreed that Ik'al would walk by night and Votan by day. Since then the gods walk with questions and they never stop, they never arrive and they never leave. So that is how the true men and women learned that questions serve to learn how to walk, and not to stand still. Since then true men and women walk by asking, to arrive they say good-bye and to leave they say hello. They are never still."

I chew on the now-short stem of the pipe waiting for Old Man Antonio to continue, but he never does. In fear that I will disrupt something very serious I ask "And Zapata?"

Old Man Antonio smiles "You've learned now that in order to know and walk you have to ask questions." He coughs and lights another cigarette and out of his mouth come these words that fall like seeds on the ground.

"That Zapata appeared here in the mountains. He wasn't born, they say. He just appeared just like that. They say he is Ik'al and Votan who came all the way over here in their long journey, and so as not to frighten good people, they became one. Because after being together for so long Ik'al and Votan learned they were the same and could become Zapata. And Zapata said he had finally learned where the long road went and that at times it would be light and and times darkness but that it was the same, Votan Zapata, and Ik'al Zapata, the black Zapata and the white Zapata They were both the same road for the true men and women."

Old Man Antonio took from his backpack a little bag of nylon. Inside there was a very old picture from 1910 of Emiliano Zapata.

In his left hand Zapata had his sword raised to his waist. In his right hand he had a pistol, two cartridge belts of bullets crossed his chest, one from left to right, the other from right to left. His feet are positioned as though he's standing still or walking and in his gaze there is something like "here I am" or "there I go". There are two staircases. One comes out of the darkness, and there are dark-skinned Zapatistas as though they were coming out of something. The other staircase is lighted but there is no one and one can't see where it goes or where it comes from. I would be lying if I told you that I noticed all those details. It was Old Man Antonio who told me. Behind the picture, it said;

"Gral. Emiliano Zapata, Jefe del Ejercito Suriano.
Gen. Emiliano Zapata, Commander in Chief of the Souther Army.
Le General Emiliano Zapata, Chef de l'Armee du Sud.
C.1910. Photo by: Agustin V. Casasola."

Old Man Antonio says to me "I have asked a lot of questions of this picture. That is how I came to be here." He coughs and tosses the cigarette butt. He gives me the picture. "Here" he says "So that you learn how to ask questions...and to walk."

"It's better to say good-bye when you arrive. That way it's not so painful when you leave" he says giving me his hand as he leaves, while he tells me he is arriving. Since then, Old Man Antonio says hello by saying "goodbye" and leaves by saying "hello".

Old Man Antonio leaves. So does Beto, Tonita, Eva and Heriberto.I take out the photo of Zapata from my backpack and show it to them.

"Is he climbing up or down?" says Beto.

"Is he going or staying?" asks Eva.

"Is he taking out or putting away his sword?" asks Tonita.

"Has he finished firing his pistol or just started?" asks Heriberto.

I'm always surprised by how many questions that 84 year old photograph provokes and that Old Man Antonio gave me in 1984. I look at it one last time and decide to give it to Ana Maria and the picture provokes one more question; Is it our yesterday or our tomorrow?

In this climate of curiosity and with a surprising coherence for her 4-years-almost-five-or-six, Eva asks "What about my present?" The word "present" provokes identical reactions in Beto, Tonita and Heriberto. They all start yelling "Where's my present?" I'm trapped and at the point of sacrifice. Ana Maria who saved my life in San Cristobal almost one year ago (in other circumstances) saves me again. Ana Maria has an enormous bag of candy with her. "Here's the present the Sup had for you" says Ana Maria while she gives me that I-don't-know-what-you-men- would-do-without-women look.

While the children decide, or fight over how they will divide the candy, Ana Maria salutes me and says:

"I report. The troops are ready to leave."

"Good" I say as I strap the pistol on. We will leave as always--at dawn. "Wait" I tell her and give her the picture.

"What's this for?"

"We need it"

"For what?"

"So we'll know where we're going"

Above flies a military airplane..

In conclusion I will answer some questions you are surely asking;

Do we know where we're going?
Yes.

Do we know what awaits us?
Yes.

Is it worth it?
Yes.

Whomever has answered the previous questions with a yes can surely not sit and do nothing without feeling that something deep inside is tearing.

Vale.
Health and a flower for this tender fury, I think it deserves one.

From the mountains of the Mexican southeast.
Sub-Comandante Insurgente Marcos.
Zapatista Army of National Liberation.
Mexico, December 1994

P.S. For writers, analysts and the general public. Brilliant pens have found some valuable parts in the Zapatista movement. Nevertheless they have denied us our fundamental essence: the national struggle. For them we continue to be provincial citizens, capable of a consciousness of our own origins and everything relative to it, but incapable without "external" help of understanding and making ours concepts like "nation" "homeland" and "Mexico". They will chime in during this grey hour with small letters. For them it is all right that we struggle for material needs, but to struggle for spiritual needs is an excess.

It is understandable that these pens now turn against us. It's too bad, someone has to be responsible, someone has to say "no", someone has to say "Ya Basta (Enough)!" Someone has to leave prudence to one side, and give higher value to dignity and shame, than to life, someone has to...Well, to these magnificent pens; we understand the condemnation which will flow from your hands. All I can argue in our defense is that nothing we ever did was for your pleasure, what we did and said was for our please, the joy of struggle, of life, of speech, of walking...Good people of all social classes, of all races and generations helped us. Some helped to relieve their conscience, others to be fashionable, the majority helped because of their convictions because of their certainty that they had found something good and new.

We are good people, that is why we are letting everyone know what we are about to do. You should prepare yourselves you should not be taken by surprise. This warning is a disadvantage for us, but not as great a disadvantage as would be a surprise.

To those good people I want to say I hope you continue to be good. That you continue to believe, that you not allow skepticism to bind you to the sweet prison of conformity. That you continue to search, to seek out something in which to believe, something for which to fight.

We have had some brilliant enemies. Pens which have not been satisfied with the easy condemnation, pens which have sought out strong, firm coherent arguments with which to attack us. I've read some brilliant texts which attack the Zapatistas and defend a regime which must pay and dearly, for the sake of appearances for someone to defend it. It's a shame that in the long run, you wound up defending a vain and childish cause which will be demolished along with that building which is crumbling...

P.P.S. On horseback and with mariachi, Pedro Infante sings that song called "They say I am a womanizer" and ends with...

"Among my sweet loves
One is worth more than others
which has loved me without rancor
of my tarariraran...
A sweet old woman
Who I don't deserve
Who with all her heart
Has given me the most divine love. "

In front of a grandmother one is always a child,
and it hurts to leave..
Goodbye,
grandmother I am coming.
I've finished,
I'm beginning...

Translated by: Cecilia Rodriguez
National Commission for Democracy in Mexico
USA

nothing saints

2011-05-26T23:06:00.008-04:00

"a civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself."

- edward abbey

garbage is the most significant part of the city ecology. under the cutglass face of the sprawl, under this greasy everfalling rain and the gliding cars, is the dark wet sex organs of the city, the ash stained guts. among the debris all these children live, scurrying from the light of the towerskin, remote and killer distant, future and abandoned towns.

a madman on the street once stopped and told me he was satan. he said he made the city. he said he made it a trap to trap his future wife, who would breed his children.

the momentum or impulse towards increased expansion of human power over nature and over itself has created a thing beyond its control... this replicating expansion has hybridized with a wild emotioned mystery called the human. the land is eaten up to make way for industrial farms, urban sprawl, mining projects, hydroelectric projects to build cores of light and steel and plastic.

in these cores white towers of conception excrete ideas, images and impulses. they radiate hallucinations. at the top, on the 33d stories of high rises, long limbed women and men move gracefully in noiseless dances, in the glare, in the hums of dreams. they build longer towers, more land is exterminated.

this girl ran away from her parents, who beat her every day. this girl went to the city, in a month she was hooking and shooting meth. the needle is made by a factory. the machines wrap the hot plastic into a shape of perfect precision, wrap it around an inch of perfect steel with a sharp point at the end. the machine does this 5000 times a day. she takes the machine and finds a wounded beaten vein and purges her light from her body. she is the book of revelation. over and over .

again.

this one deals meth out of a hotel room. when he is caught, he takes all the charges so his girlfriend goes free. it will send him to a concrete madness of torture. we call this the democracy of the fat.

this drug is an explosion of ugly euphoria, it comes from the city and is the city. if there were no city there would be no meth. the science that made the downtown made the meth. the same humans made it. so they inject the city into themselves. they inject the rain and the bleach and the cars and the indifference and the neon and pornography and the vanity and the television and the internet and the politics and the pollution and especially the pollution and the eulogy to the land

the kids are the city's garbage

and who or what is

a you

sally votes conservative

2011-05-18T01:45:00.005-04:00

sally votes conservative and is a fire in the night to thousands of street forgotten children. the salvation army van groans and rocks at the stop in the downtown. wet rain on the street, shimmering light shadows zigzagging across the unreal asphalt. she comes out roaring, red hair and all. glasses cut across her biker face.

she hands out little cups of pasta to hard faced men - "what doya say?" "fuck you" he cries, half insane and ready for murder "ah ah" she pulls the little bowl back, the van rocks like a boat. he dazes, he dances, eyes wild like a muscled deer "i mean, thank you" "that's better" she shouts, he eats. she is a talking fire, she spins on the kids the mystery of jesus, how violence can become violent adoration, the strangest of all mysteries, only a blood bathed wise man can say them. this is not the religion of the pious, this is the madchrist, the one who rolled in broken glass and threw themselves into oceans. this is the badchrist, who sucks rags for water and eats rats for dinner maybe jesus should have had another gospel - and i crawled on my belly in the sewer where all the virgins go...

sally clasps me round the neck, exbiker, pillhead, foundgod, now feeding the starving while the fat man pays her bills - says the conservatives will save her kids. she is wild, wandering on to the bus while she waves around a knife and cuts white chocolate cake. sandy votes conservative to save the world. she tells the kids who will be eaten by the rich that the conservatives will save them. i try to tell her they will eat these kids. she doesn't believe me. that cannibal god will save them.

the kids need her to eat. she is the last stop. her boat is like a bus. it rocks among the waves. there is neon cutting the world of rain everywhere. she laughs and kisses them. "what's wrong?" she shouts at the sweet girl "nothing" the girl says "youre lyin to me" she roars "no" the girl says, brushing the rain from her dark skin "yes you are, come with me" they wander away from the bus, drunken, holy, lost. you cant be holy until youre really lost. if you dont get a meal with sally, you dont eat today.

christ is the religion of madmen, because madmen need religion. and the world is a sea.

why i am an anarchist

2011-04-22T01:09:00.013-04:00

because i'm in such good company. anarchism is fluid, hard to pin down, resuscitated back to life only with each person who takes it on. this makes it politics spun in poetry. each human being creates their life, and we all therefore create civilization, and one day when we stop trying so hard to be slaves to an ideal we might become poets of each other instead of good soldiers to our masters, whoever we have decided they are. anarchism is the belief that all authority is a delusion, part of the dream, part of the sweat-blind struggle just to survive. anarchism is a belief in one's life apart from its trade value, as a thing belonging to a great mystery and not subject to strange human made rules. anarchism is a paradox, a lovely growing and dying spirit that exists everywhere and has not yet blossomed. some of my favorite people are anarchists, sometimes only for a couple of years, before they went back to being things:

EDWARD ABBEY: national park ranger, sayer of the following, “anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.” ed taught about compassion coexisting with violence, and violence killing compassion. above all, ed taught that if you move slow, the world gets a lot more real. some snort at the praise of nature, but one can only assume this is because they are jaded. ed demanded we walk rather than drive, because you are one kind of thing when you walk and another kind of thing when you drive, and no amount of rationalization is going to help you understand what it is to experience to live now, not then or when. i remember the happiest moment of my life was drinking water in the bush because i was alive in the way i was supposed to be, and most dead in the squalid urban environment of the subway going to work and wondering why i would live this nightmare at all. no one wants to live surrounded by the screech of machines and the death of concrete, unless you think you can't get a square meal without it. if you believe that, you're fucked.

NOAM CHOMSKY: old noam has done more to break up common hallucinations of democracy and the nature of disinformation than any individual in the 20th century. for the most important intellectual alive, its hard to find anyone who actually reads or admires him. most people groan when they hear his name, as if it were pedantic to say that you live in a sea of lies. probably because old noam pointed out that every person has a moral obligation to work for the common good and to get up off your ass and resist the people who run your life, most people hate him.

EMMA GOLDMAN: sweet ms. emma, may they always remember when you said "if i can't dance, i don't want to be part of your revolution" she was pretty badass, getting down and dirty with the kind of revolutionary war here in the west that most people were afraid of, even though they accept the violence of the state most of the time. she was a warrior in the old sense, and puts the soldier to shame for killing in the name of an evil cause.

JOHN LYDON (aka JOHNNY ROTTEN): only really great for a few years, somewhere between 1980 and 1990 he turned into a strange clownish parody of himself, johnny almost alone created an entire culture. johnny spent a year in a hospital at age seven for spinal meningitis and claimed to have lost the memory of his childhood when he returned to school. somehow this created in him a kind of vertigo in which the savage and unjust behavior of the people around him didn't make sense, had no narrative. as a consequence he became abrasive and rebellious towards a world of people who were not honest, about their ugliness, about their weakness, about their condition of servitude. dressing as offensively as possible, johnny created a culture of defiance from being told to act or submit in any way, not just to the tyranny of expectations, but the tyranny of the fear in yourself to be what you are on the outside what you know you are on the inside. be yourself, tear down the curtains, johnny said, in pure rage of being crushed in your insides. youthful rebellion made real, and not just a joke to laugh about when youre old and cynical. then he became old and cynical. oh well, up until 1980 or so he was a walking advertisement for revolution.

well, i could go on, maybe i will, someday. here are four good influences on your soul.

the first lightnings of spring

2011-04-20T01:38:00.004-04:00

where are the birds now at this time of night & storm?

canada is a place of forests, cut by ugly long lines across its middle and up its breasts, where ones with guns decide to rest. and us - the rest - to cling to the warmth of furnaces, and easy food, but out there in the Dark, a few hundred thousand square kilometers of wildernesses, for all the holes we dug in the flesh of mother earth, she will still shake us all off like a street dog shakes off flies, i guess.

the gods of winter and spring are behind me, out my window, fighting their last war of the year - may i see you clash again in the next, always, like the last million springs we spent together, when i was a flea, a tree, a sea, now a me. always i side with spring, always she wins against winter gods' jaws and claws. now they are swirling into each other, cold and warm, there in midnightchildhood blackbelliedclouds demonfaces there entwining of wind and rain, trees bend, pines raise their branches higher in honor and wild abandon, little monkeys conspire in little city hearts, i wonder how big a cloud is, i think they are bigger than many mountains, i think they are bigger than my city, and the white house not big at all. they found these ruins once before, at giza, karnak, mojeno-daro, ur, all over the world...

who knows how old the war is above me, lightning and wild thunder the limbs of winter gods and spring gods? more than a million years, i think, those souls that have been being born and dying, winter staggers in the dark alleys on my way home, winter smashes me to the ground, wild eyed and unknowing, lets the icy white run down its face - winter gods pull down darkness from the sky with arms longer than kite strings, pull down black bellied mourning clouds, bruise the air near my face - spring, sexual spring, stamen and pistol spring - she comes in gusts of living, she spins, she erupts, she writhes in the sky, breaks apart, the branches bow before her as she undulates out of their grip, the spring girl gods always trying to pull down whatever winter tried to bury, snow, life, mountains, skyscrapers, hatred and love, ah spring girls give birth again and again and again, and right now she is a dark wet pregnant mother, all feral and writing on the storm, driving back the winter like an animal, our death singer, our mother, drives him or kills him or otherwise makes it possible for her children to wander aimlessly in a wilderness of skies.

drunk in the afterworld

2011-03-16T01:33:00.003-04:00

(the rain keeps hitting my hands as i smoke)

"ha i don't like to read. "he walks to the end of the street. he smells the air. he looks around." and i am like, ok done and i throw the book across the room." that's a pretty good impression of a book i said. it was in the bar of the hotel, all the bottles turned upside down and they poured the drinks out of cut glass, the caps still on, the corks, the screwtops.

its the bar the suicides drank in, i found it between two alleyways crossing each other. a shrine to the virgin mary by the garbage can with a dress shirt on fire as a sacrifice in front of the rain stained face.

heavens to betsy, i said. maybe They won, all the poets are segregated from the poor now.

yeah but who are They? asked the tranny, nursing her baby at the bar. it was a good question, They were never around. I could only look up at the TV and look cockeyed at the announcer. someone was flipping knives at the dartboard, at the keyholes. there you could hear the river outside, roaring like a mad dog. the water rising above the windowpanes.

allmaziful

2011-03-03T22:41:00.004-05:00

hell.

there's a word in finnegan's wake: allmaziful. there are a lot of brilliant lines in james joyce's finnegan's wake. there's a lot of pure nonsense in the wake. you have to read a lot of insanity to come across a bare line or two of pure brilliance, like the sun at noon blinding you with the eyes of life. yes, that's light.

finnegan's wake isn't that much different than living. in that respect, a lot of insanity for a few moments of being stunned by the allmazifulness of it all.

so i went to a conference on sex work. three current or retired sex workers - prostitutes - whores or hookers or what have you gave their witness of their lives. it sounded like hell. yet they spoke of it as a day in day out kind of life. they all had been raped, beaten, hated. not once, but many times. one started at nine. one started at fourteen. one at thirty one. the one who started at thirty one is the only one who stopped.

i am sometimes allmazed by how each of the six billion plus human being who live and die on this little benign island is a universe in themselves. most a universe we will never know or understand. and how many of these universes are hells. pure hells. where is hell? go down to the nearest anything and ask. someone there has a hell to tell you about.

the ones who started as children never stopped. does anyone?

and yet, they laughed. they cried, or showed love for each other. they lived there, in that conference room. now the lights are off, now they have gone off. to their respective universes.

they passed by here

all-maze-iful

an old story from ought seven told to a friend of mine

2011-02-02T01:55:00.002-05:00

I met this old man once out in the North and he had a big beard and the whole bit. Fuck this cat was strong. I thought he was fifty but the goldpanner who lived a few miles away by the big river that went through there said he was 72. The old man was i guess 6'2" and had hard muscle you could see where his plaid shirt was rolled up. I caught a faded tattoo of a snake crawling through the eye of a skull on his arm.

Yeah I got that in '42, he said. 32 years before I was born.

I came upon him dressing something in the woods with treebranches a few yards away from the lake. We said our halloos and I mosied over in the casual, disinterested way that is polite when meeting in the woods. He grinned through his beard caught with twigs and leaves and nodded. His eyes were clear and bright and hard ones not to stare into.

I asked what he was doing and he told me he was hiding a boat. He raised a branch to reveal a porthole. He said since I asked I was bound to go on the boat. I wasnt afraid but really wanted to go. He said help me take the camouflage off and we pulled all the branches off and it was a huge sailboat with living quarters and everything buried half deep in the earth. How do we get it to the water I asked and he said nothing but looked towards the water into the setting sun and pushed down on the earth until it began to sag and drop and the water of the lake started to trickle from the edge along the depression. I copied him and pushed down on the ground and it gave under my hand like it wanted to and the water began to flood around our ankles and hands and when the ground sunk so we were up to our knees Quick! he shouted and leapt and grabbed onto the gunwhale and hauled himself over and I jumped and he grabbed my arm and hauled me up.

The trees around us were trunk deep in water and the boat began to rock and bob. He unfurled the sails and directed me with the ropes and then we were floating upon the great lake when the last violet of the sky died and the stars glowed above us. We followed the lake where it went and sailed in the night wind for many hours. After a long time I said there is no sign of the dawn and he said notice how the stars are heavier and brighter. I said yes and they look almost as though I could reach up and grab one. Yeah he said well look below and below were stars too and no water. Where are we I asked and he shrugged which was weird. And there was no sign of earth or sun or moon but just a sea of stars.

And I leaned over and said hi stars and they glowed bright and said something so mysterious and important that to this day i would not dare of explaining it. I said hi stars and they said yes.

Then ahead we came upon a castle on an island that had high paraphets and flags of red and blue and violet. This is where the drunk angel lives th old man said. lets go inside and say hello and have a drink. And we approached the shore and long-limbed foxes came up from the dark and caught our ropes and said nothing but grinned foxy grins.

The drunken angel sat in a broken down throne room that must not really have been intended for him. He leaned on the steps leading to the throne playing with a wine bottle. He had wings and no irises. I wish I had irises he said to me youre goddamn lucky. Look how beautiful those things are, you gots scuse me got to little purty jewels in your head, the doors to your soul is wrapped in jewels, how bout that?

I smiled and long-limbed foxes brought us wine and drank with us. Everyone told jokes and the old man told good stories about frontiersmen and lumberjacks and grizzly bears.

The drunk angel whose skin was pale but thin drank and let the wine run down his chin. like breath he said sadly. so do you work for god i asked and he snorted and lit a smoke. well no but from time to time i am expected to show up and light a star. im like you my friend i dont know what to do but i know how pretty the whole thing is. fuck man, the other angels think i'm a freak.

we got along and i got pretty drunk

the presence of the living in history

2011-01-20T13:32:00.007-05:00

this moment in history is populated with only the living beings. the nineteen fifties continue to live in the memories of living beings who are in their 60s and 70s. so take the korean war, stalin in russia, take eisenhower, kerouac drunk in california, castro in cuba or kurosawa painting in japan. think of malcolm x still alive, walking around, all night diners, wildernesses yet untouched, bukowski a young man, television moved into the home but everyone loved the radio, all this was some old lady's childhood hobbling down yonge street looking for a deal on table cloths amid the sex shops and thai restaurants and starbuckses of 2011.

the memory of the oldest person living today is the last living thread that connects the present moment to the past. As each of the oldest dies, then that moment in the past hardens into a stone, becomes part of the cloud of was, and we move further into the future.

the present is made up of only living beings. the living beings of the past are gone. the memories of the living beings of the present make a kind of aura around the recent past, make it still alive in a way. time does this too, the closer the past is the more vivid and alive it is, last year more still in our skin and our breaths than 60 years ago. the angel's wings blown along by the force of history is the present, the life. life's roots going back only so many years. in her mind 60 years ago lives, her childhood, whatever moments glowing within her, waving like grass in fluid memory.

two hundred years ago, in 1811, that was the present moment. The old timers could remember far back, and that was their roots dug into a farther past. What made it the present was that then they were alive, living beings populated that past, made it not this future. Because they lived, their memories had power to tie them to 175o. that is the strange thing about being alive, is that living is the creation of the present.

and of course, the present is always. the present now is the same present as 1811, only with different living children in it, so we mark it 2011, to signify the number of times the earth has gone round the sun. and we mark it too because this now is ours, those who are here, and we create this present, as much as we are created by those who populated it before.

maybe each time is like a city. we live in the city of the 2000s. we traverse it and can only meet other citizens of the 2000s. the citizens of the 1800 cannot travel here. but the city of 1800 is also a ruins, a ghost town. we can see its hollowed buildings from here, where the living once were. the present is always a place where the living are, on the other hand.

my general understanding of time is that it doesn't exist. the moment is an infinite present, the past and future illusions of the progression of motion, einstein called it time-space to mark that it means one thing, indivisible. what is really past is the dead, what is really present the living, you are on board a strange moment, the presence of the living in history is always the now, like a star orbiting a you, the dead living in a dead now, gone beyond the event horizon that doesn't make sense to us,

books

2011-01-15T00:35:00.006-05:00

if a book has not been a world you have not read the book. you must have fallen into the land the book made, you must have gotten lost, forgot the world you know, you must have been there in the other land, in a place you cannot explain except to others that have lived there, unless, unless, you can tell the story of being there.

in a book there should be a story, and in the story a reality, and in that reality anything is possible, which is the dizzying thing about the imagination - it can create something which you cannot find in your blankets or your clothes or your cities. to say it is unreal is to not understand that you traverse your whole little mortal life inside your imagination. the creation is not a lie, because it should never claim to be true. it lives within its very own country, a country made of wonderings and feelings and ideas and experience - most intimately experience - and that is as real as a stone or a law to you. and a story flagrantly trespasses, becomes limitless, like the universe, like the number of trees or counting grains of sand or stars - these things lose numbers.

and you should be careful how you read, because there is what the writer intends, and what they really meant, and what you understood or half-understood, and what you think they really mean, and what you think they really meant despite what they intended, and what really happened, and if it matters, and you have to follow each way one at a time and get lost in it, to really appreciate one side, and you have to be a certain age, maybe younger or older or or the same age as the writer, because you'll feel and see things differently if you're too young or too old or too much the same age,

and there are more books in the world than you could ever read. in the library of alexandria, at its height, were a million books, most of which were burned to death, except for a few that survived elsewhere. there are books that were and in a sense still are floating around and gone, that you could have read or can read, worlds all, ancient worlds, private worlds, each one a story that is like a breath of someone's heart, across centuries or years and miles, you couldn't read a thousandth of them, but if you read one well could breathe a universe into your heart. don't read fast, read slow, read like all secrets of the world were in them

its so weird being a human

2010-09-30T22:05:00.001-04:00

its so weird being a human. i can never get used to this body, or the strange way of seeing everything as if it were a painting. walking paintings, all over, but wild animals, pure spirit in the eyes all yes and solar prominences, death like a sick tree, branches waving across the moon's soft skin, saw my friend dressed up and ready for war, how brave, to walk into pieces of metal at high velocities for the sake of other animals, but i'm glad i'm not him, my war is under streetlights like a coward almost anyone can get me.

but what should you be here for anyway? i'd be ashamed to vanish into a disgusting paradise of placid air, frail as i am. what were you born for anyway? to be a thing? to be a dream that ends with a shrug? to give a cigarette to my possible killer, to be so much blood and brains on the street running into the gutter, at least i could say, when the world was burning down, i dragged people from the fire. and when the fire offered me television as antidote, i said stick it up your ass.

drops of glass

2010-09-15T23:49:00.003-04:00

big cities, humming towers, little squares of light in razors of silver, quiet downtowns in the night, young kids getting wasted in many ways crossing the streetcars' scars that run down the abandoned street, the damage retreats indoors as the corporate tyrants swallow up the main streets, where all the light is. they go back in the dark and die or disappear or become new sewn together souls. like a shattered mirror grown back like a cut tree. like a wasp drowning in a cup of coca-cola. the glass melts when it is bombed and deflowered with fire.

corporate tyrants (eyes roll) (then-sigh) they gave up giving up a long time ago.

the trajectory is this: from nature, which is the life of staying ahead of starvation, if you see a seagull its the same now. watch it fight for food. that was you, a million years ago. then cities, then torches in the night, then spears, then big men, then iron, steel, gunpowder, gasoline, uranium, allkinds. then there's you, flicking light switches while electricity hums, while special planes fly overhead like graceful hammers. then one day space, when they leave you behind in big ships. and the sun burns.

children born haunted by their ancestors, because they have no names. error we call insanity. wayward slaves, all they need is wine and television (eyes roll) i forgot you knew that and were over it, or something. the wires that run along your veins, they are natural. the reality of screens.

maybe just maybe we could run and make some kind of fort in the woods, and have little laboratories run by panhandlers and wanderers, and they could teach us how to make elegant power plants in the shapes of jackpines,

you know, if communism was good for anything, it made a lot of lone soldiers. maybe that's what we miss most about it now. it made doctors and piano players into guardians of us all.

good lepers

2010-05-28T01:08:00.006-04:00

how many dances does it take to dance upon the head of an angel and get away with it. so many scars i lost count off the skin of careful bones . and so many lacerations, and this many incisions, and that many amputations, until there was a corset only of stars upon a bare soul with eyes looking back at me or thee.

how much body walks across a black stage and calls itself real? how much stage does a soul need before it decays into uranium? how much magic before you see the animal in a god, or human in a stone lying upon the gravel driveway?

how much disease is just another kind of lifeform? or how much porn creates a heaven? or how many poets do you need to get eaten by crack or joysticks before that drunken angel appears on the radar a thousand miles above the city, igniting so many marquee stains along the sky.

take this buzzblade and cut down the sound which mixes concrete along the summertime, but maybe you think youre better off being less star and more tv. they all pretty (comma) anyway right? indeed, it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks, a madman once said.

no no leper art thou. you consider or eat the little ones, tis all justified. so long as youre fat or skinny or whatever

since when

why i will never be a politician

2010-04-04T03:10:00.006-04:00

because i would rather be a supernova.

but not be a ragged tombstone, but not be a fairy queen crucified upon her own smirks of doom. because this earth we stand on is reverberating with death in life. every step you take is a blasphemy. and because of that i would rather hold death's sunlight in my hand and say upon you, go be a shooting star, go be a suicide. erupt.

i see the managers and we need them like we need garbagemen. and if you thought the last war was fought welcome to the 21st century, a million dead foreigners won't convince you then nothing will, fling your arms wide and eat a nuclear halo, i've seen them all and their toxic peace, fuck them, give me cutters, give me drug addicts, give me animals, give me satan like a shadow on the cross. you have this many days, this many, this many, so many burned afternoons, then you slave will die too, yes you, like a slaugherhouse dancing on a dime, like a cow writing her last sonnet on the cell wall, like a mouthful of bullets, ask me why i don't want to save the world again, ask me why they put knives against girls necks, just for kicks, ask me why, ask me why i prefer drowning to standing up there and lying for the future, ask a million housewives why being a whore is better, why god is such a pervert, why forests hopefully will eat us all oneday,

and christ smokes crack under the bridge, but he was never together to begin with. but the devout think he will be elected president. one day.

blue volcano

2010-03-29T23:45:00.004-04:00

at the edge of the lake, shipwrecked stars wash up onto shore in the still night;: listen to all that water, glowing dimly somewhat where two hundred spins of the sun ago came eagle wingéd ships of the human catastrophe . or did i mean future . somewhere where the water hits the horizon, birds talk of captured childhoods, and tracer bullets alight and conquer the sky. the warm nights. so many people without tales now, so many old men without ancestors and so no grandchildren, that would bother to bear their names into the white wall of tomorrow. so many heavens where the water hits the horizon, waterlogged oathes, princes in the bath, naked and grinning, antibodies for dirt or vaccines for honor, bleach for justice, its so peaceful here, its so quiet. there's only a tiny hell beyond the street lamps' scream, but the king should never reach for the drowning man, not even if his eyes are two stars.

never would she object to torture, not in a river made of razors, never in a sky kingdom coming next week or next century, i can never recall the difference. i wouldn't have minded giving her a flower though, just for her troubles at her wedding to her funeral. if they could they'd make it illegal to talk back to god, and you thought those days were behind us, but never underestimate the axe's taste for the tree, nor how much ruin a robin can sing in. there's always someone worth more than you on a free market, and certainly better planets, but maybe none sweeter. and there's always a blue volcano erupting in her hearts, like human sacrifice, like heartbeats turning into pulses of lightning, like fevered lava running across the downtown, usually around 2 am,

sometimes i want to know

2010-02-24T02:42:00.002-05:00

i have felt very close to dying for the last couple of months, it has to do with smoking, every time i would take a nice drag off a smoke this terrible buzzing noise would start in my head, a strange pressure behind my ears. sometimes the buzz and the pressure would build slowly, over hours, until i would get a moment or so of dislocation, as if my mind and body were decoupling and i would snap awake as if by some resolve of concentrating i could keep myself from a stroke or an aneurysm. maybe this is crazy or not, but it is true i live with these private sensations. i feel alone with the presence of death but a good kind of alone. i know i am loved, even if those that love me are too wrapped up in their own lives to help or listen. i know how it is to be human - it is not easy, and they would help if they knew how if they weren't burdened by so much torment and illusion. i can't decide whether i blame god or civilization for the fact that people must suffer in tormented illusion. but like i said, i'm alone with death - and that's a good thing.

the funny thing is, ask anyone in jail. they live with death every second of their lives. they live in the presence of horror all the time, are they better people for it? many of them would claim that they are, but they're liars - they might be tougher, but that doesn't mean they were better. the world is full of bullied cowards worth their weight in gold. anyway, certainly they weren't smarter or more talented, or moral for being so close to death. if anything, prisoners look like they're rotting on the inside.

so even the threat of death cannot conjure up the Great Transformation - from idiot to shining angel. all being afraid of dying has done for me is made me quit smoking - the thing i felt threaten my life. this is no more than survival. it was strange to walk around feeling like at any moment death would start pushing on my brain. on really hot july days i would walk around montreal alone, the sun so hot it dripped light too tense to even consider whether it was my last afternoon or not.

in fact, one time it was so bad on the bus i really thought something terrible was on the verge of happening. all i wanted was to be out of the bus. my biggest fear was to have some major meltdown in front of a lot of strangers. like a wounded animal, i wanted only a hole in the earth to lay my head down. if i had to die, i wanted to do so alone.

i don't know why, there are a lot of times when i don't want to be alone. i guess i feel safer alone. i look at people in a really harsh section of toronto, like parliament and queen, and i can't believe two things: how people can endure so much, and how fucked up they are.

now i can understand needing the warm awakedness of a human being. the silence of the real world can be terrifying. no wonder humans think that god exists through humans, to us only humans ever give a hint of god, are the only creatures who answer.

on the other hand, the natural world speaks too, just differently. sometimes the silence of nature is a cold, hard silence, but sometimes it is a language itself. silence is a language that can be learned, for that i think i would want to be around trees, if anything. the 21st century, though, the dusky skyscrapers, there is the mystery of where all this is headed, all the bullshit and murder and strangeness we've gone through and here i will be hanging, maybe vanishing. being alone is not so terrible, or maybe it is, but you do get to confront god-in-life one last time, you get to strain a look, one last chance to ask and listen to the air - what are you? what is this? where am i going? is life good, or is it just there? answer me. answer me. answer me. because most of the human questions seem so ridiculous and arrogant, and especially now, when the world is such a stark division between the fat and the starving. in this age of streetlights and nuclear weapons, sometimes i want to know -

vincent (the scumbags of dawn)

2010-02-22T00:49:00.005-05:00

outside the bar, where old men meet, in freezing cold february, out in other countries called power lines and nighttime, the few, the driftwood of the rebels left against the shining steel giant octopus, called her highrise or ambulance, call her a ragged childhood stumbling along the dumpster back alleys with knifewounds in the belly, shards of mirror of common conversation about movie plots, song titles, insect trivia, see how the blood hardened on his knuckles until they were purple stones dominating a landscape of garbage stinking skin, leaves his apartment door open in a crack den, offers lasagne for guests, panhandles for hockey games, catch her in your arms: democracy before she dies, line up dressed up in black and throw newspaper boxes through bank windows, be a human being - which is only an animal that thinks too much , like wild horses at the edge of the mountains, running like flowing water the colts the mares the stallions like undulating stars, fight back, you cowards? fight for who and why? for each other, you cowards! who else? why else? the mohawks point their guns for the month of strawberries, the panhandler reveals a gun for the homeless, the horse kicks for hatred of the reins, they don't publish the names of those that died for their friends on the news because the news needs you to die for the news, and the news is a jealous god. how many suicides died for want of love because there was no one there to teach them to love to give it?

give more, give more, let them eat your heart out, you are a mountain, go be an ocean, go be a sun, go be an orphan like a giant with three hearts and seventeen uteruses, a daughter of an angel and a devil, go be a monkey, they kill some for talking, they kill some for walking, they kill some just for standing still.

go be the wind, go be the tiger that makes the wind, go be the fire that lights the dawn of new unborn days, there is no politics but the one that says you are my sister, brother,

me the machine

2010-02-03T17:18:00.003-05:00

when i hit 140 km/hr then i and the highway were become one thing - me become a wheel, a ton of steel tiger, aquiline, roaring, become a long black vein twisting through the wild earth, this is the future come alive, me the machine, crazy freedom or just crazy power, "if a deer bolts in front of me (in front of me?) don't stop, speed up because if you try to stop you'll lose control and destroy yourself (yourself?) in the process. the deer is going to die by the skull of this metal monster with cold arclight eyes, so hit it hard and without hesitation. kill it fast or it will be you in pieces." in the night the rigs and cars flow and intertwine gliding reel and coil like elegant sharks with burning red eyes, so smooth and vicious dancing its the road and me/its the road: me/its me i am the road

and this is a truer gospel for now the gospel of saint engine thou shalt obey the machine thou shalt have no other gods but me though you may say in words that you believe in other gods but it is the machine you will love kill and die for, and if the machine should strike you on the right cheek then offer it your left also

when i came back from saturn

2010-01-22T01:37:00.005-05:00

when i came back from saturn i went to the nearest bar and traded several emeralds for a decent beer, sick as a leper. i could barely falump into a barstool before i remember looking at a photograph on the wall of a life i didn't have, and drank my drank to forget what i love to remember.
and came in, dressed all in black, three cigarettes between his fingers as usual, he sat beside me, dear old grandad, younger than me,
remarkable, he said.
do i know you?
i looked at him long, he gave me a friendly smile,
we meet often you and me. once in a bathroom you almost did yourself in on some kind of (he wrinkled his nose) whatever that was, or then there was the traintracks, and of course, the bottom of a canyon when you were just a boy and i almost caught you in my bag with a scorpion.
all kinds of little silver streams of cold sweat crawled on me,
shit,
oh don't worry, i'm just visiting. sometimes you look lonely,
and he produced a penny which he spun on the table. it turned into the moon, then into a little sun, then he slapped his hand down upon it and smiled again.
beautiful,
i like you, henry. you're getting ready to meet me. i hate it when people run, i really do. it makes everything seem... sordid.
and he opened his palm to reveal several human teeth with blood on the ends, he dropped them into his glass and drank it, become a good scotch.
i have a lot of love for humans, believe it or not, he said and lit two more cigarettes, looked philosophically at a pirate flag, and resumed,
animals die with dignity, but humans are so... nervous. they take it so personally. they have no... sense of humor about this business. it breaks my heart, it really does, because i love grace, and more than that, cruelty is sweet, for i shatter one thing to give birth to another.
and you, dear henry, you want to understand me! you're a goddam poet, henry, you're a lunatic! i love it!
i took a big drink.
so ask me anything, said he, pulled his left eye out of his head, rolled it on the ground like a marble until it turned into a great black dog and roared out of the bar and into the night. when i looked back he was sticking an olive in his eye and smiling at me like an idiot.
what happens afterward? i asked sadly. i smiled a little and traced a sparrow in the beer dregs on the table, and the little guy hopped up and flew away.
he grinned but looked serious.
here. he said, and produced a small ladies' hand mirror from his breast pocket. look into it and tell me what you see.
me.
he rolled his eyes. i frowned.
what?
are YOU looking at YOU? he asked, leaned across the bar, lit a match and tossed it into a bottle of gasoline on the bar, which exploded and set the chandeliers on fire.
i'm looking at a reflection.
yes! he shouted, oh i could kiss you! the mirror is made of a particular substance that reflects all light. so am i.
and what about everyone? what about all these fools and sweethearts i wanted to love and just watched disappear?
how big is your brain?
not big enough.
yep. remember when we used to meet when you were a kid? you were so cute, staring right at me. i stepped out of the sunset for you, i could have wrapped you up in my arms right then, but then i wouldn't get to see your scarred face, which is so delightful i could lick it. god, you mortals have no idea how rich is age, how boring it is to take little kids. all the same really,
and he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, let the brains hit the wall,
where was i? want to try? just kidding. i've got big plans for you, kiddo. children. GOD. All so sweet and wonderful, my sympathies really, but the old, the scarred, those with hearts so muscled with cruelty that the depths of how they can love, is well beyond understanding. they know betrayal, and failure, and futility, and they can still get up and love and fight again. to eat that death, to have that taste, you have no idea how i cry to take a soldier, or a hooker, or a prisoner. oh my, i need more eyes just to cry!
and he opened his third eye, and revealed fourth and fifth eyes upon his palms, which all ran with a couple of tears, just for effect.
big plans, huh.
he looked disoriented. he lowered his hands and nodded the waittress over.
honey, two bottles of haitian blood, s'il vous plait.
she was the color of moonlight, he put a fistful of syringes in her hand,
don't worry, he whispered, its really not as bad as all that.
yes, big plans, my dear. you, you are going to be my masterpiece. no human is going to know, its really for an audience of angels, orphans and devils i invite over on saturdays for wine and fireworks. you'll be death's sculpture.
what if i blow my brains out tonight?
how do you know thats not the sculpture?
no way.
well...
he looked slyly at me, smiled again, offered me two cigarettes. i accepted and he lit them with his tongue. we toasted the universe, and duels and strange small towns in nowhere, and rain, and lonely travels, and knives.
he gave me his phone number before he left. i call it, when i'm lonely, now and then. he makes me feel better.

let us waste today

2010-01-18T18:07:00.014-05:00

let us waste today, so that we can be awake for the night, and meet again all our little guys up there in the sky. and we shall walk around in the darkness, and and grow tall enough to stand in space, for the stars to crown us or kiss our noses.

let's give them new names, or forget their names, or learn the names old men gave them a thousand years ago. let's send them the compliments of a hundred dead loves. for they are always there, our little stars, preaching a soundless nuclear gospel, shining close and far away, a sea of stars.

let's play in their black oceans, let all ideas die before they hit the air, let the little dots of light talk to us, for they are sending little words all the time, and in places where no one is there they sing, wandering in the trees, the spirits of living gods, the flaw in all answers.

let's get drunk and make them our fathers and mothers, dancing unknown dances that entertain their dread immortality. let's cross the graves of all known suicides and sing their names so that the stars may shine for them.

let's pretend we last forever, and will be with them, because we do, and are, and will be, moving for the love of the black ocean. the ocean that goes on forever. yes, forever, if you remember. forever is forever and forever and forever and no more no less. as it is said, the number 1 is as close to infinity as the number

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

atheism on a highway

2010-01-15T00:26:00.006-05:00

i, driving the car back to ontario around midnight, my mother talking about how religious she was as a girl. something mythical about dashboard lights and the undulating black worlds of clouds in the sky, like here we are, living in a supernatural country. she said that believed in the catholic god with all her heart, she said that she got to crown mary, a privilege of some frenzied catholic ritual on a day in may. she said, you got to crown mary if you went to mass every day at 6am, and i went to mass every day at 6am for months and it was such a big deal when i got to crown mary.

but when i grew up, i began to realize that everything i was being taught was crap. they said that everything you felt was a sin, that anger, lust, fear, you had to be ashamed of them all. and god didn't make any sense, and women weren't allowed to be priests, and just a lot of it didn't add up if you thought about it.

and now i understand you don't believe in any god, i asked.

well, i think jesus was a good man who tried to change things, but i don't think he was god,

yes well imagine what it would have been like for jesus' followers, i said. he went around saying he was god, and all these really brave and scary things, like put all your faith in god, and don't hurt anyone even if it means being harmed yourself, and believe in peace and equality and all these good things in a pretty brutal part of the world. And they all probably believed he was god, since he was so convinced. imagine how traumatic it must have been for them when one day they just grab him off the street and torture him to death in front of them. how the guy they thought was god they put a crown of thorns on him and laughed at him and no one could stop them. and then he's just gone, just like that.

you can see how they would try to make sense of it, because it would have been too terrible to imagine that he was just a sweet, half-crazy guy and they tortured and killed him. maybe that's why the story is so compelling, its about a simple a parable for life as there is, without all that magic crap in it.

yeah, my mom said and stared at the road.

i kind of believe in some kind of supreme being though, i said. do you?

well, i don't see any reason to. there's no reason to believe there's anything after death. that's something people need to believe, i think. its comforting. but why would there be a supreme being when there's all this terrible stuff in the world, all these innocent people who get harmed?

really, so you think this is it, there's nothing more than this?

well, i think life is quite amazing without making anything up about it. so... i don't know, but i just don't see any reason to believe in a god.

i think i believe in something more than this. i think i have proof. if we think of god, we think of something incredible and wonderful, something that is awake about the universe, not mechanical, even something that can love us. now, we experience what it is to love...

but thats because love evolved out of the need to raise our children, my mom said,

yes, yes, yes, but that's no matter. the fact is you have experienced love, you know what it is to love, to care for and be close to another living being. more than that, we have the experience of being aware, of being awake in the universe, no? we know what it is to be conscious of being alive, conscious of ourselves, conscious even of the dizzy grandeur of the universe, of stars and all that. now, everything you are made of is part of the universe, its part of nature, it is natural, it is inherent in the universe, nothing you have can exist outside of nature, nature prodcued your experiences of love and consciousness. so they belong to nature, therefore the universe is conscious, does love, at least as much as you do, and knowing how small you are, very very likely about a million times more than that.

my mom was thoughtful, and kind of sleepy. she said, i guess some people need comfort.

what's that?

well, i suppose people need to believe things that make them feel comforted.

you don't believe me?

well, i don't know what it means.

i don't either.

hmm.

i snuck a glance at my mom, falling asleep. i felt an overwhelming admiration for her bravery, to look into the cruel face of life and stare back at its coldness and still believe in goodness and justice and innocence. when the people in her life die, she weeps in the certitude that they are gone forever. i liked to look at the skeletons of jetblack trees against the midnight sky and they roared by along the sides of the lone highway.

loss

2010-01-11T03:46:00.007-05:00

i might disappear tomorrow. i probably won't. and that's it.

but let's pretend like i was here, and you knew me and i knew you and pretend this big old world was making beauty while we were hurting each other. and there's only most people dancing on a fragile thread of being and doing it so beautifully you fail to notice how much time and practice it took to look natural while hanging above the biggest open mouth.

and then remember everyone dreams lots of dreams they'll never understand or remember or remember to remember. and see all of those people go under the waves of a great flood. And the water somehow laughs. And somehow there you are, dancing on a string, smiling for now,

how i wished the world was a paradise, how sad i was to know it was a nightmare. did you ever think we are the ugly monsters of the world? maybe one day there will be another species with stars in their foreheads, but they will be much kinder than we were. Maybe birds will grow legs and hands and start building beautiful places and not say necessary or unfortunate. Maybe the birds will know better how not to leave little ones by the side of the road to die alone, like i do every day. like you do, looking for your own star.

and then we'll be ashamed to know what we could have been, but thought it was better to be successful rather than good. And we built palaces on tops of foxes' houses, and shrugged. And we built cities on tops of joyous mountains, and thought ourselves geniuses, and built mines where caribou once danced and ate up coal, and i saw the snow fall by the blinking lights of the smokestacks and thought how we were left, and where is the purity in that? but they said, youre just mad. and so i said, then im mad, and they wouldn't make me king. and i said i am king of bright sunsets, come take it from me. but they couldn't, and i stand there still, with outstretched arms before the sunset, somewhere on the west coast, alive and free, the earth eating my bones on hornby island, alone but part of some strange wild animal you can't imagine,

what if you and i are near the beginning

2009-12-17T15:05:00.001-05:00

what if you and i are near the beginning of the universe and not far away at all?
what if we are of the first children to wake up and look around and this is why the stars seem so quiet? what if that is why we are so wild and lost and shout at the silence? why we make a thousand gods of all different reasons and glows?

what if the universe lives to be 2000 billion years old, and in dog years it is now only barely a toddler? and we are the first spirits, the first legends, to stand up and utter the intelligence of music, the birth star opening its newly invented eyes and the light from therein is so naive it thinks itself old and brittle.

what if you and i are of the first, and there are no others (yet) but we have to leave memories for them, and totems that they might find and say this little planet was the first to sprout little spirits that loved and sang and thought and made magic out of atoms and mind.

what if we're young grandparents of another few billions years of growing, what if we're older than stars to come? what if the morning light you see is the glow of mysterious birth and infant worlds?

bad people

2009-11-22T13:49:00.008-05:00

the following were initially poems i wrote about my early profession working in homeless shelters for street kids, but they make good stories. it gives you a very small shard of what it was like to go to work everyday for years, and how you end up missing the fucked up part of reality when you go onto a more normal life. i miss all that crazy shit, i miss all the crazy little lunatics.

one thinks he has cancer he is 18 he is a great fighter the first day he came here he fought a guy bloody and shook hands with him after he shakes my hand and laughs as i kick him out into the night

another says a cigarette doesn't mean she wants to marry me or wants to do it with me but she will be my friend she will share her research with me she wanders the halls all night talking to herself like ophelia, at lunch she is told to hand over the dish detergent so she drinks it and blows bubbles out of her mouth and everyone laughs but only partly because of the bubbles the other part is victory

and another understands chemistry instinctively but school is boring and its better to wander under the night high on whiskey he is occasionally wise when he can't sleep tries to draw pictures with his eyes closed he shows me "hey look, there's you"

another, his mom was murdered and he tells a woman worker if anyone messes with you, i'll protect you he swells with pride when i shake his hand like a man you can see it in the way he walks away

one has a good sense of humor she smiled when I called her sunshine she was raped in the park but she would rather leave town she camped by herself in the woods which very few people can do she does her best to be strong it might not be enough

and another stormed downtown with no shirt or shoes and threw a bike through the window of city hall on a January night he gave half his lunch to an old man who played a drum for change on the street every day he sprayed shaving cream all over the hallway but when i yelled who's gonna help me clean this up he came out and helped a gentleman of the old school

another has everything wrong with his body it needs four injections a day and they don't help enough so he walks very slowly everywhere when i snuck his diapers into his room he insisted on the principle of his dignity and offered an explanation for his trouble how he had to live with this horrible body

she didn't know my name so she used to call me hey mister one day someone put bread in the juice jug and when she found it at dinner she screamed high and furious and stormed around growling and hissing at people like a feral cat it was a little too much she had a happy laugh a little crazy but delighted

he is obviously inbred he smells of shit no matter how often he bathes he is barely coherent when i told him he had to leave and why, for really a pathetic reason he grew angry and frustrated and he couldnt talk. on his lowered face, despite his anger “leave me alone, leave me alone” i saw frustration and confusion his mind wouldnt do what it is supposed to do and despite banging and punching walls when he left he suddenly turned and hugged me and said “sorry guy” and would not look at me because he was almost crying

another is indeed a great man he has a bad temper, i watched him pick up in each hand a bike and smash them together because he couldnt use the wrench when some of the brutal ones wanted to kick the shit out of a kid with glasses he stood in their faces, you wanna fight someone fight me but i never saw him raise his hand against a gentle soul later he told me i used to get beaten up everyday my mom said no fighting so i would take it one day i came home with blood and bruises all over my face she asked me what happened? i told her you said no fighting. she said: tommorrow, go fight. and i never stopped since then

she was a serious cutter deep red lines running up her arms playing hacky-sack in the summer with a t-shirt on she drew a beautiful picture i insisted go up on the wall it was dark and brooding pencil all shaded a simple land of hills and simple trees piney trees and oakey trees it was drawn by someone who understands the love of forests she had no one a few months later after she'd gone i heard she cut up her face and body and was in the mental ward

they met in the summer and have been in the most blissful state of love ever since. they share one thing in common, that neither has any clue about anything. they often have nowhere to sleep no money, no food, no drugs not out of any particular tragedy its just that they dont think about such things. begging for change they look at you and smile graciously, as if they were prince and princess when the boy finds outlandish clothes he wears them and the girl always giggles you might see him walking up the street with a styrofoam crown from a tv crate and her holding his hand and smiling they cannot keep welfare appointments because they have no sense of time they have been kicked out of homeless shelters for being late, they have been arrested for taking food when they were hungry "but i couldnt afford it!" watching them walk down the street one realizes they are not aware of traffic lights, private property, public property, business hours, and everyone is always mad at them and suspects them of deception to which they smile graciously and ask them for money

another is charmed by jokes and will giggle like a little girl when I kid around with her she says she is afraid of only 3 people once she broke a girl's face with her bare hands and afterwards told her to "sit pretty" and the girl sat just like that until the guards came

politics

2009-11-13T00:33:00.008-05:00

so these trees coming up out of the street they buried under twenty feet of concrete and call it heaven. somehow all across this blue planet, these thousands of miles of oceans, all these mountains, these immense mountains cutting into the air, out of all these thousands of firs and alders and pines, down in stinking jungles and across plains of golden grass, some twisted old men and women play games with human lives, the dreams and hallucinations of politics. we little infants squeaking month to month, like fat little mice reaching for the sun, dancing on the edges of the slavery of millions, down there making shit, in corridors of service-based industries and factories and mothers making dead wages to feed dying mouths, we whine and bitch why not enough wine, sex, love and fame for all of us? and these chess players, talking over the arrangements of human lives as if they were sticks in the earth to be uprooted and shorn apart on a whim, politics is the arguments of inmates holding court in an insane asylum with no guards.

look at this power - to do to people what you want - a butcher knife in a thousand heads. repeated forever. rebels die. remember that. survivors hide in sewers. we citizens of the empire sneak around trying to fuck ourselves into paradise, and yet so much death lies on the living, and so much living lies on the dead. we are building something but no one knows what (but we have a lot of good ideas while the world burns down) and the gods know, in their genitals are all chaos and creation, all bird babies and predators feeding. so much of politics has no heart, my heart has 1000 caves, all twisting down there in the dark of aortas and pulmonary veins and in each one is a fairyland of blood cells and a breathing mystery in heat - but in one cave is an old woman who mutters around a dying fire. and in her magic springtime she predicts nothing but more of the same and all theories are crazy to her. she sees the rising of new animals and the pyres of old ones. one day she will just - stand up - and shake us all off like flies - the intifada according to the palestinians - and they should know - no one has been more murdered than they by machines.

so many ideas of how to improve an animal chaos marxism, liberalism, conservatism - and worth no more than a kid's drawing of a sunset. and we say to hell with science, as if it made all of us violent and killers. which it didn't. science like a sweet girl holding a rope to the light, and we just asked her if she could make it rain diamonds. down in the caves of my beating heart she built astronomy and climatology and oceanography and told me why genes dance in a spiral and why gravity paints light into suns and someone interrupted us with 24-hour news networks. i had wanted to ask her if she could make trees talk and before they dragged her off to build iphones i heard her gasp yes.

so fuck politics, man.

seriously, fuck politics. make politics sex. make it be fertile and pregnant with a thousand new lives. politics kills people, you know? it kills them in the dark places, in the back alleys where no one goes, it kills them downtown, it kills them in the suburbs, in the small towns of weekend nights with nothing to do, where no magic lives. it kills them with predator drones and no love for stars. we were born and had it explained to us that our sex was a basket case while they built factories making plastic daffodils and named themselves geniuses. and now i see a million iraqis in an attitudes of death, a dragon with a hundred mouths underneath all that armor, don't he wish he were saturn making music with his lights instead of twisting us into skyscrapers?

and this little kid - a small dancing ball of light - comes to turn and face - look at this - a garden of dead bodies, piled up in a black wetness of life upon life upon life and what are you going to do about it? be a small edge cutting itself on a new kind of uselessness - such is politics - help us build a tank or a nothing or a new way of boring a hole in the heart of your mother ah maybe its too much to ask of you after all to stretch your arms wide like a mossy god and have a rebellion of daisies and black eyed susans?

is it?

the moon

2009-11-04T10:54:00.009-05:00

the moon is a gleaming island,

to which people will one day swim. the moon like a grandmother, dancing around in the night above us, waves to you and me and says i wait for the day of your coming. and when we sail the small sea to the moon, we see our home way down there like another place, and we see the stars are many and the darkness deep. this moon is part of us, its breaths watch the earth's breaths, it has kept us company all these long years through many fearful nights, casting a light in the dark.

the moon, maybe, loves us and the earth. one day we shall build houses here, if we are good, and the moon's heart will be warmed by the aimless chattering of human walkers like new birds arrived in an old place. and we will begin our journeys into the great ocean from here, and painters will draw with familiar love of the dark grey seas of the moon, they will say mare tranquillitatis (sea of tranquility) is where i'm from, or i miss mare imbrium (sea of rains) where the land is bright.

maybe there are winds on the moon that are good for sailing with translucent sails drifting across the maria like explorers of ancient worlds and the awe of new strange wildernesses will make us mythical again, and maybe we can build little circular towns snug in the bellies of small unknown craters, and the moon will laugh and say remember you used to live down there on the earth and we were strangers then? how i called to you in pale light all that time! how we wondered about each other!

and our children will roam the grey soil and maybe (who knows?) learn how to fashion certain kinds of silver flowers that can grow in the moon's earth, and we bring fireflies that make gleaming honey and they will come to address the moon as mother and she will tell them of being companion to the earth all these millions of years, her stories of sunstorms and all the shooting stars she saw falling and dying in the earth's hair. how the moon herself was once a great wild fire who cooled and froze into a grey serenity and wondered about the blue of the earth and all the strange little growing things running and swimming and flying on its skin. and this will be our astronomy then,

age

2009-10-24T00:23:00.005-04:00

know now that to come is the final door, the one we must all pass through no matter how happy or sad. you curving through dooms of love and struggle, are no more nor less an ancient thing than odysseus or gilgamesh. look now to your hands, the hydrogen and carbon with which they are wrought the same hydrogen and carbon burst from the celestial fire a million and million and million years ago, look down now at the veins in your hands with good blood running in them, the same iron burned in the hearts of suns ancient and majestic beyond your horizon. our bodies are ancient, our heritage something grander than this age or any other, and our inheritance in the great dark at the end, the same as all inheritances of all buddhas, alexanders, neros, hitlers, ghandis, elephants and suns. so how will you pay homage to this, great palace of oceans and evergreens? do we put on our crazy lab coats and agree to count beans for fat merchants, do we fashion strange lusts and chase them calling them paradise?

i am ancient. i am roots, i am the son of supernovas. i am a billion years old, and you dare to trouble me with fears of cancer. to the defense of an old flame i warned a man away from her, and he told people i later learned he would stab me in the heart 14 times. who knows? aside from being a decidedly undesirable way to leave this earth, better to leave the modern world to bean counters and walk upright with an ancient soul who lives with a full heart in the wild rain in which no dreams of perfumed soldiers of money plague my dreams of perfect stars.

the drifter's manifesto

2009-10-22T17:13:00.004-04:00

and now let me tell you as i walk disheveled in the rain, singing to the trees carelessly and drinking and smoking my way through the galaxy. light is my step my wet chin held up high, i like the streetlights that keep me company. i have wandered there to here and will wander there again, but i take dancing steps on a blue planet and roots long and brown grow out of my skin straining for the ground, and i curl a hand into the sky blooming asters by the hundreds from my fingers, the stars bright and tiny blue spilling out of my eyes and down my cheeks, sparrows stumble and fly from my mouth out of each fluttering note, and the moon kisses me with a pale white mouth. from far away the stars call me again, i will come back to you, i sing, and the ghosts of foxes and deer dance around me a musky, ancient dance and out my heart comes a red horse burning, and a thousand children are born and their lives taken across my collarbones, and with my few dimes i spin and toss them into rain clouds high above, dark and gleaming, and drink a bottle of wine inside which a captured galaxy steeps and swirls and gets sodden drunk like a tequila worm and all of the lifeforms that live therein drunk driving their spaceships too near far suns, and i slip and fall and my hand goes splat against the pavement, and a thousand acorns burst like blood therefrom and roll into the road, run over by empty cars but so many that they cut into the asphalt and burst into sudden oaks all splaying their branches to the destruction of dark windowed buildings and everything i brush up against becomes auroral songs like free whales singing, and every exhalation of my dread cigarette gives birth to a virgin earth that drifts into the sky to find its star in heaven.

subway gods

2009-10-20T17:05:00.005-04:00

we should all be grateful, apparently, having been rescued from ten thousand years of tyranny of the earth to be protected behind a shiny new world. healthier, taller, smarter, freer, safer, fatter (or so they say, ask some who once lived in the forests far from tyrants) the lash replaced with the paycheck and nonetheless still lots of booze and sex left over from the old feral world of our ancestors, those wild totem carrying peasants in heat, up before dawn. the life in a fist of a mean old king,

subways are funny things, look at them all, all these ex-peasants in fancy clothes and perfumes, all these lifeless faces locking in such animal spirits, grateful for a dead office in the sky than in a mine in the inferno of the earth. grateful but still harshly sewn-together, all packed in here like herds of drugged mice, grateful to dream one day into the next in a labyrinth of drywall and cheap furniture, plastic flowers and one hell of an economy, they say. who hears the songs of third world families in the sunburned skins of farmers and survival, high grass and lone rivers here? all these possible earth mothers digging into purses for mascara instead of into the earth for seeds, is it really better? all these tall craftsmen staring into the blackness of the subway tunnel like arid mannequins, free from the tyranny of princes to fall into a tyranny of nothing, with all this free time what has been built in their souls that is beautiful, that breathes? what now, you sunless spirits of the land?

nietzsche

2009-09-12T14:20:00.006-04:00

they said he was a great philosopher, that his ideas were on higher reality and beyond our time, that most people weren't even smart enough to understand him, and that he conferred great power to a budding thinker.

he claimed to be a dangerous preacher. Nietzsche rose out of the 1800s a devil of joyous rebellion, grew up among the growing factories and pregnant machines and the splendor of colonial empire at its height in europe. when the white race dominated the earth as no race or empire has done for all eternity. they subdued all the earth's peoples, lay claim to nearly all its land, wielded a great army that strode across the earth and brought all the wealth robbed from a hundred peoples back to the cities of europe. it was the age of the annihilation of a hundred civilizations, a thousand cultures, a hundred thousand tribes. the 1800s was a holocaust the world has not known before or since.

in the heart of the butcher's palace, among the cathedrals of gold and rubies praising a dead hobo, of serene parks and latticed pagodas by gentle lakes with birds chirping in immaculately pruned trees, among great neo-classical architecture of banks, ministries, courts of law, he was born into this - god knows how. they said he was rather innocent, that he walked upright and patiently in torrents of rain coming home from school - because he was a good boy.

but not long later, grown into a philosopher. he roared of the birth of the overman; the evolution of the human into something Great and Powerful and Not Human. he mocked good and evil as the hallucinations of addled pigs and dogs, as lustful hypocrises, and he said god was dead and man should seize his throne.

he danced and laughed, he teased the lords of europe saying that music was better than business and that the best men were always out of fashion. he pushed down statues of saints wherever he found them. he strung paradoxes in the air like a magician, triumphantly declared that being alive was an infinity of creativity and wild, natural freedom that made all our culture seem like just pompous moralizing and play-acting.

and he breathed fire on the weak and the gentle, said that war brought meaning to life, that slavery was best because the stupid cows of the poor were filling their best use by working to death to free up the days of better men.

and these words were like honey mixed with blood to stupid and vicious men then and later, they ate up all sanction of hatred and violence, though he may have protested that's not what i meant!

but too late, when one laughs in the face of suffering and encourages others to do the same, the consequences will follow. the consequences always follow. and he was a contradiction always, building labyrinths out of words to lose yourself from yourself, in getting lost finding freedom, building labyrinths of feelings to conceal that he was pathetic, hiding a wounded soul in agression and abandon.

a few dead friendships later his thoughts grew larger, became dancing green ghosts before him as he sat alone in various towers in europe. agonies of physical pain he warred against, always rising back with a cry that to triumph over life is the truth of god. to conquer, to grow ruthlessly, to create without humility, to steal insatiably, to be light-hearted and cruel. to shed the slave talent of kindness.

send the little people to a million graves, he demanded, if it makes a single great painting or warrior... or philosopher. At his height he tried to build a new religion that destroyed all other religions, and put in the mouth of a great prophet, Zarathustra, an N turned on its side, beautiful and terrible words, of a boundless creativity, a full laughing, of a holy sensitivity to life, and somehow an endless cruelty and a fearful child's obsession with becoming a great hero, a puffed up crown striding about the planets, finding new things to dominate and grow larger than.

he intended to write the will to power, a magnum opus that would teach those who were capable of knowing, and thus deserved knowing, how to live and breathe pure power. perhaps if he had some men might have read it and turned into blobs of blinding sun in the shapes of angels and scorched the earth of frailty and shallowness until only lions and symphonies remained, and then fly away into the sky to drink the blood of stars.

they say one morning nietzsche left his tower to go for a walk in the dusty city of turin, and saw before him a man beating his horse with great violence in the street. they say nietzsche suddenly threw his arms around the neck of the horse and burst into tears, trying to prevent the man from lashing the horse. but the horse collapsed and nietzsche collapsed with him. when he awoke he had become nearly catatonic. he never spoke another word of philosophy, never wrote another word, never declared or demanded anything more.

helpless animal

2009-09-09T19:50:00.002-04:00

it takes thousands of years for a plant or animal to change into something else. a city changes beyond recognition in a hundred years, and a human being takes ten. and countries change all the time, like big floating storms of factories and armies churning and thundering above a teeming, wandering humanity below. Those lines on the map move with plans of war and power, and we forget that the people move back and forth across those lines which are not in fact walls but just the boundaries of the storms of governments, hundreds of them clashing and expanding and contracting, trying to herd the people around as much as possible. this is politics: humanity below, power above.

The storms rain laws and jobs and bombs and propaganda. The black clouds of institutions, look up at the ripped stone foundations with dirt and roots and sewers on their grey bellies in the sky, dripping debris upon us all. In the far distance sometimes see the columns and the long stairs lit up by the setting sun, always too far to reach out and touch them, and get cover quickly if you see them coming towards you.

And all the kids that we raise and send into this storm, call it better than natural. this one won't make it, this one will be transformed into a monster, this one will learn to drop fire from the sky. And this one will end up on a farm, but this one will end up in a supermarket. And this waitress wanted to be a doctor, and this astronaut answers phones.

And the floating skyscrapers blast a way clear for a parking lot, watch all the animals run.

how many of these ones under the storms? millions, they say, cowering like helpless animals, dressed up like princes. and no one trusts each other. how many until some start wondering about paradise, trying to see it in their heads, going to look for it outside the cities of storms, drawing pictures of paradise on earth with an untrained hand, wobbly markings, crude trees. how long until some of these ones start trying to ask what a paradise is, what kind of paradise should be? how long until these put their hearts into a paradise that might be and is and needs to be learned? These animals, dancing in suits on the lips of volcanoes.

the guns of today

2009-08-08T22:22:00.006-04:00

out there, the crackle of fireworks going off circa 10:23 pm

in gaza, in the sudan, in iraq and afghanistan, the crackle of bombs going off, a triumphant cackle of destruction.

what we don't see.

we think that here in the centre we have earned this. in america, in europe, we have earned this peace, this beauty.

this serenity is not just temporary, it comes at the crackle of great death,

we, meaning our overlords, killed everything that stops us from having all this serenity. we are in the eye of a great storm, and see only the peace of the great storm, and no one understands that the storm hangs all over the world, killing and mutilating little children all the time. they point and say look at all the immigrants, they come here because we have a superior society - yes, superior in that it is close to the houses of our overlords, who are pleased by gardens dripping with flowers, shipped from countries where the flowers drip with blood and phosphorus.

your peace comes at the price of a slaughter in the countries where they make furniture, and oil, and gas, diamonds and trees, and my dog is rightfully spooked to hear the cackle of fireworks of an august night, because for all your celebrations someone has to pay. your things are made in china, go check the bottoms of everything you have bought, it will say made in china, and that means the tibetans, the uighurs and the poor han paid them for you, and the gasoline that brought them to your door was driven over the blood of iraqis and afghanis and saudis. so much for a democratic world, when the choice is between two slaves to gasoline,

there are no guns anymore, just bombs. guns are for the hopeless, remember that. the great powers annhilate all enemies with a cackle of fire. and you serve them. remember that.

buddha

2009-08-04T23:26:00.004-04:00

the summer rain around midnight in the back alley speaks in drops of water, tap, tap, drip, smack.

gautama buddha lived sometime around 400 bce in what is now nepal, watched over by the great mountains of that part of the world. what we know of the buddha's original teachings are that they are bound up in a very very old literature known as the pali canon, of which the clearest expression of his words are contained in the dhammapada, which is at its most simplest can be understood as path (pada) of eternal truth (dhamma).

gautama buddha, remarkably, did not comment on the existence or nonexistence of god or expound a true cosmology, which would deviate from the focus of his teaching. the essence of the buddha's teaching is the four noble truths,

1. life is suffering

2. ignorance gives rise to desire, and desire causes suffering

3. desire can be overcome

4. the means to overcoming desire is through the noble eightfold path

the eightfold path is a series of 'right' behavior, e.g. right thought, right action, right speech, etc. you get the idea. this idea of 'right' is possibly best thought of as 'focus' - to maintain focus on the goal of eliminating desire in every aspect of one's existence.

the idea of eliminating desire is a funny one. it is somewhat revolting to a sensible person on first glance. the alternative to desire would seem to be a kind of giving up, to stop living. the idea, of course, is that it is just the opposite. it is to give up trying to hold onto life like a piece of diamond. and really, trying to grasp life is no different than gripping a fistful of water and seeing it run through your fingers. humans are a bit insane in that they do this all the time in life, snatch a fistful of water and look on in dismay and horror as the water bleeds between the fingers.

generally speaking, most people aren't terribly interested in ending desire - if pressed, most people will gladly take on more suffering as long as they have a shot at more of what they desire. the allure of what they think is beautiful or desirable is too overwhelming, and the confusion of what they want with what is truly good is always a great, vast mountainous confusion.

more than 2500 years ago, buddha understood that human beings live in a dream throughout their lives, a dream born in childhood whose non-existent resolution they chase like a white rabbit down a hole. somehow, every generation from then until now has been born and grown up trying to triumph over suffering and death, and really, who could blame them? the body gasps for air, water, food, love and sex. i saw a great fat woman smoking in the darkness of her balcony tonight, i followed the train of her glowing cinder in the rain and found it remarkable how totally cruel life can be. to be stuck in some body no one wants, and few will see you in your fat body unless you are blessed with power or charisma. and even all human warmth that might come your way comes at the price of this chaos of ageing and a million unanticipated sorrows. the dream is filled with illusions and storms.

of course, the greatest challenge to overcoming these things is the effort in persisting at it, the immense bravery required to end desire and the imagination to take up a real life. the buddha's lack of commentary on god exemplifies this, for it is that god is god, always present, always elusive, never punishing or forgiving, something greater than the little life you must lead that can end only in death, the great parting from the dream.

but with each little letting go, one joins an understanding of the much greater river, by not trying to grip it in one's hand one sees the water flow, and a love that comes not from jealous desire, but from seeing living beings as they are, and knowing what there really is to love, that is, the being that is outside oneself. to break the bubble by listening. real life begins where you end.

to the old woman

2009-07-27T20:30:00.002-04:00

to the old woman i saw up on st viateur today goddamn i was stunned to see your moon face at 9 am and what a face like the face of an old goddess so pained and wonderful, with moon eyes and lips and your legs all swelled up and god how you knew all of us young stupid children's eyes, like you knew what we were all thinking and plotting and wanting and so heartbroken in this insanity.

and i saw your body and the horror of how you must have been beautiful and how this body swelled up and distorted to the point where walking must itself go in slow, small steps because of the hundred little pains and ugliness of a body exploding with its own destruction, seeing your body suiciding slowly near the end and in this morning sunset how you endure I may yet know someday down the road when I am old and my body explodes and the world of young cruel fools no longer sees me. those moon eyes slowly coming to rest on me for a moment with everything in them i will remember.

what have we done to our elders who should be set up in pavillions of honor and wisdom telling us of what it is to live we drive them to become part of the masonry of sidewalks and buildings and leave them to suffer in their bodies. the natives are right we are insane.

history

2009-07-25T21:14:00.017-04:00

to be born into the world is to be born a dead man. i must eventually face death. i am born innocent only to face a terrible fate. born into this world of a tangled chaos of beauty and misery. you try to find a way to live, to live meaningfully, or at least to have a good time. but for the millions life is just one long stretch of losing battles, its madness. and the millions themselves are just an idea in my head, in my mind i see them all in china, in tibet, in india, in south america, in africa, in europe, here. millions of them, fighting, struggling, weeping, bleeding, giving birth, fucking, laughing, screaming, reading, trying, lying, being brave, thinking, listening, running, jumping, singing, burning, cooking. in my life ill make the acquaintance of a few hundred of them, most of them in passing between some strange past and some strange future, you can't save anyone.

born a dead man at some point in history, that is to say at some point in someone else's past. the grandchildren of the little children born today. you fall into this river of millions of people coming from somewhere, going somewhere. you think life is about you, because you are you and the horizons of your eyes seem to be the whole world. but that's a joke. you are the last thing on the world's mind.

on this windy night every tree sings of its life, the water coursing in its veins and hurling into the ends of its leaves a throbbing pulse of an awesome life. trees growing in slow explosions of dirt and water. like us, this strange history whose end we'll never see. up on st viateur, just before the warehouses and monasteries in the back ass of montreal, people of all stripes hanging around obsessed with clumsy, little horizons of wondering about their standing in the eyes of other little horizons, are they mountains, maybe they don't care, playing games, loving, giving birth, watching tv, taking in a show, voting, goddamn all hurling down some river they don't really know or care about.

it seemed to me that my inheritance in being born was to know history, to know all the things and millions of people that came before stretching all the way back to when there was nothing, no cities, no roads to interrupt a crazy unending sea of trees and water. just to know all these wonderful things, and the present too, how the world is, physics, biology, ecology, chemistry. how beautiful. how incredibly beautiful to be curious and learn things. how fragile and pure. i didnt resign myself to me, i swear it, or resign to television or music, this feed of noise in my eyes to block out the thousand knives of the bare fact of living, which hurts to look at, like the sun. but after awhile you can see more, and risk a blindness of course, that warm, sweet blindness to being mortal and not giving a damn, but i cant pretend i dont give a damn - to most mortality is immortality, to not think about the eternity of everything is to live without the fear of death, which is not really being humble in my opinion. its a betrayal of all these trees singing. they don't care whose listening of course, that's why the singing hiss and roar can be so beautiful sometimes. just swelling up in my heart, knowing i am finite, small, propelled towards ending, just dirt and water, singing these beautiful, unheard songs in the general traffic.

i don't know what all these people are doing with themselves, going to parties, getting shitfaced and saying oh my god that was so funny, what are you doing now we went to st martin and blew our brains out with lobsters and margaritas. fuck, its crazy. all falling into a pit of blackness, and skirting the tombstones of the living poor and destitute while doing so.

i cant be mad, maybe a little appalled, but really theyre just kids, playing playing playing, even when theyre 95. playing at being old. kind of pissed off, huffy, as if mommy can reverse the aging process but wont. i was afflicted at a very young age with a terrible consciousness of death and life. maybe i should say deathyness and livingness. that sweet innocent bubble that everyone lives in i had to learn artificially and it took a long time, but i never quite got the full swing of it. even the shamen dance with one head up their ass, it seems to me, like they dont quite want to fess up to fundamental ignorance. god the thunder is having a hell of a time out there on the river. hell maybe thats the war finally come home. its about time. i wouldnt be totally disappointed if the taliban, or the darfuris, or the congolese, or the iraqis or palestinians or the thousand people living under bomb thunder tonight showed up in montreal with attack helicopters and state of the art tanks blowing holes around St Catherine and Metcalfe.

christ i was terrified. maybe i still am but got acclimated. i used to tremble and tremble. i used to look at people and think everyone was insane. maybe i still do but accept it now as childlike behavior. i wanted to rage at the monsters of the world tonight, i wanted to talk of blood and pain of the millions, but i come back to me, if im honest. maybe a human's greatest challenge is to be strong enough to be part of the human race, to be the dirt of nature it is and to stand in defence of innocence, against survival, against the hysteria of mortal humanity and its obsession with remaking the world in the image of its stupid blundering bubbles. maybe ive just described the path of history. the stars know best, and they sing without words, as they have before humanity ever was, or will be.

clouds

2009-07-15T21:12:00.019-04:00

there are many different kinds of clouds. these are shaped by different forces. they take shape and become beings. as humans on the bottom. try to think that you live in an ocean of nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide, and the clouds are floating on the surfaces of this ocean, and yes you are at the bottom of this ocean. they are ships. you are fish. and maybe trees are like giant seaweeds reaching to the light at the surface, waving in the current. if you were to break the surface of this ocean, you would gasp and flounder like a fish, until some kindly fisherman dropped you back in the ocean.

so, let's begin.

the first thing is that there are cirruses and altos. the cirruses are the highest clouds. they float at 6,000 metres above the land. they are mostly little ice crystals because its fucking cold up there. they don't make rain, and they're wispy and curly, often described as streaks of white paint against the blue. they can make a series of little puffballs too. the commentary of these clouds is one of serenity. they can even look down at wars, flaming oil wells, megaslums, with enlightened compassion. when they drift, they move with a peace that little humans only really know on their day off, or just after a funeral or a birth.

(cirrus clouds)

altocumuluses are mid-level clouds, between 2,000 and 6,000 metres. these are made of water drops in big lumps. they can come in puffballs or streaks like cirruses, but the difference is that they can be observed as having depth, shading, weight, bulgyness, like fat little bellies. not unlike cirruses or any other kind of cloud, altocumuluses can look remarkably like something very fucking important is going on beyond ourselves, as if they were trudging off to a war of storms, or obeying the commands of mountains, which in a sense they are, since mountains can catch these low drifting clouds and spin them around and send them off to different lands.

(altocumuluses)

altocumulses often precede the coming of storms, like a great herd, and i do mean herd because if i've failed to mention it yet clouds are beings just as we are beings. this is called animist thinking and this is also called extremely primitive. the idea that a being is only a human, or for the more charitable only humans and animals, arises from the notion that a being is something that thinks and lives exactly as we do. it also arises as part of the delusion that beings are more permanent than non-beings, that as a human you do not change, moreover there is something about you which is divisible from the natural world. to me this is kind of a slander against the natural world, and a misunderstanding of what it is to be part of life. no different than a cloud, you form, drift, change, are propelled along by forces like wind and heat, break apart and become part of some other being. that clouds do this quickly and we much more slowly, and perhaps mountains and stars slowest of all is only a peculiarity of time.

that there is expression in the motions of clouds ought not to be denied. communication is of course difficult, but they speak a different language and really have different priorities and concerns than we do.

altocumuluses are formed by convection, which is a fancy way of saying lumps of hot air occasionally rise from the earth, and will keep rising so long as there is colder air around and above it.

this brings us to nimbostratuses, dark, moody, fat clouds that reside low in the sky. Nimbostratuses bring rain with them, and if light, twisting cirruses are the dancing drunks of cloud society, and altocumuluses the practical, serious middle children, then nimbostratuses are the brooding poetic teenagers.

(nimbostratuses)

nimbostratuses move along like great tortoises in the sky, they carry their bodies with heavy emotion like knights going to war. it is the nimbostratuses that look like they are travelling to some important cause, some part of the world where there are no people and the gods of the natural world still congregate and fashion the motions of this planet that we have deluded ourselves into thinking we conquered.

maybe i should explain a few things.

2009-07-10T00:18:00.007-04:00

the first is what I don't know. what i don't know could fill a universe. i can say i was born, just a small thing, that eventually grew into this, and will eventually be something else than what i am. but i cannot say this infinitely vast world is something that i understand. nor do i believe anyone who says they understand it. i think i am a little creature born into a great thing that goes on above me. i see mars chasing the moon in a dark sky tonight. a little star chasing a fat moon. but the moon is smaller than mars, i am told, and mars much smaller than the stars it passes by. and this planet smaller than this sky.

maybe this is what i should explain, the great mystery of the world. we watch children sweetly as they explain ghosts or god to each other, their innocence charms us to love them for the naive way they understand. but that is just us small and new, because when we get big the ignorance does not vanish, it just becomes a more grim imagination that invents reasons for everything.

i resolved to rename all the plants in the world. i never liked the name butter and eggs for the little yellow and orange weeds that spring up everywhere this time of year. i'll call them orange novas. and maybe even mars should be named after a different god, let's rename him drifter. and so maybe ill rename everything in the world, since they never came when called anyway.

because it is hard to remain conscious of one's innocence, even if that innocence can endure in the face of the worst cruelty. and its strange to look up at the stars tonight and know they all shimmer with a kind of joyous violence, this strange paradox of living, this coexistence of violence and gentleness.

i am trying to explain the first simple things to you, but it is hard. from the beginning, when very small when just at the edges of first thoughts, one must understand one is a small being in a great big mystery. as we learn of the world we learn of ourselves, and both are sacred and infinite things. the first thing is to understand that most of life is a dark space of unknown, and that we are like children, no, that we are overgrown children filling in the dark spaces with ideas more than truths. We learn to talk after we learn to listen, but we don't talk well because we don't listen well.

growing into adulthood is the process of the child compensating for the demands of biology, or compensating for the confusion of flooding experience. We never really become adults as we pretend adults are, those creatures who know themselves and know what to do. When we were little the adults were gods who held the answers to all questions and the power to do what they wished, and so we grew up trying to be that way, and grown up we see now how we don't know and have little power and how little children treat us as gods, and we play the part, stumbling along in this great mystery, trying to protect them from the strangeness of violence.

and aristotle, the teacher of alexander the great, the ancient king who as a young man conquered the ancient world from greece down to egypt to the borders of india and died on the way back. with a sword and horse he killed and conquered all the little people because he was a great genius and they were little people. and alexander the young, golden haired hero, was known to have been instructed by philip, a great warrior king with one eye, and aristotle, a great philosopher and scientist. and aristotle, who taught alexander, was revered because he developed theories about the stars, and about human conduct, and about politics, and about biology and physics and a theory of everything, and the funny thing was he was dead wrong about nearly everything. and alexander and all the kings and priests who came after him believed everything he said, because he had an answer for everything. and only in recent history have people realized aristotle was a fool.

democracy requires blood

2009-07-07T22:41:00.015-04:00

the moon is rising behind some clouds. the hard stars are out. the hiss of delusional streets as i lay here wondering. in honduras there was a coup. in iran there was a coup. in america they play at democracy, but they know who signs their checks. democracy is far away.

democracy is hard. it requires blood. there is no way around it. if you believe, you must be alive to bleed. if you can't, you recede into aesthetics. it is hard to believe. to try, for your fellow humans. to believe in them as your family, as people worth chasing down and convincing, worth listening to, worth taking a punch or a sentence for. but it is there, to try, and there are still, even now, thousands of people who'll take a bullet or a world of hatred and lies for democracy, for literally, the rule of the people over themselves. Interesting, isn't it, that we are supposed to live in such a world, but for ordinary people to fight for it seems alien?

see, last week i got in a car with some folks who can only be described as radicals. they made their way down to akwesasne, a reserve that lies on the border between America and Canada, on this land of wrought storms, and on such a day we drove down under a sky divided between a shining summer blue day and a dark rain. we crossed the bridge over a river blockaded by cops doing their job, and over the rusty now derelict bridge we came onto the reserve and were immediately in a place not America, but an old land of the First Nations of this country.

And as we came down to their pavilions they came out and stood by the road, waving at us and one guy shouted welcome as we drove onto the grass field that was the parking lot. the mohawks, well they were there to defend the land from the guns Canada wanted to arm the border guards with. And they told us soon there was really no border to defend, just some land of green trees and fields they called a border that wasn't even a border of land they had any right to. and we were there to say yes this is not our land.

and they lined us up inside of a tent and said their welcomes. and it started to rain in a little greyblack pitter patter and etcetera and one of the chiefs said thank you for coming, thank you for believing in us, and he told jokes and made us laugh and showed us how men shake hands, by gripping the wrists so you would feel the blood pumping in the veins, and how you would hug the women so you would feel the blood pumping in the hearts, and how different and solemn was the meeting of people here among the Mohawks, how important, and how he said the rain is the tears of the spirits hoping we would come to meet each other, and we all of us heard the weeping of the spirits hoping. hoping we might not forget we heard them.

and then we met everyone, and how they fed us their food, and how a lovely woman named Margaret, once she knew I was listening and not telling, not telling how it should be, how the natural world spoke, how we had made the land sick, and how so much is willing to teach among the plants and animals of land. and she told me how they marked time, by the changes in the world, the real world, the time when strawberries came out, or certain flowers, and how those times changed every year and did not go with the calendar, and it is not about calendars being bad things but it is about a way of being, a way of living in the world where one lives by the world and not by the date and time. and how i could have told her of the apocalypse of low flying airplanes and shattered horizons by blades of skyscrapers but did not because i was there to listen for once and not instruct. because the mohawks, they never left the fragile hearts of things and that is why they are losing. maybe that is how in the end they will win.

it was a siege in a great paradise, a lonely grass in the middle of nowhere. and they were angry for what we had done to them, because we still do not know we are on a land with its own life that is not ours. the land is a being much stronger than us, and it can handle our destruction, and it defies our understanding that there can be such people that know what it is to talk to the land like a living being, and still believe themselves to be their own people, and not ours to do with as we please.

caution for the walker of the victorious city

2009-06-20T23:37:00.001-04:00

caution for the walker of the victorious city, there is a wall of noise between you and something. the city has made you now, you have become the city, you have accepted its victory. there are little skyscrapers on either side of the lines of your hands, a little roar of constant traffic in your ears. there are a river of giant trucks that scream like airplane engines flooding in and out of the streets of this steel house, there is a dread hum of a dead star electrifying the streetlights, a billion piston angels raining blue and red police sirens. these are the slums where girls with no friends vanish, these are the gated communities where new aristocrats are born.

but a caution to you prisoner in the triumphant city; your memory had been erased. there is a silence you have forgotten, beautiful and alive. you laugh at people who say it’s real and a silence more real than even power lines and post offices.
run.

i washed dishes in an italian restaurant downtown

2009-06-10T23:06:00.001-04:00

i washed dishes in an italian restaurant downtown until 1am every night. the owners were three brothers all of them did coke and talked to the women at the bar or played computer golf and didnt look up when you asked questions. i made about $8 an hour, a real winner. i think me and the youngest brother were about the same age. my clothes developed holes in them because i could still wear them. the kitchen was otherwise populated with sri lankans and a strange afghani man who made cock jokes and employed little tortures on me because i was one of the only white guys that worked in the back. the afghani had fled some kind of war or some kind of army and terrible things had happened because his eyes twinkled in a bad way and his laugh was slightly angry. he was harmless and spooky, and he made me sad because he reminded me of how many people there were in the world that you would never understand or like but suffered and tried just as you did in a way you would never know.

the dishes would pile up so fast there was no hope of staying on top of them, they would just keep coming in by the hundreds, piling up around you and the giant pots and giant pans and the stink of garbage mixed with food - a smell like spiced vomit and human sweat until there was nowhere left to move just surrounded with dirty fancy dishes and a PTSD afghani laughing at me silently. and at the end of the night they would flood the floor with two inches of water and let it all go down the drain all this dirty water thrashing in the kitchen like a drowning boat in the sea and we were covered in refuse and water and even now it is nothing to me to reach my bare hand down in to a garbage can or a bucket of shit. and one night feeling broken like a soldier in napoleon's army at waterloo - napoleon gone, the generals gone, just dead friends and the enemy swaggering around ready to kill you, fleeing the british who were coming with old mean kings and princesses of europe to put the winners back in charge and the losers, the peasants and the unpaid footsoldiers all ran off somewhere in the bright dusk...

i ran into the coked up bartender about my age, 6'3 with a tiny silver earring and an immaculate goatee who pretended to sneeze on me and ripped a hole in the collar of my shirt well open so that a flap hung around my chest and laughed and i said weakly what the fuck did you do that for? and he just laughed and hugged me and sent me away into 2am downtown to be almost run over by a yellow sportscar and across the street having a smoke watching some rich kid who thought he was a gangster sexually harass some girl , and i said between chain smokes hey man youre scaring her. naw he said naw i aint and she went off with him in the end.

the rebellion in heaven

2009-06-02T20:52:00.010-04:00

(oka-1990)

this past week two rebellions in heaven took place, and the angels both times flew quickly to the scene, angels with huge, drooping wings and gas masks, armed with gas bombs and pistols.

down in akwesasne near the border the mohawks seized the outpost of the angels and said the angels may not bring guns on to our land. how little most know. the iroquois never gave up their land, never became part of america. through all the disease that the angels brought unknowingly or knowingly, through all the deaths of mystic animals, through all the armies of angels that crept closer and closer each time the iroquois stumbled, like hyenas around an injured deer, the iroquois, the haudenosaunee, clung to the longhouse, the council fire, the bowl with one spoon, the great wampum belts and the clans, and they remained.

and they rebel against the angels that made paradise here and said no paradise on our land, much to the surprise of heaven. and the son of man, the disease of power, was driven back at ganienkeh, at oka, now here as the angels tried to bring guns to make heaven better. and the iroquois will not negotiate with the guns of paradise, because they are not heaven but earth, they are humanity, they are the fugitive, democracy.

and up in the city montreal the people claimed a city block of paradise on rue St Patrick, the children of angels who hated guns, made a little democracy like a fire of twigs, and the angels came swiftly, and before even 24 hours had passed the gas had driven them out the back door and into the blue june dusk. there were women and children who did not understand heaven there, did not know how angels in gas masks are the heralds that declare the eternal kingdom with bangs and whimpers. the little fire of twigs of democracy, a piece of the city claimed by the city dwellers, when it is in fact owned by the god, they didnt know,

and we? we are lost in heaven, wandering around, unaware of the bones that compose the clouds on which we tread, condeming, mocking, lecturing, judging, but mostly shrugging.

the montreal action:

http://www.centresocialautogere.org/

the iroquois action:

http://www.akwesasne.ca/

3 day storm

2009-05-29T17:14:00.005-04:00

at the end of may came the wind blowing and a storm that blocked out the sky for 3 days with an iron belly of cloud. the trees twisted and waved and hissed their leaves everywhere in the city you could see them far in the distance of mysterious neighborhoods and the jungle of green leaves overhead dripped the radiance of birth like some fat pregnant bullfrog. everyone wanders the streets, without aim, wayward, drifting like little human white sails in the sea of cool wind.

the storm gets more violent, the branches rock, husks of clouds that hang below the iron belly drift wetly, shards broken off of a defeated storm. so that's what has happened. the belly has gotten darker and closer to the earth, an army, a force of storm that journeyed across the plains of the West from where it gathered in the mountains to come East and clash with some great god of an atlantic storm, and where they met and churned and twisted together in the sky not far from this ancient street the army of clouds won some terrible battle and ripped the Eastern storm to pieces, and ate its limbs, and the shards of the dead god were caught up like driftwood with the still raging army poured South across the lakes to pillage the earth, so maybe these storms that hurl lightning and floods down upon us, they grin wide pale grey grins at atomic bombs. if they should ever get tired of their wars in the sky, we're all done for.

?

2009-04-27T19:31:00.003-04:00

we were in the cafe when the blast hit and threw us both to the ground, talking about women and sex. when i came to i was bleeding from somewhere on my face and it was hard to hear, there was a big dust clouded hole where the windowed wall used to be, and no tables sat in front of it any longer. I wondered what happened to the people on the street, if they were alright, if they were dead or worse. i could see lumps of unmoving bodies in front of me, and heard the first tender, cautious noises of survivors recovering behind me, silence though no sobs, no fear, just little pieces of debris being moved and stepped on, like mice scurrying in a house abandoned for many years.

and i lifted myself onto my knees and saw my good friend lying there with his skin melted down to black and shiny red on one side, and only half his face still his. his arm on his right side was all popped open with little and big holes and you could see white fat and how the elbow had come off so his arm was longer and flaccid. and how he didn't look like he minded. and i got to my feet i thought and looked for a mirror because there was blood all over my hands whenever i touched my face and then i heard mice scurrying behind me and i turned around and saw my friend stood there, slightly bewildered, leaning against the wall with his torn fingers and he looked at his perfect, untouched left arm in wonder and he looked up at me, fascinated, and said

don't worry, i think i am going to be alright

and i said i don't think so, my friend

and then he smiled a calm, easy smile and said

no, you see, its alright. this is flesh and muscles and blood all working together in a wonderful harmony, and these are my movements which come from me, gestures of me. look

he waved his perfect arm in front of him like a paper bird

you see, thats me, your friend, sailing my arm through the air. you see? and i am never going to be anything more than this

and he waved his perfect arm like a leaf sailing in front of him

i am a wave on the ocean, and i am not afraid. i rose up, i crested and opened my eyes, and now i vanish, and become part of other waves.

we are on a planet with a little moon. we are on a little planet, going around a sun. a little sun, and there are other planets going around the sun. and the planets are as complicated as this one. and the planet is blue, and it floats like a little dot of dust in an endless ocean of space.

we are on a planet

the way things are

2009-03-06T12:22:00.008-05:00

charles darwin noticed that over time, over many generations of children and parents, living beings evolved into new forms. on the galapagos islands, darwin saw birds with many different kinds of beaks. he discovered they were all finches, the same kind of bird but with a different nose. this suggested at one time there was a simple finch species, but this was branching off into different kinds of finch specialists - big beaked ones for breaking seed shells, narrow beaked ones to catch insects in trees, and etc.

darwin was watching this branching in a transitional phase, between what was and what was to come. over thousands of generations, it is possible that the different kinds of finches would stop being finches, and evolve into altogether different bird species. now this was happening with all living beings, all birds and animals and plants and bacteria and amoeba, and all happening in relationship to each other. the beaks of finches changing to suit of the kinds of food available in their world, and the seeds themselves changing in response to finches and other seeds and weather and soil and plate tectonics and oceans.

and over these few thousands of years of civilization there is a strange thing that humans are slowly becoming aware of, a strange thing about life and ourselves that terrifies us at first and seems to mean the end of everything we care for, and that it affects not just the natural world, but our societies, our beliefs, everything.

and i remember sitting in the park in july with damien talking about the evolution of ideas and how civilization grew and changed over time, and why, and he said

"the great discovery was that everything is changing."

yeah, and that means that everything is changing is relation to everything else. i walked in a gentle snowstorm last night, and i watched the millions of snowflakes falling on the road, through the light of the intersections from the dark of high space, and i noticed how not only is every snowflake perfectly unique, but everysnowflake is falling in its own unique trajectory, and falling in relation to everyothersnowflake, and falling in relation to the ones that had fallen a few seconds before and the ones that were to come.

and its funny that humans want to build a civilization that will endure forever, and that is the motivation for the pyramids and easter island and machu pichu and the vatican and etc. and there they are now crumbling or fading, mostly because things changed. and because they wanted things to remain the same forever. because that is how they understood immortality. as the same thing forever. no wonder the idea of heaven is slightly depressing, and why people looking forward to heaven seem slightly crazy.

anyway.

there is great beauty and great mystery to the idea of everything changing, and it is such a big thought that it extends far beyond the power of our little heads to really get around it, but even within our tiny lifetimes we see everything changing, we see saplings grow to trees, and parts of cities come down, and people coming into the world and people leaving, and the earth going around the sun marks a year, which is the earth changing and changing is the passage of time and the passage of time only change. who knows, and we ourselves changing and yes paradoxically in a sense remaining the same. but certainly our bodies change against our will.

the most important thing is to understand that this is truth; everything is changing is how life is. the idea of a thing being true is confused with a thing being permanent, and this is maybe where it is terrifying for many, to let go of ideas that one relied upon, that one loved, and to walk freestanding in the world. but the real beauty of embracing that everything changes is that in its heart, it is embracing the feeling that the realities of life and nature and god are much, much, much greater, stranger and more profound than our ideas of life and nature and god, and that to cling to some small, flat, dead human certitude of an idea does not confer purity nor clarity nor any kind of good.

there are lies that can endure, and there are truths that can vanish for generations. the lie that god rewards the faithful is still believed by the majority of the world's people, no matter how many fucking many of them get brutally cut down. and around 240 bce, eratosthenes estimated the circumference of the earth and established that it was, in fact, not flat. this truth would be crushed out of existence for many centuries, until but a few hundreds years ago.

this is the evil that men bring me

2009-02-10T02:45:00.004-05:00

it is so much inwreathed in morality i can barely snarl, but so starkly clear the murder of sweet innocence, i was just born int0 this concrete desert. i was made to be among the living things of green, but was chosen to rot among you here - to be a teller. to tell, with knives at my throat, whatever you have made these children who never had a chance to be made by beautiful things but must learn horror and rightful hatred of the murderers of their fathers and mothers, that you have made this world out of political gain. you have murdered for the sake of expediency, you have not just murdered men but their loves, and now you demand the world turn. it she will still turn, but she will come around again, and she will come bearing the bodies of those you thought went with her. and this rage will never cease. it will never cease, despite all paradises we have to chase each other through, and they are many, and if i know man i know they will burn each down after they are finished with them. and slaughter all children who try to hide in sundipped gardens in spring, should those places contain anything worth having according to immaculate princes.

but such things that are brought me by men smiling wisely and sure of themselves, how I would turn their knives upon them and let their smiles bleed into the soil of all living things. i would kneel over them with such violence and send them from all beings so beautiful and brittle. beings they would blame for being victim of the strong, and ask them, what monster would believe there is no child in the soul whose tears of cowardice are not worth protecting. And man laughed out like a snake and said nothing brittle shall ever have currency while my fist rules this earth, and so it was. and so man's end became.

dear civilian

2009-02-04T17:04:00.003-05:00

A series of messages between me and an iraq war veteran last year, edited for clarity.

Dear civilian,

Why do you feel that you have to comment on a wounded soldier. What have you ever sacrificed. Instead of sitting at home on the couch and judging us on what we do, join the army and see if you have what it takes. Oh thats right you don't. When you comment on everything we do and the actions we take you sound more like a terrorist. You have never been there so you don't know a thing. You believe what the media says and for that your an ignorant person. Don't judge us on our actions for something you know nothing about. Keep your mouth shut.

***

for someone who pretends to defend democracy and freedom its despicable you would go around telling people who criticize you to keep their mouths shut.

i'm not a soldier but if you voice a political opinion you dont get to hide behind your uniform. your opinion is not sacred. you are also "just a citizen" - but your military ass has been kissed by manipulative politicians for so long you actually believe you might be a saint; and if you want to attack politicians all the "second-class" civilians better keep their "mouths shut" because you have special privileges. talk about elitism.

well guess what i was a social worker for four years and i have seen shit you have never seen. I have seen your fellow citizens discriminated against, oppressed, raped, beaten, murdered, poor, insane, dying. I have seen what you say you are protecting, and you are not better than me because you choose to go to war for a corrupt government. I guarantee you wouldn't last a day doing what I did, trying to save people your society crushed.

also, I dont listen to the media. You do. I read books, ones by real thinkers, not TV hacks. Do you?

I won't tell you to keep your mouth shut, because unlike you I understand what democracy really means. Go ahead, have your political opinions, you are entitled to them. expect to have to defend them. If you can't, don't complain when someone who knows something about the world shoots you down.

And one last thing. Your government lies to you all the time.

***

All the things you have so called seen I have seen worse people ripped to pieces by road side bombs. You speak of corruption like you know what it's like. And know body kisses our ass. I can do your job do mine. When was the last time you got hit by a 500 lb. road side bomd and then ambushed. You have friends screaming in pain from the metal that tore threw there flesh. You know your job is a cake compared to what i do and many others who risk there lives day in and day out. We pray to god everynight that we make it to the next sunrise. You see only the pieces of something small. Those people who are suffering in my own country have to blame themselves. You can blame people who are tortured everyday by others who don't like them.
What do you know about discrimination. How would you like it if a sniper started targeting only certain groups, like hispanics. I don't hide behind my uniform. I never have and never will. I stand proud for everything i have done. You know nothing about the horror's of evil men. Don't you can compare your job to mine. You have no idea what evil is really out there. You can go home at night, shower, eat with your family and sleep in a warm bed. When was the last time you had to rely on the person next to you since you are a social worker. When did you ever have to check for traps in doorways when you walked into a home. Let me guess never.

Your right I might be a citizen but I stand behind for what I believe in. Instead of talking down about others who have suffered greatly. You people are all the same. Let's help them but when we take action you cry and complain about hurting people's feelings. You all want peace but for that to happen soldier's have to stand up and protect the weak, the sick, the hungry. Plus what murder do you speak of what have you seen that i haven't. You sound like you have been to Iraq. You know about the oppressed, raped, beaten, murdered, poor, insane, dying. You know nothing I saw that all in such a short time and at a young age. I have seen chilideren gagged and bounded with rope with a bullet in the back of there head.

You speak like you know a democracy. How can you act like you know anything about that. You are the type of person to cast the first stone. I'm not saying shut your mouth. I'm simply saying keep your comments to yourself especially in this manner. Like they if you won't stand behind us stand in front of us. And i know you won't do that because pepe like you think because you sit at home and think you have seen more suffering that your stronger then us. Ask yourself when was the last time you saw your friend die and tell you he wants to go home. Screaming for his mom. I have heard it many times and have had to say goodbye to everyone single one of them. Your job can't compare to mine so don't even try. Goverment lie's about alot of things so does the media and your news weekly and all of them. But for you to think getting rid of a man who tortured his own people for pleasure was wrong then you are sadly mistaken and are as bad as the people we fight. We are the one's that protect you at night. And what little you know about a country you have never been in. So sleep well tonight because people like me will protect people like you who judge us and I'm proud of what I do. Because i do it for a greater good and being part of something bigger then myself is always better then living in my own world like you.

Plus i don't watch the news. I read books on F.B.I. Profilers and what they have done in there life and what cases they worked on.

GOD BLESS AMERICA AND IT"S TROOPS

***

youre the one who judges people, buddy. i criticize a guy for his political opinion and you tell me i have no right to criticize a wounded soldier because i am not a soldier. youre the one who tells me I am below you because I don't go to war. You call me a terrorist. So cut the self-righteousness, we're both equals and no matter how many times you try to make me ashamed because I didn't join the fucking army that will not change. maybe you can push around democrats like that but not free thinkers. By the way you pretend you werent trying to shut me up but thats exactly what you said.

The minute you say Vote for McCain or Vote for Obama you step out of your uniform and become a civilian. Thats a political opinion and you don't get a free pass for being a soldier, your opinions get criticized too. If you really believe in democracy the minute you are in uniform you become an American, not a Democrat American or a Republican American. And if you have the balls to get in your uniform and say "Vote for McCain, Obama sucks" you have stained your honor in a way I could never do. The day you use your military service to get votes is the day you stop being an American soldier and become McCain's soldier.

You've seen alot? I won't question what you've seen. I'll take your word for it. Those all sound like terrible things. I'm sorry you had to see them. But that doesn't give you the right to tell me to shut up or to claim youre better than me. And don't you think its weird that all that shit happened not under Saddam, but when Bush was in charge of Iraq?

I've seen shit you haven't seen and if you think you could do my job then sure as shit I could do yours. Why, because you have to be gentle with victims, you cant slap them around and tell them to shut up. Bringing a rape victim back to humanity takes a lot patience and suffering and youve got no right to tell me it doesnt count. And for you to say that people like that have only themselves to blame shows you dont know what I'm talking about. It sounds like you dont know whats going on in your own country. I never said I was better than you, but you dont have a problem telling how much better you are - and that's bullshit.

***

Honor never grows old, and honor rejoices the heart of age. It does so
because honor is, finally, about defending those noble and worthy
things that deserve defending, even if it comes at a high cost. In our time, that
may mean social disapproval, public scorn, hardship, persecution, or as always,
even death itself. The question remains: What is worth defending? What is worth
dying for? What is worth living for? - William J. Bennett - in a lecture to the
United States Naval Academy November 24, 1997

Thus there is a paradox, and we must grasp both ends of the situation:
We may well be in the most violent times in history, but violence is still
remarkably rare. This is because most citizens are kind, decent people
who are not capable of hurting each other, except by accident or under extreme
provocation. They are sheep.

I mean nothing negative by calling them sheep. To me it is like the
pretty, blue robin's egg. Inside it is soft and gooey but someday it will grow
into something wonderful. But the egg cannot survive without its hard blue
shell. Police officers, soldiers, and other warriors are like that shell, and
someday the civilization they protect will grow into something wonderful.? For
now, though, they need warriors to protect them from the predators.

"Then there are the wolves," the old war veteran said, "and the wolves
feed on the sheep without mercy." Do you believe there are wolves out there
who will feed on the flock without mercy? You better believe it. There are evil
men in this world and they are capable of evil deeds. The moment you forget
that or pretend it is not so, you become a sheep. There is no safety in
denial.

"Then there are sheepdogs," he went on, "and I'm a sheepdog. I live to
protect the flock and confront the wolf."

If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive
citizen, a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy
for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath, a wolf. But
what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow
citizens?
What do you have then? A sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking
the hero's path. Someone who can walk into the heart of darkness, into the
universal human phobia, and walk out unscathed

Let me expand on this old soldier's excellent model of the sheep,
wolves, and sheepdogs. We know that the sheep live in denial, that is what makes
them sheep. They do not want to believe that there is evil in the
world. They can accept the fact that fires can happen, which is why they want fire
extinguishers, fire sprinklers, fire alarms and fire exits throughout their kids'
schools.

But many of them are outraged at the idea of putting an armed police
officer in their kid's school. Our children are thousands of times more likely
to be killed or seriously injured by school violence than fire, but the
sheep's only response to the possibility of violence is denial. The idea of someone
coming to kill or harm their child is just too hard, and so they chose the
path of denial.

The sheep generally do not like the sheepdog. He looks a lot like the
wolf. He has fangs and the capacity for violence. The difference, though, is
that the sheepdog must not, can not and will not ever harm the sheep. Any sheep
dog who intentionally harms the lowliest little lamb will be punished
and removed.
The world cannot work any other way, at least not in a representative
democracy or a republic such as ours.

Still, the sheepdog disturbs the sheep. He is a constant reminder that
there are wolves in the land. They would prefer that he didn't tell them
where to go, or give them traffic tickets, or stand at the ready in our
airports in camouflage fatigues holding an M-16. The sheep would much
rather have the sheepdog cash in his fangs, spray paint himself white, and go, "Baa."

Until the wolf shows up. Then the entire flock tries desperately to
hide behind one lonely sheepdog.

The students, the victims, at Columbine High School were big, tough
high school students, and under ordinary circumstances they would not
have had the time of day for a police officer. They were not bad kids; they just had
nothing to say to a cop. When the school was under attack, however, and SWAT
teams were clearing the rooms and hallways, the officers had to physically peel
those clinging, sobbing kids off of them. This is how the little lambs
feel about their sheepdog when the wolf is at the door.

Look at what happened after September 11, 2001 when the wolf pounded
hard on the door. Remember how America, more than ever before, felt
differently about their law enforcement officers and military personnel? Remember how
many times you heard the word hero?

Understand that there is nothing morally superior about being a
sheepdog; it is just what you choose to be. Also understand that a sheepdog is a
funny critter: He is always sniffing around out on the perimeter, checking the
breeze, barking at things that go bump in the night, and yearning for a
righteous battle. That is, the young sheepdogs yearn for a righteous
battle. The old sheepdogs are a little older and wiser, but they move
to the sound of the guns when needed right along with the young ones.

Here is how the sheep and the sheepdog think differently. The sheep
pretend the wolf will never come, but the sheepdog lives for that day. After
the attacks on September 11, 2001, most of the sheep, that is, most citizens in America
said, "Thank God I wasn't on one of those planes." The sheepdogs, the warriors, said,
"Dear God, I wish I could have been on one of those planes. Maybe I
could have made a difference." When you are truly transformed into a
warrior and have truly invested yourself into warriorhood, you want to be there.
You want to be able to make a difference.

There is nothing morally superior about the sheepdog, the warrior, but
he does have one real advantage. Only one. And that is that he is able
to survive and thrive in an environment that destroys 98 percent of the
population.

There was research conducted a few years ago with individuals
convicted of violent crimes. These cons were in prison for serious,
predatory crimes of violence: assaults, murders and killing law enforcement officers. The vast
majority said that they specifically targeted victims by body language: slumped
walk, passive behavior and lack of awareness. They chose their victims like
big cats do in Africa, when they select one out of the herd that is least able
to protect itself.

There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible
evil of evil men. - Edmund Burke

Here is the point I like to emphasize, especially to the thousands of
police officers and soldiers I speak to each year. In nature the sheep, real
sheep, are born as sheep. Sheepdogs are born that way, and so are wolves.
They didn't have a choice. But you are not a critter. As a human being, you can be
whatever you want to be. It is a conscious, moral decision.

If you want to be a sheep, then you can be a sheep and that is okay,
but you must understand the price you pay. When the wolf comes, you and your
loved ones are going to die if there is not a sheepdog there to protect you. If
you want to be a wolf, you can be one, but the sheepdogs are going to hunt
you down and you will never have rest, safety, trust or love. But if you want
to be a sheepdog and walk the warrior's path, then you must make a conscious
and moral decision every day to dedicate, equip and prepare yourself to thrive
in that toxic, corrosive moment when the wolf comes knocking at the door.

For example, many officers carry their weapons in church.? They are
well concealed in ankle holsters, shoulder holsters or inside-the-belt
holsters tucked into the small of their backs.? Anytime you go to some form of
religious service, there is a very good chance that a police officer
in your congregation is carrying. You will never know if there is such an individual in your
place of worship, until the wolf appears to massacre you and your loved ones.

Their only response to the wolf, though, is denial, and all too often
their response to the sheepdog is scorn and disdain. But the sheepdog
quietly asks himself, "Do you have and idea how hard it would be to live with
yourself if your loved ones attacked and killed, and you had to stand there
helplessly because you were unprepared for that day?"

It is denial that turns people into sheep. Sheep are psychologically
destroyed by combat because their only defense is denial, which is
counterproductive and destructive, resulting in fear, helplessness and
horror when the wolf shows up.

Denial kills you twice. It kills you once, at your moment of truth
when you are not physically prepared: you didn't bring your gun, you didn't
train. Your only defense was wishful thinking. Hope is not a strategy.
Denial kills you a second time because even if you do physically survive, you
are psychologically shattered by your fear helplessness and horror at
your moment of truth.

Denial is a save-now-pay-later scheme, a contract written entirely in
small print, for in the long run, the denying person knows the truth on some
level.

And so the warrior must strive to confront denial in all aspects of
his life, and prepare himself for the day when evil comes.

This business of being a sheep or a sheep dog is not a yes-no
dichotomy. It is not an all-or-nothing, either-or choice. It is a matter of degrees,
a continuum. On one end is an abject, head-in-the-sand-sheep and on
the other end is the ultimate warrior. Few people exist completely on one end or the
other.

Most of us live somewhere in between. Since 9-11 almost everyone in America
took a step up that continuum, away from denial. The sheep took a few steps
toward accepting and appreciating their warriors, and the warriors started
taking their job more seriously. The degree to which you move up that
continuum, away from sheephood and denial, is the degree to which you and your loved
ones will survive, physically and psychologically at your moment of truth.

Ask the Kurdish if sadam gassing them and killing thusands in one single strike was right. Kid born with extra fingers. Thats the life of people like me. Hussein and Kussein sadam son's would rape and kill woman everyday just for fun. There is a palace in Mosul, Irag with a pound right outside to it. It was drained and hundreds of bodies and bones were found. Thats the life you will never know. I feel sorry for the rape victim but I have fellow soldiers who were under investigation for helping a little boy who was getting rape by 3 men for talking to us. What did they do they became the sheep dog and killed thse three men without mercy. You know nothing about the suffering of man. 200,000 iraqi's were killed but not by us. THere shite and sunni death squads who go around killing each other because of different religion. they kill them by the hundreds and it's an on going battle to put an end to all of this. When was the last time you try to put a stop to a war thats been going on for thousands of years?
Did you knw sadam killed his country soccer team for loseing. You live a regular and I tell myself sometimes at night I would take any job then this. Unlike yours my job requires not a 9 to 5 schedule it's 24/7 thing for me. It doesn't end when I close my eyes it only means I must stay more alert. I'm always ready and vigalant.

I don't use my uniform as a shield. It's not a political opinion it's far from that it's the comment you made about the iraq war. What do you know since you never put on a uniform and looked at the wolf. What I'm saying is keep your mouth shut of stuff you don't know whats happening. I spent over a Year in Iraq and saw many things that would send a cold shiver up your spine. Things that would make you say how can someone do such a thing.

And were gentle with the iraqi's. What little you know about that. The people love us for what we do and how we make them feel safe. The only people we slap around are the wolf's. Exactly and where did you hear that the media exactly. What little you know outside our neighborhood. The difference between me and you is what ever happen's in the world affects me in every possible way. Because that means we must once again protect the flock from the wolf. I know whats going on in my own country but people become victim's out of there own fault. The prays on the weak not on the strong. Peple need to become the sheep dog. thats there own fault.

The sheep dog.

***

you dont know what ive seen or what ive done, and ive seen shit youll never see. i know what evil there is in the world, just as well as you do. you think its someone's fault if theyre a victim in your country, then you dont know your own country. you wouldnt believe what happens to people. It would send a chill down YOUR spine. your government creates the conditions that allow millions of your fellow human beings to fall into death and poverty, and you say its their own fault.

its a noble thing to want to be a sheep dog. i chose to be a social worker because i wanted to protect people too. Walking around with an M-16 doesnt make you any more important than me. you know why i didnt join the army? because i knew that the government tells you that they are sending you to fight as a sheep dog and they turn you into a wolf. they lie and say go kill these people they are terrorists we are the only ones who can protect them. but i learned youre not protecting anybody. iraq was a violent place under saddam. now its a violent place on fire. i heard the soldiers come back talking about opening up on civilians in free fire zones, mercenaries shooting up civilians. the death squads run crazy because the iraqi government has no control over them. theres no law in the country so anything can happen, just like you said. that country is ten times more fucked up after the US invaded than it was before. im not saying thats your fault, but thats what the old men who run things do - they tell you youre a sheep dog and then turn you out like a wolf. and the sheep end up dying anyway.

saddam could have been taken out if your government really wanted that a long time ago, if they just paid the resistance of kurds and shias half the money they give the saudis every year to overthrow him. if the US backed them up with airpower the iraqi people could have taken their own country back. saddam was weak. why not? because then the US couldnt control the country, thats what they really wanted. its an oil war. except bush was too dumb to understand that he had to lock down the country after the invasion before chaos set in. thought he could let the country burn to the ground and start all over again. well now the place is fucked. and theres a lot of dead innocent people that paid the price, their families, their homes. if the iraqi people love you so much, why the hell do they want you out of there so bad?

so if you want to tell me you think the war is a good thing, go ahead. but i dont have to be a soldier to challenge you on it. im not going to shut my mouth just because you saw some people die. and ive tried to help people who had bad shit happen to them and their only crime was being poor and i dont tell you to shut up. you dont know anything about me. you call me a terrorist, but i want to protect people from wolves too. maybe not in the army; i want to protect them from the wolves above them as well as the wolves surrounding them. I think you mean it when you say you want to be a sheepdog protecting the sheep, I just dont think you realize those old men never intended for you to protect anybody except some oil executives.

that guy is trying to make politics out of all those dead Iraqis, saying Obama this Obama that. its got nothing to do with politics. i wanted to remind people that its not about politics, its about a hell of a lot of human beings getting killed for a lie. its a lie when bush says it and its a lie when a soldier says it. i dont need to be a sheep or wolf or a sheepdog either to know it either. all i have to be is a person.

***

First off the suffereing you speak of is nothing compared to the iraq people. I will agree you have seen some crazy stuff but a country that infested with war and violence and no social order is alot different. What little you know. Iraq has the same problems like any other country not torn apart by war. Just threw the fighting in the mix and you have a whole world of pain and hardship. The things you describe in your first letter is the same things we see in our daily life just get blown up by I.E.D.'s and shot at.

In a country where anyone can be the enemy. You have know Idea how hard it is not to shoot in a crowd when the gunmen alone hides in there and take pop shots at you. Trust me being a social worker is hard I'll give you that but war takes a bigger impact on the mind and body. Civilians being shot well most of them stand there and don't move because there told to do so by the enemy. I've pilled bodies high and carried my burdens for others. You speak like you know about violence and all that. We risk our life's protecting these people. You act like you have been there. You have know idea about what happens over there. You speak on word of mouth.

You clearly didn't understand the sheep dog. He's like the wolf he looks like the wolf. He must become the wolf to protect. Thats what a sheep dog is. Have you ever heard the saying to stop a monster you have to become one. We have to get our hands dirty to stop them. These men torture these people for no reason. We ca't just pay them to over threw sadam. The people have always been weak and put down. Anytime they fight there own battles there lines break and they retreat. We armned them but without us they have no backbone. We give them the courage. With us behind them they are willing to stand and fight.
People die innocent for that you are right. But for peace and social order to prosper during war innocent will get kill in the cross fire. American's who work as independent contractors get killed everyday. There jobs from driveing food and medical supplies for the people are killed.

You are also right that you don't have to be a soldier to say that war is a bad thing but at the same time you are like many others that want peace but don't want to get there hands dirty. thats where we come in. We get our hands dirty so you don't have to.
I have conducted missions and operations to puch the enemy out of villages and cities. I have help the people to the point where they come out of there homes with a smile. There are people in places where they won't leave there house because Al-qaeda is around the area killing everyone who doesn't join them. I bet you never heard about that did you. The cities are bigger then any city in the U.S. Baghdad is the size of 4 L.A. When you have a population reaching over 8 million and 20,000 troopes trying to protect every single one. It's not an easy task. Restoring social order so people can live a regular life is a hard job.

The man is not trying to make politics about dead iraqi's not at all. He's saying how disrespectful it is for someone to call what we have worked for and all our brothers who have died to accomplish a mistake. By far you still don't get why I tell you to shut your mouth. It's not about politics not at all. I don't even vote. I don't care about politics. It's about you down talking a soldier who gave his best years for a cause. His years that could of been better spent at home going to college meeting girls etc... you get my drift. Someone who put's his own personnal views aside and answer's his country call is something great.

If you ever read books about profiler's and murders who write there stories it's funny how you say it's not there fault they get raped or murdered. But it is. The F.B.I. did a survey and over 90% percent said is because people look weak and helpless. People make themselves a target not the other way around. People give up hope on alot of things. I never gave up hope either did my family when we were doen and in the gutter. It's about wanting to do something great abd become better. The iraqi's try to become better and when they become what you want them to become they get killed because they choose to be strong.
You are right you don't have to be a sheep dog, a sheep, or a wolf to know the difference but this world falls into that category. You choose to be one or the other. It's not that matter of choice or what you feel like being the next day it's what you are. It's just that simple. There's you have seen that i haven't that will send a chill down my spine. If you have seen human body parts laying on the ground, people burned to death, or woman rappen in plastic around a telephone pole for just saying Hi. I really doubt it. People fall into poverty because they give up on life the refuse to fight back and yes it is there own fault. I hate to say it but it is.

Yes we all have bad luck but people need to get off there lazy ass abd become something instead of just another person in the crowd. It's the spirit to fight, to rage aganist the dieing of the light. The only really freedom anyone has is figureing things out by yourself.

All I'm sayng is that you speak of a war you know nothing about. You can point your finger at us and say thats the bad man but when push comes to shove and the wolf as at your door. We push our feelings aside and stand right there and tell you everything is going to be all right. We step out that door close behind us and get our hands dirty so you can sleep with peace.

Learn about the war and hoe the people live. Have you ever had to walk in knee high sewage i have. I have been covered in blood. I have held innocent iraqi's die because we were to late. Women get beat in the middle of the street because thats the way there society is. And we can't do a fucking thing about it. We stopped it once and got in hell of alot of trouble for it by the iraqi goverment because we can't get involve in there daily life. It's a male domiant society. People suffer more in places like Iraq and in the middle east then any other place in the world. People die everyday it's a fact but to make progress blood has to be spilled on both sides. The iraqi people rean't the one's pushing us out. Do you want to know why wee leaving it's becausing we are spread to thin. Soldiers who have done there time and are suppose to be getting out are stop loss and force to come back. People come back with more problems then you will ever know. You have becoming like michael crook. Look him up on YouTube and watch the one with hanity and colmes. You'll see how ignorant people can be.

Don't point your finger, cast the first stone, or bad mouth what hundreds have died trying accomplish which you are to afraid to do yourself. We do it not because were told to do it because we are ask to do it. There's a difference and something you will never understand. I know your from canada so it says on your profile but if it wasn't for people like me and your fellow country men who stand by our side you would be in a world of pain. Just never question a war if you have never been there or not willing to fight to see what it's really like.

free will

2009-01-30T17:18:00.003-05:00

i do not think people are in control of themselves. when you talk about someone and how they behave, how they act, you talk about them as if everything they did was a matter of choice. As if they chose a certain attitude, a certain action, out of all or many possible alternatives. people just aren't like that. our actions and our perception are narrowly guided, shaped by our past and by our surroundings. often people who do terrible things find afterward that they do not know why they did them, become horrifed by themselves. i think many suicides come about because people realize that they have no control over their own minds - and ironically they take the last bit of free will they have to end their life (or do they? in many cases perhaps they had no control over their decision to kill themselves) - to be "stuck in hell" to feel "trapped"

i think maybe there are moments of free will, moments when one adequately perceives alternatives to the way you view the world or the possibilities of action. these come in moments of lull in the mind -when either one is sufficiently shocked or awakened to pause before committing, for a moment to hold one's head above the flood of thoughts and feelings that compose the inner world, and one can consider the eternal possibilities of life.

it must be remembered that we are half-machine, after all. half-living, half-awake, and half biological sculpture - half nature's plaything. probably more than half. nine-tenths, given the amount of unnecessary evil we inflict on ourselves and the world. We learn by having the same thing drilled into us, until it is a habit. This isn't just because education is primitive, its because we found that that works. People dont learn when you explain things to them once - they learn if they hear it 1000 times. And by learn, I mean adopt as their way of being. Maybe I shouldn't say learn, which implies something higher, let's say... they become.

We have a certain natural light turned on inside of us, and the only difference between us and animals or any other living thing is not that our light burns any brighter, but maybe that we have a higher wattage than they do. Maybe from now on we should say - that lizard is about 5 watts alive, and that person 40 watts alive. Some people I've met strike me as 5-watts alive. The purpose of that scale is to stop making value judgements about life and to see life as intrinsic.

But what I really want to say is that free will is a muscle, like anything else. Exercise it, and it grows. Ignore it, forsake it, and it atrophies. When one considers that for thousands of years humanity has lived under various forms of tyranny, I wonder what we were like before all this. and free will is not anything else, which i think is the most common delusion - free will is not being perfectly pious, free will is not being incredibly aggressive over yourself or the world: power is not freedom per se.

before i go, i would like to add

2009-01-26T00:33:00.003-05:00

sometimes i understand i have spent most of my life just trying to slap myself awake, surrounded by a world of dreaming people, who keep telling me its sane to believe your dreams are real.

and on our deathbeds, we must look back at it all and say - yeah, it was just a long, strange dream. i try to imagine how i will feel on my deathbed alot - i wonder what i will feel most of all, if ill be mostly sad or accepting or scared or shocked or what. i feel like if i understand what itll be like on my deathbed, ill know how better to treat life now - like its the one point of view i will have where i will understand it all best, when its all done, when im about to leave (forever). christ i will miss everything, i will miss everything i know and everything i missed.

it seems so terrible to me how people are such monsters, knowing that life is already strange and sad and beautiful enough without adding any human bullshit to it - yet 99% of human life is preoccupied with human bullshit, and the barest sense of the non-human, Rest of Life - which consitutes some 99.9999999999999999999999999% of existence. people talk of finding meaning in other people, probably because they resent the silence of the real world of skies and trees and dirt and space. finding comfort in the babble of human voices is probably what made us feel safe in the dark nights of our early history, when we roamed in lonely little groups across the great spaces of the earth. the light and the noise that kept predators away, that kept evil away. that kept all fears and all cold away. but the warmth of babble was only that, and maybe was never intended as thing we should use to turn away from the world for. ok thats enough whiskey inspired horseshit for one evening.

haunted city

2008-08-31T00:35:00.004-04:00

the sky is grey just about dusk in montreal. the streetlights have come on and the wind is blowing at the end of august. there is peace here in this little corner of violence. the daggerteeth of wolves live placidly beside the warm breath of mothers on the pup’s neck and that is miraculous.

this city is like a dead city and i mean that in the most complimentary way; for its a pale ophelia floating serene in the summer river with flowers all around. to get to montreal you have to die. on some still nights it is the city of the afterlife, all of us are ghosts. there is violence in this little corner of peace. ghosts of children playing in the streets, ghosts of lovers kissing on streetcorners.

every so often I see an old man walking like an ancient god in the park. something sad but holy in his motion; he may know that he is many things, he may try to pretend hes not other things, he might be ashamed, or complicated, or proud, or cynical. above all he is unconscious of his innocence; he does not know that by standing like a man on the edge of the end, his muscles fragile, his power fading, there is courage, and he does not know that the child he was born as lives on in himself, forever to be a mystery to this world. in the park there is peace in this little world of violence.

this crazy night in this unearthly city – these powerful clouds, the muscles of their limbs twisting slowly in the dark sky. All immortals move slow: trees, turtles, suns. all shortlived things hurry: hummingbirds, sparks, humans: to touch your immortal self you must pause. when you run you can only run in one direction, so go slow. here in montreal there is nowhere to go, life is fire, it consumes itself one day, expressed in hot blood, so why try to live so much? it is the violence in this strange world of peace.

these old stone apartments of this haunted city, they are so like graceful old people, and we just come and go while they stay together as families of streets; duluth, st hubert, demaisonneuve. so many hiding places. here is really the mystery of this ghost city: the secret of this island of peace in an ocean of violence. for here the dead have come and gone for hundreds of years, and we only the newly arrived, the amateur dead. this isn’t just a geographic city on a geographic island – this is a city in time, a city that spans 400 years like a bridge. this city is an island of time.

under these streetlights as faded yellow as gaslights, all dead are still here, because we are here, the latesummer breeze passes through my skin and out the other side of my cheeks and temples. look how to live is know the life after you’ve gone, all these beautiful immortal trees, this my adopted city agrees to carry my ghost in its heart, I can feel this girl assenting, yes she says, this one little violence for a world of peace. these ghosts who are my roommates. this world of fire beyond the island, and that every birth contains within it all future tragedy and death, that is the violence we trade to live, so we can hide in this slow, boring paradise of peace.

paradise in hell

2008-08-17T01:43:00.006-04:00

It is of course perfectly likely that humanity will live under madmen and demons for at least another thousand years. They stand under the glare of crazy bright lights, in great halls before thousands of desperate humans, gripping their podiums with perfect hands. I think we need to be conscious of this possibility. These men, who only mean the best while only knowing nothing at all, playing chess with money and guns, most of us will hide under the rains of fire when these postmodern gods become angry,

some of them are cruel, most of them are just insane, just madmen, whose main qualification for office is they are insane enough to believe they can avoid staining themselves with evil in doing their jobs. No matter how well we plan, no matter how cleanly we might pull off our revolutions, we will probably be unable to shed the madmen and demons. They will rule us, and we will have to do our best to keep the innocents out of the way as much as possible.

in the meantime, we have to learn things. the reason why we will be ruled by madmen is because we dont know enough about how to rule ourselves, how to behave, how to be responsible. we are children, playing at being adults in a world of rain. we can learn to build the things that need to be built; houses, towns, consciences, love. We have to learn how to cooperate and defy the temptation to withdraw from each other. We need to break through the bubble of personal self-infatuation and self-pity and reach out to each other, even though it might be painful in the beginning. This is how we will defeat the madmen one day, likely a thousand years in the future. we will learn how to be sane. the first step is always the hardest, to admit we really are insane, that for all these years, when it comes to morality or politics or god, we really have never had any idea of what the fuck we were talking about.

the first thing one must do is accept the hell we have created in the midst of this paradise.

iraq veteran, antiwar activist

2008-08-10T22:48:00.003-04:00

"ADAM KOKESH, IRAQ VETERAN, ANTIWAR ACTIVIST to REP. JOHN CONYERS: My team was called to assist in the medevac to get him to the field hospital at Camp ["dih-KA-toe-min"]. He was on a stretcher on the Humvee in front of me, and I watched the corpsman treating the external wound that frightened [inaudible] panic on the road. And when we got there, I was there to help unload him and carry him in on a stretcher, and he was moaning and writhing in pain, barely conscious, and he flailed his arm off the stretcher. And as I put it back on and put it by his side, I told him, "You made it. You're going to be alright. We got you here. You're going to be okay." And he died only minutes later from the internal bleeding. And I get the feeling that what you're doing and what the Democratic Party is doing is telling this country, as we are being bled dry by tyrants, that we're just going to be okay, that the only promises we get from Democrats are Band-Aids over these far deeper wounds than anyone is willing to really admit to publicly. I hear one of the arguments against impeachment is that it would harm the Democrats in the upcoming elections. And I hope that you realize, because you didn't communicate this when I asked you the question, that there are real consequences to not impeaching that are far, far worse than not having Democrats in Congress and the Senate or a Democrat in the White House. You said you've made thousands of decisions, many of them very respectable, many of them very courageous, but by your own admission it seems what's holding you back from this one is your own indecision. You have said that I might be surprised by your plans. You haven't put forth any, and, frankly, I'm not surprised."

there is a country in the north of canada

2008-08-04T23:41:00.004-04:00

There is a country in the north of Canada that is the mystic paradise sought by innumerable people down through the years. Here the land is doing something relatively undisturbed by the human noise which threatens to destroy everything in order to make it better. The defenses of the paradise are strikingly simple and effective. Cold winters drive out the unappreciative sort for more than half the year.

And then, the reward for the enduring and the loyal is three small months of living in a secret land. Among those that survive the tyrannical winter fewer still venture out into that great sea of forests which constitutes most of the country.

And how to tell the sophisticated, hammer-eyed, television-brained man that paradise is a two hour drive out of the city? The argument goes something like this: nature is just as brutal as civilized life, in fact moreso since aren’t we all a hell of a lot safer in our civilized beds with our civilized electricity and our civilized central heating?

How can I explain to them that the thing that made it possible to build houses and electrical grids and the miracle of combustion, that thing is not synonymous with civilization? its a savage genius born from the jungle and may or may not die with the jungle, for all we know. Within civilization yes of course there are 24-hour supermarkets and ambulances but there are also guns and pollution and concrete.

The thing that made such discoveries that are worthwhile, the human genius, could that not be applied to living well in paradise? Is not human genius capable of approaching this great spontaneous church to a wordless god – the forest – and building warm houses within it, instead on top of its bones?

Today I got in my canoe and my dog hopped in too and the water was lappy and the clouds are hulking whale monsters that had some grey evil bellies. But we moved down the lake anyway and let it rain. It was a clean evil that came anyway, the kind you wouldn’t mind killing you so much. A clean evil with nothing cruel or sick in it, just some kind of honorable destruction when the sorrow contains some verdant solace.

which is to say, i got rained on.

Now there are two kinds of clouds, there are Hulking Whale Monsters and there are Far Countries. I know some people will try to say a lot of shit about Cirruses and Cumuluses and listen that is all great and One Way of Looking at Things, all very valid and I recommend a good meteorologist but I am not a scientist I am a guy who admires science and goes “wow, that’s cool” and then I wander off and talk to trees when I’m by myself. And fuck you if you think that’s stupid, because youre just as mortal and useless as I am.

So the Hulking Whale Monsters were drifting above me and I was dumping huge rocks into my canoe. And when the grey storms drifted overhead there was a small crack with blue in it and the light revealed the bottom of the lake and all the rocks and all the fishes therein.

Now I am at the edge of the world, and I cannot speak for the rest of it. I cannot presume to know the mind of graceful Sudanese women with broken eyelashes, or the calloused skins of Peruvian children or even the brown concealed eyes of the First Nations of this country. I know this spoiled humanity thinks the world is so alike and small when really in true proportion for a tiny human this Earth is inconceivably vast and strange. We are more like aliens to each other than of the same species, yet we are as interchangeable and predictable as Coca-Cola bottles.

Where was I? So then I canoed back home in the rain. it was just a small patter of rain, and although I initially told it to go fuck itself I softened up and began to get along with it when I saw how gentle it was. Standing above me were the great White Pines and Hemlocks and Spruces amid the crumbling rocks that lie exposed, millions and millions of years old. All that time. A million years. Imagine being a rock and enduring through all that time, down to some dark, fat well of life us little creatures can’t even think about. From the time you as a forgotten stream of bright red lava froze and became a stone, and year after year passed and now you here at the edge of the world, in some anonymous forest, the lonely power lines on the top of hundred year old poles, the pine needle beds of orange this serene land

And drunk I look up to the clouds that are piled up looking like mountains in the sunset from a far country I may not visit and I believe them when the clouds look like they belong to this part of the world, this north country. These are the mountains of my country, we live up here away from you, we things that take centuries to move.

So when I got home and strode up onto dirt I noticed my hand was bleeding. I had ripped it on a rusty nail out on some abandoned wooden contraption at the far end of the lake in my wanderings and had hoped it wouldn’t bleed. So I had to drive into town to get a tetanus shot, so that you know I would got feral and bite people or watch my hand turn green and fall off like a rotten melon or whatever rusty nails do to you. Rescued by civilization?

After I left the hospital and all the sweet doctors who mothered me, I went to get some food. Everything looked pretty horrible in that nowhere town so I went to a pizza joint. I saw these two sad looking things lying under a heat lamp with some dead animal on them for taste. So I left civilization and all its heat lamps, taking with me only precious tetanus immunity.

god, death and irritability

2008-07-11T02:49:00.002-04:00

I have never seen god but believe I see him everywhere. It just seems as though he is in everything, in every leaf, in every pool of blood. i cannot accept that god shares my morality. It seems to me that god is a big-titted satan, all bulging with all imperfections in her fat body, somehow more than everything in the world and universe and yet somehow different, somehow like a kind of invisible blood that runs through all moments, or is not part of any moment. And what use is there anyway in trying to define god, I could never do it. I am not god, although I might be borrowing some of his property. And why ask but because of looming death. Were I not to die, if I lived for ever, what motive could I possibly have for worrying if I’d figured everything out or not. But knowing that at some point I may die… suppose everyone knew the hour of their death, would they behave better or worse? Who cares, people are only slightly smarter than dolphins and a hundred times as dangerous. The fact that people are dangerous might be the only reason they are at all interesting. If people were harmless there might be more tv shows about turtles. Theyre nicer.

And here we are at the lip of the 21st century, enlightened and all that etcetera. Yet somehow I feel alone in talking directly about god and death. Because I am not here to tell you something someone told me, which often seems to be religion’s only activity. I have a hard time finding people who just want to talk about god and death. Funny, two of the three most important subjects for the human being, and all anyone can handle is the third: love. But we have abused the concept of love so much the only way to really love someone anymore is a rebellion. What I mean by that is love becomes a platitude when its only a blanket against loneliness. Look at all the horseshit about loving people, it’s always offered as a solution to YOUR problems, not as a truly natural casual un-thought, un-planned gesture of unconditional supreme affection from one lost mortal soul to another, but as a constructive, progressive, a bedrock of values and morality and every unethical commandment written by moses all dripping down the lips of the guard dog who protects you from the hysteria of death and darkness.

We need a new religion in this country, one where god is symbolized by a rotten banana peel lying in the gutter. Or maybe a glut of syringes and soaked brown paper bags, just so we all know that we are not allowed to pretend that god is going to sanitize our lives. So we know we have to worship everything or nothing, but not something. Not the dread something that is sure to piss on everything living and fragile.

And death? Well, old death… you must admit its strange to be alive. Think of the eight year old who dies. Imagine being here long enough to believe in santa claus but maybe not long enough to realize he’s fake. Imagine a little beautiful life of playgrounds, and the sky as big as the universe, where adults are giants who make magic, and never growing into that part where the giants are short… strange huh? That is as much our lives as it is the eight year old’s. why do they say it is a trajedy that an eight year old dies? Sounds like a sweet deal to me, a world pregnant with magic sustained. Finally. Ive been trying to do that my entire adult life. No one believes me, and they keep doing their best to disprove it. Now as ugly and mean as life can get, as grotesque and ironic, I still stand with anne frank in the notion that people are basically good but I will do her one better as she is not here to tell us, that life is basically unbelieveably beautiful if only we weren’t such assholes.

How much strength can I put in your heart. Because that’s what I mean to do. Lets not kid ourselves here, im not just trying to impress you. Im getting at something here. we beat around the bush so often. No, we pissed away enough life on that. I want you and me to be brave enough for the fight ahead. I want us to believe in something new. Yes, new. Something holy, something that we can ruin but will take us a good five centuries while it goes to work. The first rule is that god is everything and more than everything. In fact, god is god. The second rule is that our bodies and souls come from mother earth, who also comes from god. The third rule is that as pieces of earth, we are all equal, and by we I mean trees and flowers and you and me and cirrus clouds. There is nothing to fight over except for HOW LONG WILL WE LET CRAZY PEOPLE RUN OUR LIVES?

But back to death (always back to death) which is a hard thing to explain to you – you who should be sitting in the woods to hear this. If I have one piece of advice it is go sit in the woods to really think. But yes death. We fuck to run from death? No – just in the interim between being bored and dying sex feels good. End of story. Everything else is being bashed over the head. But yes death. Disappearing from planet earth. Vacating the body. Suddenly all the lights go out in the eyes. The arms wilt like the stems of a dead flower. Suddenly they can answer no more questions, suddenly they can solve no more mysteries with the simple warmth of the hug. They are gone. A cruel trick. What would play such a cruel trick, and why do humans get so enthusiastic about doing it to each other? Great mysteries. Welcome to earth.

millions of miracles

2007-12-19T00:48:00.001-05:00

to spin, to claw, to cry. out there window is a picture of the stone building across the street. it is past midnight but the sky behind it is a dirty grey, not black. the grey is not to be scorned. its an old grey - a grey that was above the stone building in 1910, the grey will endure until they knock down that building and the one i'm sitting in, the grey will come during the month of december 2076 in the early morning hours. it will always be in the past.

right now i am in the apartment that is in the present, and outside the weather is 1910. They are all dead of course. that our lives should be matters of bloodpumping love stunning at a breathing, colour gleaming, miracles by the millions, miracles of everything, the moving, unfurling skydrifting silent roar of every beat that pulse in harmony in love with your heart beat pulse, that our lives should the be business of exploring the far countries, of cracking open into fat shining eyes of mortal wisdom, miracles by the millions of everything, of building a cabin in an silverbirch forest made of swampwood smell of rotten trees, the heavy fertile musk,

well call ME a faggot, but in all our practical, sophisticated calculations of morality and aestethics we built a little web of a dry, pale future. its a future that will invite you to come along or stay behind alone. all all alone, where you can be a pretentious whiner in the basement apartment of your mind. up there we will be "doing alright" we will say we should not be blamed. weve done the best we can, i remember something out there, beyond the grey, the colour of the sky reminds me of it. something young and ancient, we did our jobs, maybe we did not learn to ride wild horses across a rain, maybe we did not canoe down the Mackenzie River singing french songs, maybe the best i could do was just to hold it all together just to take of myself and not be a burden, to stuff art and craftsmanship into a cafeteria tray, oh eyeless dreams. but dont blame me, because im not a great hero. i learned i was no hero long ago when i shook hands with cowardice. dont blame them, when they say dont blame me because i shunned the beautiful world, it was too hard to look at, you can see it in their eyes, or your eyes: its death somewhere down the road waiting for them that drives them there, the loneliness of dying with no meaning. they seek wombs of all kinds. do not sneer at them, with cold death perched like a bird on a branch above their road, watching, watching, watching.

In the agonizing dark when the lights go off and there is a great huge space between you and the ceiling that contains future trails and past trials, go on open your eyes, the dark that never speaks, never answers your questions or pleas, but sits there silent - sometime stark and immobile, sometimes covering and warm. the futures are different, the pasts are mostly painful. the present is a question, when am i going to die? what will the world go on to be? What will the people i know go on to do. they will forget me, and sometimes remember. but they will never remember me as intensely as they spoke to me, as they slept with me. All the beings in 1910 are somewhere or nowhere. I like to reach into the past sometimes and seek people similar to me. A woman in 1877 who looked at the grey sky and thought the same, maybe while drinking tea and thinking about her past. I used to have a crush on Emily Bronte, because she thought about a lot of the same things i do. i wonder if it occurred to her there might be a fellow that she would really like, but would be born a couple hundred years later. Theres a beautiful fellow who does not belong in his time in a workcamp in the Temagami, circa 1903.

and now, my fellow future ghosts. i was reminded of the beautiful world that is such a narrow path, to be distracted is to lose it again for months. it is a sacriledge to not revere the declicate sense of that far place, but a frail truth is always more despised than a passionately believed lie.

snake in a jar

2007-07-03T00:49:00.001-04:00

it is said that Li Po, the Chinese poet. used to get drunk and throw his poems into the river one after the other as he wrote. he probably loved the moon, probably sat or stood and fumbled and fell and drank wine and wrote beautiful, perfect images of the world and threw away the paper that cost much money into the water and laughed. laughing it is funny because he was half human and half animal, half child and half god and you can pick which half you think is which but i'll tell you you're wrong.

in the woods you can know something you cant know anywhere else, not on mountains or in subways. you can stand in the trees that wail in the wind saying here come the ghost. you can see a morning sun worth more than all human effort, a sunrise alone that glories the underbranches surpasses with the most casual gesture all art, war, science, philosophy, cities, even god, and you feel in your soul of beating blood that you have been embraced by ordinary sunrays into the forever of living things being born and dying. You join it.

they do not know why the drunk laughs with the moon.

and if you would fight anything fight yourself.

and if you would fight anything of yourself then fight adulthood. not because you were happier but because you said true things.

with adulthood comes two things: conscience and survival.

you never worried about apples until you had to get them. you never protected yourself until you were hurt. you never hated until you saw the reptile in someones eyes. survival gets bigger, always tries to eat more of you, when i was small, i lay in the dark and had a vision of a big fat snake coiled in a jar. it filled the jar. that is survival, and if you go that way the things you say you wont mean, but youll think you do because it will hurt to say you dont. you wont love right because you wont be able to be honest, and love must be honest to be worth more than trajedy.

and there is conscience. conscience is very old. it is always tired. it is always tired of loss. it always remembers everyone you lost. the ones you could have saved. you were not immature when you were a child. you know this. what, just because you didnt know how to wipe your own ass then you think youve got more sense now?

it is said one night when the buddha talked late with his students he pointed to the candle and said,

at the beginning of the night we lit this candle. see how it has burned down half way. By the morning it will be extinguished. Now, the flame we lit at the beginning of the night, is it the same flame that burns now?

One of his students said, it is a different flame.

And another said, it is the same flame.

the buddha answered, it is both the same and a different fire. The fuel it is burning is constantly consumed. The energy it is composed of is like the water of a river, constantly flowing through it. But the form of the flame, it is the same. This is the same flame we lit in its progress through the wax. This is you. You as a child are both not longer the child and remain always the child. all your moments are contained within you of now. All men are children, all men are angels as in their best moments of love and courage, all men are monsters as in their ugliest and cruellest moments. this moment is all moments that have been and are to come.

Me and Gary Crow sat in his basement again, after so many years. When we were young, we became naked in front of each other sometimes, and this fuelled an obsession with truth, a stupid, hormonic, obsession. we had said i am lying, i am confused, i am chasing myself like a dog chasing his damn tail, i am humiliated to be human, what is it to be here, what is the shadowed god that never answers but hangs there, sometimes a grinning blackness, sometimes a dancing star?

he went his way, alone, or at least we could no longer find ourselves in each other. he hated me for awhile. i hated him for awhile. he threatened me. i told him to fuck off. he slept in cars and apartments in anonymous towns with no furniture, he read lonely books and saw jesus and buddha. his mind outran his soul. he was trying not to try and it was killing him because the snake in the jar eats you unless you make friends. the snake can never be killed. this is sorrow in all things. you have to love your wounds. he accused everyone of being inside him, pulling him. then his family brought him out of hell, amazingly. then he tried to explain, and i loved him even though i barely understood, just for trying. we got hammered on wild turkey and he said the most wonderful thing,

the one thing ive learned is that you should be kind.

the chicken factory

2007-04-20T19:06:00.001-04:00

To begin with, I would point out that most meat-eaters seem mysteriously offended by the concept of vegetarianism. Every time the subject arises (and I've deliberately never initiated it) there is an automatic reaction to criticize vegetarianism as being impractical or at least associate it with some kind of hippie delusion. There invariably follows an angry joke about how pleased the individual is to eat dead animals, despite having never passed judgement on anyone for eating meat.

To most vegetarians, I don't even count as one. I eat fish and dairy. I simply do not eat mammals or birds. I suppose my motives for being vegetarian are fairly unusual, at least I haven't found them in the classic propaganda.

It began with a simple question. There was some conversation about hunting. I think I got the idea I'd like to hunt. I'd never hunted before. The more I thought about it, the more I was impressed by the knowledge that hunting was an ancient and basic form of food gathering. Even as humanity began farming, the killing of animals was an intimate act. There at least existed on some level a relationship between the killer and the killed.

In this age, most animals are killed in factories. I used to live two blocks from a chicken processing plant. It was on the corner of a main intersection in a rundown part of town and some sick capitalist bastard had the notion to paint it pink. Big trucks used to pull in with thousands of cages stuffed with shrieking birds. Asian guys would come out and hose the trucks down. They always seemed to be hosing some part of the place down. When you were forced to walk past the factory, you did whatever you could to dodge the spray and the little rivers of chickenwater.

There were many terrible things about that factory but nothing was more awful than the smell. It smelled of metal and disease and bowels. It left you feeling stained. All the welfare bums and junkies and teenage hookers that walked around in that area felt that somehow that smell was the true smell of the black heart of our predatorial city. It was the smell of hopelessness and cruelty. The total indifference of the white suited workers outside with facemasks on, hosing down the concrete and sending greasy infected pools of water into the street only underlined the message. You live in a meatgrinder.

Perhaps as a kind of crowning fuckyou to the sad grey humanity around it, the chicken factory boasted a small metal cylinder on the top of the building. The rusted cylinder turned round, night and day. And sometimes you would look up as you passed by and would see something slurping out of the mouth of the black cylinder. It was pink and it dripped into some unseen vessel.

The chicken factory was probably fairly representative of a typical slaughterhouse. From complaints I've heard about the smells coming from beef and pork processing plants it sounds as though the chicken factory wasn't that bad. I've no doubt the factory upheld all environmental and safety requirements. I do not believe that the factory violated any humane treatment laws. But nothing good can give off a smell like that.

And that's what it is to eat meat in the modern age. They kill animals on an assembly line reeking of terror and pain. The animals are bloated from growth hormones. And in the end, theyre only killing dumber and more innocent versions of children.

There may have been a time where such things were necessary and even right but that time disappeared with the advent of the factory. The old time hunter and farmer that kill what they need could claim to be honourable. Hunting still seems to me to be a valid lifeway, if done for food and done with some sense of respect. The same cannot be said of factory farming, which reduces suffering to a Quarter pounder and the laughter of the wellfed. It only serves our cold, vicious instincts to shrug in the face of the suffering of other living beings.

And I came to ask myself:

"Could I kill an animal and eat it?"

The answer was obvious. I didnt know. In my life I'd only killed animals that I'd found dying like mice and etcetera. The more I thought about it the more I thought specifically of mammals. Humans are among mammals. Mammals and birds are the only kinds of animals we know of that demonstrate the capacity for empathy. Empathy is the ability to care for the happiness of a being other than itself. Empathy is the primitive root of love, understanding, altruism and art. It may be that this deeply biologic aspect of our natures is the source of goodness. It is perversely ironic that humans, who tend to see themselves as the highest order of life on this planet precisely for their capacity for goodness, discard empathy where the killing of animals is concerned for the very reason that they are entitled to it because they are "higher" beings.

One has to spend only a little time studying the conduct of mammals before realizing their almost "human" behaviors. Elephants are well known for leaving totems for the dead. Dogs are known for sacrificing their lives for the sake of their masters. Macacques are known to hand down learned behavior through generations. Whales compose complex and changing songs. Cats are fuckers just like humans. If humanity would spend a little energy learning about these beings instead of wasting it protecting a proud ignorance the world might well be unable to sit before meat without being troubled. We are masters of the Earth, we no longer need to scrabble in the night, struggling just to survive. We are capable of honestly being the honorable and good creatures we always pretended to be, and one big step in that direction would be to recognize innocence when it stares you in the face and oinks.

So that's how I came to be a vegetarian. I could not be responsible for the suffering of animals that were about as kind and sensitive as I was, only a little bit dumber. Knowing what a dumbass I was, how could I hold that against anyone?

a long time from now

2007-03-14T02:04:00.001-04:00

A prologue to a novel

A long time from now, after the last war has been fought and the last piece of blackened earth has been buried in green, a great thing will happen to the little species of humanity on this planet. We will, finally, blossom into a shining, elegant people, we will become the gods we always looked up to, but our darkness will not rule us as it rules the gods.

One of the great problems of future mythologies is that they haven't happened yet. Our epics, fables, creation stories and fantasies all have the advantage of having taken place in the past. They have happened already, and so can be told, and anything can be true if it happened in the past, because no one can go and look and prove that it did not happen.

But this story is of how we are to come, a story of what might happen. But this story is different, because it draws upon great things that are asleep or only half-awake in the human soul.

The history of our species so far has been a chaos of war and peace, beauty and ugliness, violence and love, brilliance and savagery, ignorance and curiosity. In the broad strokes, earth produces life like a mad garden, species of plants and animals, viruses, bacteria and insects growing indiscriminately on top of the rotting compost of the dead. Through millions of years and millions of changes, mountains rising and falling, trees jutting up like calm mammoths into the sky, reptiles and their cold hearts hunting on the small and the defenseless, then flowers came, and birds chirping in the dawn, and then warm creatures, dolphins and whales and bears and elephants, and among these came little humans, ingenious and curious, fearful, caring, vain and restless.

Their delicate, so beautifully intricate irises of blue and hazel and emerald bore a great spark in them when they paused and watched the landscape, the motions of the world. Their eyes were the diadem of Mother Earth, for that spark was the great light of Life, and its brilliance is unmatched even by the most terrible sun. All life did mother earth bear from her heart, so that all life was not just, not just her children, but all life was mother earth herself, but a great age was to pass before these little humans took up their heritage and called themselves earth. Many times the mother herself doubted the outcome, and whether her own children would turn and destroy her one day. To her great relief and ours, humanity would come to love its mother again.

At first these little mammals seemed good and innocent. They loved to roam, and wandered the earth, always wondering what lay beyond the next horizon. Slowly and in good time they would learn things, how to keep fire, to make a sharp point, how to bear the furs of great animals to survive the cold. They delighted in the busy sky of night, in sounds and colours. But mother earth was not a gentle mother, and she was far from perfect. She was a wild being, indiscriminate in her creation. Her house was always stormy, and her house was not safe. She could throw up great fires, or breed vicious and cruel beasts. She could freeze the land, or lay it waste. Once she rained with all her might on every place her storms could reach. She could laugh at the most capricious designs of parasites, or withold her sapphire waters when they were needed most.

The little humans were raised in such a house, and their brilliance and their fear and their vanity and their love clashed with the world and grew into the tangled vines of our hearts. They came to accept casual creation and destruction, learned the killing throw of the spear, to watch with one cautious eye the clouds, that death and life were inextricably woven together so that one meant the other and the only prize was to see a new dawn rise in strength.

Humans were born to fear, and they were born to wonder. And wonder begets more wonder, just as fear begets more fear. They struggled to grow into the light of their eyes, but at the same time this light shone through, and humans began to act and move rather differently than their brother and sister animals. Humans began to do mysterious things. They would pause and wonder, and then move on. They would make intricate sounds, and trace pictures in the soil. They fashioned tools, and these became more and more elaborate as time went on.

Then came the first time that flowers and beautiful shells were put into the ground with the dead, and the first time the words of the grandmother was preserved in the granddaughter, and the first time the count of bison were kept in pictures on the cave wall.

And rapidly, after a millenia of slow and languid change, the arts of humanity gushed forth, affecting all they did and were. They learned to tame animals, and to mark themselves, and how to evoke experience from words, and most amazingly, they grew, all of them, to conceive of a power and a meaningfulness in something much greater than themselves, they could sense something beyond what they knew, this they called gods, and all people made gods.

And then in some places people began to tame the earth herself. They told the soil which plants to grow and which to not grow, and told the water which way to run, and how much. They commanded the dirt and the stones to arrange themselves to keep them from the cold and from the predators. They learned to co-operate in great numbers. And from these came little towns, and little vistas of farms. They bade the dog and the horse and the chicken, the goat and the pig, to come closer and take food from their hand. They told the horse to pull and the chicken to feast and the dog to watch in the distance.

And they learned that when they co-operated there was great bounty, and when they bickered or went away there was less or none. And many understood already how to punish and so to make the defeated co-operate, and this they accepted.

And they were so small and innocent and fragile looking. Watching them from above, in that great blue that they looked up at as master, They collected stones and raised them high and hoped the gods would notice. They peered into tangled forests and named the magic that ruled the world, that they saw just at the edge of their vision, passing from behind one distant tree to another. And most of them thought that this, their little land, was the whole world and everything there was, and did not notice all the dark spaces in their knowledge. And others did and looked at all the things that happened that they could see, and all the things they could not see thriving and moving and they called it great mystery. And a silence always follows that phrase that sounds like everything coming into being and all light.

And some chased the mysteries and looked under rocks and played with beetles, and some felt the terrible loneliness of being alive, the loneliness of being in eternity and mortal.

And they now, sometimes, and more food than they knew what to do with. And the strong men sometimes wore feathers and shells in their hair, and gave the extra food to warriors and mystics so that they would stay, and so grew armies and words and markets and temples and everything strange and human that we do and take so seriously.
and our fear and our wonder grew together and sometimes they were one and the same.

And there now, so long after the gentle mammals who wandered the earth, you can see the golden masks of Crete, the flat and grinning kings, the graceful, powerful and unloving eyes of the pharaohs, the Chinese poet sitting gangly on top of a hill and watching the armies of bamboo and iron marching. There are the halls of Alexandria, a temple dedicated to what humans had learned, and memory, and the beauty of how things are and what there is to know.

And there is Copan, the stone temple dedicated to vastness, surveying the wandering jungle all around. There are the blueskinned gods of India, carved into the rock but graceful and indomitable. They dancingly curl their arms, that could move suns with the slightest gesture. There are the Roman senators arguing, sitting on great benches of marble, suggesting the truth of lightning and reading with awe writers that were for them too ancient.

And among all these beautiful and mysterious things were the skin and bones of scarred slaves, the swords that cut into pregnant bellies in vengeance, the rats who emerged from the ditches in the night smuggling disease, and with it sorrow and horror. There are the merciless priests carefully polishing sacrificial knives, and later the scrawl of writing in the morning sun that gives birth to remote deaths.

And among the light and the innocence was the sight of parasites bursting from skin, the mysterious red blotches, the black sores, the blue lips, the green skin. There was the shivering, and greying hair and wrinkling skin, and babies born dead, sometimes one out of four.

And there were the ruthless laws of no appeal, and the droughts, and the thousand things that wear down and destroy a child as it grows. Betrayals, rejections, lies, fears, failures, humiliation.

And sometimes there was falling in love, two little mortals sharing an eternity that is now gone, gone; and hard work repaid in overflowing harvests of wheat or deer. Sometimes there were beautiful statues raised higher than any statue could have been raised, it seemed, and wanderers who whistled in the summer dusk and dogs who wagged their tails when the people came back. Stories were invented, and songs, and now and then gypsies and traders arrived with dazzling things. Sometimes the stories were true, and they were adorned so as to give the heroic deeds of the ordinary human their rightful gravity.

And then out of the small cities came men with funny hats who were very strong, called kings. Kings seemed to grow out of these complicated flowers of towns naturally, and all over the world. And with them came armies, many warriors who did nothing but make war. These strange people did not hunt or grow their own food, but sat and waited for the king to give it to them, and if the king did not have it he sent the warriors to get more. And they enjoyed going.

And too the gods grew, there came out of the mysterious giants clothed in magic, little men with wisdom that not longer said bend thy knee but bend thy heart and soul. Buddha and Jesus, Nanak, Mohammed, Confucius, Lao Tsu, Ghandi, Moses and others too.

There came iron, and cities that crept over the hills and across rivers, empires and empires of elaborate buildings, ships with white sails, here are the Romans with their tall crosses and induestructible eagles, their heroes of glory waving to thousands of them back from the wars. Here are the Persians covered in gold and purple, the elegant and brittle Chinese emperors at the edge of dawn, tracing the lines of all change in perfect words;

Out of all this we came, here and now, the thousand generations stretching back into the darkness of the long gone past. They all feared and wondered, though maybe very differently, I don't know, we weren't there. But from what is left, their drawings, their ruins, their stories, and from us, their children, I suspect that they too struggled with demons and angels, gods or no-gods, with sanity, with the mystery that is being born and one day dying, with the pushy unasked-for demands of the heart, the body or the world.

But true, true; for us we must know only by broken pieces and guesses, really for us is only a short road we look back on and see it fade into pitch darkness. So too is it with our little future before us, a rising sun that blinds when you look at it directly.

This is the prologue of our future, and in the telling I wanted you to know that this life, its presumable succession of lives, is a dance, one not necessarily leading to a perfect climax, a dance where we, none of us, can say for sure if or when it will end or begin and how. But a dance of constant changes, and beautiful variations, and scary ones, but always leaving one with the sense of a great thing moving that we may, after all, be too small to ever really understand, like the ants being arranged, when one plays with them as a child, but no less miraculous for just being ants.

a new kind of war

2006-11-20T17:49:00.002-05:00

looking down at a city i feel like i am ancient history looking at the future, shining steel, a million burning lights, cold electricity, perfect elegant silent machines gliding as smoothly as curves of water. i get a feeling of power beyond the control of humans, a force moving in time that expands without our intention. i wonder if the ones who look out of windows from the top floors of the glass pinnacles feel they understand it, that they have planned this.

because i am an animal with an immortal soul that is as old as soil. looking to the faultless euclidean skyline i feel archaic, a small being under these things, these crazy luminous patterns of concrete and steel growing across the landscape came from the imaginations and energy of my species.

here in the twenty-first century our species (yours and mine) has mastered the machine. for all of our history we have done everything with simple labor of our hands. then suddenly came the thing called industrialization, roughly 250 years ago. with the advance of science came new tools and machines that could produce powers beyond the wildest speculation of the smartest people.

before this, most people were farmers, or hunters. then they began to drift to the cities. The cities grew with factories and great buildings to stack the people in. Cities are the brains of civilization, and they began to grow very big. roads are like neural networks, buildings are organs of resources and information. people are carriers, like red blood cells, moving resources and information in an increasingly complex system.

cities are now far beyond even that. sometime around, now

the world population has tipped from living mainly in the country to mainly in the city. now we have surrounded ourselves with cities. they have burst and flooded the land around them with the hum of wires, the glare of streetlights, and the sprawling ghettos of mammoth third world metropolises; dense unofficial cities growing on the peripheries, housing made from the debris of civilization, without gleaming lights nor planned sanitation; names like Sao Paulo, Delhi, Bombay, Shanghai, Kinshasa, Mexico City.

We are entering a new phase of human history, when the power of civilization exceeds human wisdom. It could be beautiful, it could be terrible. It will be both. And already we are coming to see ourselves as beings of a planet, a pale blue marble hanging in a great dark ocean.

Yet somehow in this great teeming future we have not even mastered that blackest part of our civilization. wars still bleed across the planet in many places and many forms. death and pain, a living nightmare, and we all wake up with it. Here in the sheltered west we even we in our warm cities still feel it, the dark world over there, over there, words now with an air like the names of demons; Iraq, Sudan, Gaza, Congo, Uganda, Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Haiti.

Over here too. Under the cities Kids on reservations drinking gasoline and screaming I WANT TO DIE, American ghettos, the US has the second highest number of child prostitutes in the world (250-340,000). And the granddaddy of them all, the exploitation of third world populations by the consumption demands of the first world. The lights of the shining world draining the energy of the darkened world. It may be these things will just become less and less interesting to the people living in the high cities. We are on the verge of even more immense power as we move into this age of genetic manipulation and atomic circuitry and the life of the city is becoming more and more distant from the country. We are transforming ourselves or being transformed, but into what is not known.

I saw a rave the other night. In a dark hall thousands of people raised their hands up to music that sounded like a very elegant machine playing a very primitive beat. Laserlights moved gracefully through the air making patterns in space. Its the future, I thought, the age of the machine.

the bible

2006-10-27T16:18:00.002-04:00

My first experience of Christianity was in my grandmother’s curtained, moody living room when I was very little, just learning to talk. I remember noticing a figure on her wall of a sad looking man. It began to dawn on me that the man was cut and bleeding. I was confused that my grandmother (being the essence of decency and normality) would have such a thing hanging on her wall. I looked up at my mother and asked,

“Who is that?”

My grandmother was mortified. “Oh my god, your son doesn’t know who Jesus Christ is,” she said to my mother.

I grew up without any kind of religious belief. I couldn’t have been more than six or seven when I realized that when I died I might cease to exist. The notion came upon me as a feeling of cold clean darkness. I used to lie in bed at night, thinking about nuclear bombs. I thought about thousands of nuclear bombs being detonated all over the world. I remember the image in my mind of mushroom clouds going up into a pitch black night alighting the land in deep red shadows. A great horror came over me, that everyone in the world would die and cease to exist. Just an eternal night that I wouldnt even know.

Being six or seven years old, it was at this stage in my conjectures that I began to cry. I would creep into my parents’ bedroom around one in the morning, sniffling and frightened, and crawl into the bed between them. Sometimes I would beg them for assurance. One night (and I may have dreamed this) at some weary hour my exasperated father shouted at me that when you die you die and there’s nothing.

I don’t know exactly how this era in my life ended. It went on for a few months, until one summer day I said that if this is all there is, then at least it should be happy, and I should love all these tragic souls as best I could. I accepted the end.

That doesn’t mean I stopped being afraid of ending. I think I was more afraid of the end and of pointless suffering, considering the implications.

Here, now as a grownup (at least biologically) I’ve come to see that there is something alive about me and everyone else that is a lot more profound than I understand. It is impossible for me to believe that the miracle of being alive at all is an accessory to biology. Rather, it is obviously the essence of biology.

That means I believe in god. I believe in a living spirit that transcends mere mechanics and creates all things. Yahweh, Allah, Atma, Tao, Great Spirit; praise be to all your funny names.

I’ve had many teachers, but my first and best church has been the woods. A tree is, in essence, the purest form of life. All it does is live and grow. It takes light and water and makes food for all life. It accepts all destruction and grows as long as it is able, without thought. It is basic innocence. Many trees together are a chorus of purity.

another kind of new testament

I looked for god everywhere, in my friends, in religions, in books, in my mind, under stones. I would find bits and pieces. I did not bother with Christianity because that was crazyshit, and I wasn't interested in crazyshit.

Truth is not contained in a book. Truth is as natural and indigenous to life as sun and moon. So is god. But humans are mortal and confused and imperfect and so their religions are all clumsy attempts at describing god. There are no false religions and no true religions. Like children learning how to draw pictures, human religions are gradual attempts at understanding and all religions are valuable as expressions of how god is understood in their own age. Our notions of god change just as our notions of earth, of art, of anything, change.

There are of course better religions and worse ones. Possibly one of the most irritating debates of modern times is between Objective and Relative truth. The answer is so bloody obvious it ought to be stamped on the front of every bible and the front of every postmodernism reader:

Truth is objective, the perception of truth is relative. As all humans are mortal and finite, everyone sees objective truth but they perceive it in their own way.

My hope for the future is that one day children will be given religious buffets in school. You will walk into class and several different religions will be taught. Now the Bible says this, and the Buddha says that. Questions like,

"If Coyote met Jesus at a barbecue, what icebreaker would they start the conversation with?"

But after many years of disregarding Christianity, I've decided to no longer draw my conclusions from the solid foundation of wilful ignorance. I actually read the Bible and the truth is it is a very spiritual book.

The Bible is the story of a little people called the Jews. It is about their beliefs in the origins of the world and the history of their people. The Jews are underdogs. Its a book about people struggling between the good and evil in themselves, always falling short of what they know they should be: honourable, loving and spiritual in the best sense of the word. In this history is a beautiful intermingling of humour and madness, generosity and fanaticism, wisdom and delusion. It is possibly the most profound book ever written, and now it seems no surprise that it has been responsible for the two most dominant religions in the world today (Christianity and Islam) neither of which is believed by the Jews, ironically.

But the enduring story in the Bible, the common theme is the relationship of god and humanity. The Jews are a people who are passionately obsessed with their god and regarded god as their rightful king. Perhaps quite understandably, the Jews believed that god was as obsessed with them as they were with him.

Then one day a little man who came from some hick Jewish village, told the Jews he was their god and he had some things to add. He told them that all was forgiven, that god loved them as a father loves his children and that they had a responsibility to realize their natures as children of god and make the world a paradise (the Kingdom of Heaven). So they killed him.

The Jews didn't kill him, incidentally. The Romans actually tortured and killed him. But the Romans were bigger and stronger than the Jews, so it was easier for a lot of people to blame them.

The early Christians added their accounts of this little guy to this great, passionate story of god and humanity and for two thousand years now the book of a small, insignificant tribe has endured and spread to every corner of the globe. It has been the foundation of countries, influenced millions and millions of people, it has inspired massacres, profound acts of kindness, scientific discoveries (Newton and Kepler spent their lives trying to understand god and inadvertently discovered gravity and the laws of planetary motion, respectively), oppressions, peacemaking and vicious ignorance. The Antislavery movement in Britain was championed by the Christian Quakers while many of the enslaved tribes were annihilated by Christians who saw them as demonic for their pagan religions. The vast history of this book is as complex and powerful as the story itself.

The attraction to Christianity for me is this powerful idea of a loving god who has a very personal relationship with you. And god is god, not nature, not a human, but supernatural, literally, greater than the world as it is perceived.

My repulsion to Christianity is its exclusivity. The only truth comes from the Bible. Everything else is at best useful or at worst demonic. When you read the Bible, from Genesis to the preaching of Jesus, you understand that you believe this or you're screwed. The trouble is I know that isn't true. I've found real spiritual education in sweat lodges, buddhist meditation, in the lectures of Atheists and of course walking the forests of the earth. According to Christianity there is but one path to god and it is through the Bible and Jesus Christ, but I think what many Christians fail to see is why Jesus taught in parables.

Why did Jesus teach in parables? Because he understood that the spiritual world does not function the same as the natural world, though I believe they are intrinsic to each other. You can't teach spiritual lessons the same way you teach people to count or build a retaining wall. You have to reach a part of someone's being that spends a lot of its time sleeping or half-awake (the spirit). So he tells stories about mustard seeds or a farmer and his sons. Everyone knows Jesus isn't talking about a real guy or how to plant a crop, he's talking about how life works spiritually and morally.

Jesus isn't unique among religious teachers in this respect. There are hundreds of oral and written traditions around the world that use this same method and for the same reason. But Jesus was one of the wisest and greatest of these teachers, and I think he understood his role of waker-upper better than anyone. He was ruthless in teaching people to wake up to their greater natures, constantly urging people towards purity and god. His teaching is so powerfully direct it can single-handedly transform a life or destroy one.

I do not believe that the Bible is the source of all truth about god, or that Jesus was a manifestation of god, whose martyrdom took all transgressions away from humans who accepted him as their king. The troubling aspect of Christian teachings is that it is so unequivocal it easily divides the world into Christian (towards god) and Non-Christian (away from god). I think Christians suffer from a jingoism (e.g. words like covenant, revival or the Word) which is indicative of cultish tendencies rather than spiritual teaching. There are moral and historic assertions in the Bible that are clearly cultural and have no spiritual validity unless it is rationalized by modern thinkers. I think the idea that Christianity is the only true religion harms its spiritual purity rather than preserves it, for this seeks to capture god in a book and if the Bible has taught me anything it is that god is vaster than the horizon, more profound that the wisest teacher, and god loves and embraces all things that live, Christian or not.

So in honor of that great teacher, I’ll leave you with a little parable:

There was a farmer who had two sons. The farmer told his sons, you are both restless and irritating me, go out into the woods and play.

So the two boys left the house and went into the forest to play. After many hours of running through the trees, they looked up and saw the sky darkening. The boys realized they were lost. When they were nearly in tears from fear and worry, they heard their father’s voice calling them from far away. His voice was strong but it echoed strangely off the trees and the hills of the forest and sometimes seemed to be coming from one path or another. Each boy heard the sounds coming from these different paths and in a panic ran blindly along, each taking a different way. Finally they both emerged at far ends of the forest from each other and saw their father standing at the edge of a field, his hands cupped around his mouth and calling them.
Both boys were covered in cuts and bruises from their urgency. The one brother called to the other and said,

“You took the wrong path! You cannot get to father that way!”

The other brother said, “Of course I can, I can see him as well as you!”

But the first brother argued, “Look at you, covered in cuts and bruises! And see, there are ditches and thorns in this field between you and father! Go back into the forest and come the way I have come and I will tell father you are coming!”

And the second brother said, “That doesn’t make any sense! The same ditches and thorns stand in your way as well, and you too are covered in cuts and bruises”

The two boys stood there arguing until the father yelled,

“What are you arguing about? Get over here!”

hugo chavez and the devil

2006-09-22T12:20:00.003-04:00

Chavez speaking with a voter in 2005

As I sat down to watch Fox News last night, I was delighted to catch Neil Cavuto’s coverage of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s address to the UN General Assembly. Fox never fails to disappoint the political viewer, right or left, by managing to deliberately outrage, incite or offend somebody somewhere. Indeed, I sometimes suspect that Fox’s burgeoning audience half consists of right-wingers looking for reasons to be outraged, and the other half of left-wingers looking for reasons to be offended.

So one can imagine the slow smile that crept across my face when a Fox correspondent told of how he caught up with Chavez after his speech and asked him the obvious question, “Why do you hate America?”

To Fox’s credit, they did air Chavez’ reply to this most important question. The Venezuelan president placidly explained that he did not hate America, in fact he loved America and its people, only hated its imperialism and its current administration. While there were raised, disapproving eyebrows all round at Fox News, no one outright called him a liar.

Like Fox News, Chavez likes to gain attention for his political cause by making outrageous statements. His address to the UN General Assembly was not just a tirade against the U.S.-directed geopolitical model (especially against President Bush himself) and a promotion of the Venezuelan Republic as a global defender of justice and truth, it was deliberately insulting. Not only did Chavez refer numerous times to Bush as, “the Devil,” he at one point called the “American Empire” every bad name he could summon, such as racists, assassins, and genocidal. Chavez went so far as to declare that the world was rising up against its real oppressor, the United States. Promoting Noam Chomsky’s “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance” was, I thought, a charming touch.

These are the sort of statements that cast international politics in a whole new light. Chavez is not a rebel in the same sense as Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose dissent is exclusively concerned with problems facing the Islamic world. Chavez is taking on the capitalist system in the name of the world community, many years after history was supposed to have ended and communism tossed onto the same scrap heap as totalitarianism. The Venezuelan president is claiming the privilege of defining global democracy, something that traditionally only the West is supposed to do.

The truth is had Chavez refrained from calling Bush names, no one would have paid any attention to his address, nor to any of the reforms and criticisms that he put forth. The Brazilian president Lula DaSilva’s UN address went comparatively unnoticed, despite the fact that Brazil is a far bigger player on the world stage and is really the greater power in the South American sphere. Brazil is part of the “second-world”, along with countries like India or Turkey, the “second world” being defined as a country of first-world relevance possessing third-world influence. For an eternity, it seems, these sorts of nations have been struggling for a share in the debate and determination of global policy, and have largely gone ignored.

Venezuela could also be considered a “second-world” nation, but thanks to Chavez newspapers will be printing articles, editorials and commentaries all over the world today discussing Venezuela’s elected leader. In a rare moment, the first world lost the spotlight to a politician speaking for the rest of the world.

Tragically, however, whatever media attention Chavez has gained through his admittedly hilarious statements regarding Bush’s metaphysical origin, none of his more grounded criticisms will be understood, much less discussed in the public arena. In his address, the Venezuelan president asked why the alleged terrorist Luis Posada Carriles was allowed to remain free in the US, (he is held responsible for blowing up a Cubana plane in the 1970’s killing 73 people, as well as several terror bombings in Havana), if the US is so dedicated to its War on Terror? He raised the uncomfortable memory of the procrastination of the Security Council during the Israeli devastation of Lebanon only a few weeks ago. Chavez went on to challenge the Bush doctrine’s notion of global democracy, calling it “the false democracy of elites.”

Additionally, he made some bold and necessary statements concerning the mission and function of the United Nations. He told the General Assembly that it remained a “purely deliberative organ” of little consequence. He reminded them of four proposals made the previous year for UN reform, all of which deserve repeating here: an expanded Security Council, an effective and transparent method to address regional conflicts, the suppression of the veto currently held by the five permanent members of the Security Council, and increasing the powers of the office of Secretary General.

Chavez was proposing nothing less than the removal of power in the UN from the hands of the big five and turning it over to the rest of the world. It’s a brave statement, not least because its generally understood that countries like the United States would sooner leave the UN than give up its veto. Perhaps that is what Chavez is hoping for.

Whatever effect he intended to have on his audience and on the public discourse, his more substantial arguments were not discussed in the news today. Not one mainstream news organization made any mention of the four proposed UN reforms (with the exception of mentioning in all seriousness Chavez’s joke about moving the UN out of America and relocating it in Venezuela). In the world presented by the major media, UN reform is the domain of American critics like UN Ambassador John Bolton, not third world proponents of its democratization. Nor did any of them mention the name of Carriles, or for that matter the names of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and US citizen Ronni Moffit (the day of his speech, September 20, Chavez observed, just happened to be the 30th anniversary of their assassination as part of a US-backed campaign against Chilean activists). On the other hand, Chavez’s indictments of American foreign policy were well documented, but only in the context of his devilish slurs against Bush, and so lost much of their political potency.

So to a certain extent President Chavez bears the blame for the reception of his remarks, and I’m sure he would happily accept responsibility for them. For anyone following the career of Hugo Chavez, it is well-known that he detests George W. Bush, and this type of rhetoric is nothing new. From his speech a few years ago calling Bush “an asshole” for believing Iraq had WMD’s, to his assertion that Bush is the world’s number one terrorist (Chavez was clutching an AK-47 at the time, don‘t ask me why), the Venezuelan president dislikes his American counterpart not just in matters of policy, but seemingly on a very personal level. Perhaps this is understandable when Chavez himself was nearly deposed from power in 2002 in a coup attempt, with credible evidence to suggest it was backed by the Bush administration.

None of this will be understood in the mainstream media. He will be seen only as either an amusing or dangerous lunatic, but as Neil Cavuto put it, “he may be a nut, but he’s not stupid.”

lady, i'm drunk

2006-09-18T18:36:00.006-04:00

In this gentle year of 2000 and 6 I lie at my ease here under the English sun - with clouds, kind air… clouds that move and don’t ask why. Away across the land and oceans is blood on the walls of Lebanese towns, weeping mothers in darkened Israel’s livingrooms, the thousand forgotten anonymous murders, farther down the land, soft dying Sudanese mothers holding growling-stomached little boys, too young but still so curious with the curves of cirrus clouds like me and my eyes, across all this earth and its talking wind (and there are songs in the wind, hear the songs of Ancient Afternoon, a drifting song carrying bird songs, lapping of waves songs, winds through forests of a million million million evergreens, a flood of triumphant leaves, and above us Sunlight flowing from our most almighty star, Miss Sun, who bulges pregnantly and always is just light, pure light that drips onto leaves, leaves that… listen – these leaves contain so much miracles of that which is holy or rare or impossible – in their stomata and cells and chlorophylls, that they gather light in green bowls and send them tripping, stumbling into new leaves, new grass: light dancing in a ballroom of crystal sugar, waiting to send more laughing, crazed light streaming into the wet cacophony of all life, then this light makes little teeth, ladybugs, horses, aneurysms, wildfires, carrion birds, then, then always and then, always light making everything madly and why o why oh no, no why, you child: no why, only something more than why, always and

Who would publish this the seditious truth: that nation-states, corporations, depressions, words of honor, heartbreak, curves of history, great wars, dead heroes, are just light trapped by sugar? Light of this right here on the ground, the column of Wellington in Trafalgar square “ruling” the world, is made of light? I am light, and what else?

And what more than light? not only an impossible miracle, not only a breathing walking talking laughing death delusioned miracle, but more, impossibly more, and you dearest you, a casual miracle,

ah look down now at my hands, these hands that are casually countries of rivers of blood by veins and rolling hills of skin, healthy good blood, giving and now giving dancing breath and crystal palaces of living, look at all they’ve done- they touched you and sent waves, these same ones who bandaged holes in the bodies of dying children, and dug into soil (soil growing all life), cut and smashed through the black wet soil of living beings, digging into the ground of worms and dead flowers and the shit of animals, these hands that make words with scratches that say this, words for what? What could we possibly add?

Maybe I should have been born a river, that I could send water now into the hearts of fields, that I could have moved across the land, but maybe a river that could run into the stars of night, and past little houses warm and feeling eternal, made a million sunflowers

As a human back here I recline, I remember dimly feeling anguish, I remember that I betrayed myself and you and everyone else, though I knew or think I knew that life forgave me, laughed and said I love you and forgive you everything. I forgive you for everything, and maybe we cry when we know this and because we are not innocent enough to understand we can redeem ourselves without rebirth,

yet,
as a human again, alien, not starving, not a slave, not trapped in dead slums, not cut into, not loping along, but free, and almost perfect, I am almost a perfect human, no diseases, white as a cloud, insanity in me perfectly willing to sit as a dark subterranean lake, living among the shining cold metal of the conquerors of Paradise, people fight wars and I only have to listen to them, I had a dream once where the sky was an ocean.

Maybe instead I should have been a cloud, maybe I should have been rain, I could have made something of my body worthy of the noble weeds, curled myself into a storm and rained across the mountains and poured roars onto the pines until they sang back, bled new rivers down hillsides and carried a thousand children of flowers, daisies, asters, black-eyed susans, down into valleys where I would have called them to grow into anonymous fields of real beauty,

You don’t understand. I could have been a general, I could have killed a thousand birds and made a thousand widows, I could have opened the mouths of a thousand tigers and their maws would have made storms of fire. Power singing through my veins, my every word a contained fire, my eyes painted steel: a small child who shouted statues are men,

To say there is no god is to laugh at one’s eyes, for me here is a miracle, that I am alive at all.
And if I am alive then everyone is alive, and then everything is alive.

Think of that – everything is alive. And they all try.

To try,
This moment is only now, here, the restless eternal part of me pushes against my ribs, asks what civilizations are to come? What do other stars look like? What other galaxies? What new wildernesses of centuries?
But look, here are little… the smallest, of leaves dangling in the summersun, humbly breathing.
if I am honest,
then I am a glow, born from the womb,
wishing I was more,

the second wave of socialism

2006-09-03T08:22:00.001-04:00

Damien Walker came back from China and we got coffee and sat on the steps of the old church on the corner. Little kids, crying or laughing or screaming or meditating, would pass on the street every once in a while and make us both pause unintentionally.

His face is harder after two years over there, or maybe just after two years of living. He turns up his forearm to show me a little tattoo of a hammer and sickle nested inside the red star of socialism. There is a seriousness in his eyes when he looks down at it.

“The communists are fucked,” he says and takes a drag off his cigarette.

He’s become more political since the last time we talked. He tells me in fierce words the necessity for armed revolution in order to create real socialism in the world. He is clearly inspired by Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, who while clutching an AK-47 told a group of reporters that the United States was the world’s number one terrorist.

We’ve been friends for around fifteen years now, and I remember when I met him, he still wore an intense militant frown, but then he had a safety pin through his ear.

He came from a small mining town in Northern Ontario; only the mining industry was contracting when he grew up. The culture in his world was hostile, unforgiving and proudly ignorant. The boys liked cars and drinking and fighting. Damien loved to read and think. He would go out into the bush with the one or two kindred fellows that there were, and invent fictitious worlds in which they were heroes, explorers or magicians.

They invented whole mythologies of magic they attributed to the land and themselves. They would take rifles and bread and camp out winter and summer in the enduring wilderness that seemed to embrace them. Out there, the world was alive. It was possible to believe among the thriving forests that the world was not really dead and heartless.

In the towns his little clan were bonded mainly because they were scorned as freaks in their schools and in their families. Damien was chased by bigger kids and beaten regularly by them through his childhood. As the mines cut back and laid people off, his already bleak industrial town grew in alcoholics and brooding, angry fathers.

He escaped that place when he was sixteen and went to live in the city with his father. He escaped the place where thought and imagination was despised and punished by a brutal cult of the hard-working, unsoft, factory-worshipper. Damien was conscious of his own life, and was curious about what it meant. He loved that the world was a potential ocean of beautiful and strange things. And growing up he had to arm himself against his own world, which tried to kill these things in him until he too would only like cars and beer and violence. Many of the friends he left behind, the other magicians, crumbled and suffered mental illnesses and depression and suicide.

So Damien had been prepared for warfare at an early age, but a war no one in his town could even grasp. In the city he was free and left to move in whatever direction he wanted. His father was schizophrenic and a serious alcoholic who could only relate to his son as some sort of intellectual colleague of his conspiracy theories and grand schemes. When his father moved in to tell him drunkenly about the telephone company’s secret plan to control the world, Damien’s hands would curl into fists and through his jaws would say,

“Yes, yes. Right, dad.”

At sixteen Damien became the adult in his father’s house.
Already he saw himself only somewhat consciously as being engaged in a psychic war with the world around him. Being free he now started to grow unchallenged, becoming enamoured with poets like Rimbaud and Baudelaire, with intense mystical philosophies, with Nihilism, with fantasy worlds. He was trying to transform himself into something that was not normal and dead, and he adorned himself with dark spirits, black thorns, but also shining lights, and ancient words.

I remember him, a skinny, intense teenager, telling me that Nihilism offered the path to truth; to destroy everything, he said fiercely, to eradicate oneself because you are composed of lies, good is a lie, evil is a lie. Around this time Damien’s arms gradually became a mass of burn marks and huge slashes.

I’d almost forgotten them, but they were actually beautiful. Even in self-destruction he believed in grace and care. I actually helped burn one of those marks into his arm. The slashes were deep and ugly, and remained there for years. The cigarette burns were huge, but they formed together an abstract pattern. He turned his arms into Jackson Pollocks. For him, they symbolized sorrow and change.

We parted ways around this time for awhile, because Damien had become as dark and hostile as the city, his new home. The city could have easily swallowed him up and made him one of its own, but in the end Damien’s soul is gentle and thoughtful, not violent.

He emerged from this darkness to find himself alone, in a small university town. He says that for a couple of years he had no contact with any friends. He thought a lot about god, and himself. He began to see himself as a humble soul, and no longer as an aspiring demigod. His natural mind began to assert itself, and he looked deeper into the world around him.

I have a great affection of Damien, although this would still embarrass him I think. He was born into a world that was grooming him for nightmares, instructing him self-hatred and perversion of life. He is driven to rigorously hold himself to an inner standard. He was being trained to use his mind to transform his character into a thing of power and contempt, and instead chose to turn and face his own character. There he found a real being, a thing of light and curiosity.

He still contains a sense of being at war, and he is not necessarily wrong. Yet, like most of my friends, he has begun to drift through life. When we were young, transformation seemed to be what made life meaningful. We were obsessed with changing into things greater than what we were, better, not ugly like how we felt. Then slowly, that frantic urge to chrysalis ebbs away, and you begin to feel that changing was something you did because you’d been a victim of the world. Once you survive, you begin to reach out for other meanings. In the end, transformation meant to prepare you for the real work of life. But neither of us had found it.

Damien drifted on to China to teach, and has come back with politics in his heart. Chinese communism to Damien is a vicious fascism, no more a socialist country than Cuba is a capitalist country. He sits there on the steps of the church, the big maples that line the street waving their leaves and making the sunlight around us jump and blink, staring out onto the street, telling me about how Mao’s ideas were betrayed, (he shows me the Little Red Book he carries around with him). He tells me about ugly disparities in wealth; a top of the line Audi or shining Hummer roaring down the street past a shrivelled old man in sandals pulling a cart and donkey. Few understand or care about the revolution in China, he remarks, they are like kids all over the world, concerned with pop stars, their personal success, or seemingly nothing at all. China is the worst of communism and capitalism, without free speech, and with massive exploitation of the working poor.

He wants to practice shooting rifles, and make enough money to get to a place like Cuba or Venezuela, and contribute to a real communist revolution. He does not see himself as a brilliant thinker or political leader. He is very practical about it,

“Well, I would go and teach. I would teach English or art or the principles of the revolution.

Maybe I would teach people how to think for themselves.”

I think he is serious. I can very easily see him teaching in some tropical country, living simply, trying to be as good a human being as possible, trying to protect the poor and the weak in the way that seems best to him.

We argue most of the day about politics. But we are very happy to do so, delighted with going deeper into questions of what is good and what is true. After fifteen years of friendship we have easy conversations ranging over every subject; history, politics, god, philosophy, science, art. Usually they are all tied together, flow naturally from one thing to the next. I do not agree with a lot of what he is telling me, which only makes our talk more interesting.

I like socialism but I’m not really interested in revolution. The problems go deeper and I’ve never heard a really good solution to them. I see communism as a pointless alternative to the injustices of capitalism. For me, real socialism means building wherever possible, not destroying, defending the innocent more than attacking the guilty. But I don’t really mind if Damien runs off and joins the communists. I don’t see any reason to question the purity of those hearts or intentions any more than anyone else’s. He traded cigarette burns on his arms for the Red Star, and if he represents a new socialism, it is of people armed not with an ideology but a spirit.

good morning

2006-08-11T20:02:00.001-04:00

and inside of thinking about god is wondering what it means to be alive at all, and why is everything so goddamned mysterious.

People have all kinds of whys they are absolutely certain are the real whys, but I don’t believe them. The answer to why is not something that I will know is true from logic or explanation, but something I will feel. I’ll experience truth rather than think it, or I think so.

I am 31 years old. I was born on a small island in the Atlantic. Since then things have been confusing, but I’d like to give a report of what I’ve found out about god and about being alive.

The first thing is my awe at being here. What I mean by that is I woke up this morning and looked around. Morning light was flooding in through the window, (or whatever light does, no one’s really sure). I am alive this morning. I have this body. It is breathing. Air is being brought into it and absorbed through lungs. Air is then pushed out, stuff my body doesn’t want. The first thing I do in the morning is see. I have these two exquisite, tiny browny-green jewels in my head that draw in light and make a very good picture for my soul. They can move around and the picture that my soul sees is incredibly good, better than the best photographs in the world ever.

I’m also hearing things and feeling things; Ears and nerve endings, respectively. I can’t smell very well because I smoke tobacco, but I can smell things sometimes, which is when little particles go up my nose and turn into… smells. It’s weird to find I can’t describe a smell as a sensation. It’s like trying to describe the colour red.

I can sense something more too. Before I woke up, I was in a dream. A dream is a thing that is a lot like being alive, in fact I would say that it is a kind of life that you lead in addition to the awake life that you have. In a dream you find a world happening and you respond to it, and it responds to you. The world is almost always stranger than this world and very much more inconsistent. In a dream, I’ve gotten off a subway at a huge boat in the middle of the ocean. The dream world did not think it was necessary to explain how the subway got to the middle of the ocean, or why a boat needed a subway stop.

In a way, I could claim to have done all kinds of shit in my life. Once I was on Venus. Venus has a lot of Russians on it, I can tell you. I’ve seen ghosts. I was shot by a man outside a convenience store. I once met William S. Burroughs. I was once hugged by a blue heron.

I can fly, too.

When you are dreaming, you believe that what is happening is really happening. You don’t think that you are hallucinating or making it up. When I was on Venus, I thought I was really on Venus. What’s interesting is that when you dream, you don’t ask obvious questions like, “How the fuck did I get to Venus? Why am I not asphyxiating? Why didn’t the Russians tell anyone they are on Venus?” It doesn’t occur to you to question reality. There is a variety of dreaming called lucid dreaming when you realize you are awake. These moments feel very powerful, because you sense that you are actually in control of the reality around you. It seems like you can find secrets then.

Lucidity is defined by this little computer as being, among other things, “rational, and mentally clear, especially only for a period between episodes of delirium or psychosis.” I sort of mean that, but I would prefer to articulate “lucidity” as clarity, or an awareness of the context in which one finds oneself. So you are being exceptionally lucid when you say, “I am alive.” You are being exceptionally unlucid when you say, “may I take your order?”

Lucidity means to be aware of a more fundamental reality than is presented, and to be conscious of oneself and recognize the other selves around you. But this is a matter of degrees as well, as it is discovered that knowing the underlying truth is something that goes deeper and deeper as you look.

Anyhow, I’m starting to wander off, it’s been interesting, but let’s return to being alive.

I woke up out of a dream and into this morning, a morning that is holy because it is the only time this morning will ever be, this morning has never been and will never come again. This morning that is the mother of tomorrow morning and the grandmother of the day after that. And I realize very quickly that I wasn’t dreaming, that I was actually alive, and the world was not shifting and changing wildly. Unlike my dreams, it’s as though I can hear the world breathing too. Somehow, I sense life.

Being alive is such a simple fact that it’s significance is mostly taken for granted. The rare time that you hear someone make reference to it is when it looked like they were going to stop being alive but came out in one piece. “I’m alive, I’m alive!” People shout after a car accident or a bomb, and everyone understands they’re amazement and happiness. But if you wake up in the morning and say, “I’m alive!” people will look at you very curiously and say, “yes, you are.”

For me, being alive is a profound thing to be. It seems to me to be an actual miracle. If we define a miracle as an exceptional event that defies what is commonly accepted as ordinary, or an event that is divine in nature, then I think waking up in the morning, being alive and being conscious of being alive, is miraculous.

So I wake up and look outside, and light from the sun floods the world. There’s a big green tree, and wind is waving the big green branches of the tree and it makes a sound between a roar and a hiss. My eyes and ears tell me this, and something in my soul knows that this is not a dream. And I ask, “What’s that tree doing there? What’s a tree doing being a tree?”

Here’s the other significant part of waking up in the morning alive and not dead: for some reason I’m aware of it. For some reason someone inside my eyes and ears, someone inside the neural networks that take in and process the signals sent by these symphonic nerves, is getting all this information, all this incredibly complex technology, and is going, “that’s a tree.” That someone is the awake part, the living part. That is the soul. I imagine the soul to be a giant peeking through a keyhole.

Whoever you are that is reading this, there is an awake part of you that is experiencing these words and their meaning. If for a moment the belief systems, emotional dynamics and other personality structures, (you too, instinct) could be quiet for a second. I would like to say hi to the soul reading this:

Hi!

This awake, experiencing part is miraculous. It means that life is not mechanical. It means that life is alive. There has always been a movement to prove that life is not awake, that it is a machine, that we are machines. Science, unfortunately, has been guilty of this, as we all know, giving people a disturbing feeling that since all their actions and impressions are controlled and possibly created by complex biological systems, that in the end they are just very strange robots.

Before science, religions around the world pulled the same shit on people. They informed people that their being alive was completely irrelevant unless very specific rules were obeyed, and even then being alive was only interesting insofar as it helped one god or another.

Life has mechanics, but life is not dead like a machine or a statue. That you read this and wonder is all the evidence you will ever need.

So here I am, I’ve proven that I can wake up in the morning and stare out a window. At this point I say,

“wow.”

Then I say,

“Good morning, everything.”

Everything about being alive is amazing. I have a body. Outside there is sky. There are all kinds of beings that are alive like me but are different and not me. And where is the creator? What gave birth to all this alive? And why?

When I was born, when I was a little baby, I was still me. I had the same soul. My personality was totally different. Back then, I was a terrible writer, and I didn’t understand hockey, and I wasn’t a socialist. My interests back then were pooping and staring. Apparently I smiled a lot.

My soul though, was still awake. I probably wasn’t as lucid; apparently it takes a couple of years for a child to distinguish between dreams and reality, which is interesting. I guess over time I got used to the idea of being human, so I went along with it and I got a lot classier once I’d accepted it. I learned that having hands could be amusing, and I didn’t have to pee if I didn’t want to, all kinds of shit.

It’s amazing but at one time my soul was inside something about the size of my finger, and I was probably about as conscious as an acorn. And maybe if my soul had ended up in an acorn, I would have grown to accept being an acorn, and not bothered so much about being conscious of stuff. Which definitely makes me appreciate the notion that a human birth is very precious and not to be pissed around with.

I guess I wonder if at one point in the past I met god, and just forgot with being so busy growing into a human.

I’ve come around to the notion that since I am alive, and that the very existence of existence is essentially a miracle far more profound than dead people waking up or statues bleeding, there must be something even more awake than me that unifies and gives birth to the world. The notion of god, the creator.

I don’t know what god is, or where. I’m pretty sure that somehow god is composed of everything. Things get confusing for me because it’s strange that everything is somehow unified and also somehow separate. There is a me, and there is a world. There is you, and that make you an “other”. For you, I am an “other.”

I don’t really need to answer this question, however. What I think is that god is alive, far more alive, if that’s possible, and awake than I am. Somehow I am part of god, I think. So my next question is, where do I meet god, or how do I meet god? I’ve tried talking to him in my head, but I just end up answering myself and pretending I’m god. The closest I’ve gotten so far is sensing that I’m no longer playing games but am starting to push out into a sense of life that is not based on nerve endings or ideas, but on my sensation of living

a sculptor has a block of marble

2006-07-12T13:38:00.001-04:00

a sculptor has a block of marble and wants to carve the shape of a woman and he wants to show her in a posture of grace and fertility, bestower of fertility and he remembers a woman he once saw with a child in one arm and a basket in another and how she carried herself

so he starts scraping away at the block of marble which has sat very composed as a block of marble for years and years and years, solidly and unwaveringly a block of marble. This marble has its own currents and eddies of stones, unvisible flows of other minerals, where the glowing hot rock cooled and stopped, waves, pools, veins.

so the sculptor with the feeling in his chest and long years of carving in his mind and eyes and hands cuts into the rock. and the stone yields here and refuses there and there is the little push pull of living as they sit together in a quiet room.

over long hours the sculptor's hand (which is perfectly imperfect) slips and he makes a mistake. He cuts too far into the stone. This happens every time, in fact several times every time. He knows it will happen, slightly adjusts his sense of the the stone, the space it is, depth and isness. and the statue to be is changed slightly.

and each motion of the sculptor's hand is an individual, and each piece of marble, each current and vein running through it, each chip that flies off the block is an individual. and thousands of individuals accumulate until they form shape and gesture. the arm, the elbow, the wrinkles, the pores of the woman.

the sculptor and the marble and the individuals carve a sculpture, which could never quite be the image in his head, and it changes with every motion, and becomes something all its own. Every intention changed by motion by the world, every motion falling back behind and new motion coming into being, every perfection compromising with beating heart of raw mortality. every statue an isness.