Since May of 2010,

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The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He maketh me lay down in pastures green, He leadeth me beside still waters.
He restoreth my soul: He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Ye, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil, for the Lord is with me;
Your rod and staff, they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:
thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

The massive cries resonate in the beer halls,

in the concert stands and bandshells, in the memorials and in the gun-barrels and oil-fires of our angry and chaotic world; but where is our humanity? Where is our Enlightenment? Will we regress from humanism into pure rage and religious fundamentalism across this tiny globe, erasing the progress of former centuries, and allow the world to melt around us? What will stop the tide that came in first on this day in the 2001 year? Religious extremism, without check by reason and natural law, will tear the world down if we let it. The most terrifying condition of this whole mess is that more and more in droves, Americans themselves are embracing extremist fundamentalism. Even though it is not fundamentalist Islam, the new American religion of "Rage" is just as dangerous.

Thirty days has September,
And I'll spend them pouring through 30 photos-a-day.
Freed by the internets of my physical body,
Living reality in a God-forsaken digital unreality.
Or I could throw this away,
And spend my thirty days in a marvelous enterprise.
A living world - I could live in a living picture,
And in this masterpiece, I, I could become the artist.

"I'm highway bound.

I don't need you, never needed you or your things, don't owe you anything because you never even remembered my name."

Abram muttered these last words because he doesn't have reason to raise his voice anymore, then shouldered his duffel bag, boots thump thump thump, door slam, Abram left. Abram is gone, hell, even changed his name to Abraham. No more ramblin' men 'round your apartment anymore, Abraham is gone.

There’s some kind of runner in this village
Running all ‘round, ‘round and never tiring of going ‘round in circles
He’s simply going everywhere I’ve been
Fertilizing all my old weeds, growing those jasmines with shameless nurturing
Bringin’em back from the dead, back from underground seeds
He’s running ‘round from apartment complex to apartment complex
And I can’t go anywhere without seeing something that I once did
So that every time I go inside, I hear secondhand about things that I once did
Things that he is bringing out again
Even though he knows that I’m dead tired off running into people that I can’t remember how I met
Don’t follow me, runner.

Further and Further Away from the Fireplace.

We are moving further and further away from the fireplace.
Away from the comfort of light and warm embers, which is the living.
From the brilliance of flickering flaming plan, all-embracing fire.
Content to comfortably burn, warm, until the end of burns.

And in more ways than one, our warm winter home is dying, its hearth retreating.
-The smartest man who once walked, tonight spoke to my soul,
“Things grew even worse than a pessimist of the deepest dye would have dared prophesy.
Awareness of this state of affairs overshadows every hour of my present existence. A.E.”
And I listened to him, his words written upon my wrists and ankles,
Shackles, not to be disgorged.

Our relatives continue to die, yours and mine.
Soon will be you and I.
One as we speak.
One tomorrow, or Tuesday.

And further out from the fire they drift, souls flaming, embers rapidly fading from view.
Rapidly fading from memory, and from view.
Sometimes even from God’s view, lost beyond space and beyond time; lost.
Further and further away, the fire dwindles.
Further and further from us, and the world seems to be abandoning it for summertime with her cruel callousness.
She is the evilest of women.

Life is slipping far away, as we all die off.
And further and further away from the fireplace, we all must go.
The way of the fireplace is to extinguish.
And so extinguish all, she makes ample haste

"Behind every great fortune is a great crime.

The greater the fortune, the greater the crime."

Something wild, something strange.

Just, wild and strange.
Jesus, wild and strange.
Give it to me.

But hell, if you just gave me wild and strange,
I'd probably turn around around and turn it into a desk job,
And next week I'd just beg you for more.

When I was more than ready to abandon the corruption of rage
And the stained pages of the scrapbooks that you left behind in my living room,
The ones that I couldn’t burn for four months
And when I first noticed the advertisements for the pillar, how anticipatory my soul!
Up to where you weren’t
Where he wasn’t
Where nobody was but me
To where I, like the builders of the Tower of Babel, could reach out to Heaven
And scrape the utters of the clouds with my fingernails
From here I fantasized that I could claw away the scraps of air and atmosphere
And pour out my fifteen months of insomnia, profanity, and callous nightmares into the stars
And the vacuum of space would accept my refuse openly, willingly, begging me for more
The visage of God would grant to me perspective of the highest kind
To stare into the past, and render the explosive events my previous century fuse-less
Then to light a new candle of my own to burn with the intent to forgive

When I arrived at the summit, I discovered a rusted, overgrown sign that read
"Beware, you who would attempt to climb this pillar of freedom"
You who would attempt to overcome indecision to replace old with new
For love that lived in the womb, but was stillborn is better than
“What I wasn’t ever sure of with you.”
And purgatory is this high-dive before the new lovers plunge
So shackle them to the ground.

But

if from thence thou shalt seek the LORD thy God, thou shalt find him, if thou seek him with all thy heart and with all thy soul. When thou art in tribulation, and all these things are come upon thee, even in the latter days, if thou turn to the LORD thy God, and shalt be obedient unto his voice;(For the LORD thy God is a merciful God;) he will not forsake thee, neither destroy thee, nor forget the covenant of thy fathers which he sware unto them.

Prophets build their own graves,

then burn, burn with anointed oils and sacrificial fire.
Wise prophets use not their own tongues,
for these devices often prove the incendiary flint that strokes the flames.

There isn't any rest for liars in a sarcophagus.
And out of my righteous anger, I want to hope that the stone tomb seals your body for eternity, and keeps you away from sunshine and happy rays.
And thereby forever seals you away from my rage and indignation.

Comme si rien ne s'était. Laissez ce être.

On the day that I show up, they will be completely out of their forgiveness supplies.

Post-modernism, you are an interesting mistress, to say the least.
Do you and I believe in anything, now?
Except that the sun rises and it sets, and the moon sometimes follows in its wake.
But even that is in question, because in 5 billion years a red dwarf will destroy the Earth anyways.
Besides that, we question the world.
We question God and man and the Devil in the sands.
Our philosophies are just clothes to be tried on and discarded when it becomes proven that they do not fit.
For no shoe covers all variables, no shoe completely fits.
And Man was born naked, anyways.
Post-modernism, really means, post-belief in anything.
And the absence of concrete to seal our faith.

Oui!

C'est le premier chanson d'où nous chantons avec les dinosaurs!


Vous etes bienvenue, internet.

To Heroin.

I was at a house party in Chicago.
With a friend that I had known since I had left Ohio.
We were just sitting down and a few drinks were passed around.
And people started leaving.
And the alcohol started deceiving.
The lights went out.
I opened a bedroom door.
And I saw my friend, face down on the floor.
Some poor little girl was in the corner, staring at the body.
She was shaking, she was quivering.
I checked his pulse, then I closed his eyes.
I’ll tell you this, though, I wasn’t surprised.
I had seen that look of heroin on another friend that had died.
And I turned to the toddler looking for answers.
She said,
“And the needle went in.
And the man went out.”

When I got there, I called the girls from my cell phone. It was my last time to hold that thing. This is symbolic. I called them, told them that I was getting on a boat and crossing that damn ocean, if it killed me. They told me that they trusted me, and I told them that I loved them. That nobody in the world was going to know where I was for a while, but that when I landed somewhere, that I swore to God that I would write them. And everything would be okay. They cried, I cried. A little. Then I destroyed that cursed digital thing. I smashed it with my boot, and laughed when I did it. I picked up what was left, and threw it off the pier, into God’s big water. I threw my contact with the world into God’s ocean, where it would be rendered utterly useless for communication. And I laughed again, for the first time in weeks.

C’est Pas Suffit.

It’s the dichotomy that screams, “release me, release me,” so that it can be judged.
It can be seen doing good or doing evil as it pleases, according to those primitive diseases.
And I think, “I want to be primitive; to be the basest of beasts.”
To surrender to that of the romanticists, so that Rousseau and Emile and I could have fireside chats.
So then our Heavenly Father could look me in the eyes and say, “at least you did this with passion.”
And then I will turn on that metaphoric Bunsen burner and heat up my life, and God knows I’ll never be lukewarm again.
Goodbye, then, you seven not cold but not hot churches of lore; my body is a temple, and it wants the sacrifices that it wants.
And today it wants drastic action, and so commands me, “do what I tell you.”
He commands me to be primitive.

But thinking back on how we got here, I sure as hell notice the pattern.
We merry men, we young few blessed youth, we think of life now as the search for a partner.
Then we become devastated by a woman, and in recoil think of life as the pursuit of pleasure.
Then we take that godly step back and crucify our consciences.
We burn our old ways, drive nails through the wrists and ankles of how we spent our old days.
Then we drag our lives through the ecclesiastical dictionary, screaming, “freedom from the flesh.”

But excuse me, Saint Augustine.
Sexuality is a hard-wired into our skins.
So no matter how hard we try to repress our physicality, it rends and destroys the cage bars.
It gets what it wants.
No matter how much we fight it and we hate it, we all love sex.
No matter how much little boys are disgusted by it, they all love little girls.
Men love women, and women love men.
And, I am sorry holy bishop, Song of Solomon is full of intimacy, whether you teach it in church or not.

So what than is the balance between Christ and carnal?
Should I be a celibate priest, who burns adulteresses and whores at the stake?
Should I be hungry man, who lives only for flesh, like a savage?
Which is more unholy, the overzealous religious criminal, written about by the Holy Roman imperialists?
Or the noble savage, who rapes and burns and pillages to fill his body’s demands?
How do I merge my faith and my flesh?
All of the theological debate is seemingly rendered unpractical, and so the dichotomy of good and evil wages its eternal war indefinitely.

Donc c’est pas suffit.

I take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

-Sharon Olds

Cigarettes are demons, demons, demons.

"I'll tell you this thing, boy, and you'ld better believe it.

No matter how much you love somebody, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter one bit.
You can't make anybody love you;
And the chances are that they don't, anyway."


Thanks, Pops.

Jolene, I ain't about to go straight.

Mother Mary comes to me, and whispers words of wisdom; she says, "Let it be."