solo, e tutto solo

 When I lost

My sanity

I looked

Around

To try to

Find it again

No luck

It was gone

So I closed door

To this enclave

And stayed crazy

As day goes

Night comes

Alone, and all alone

no country song, this hymn to jesus

This slow-moving invasion

of America by billionaire oligarchs

and a deranged chief executive

is getting 

worse 

and worse

they think their camouflage army

assault guns and surly bully attitude

will intimidate and suppress the people

which they do and are

they believe in ugliness

laugh at compassion

there will be war

we will be gunned down

they will win

ugliness is in the white house

arrogance and stupidity wear red hats

the living dead count bitcoin and stocks

I have no gun

no desire to kill

but they do, they will

so, I say goodbye

thanks for the chocolate donuts

there's no living with ugliness

Jesus ain't coming back

they put a sack over his head

he ain't nothing to us they said

ok, I'm deluded, the people will

never let fools and fascists take over — (right)

this land, these minds, true hearts -- (fight)

being prayed through, the vision of god

 To pray

Eyes open

Facing God

We wonder

Who sees

What how

Do we

See through

God

Or does

God see

Through us

It is said

No one sees

God and lives

But is to see

Through God

Our vocation

To be 

Seen through

What prayer is

Why so many

Do not pray, unwanting

To be seen through

Transparency is

The longing of God

Our being

Prayed through

Praying through

Clearing wisdom

what wisdom knows, what love shows

 Pray

Facing

God

our northern neighbor(s) see us differently

"America isn't the way it is because he's president, he's president because America is the way it is."  

-(--commentator on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 2026)

. . .

Then further north (so to speak):

   “Pretending what is true is not true, or that what is is not, is actual insanity. Take it from me, I am sanity, be more like me. “

   (—God)

by any other hand

This sad time

Night, White

House murders poet

Words are fingers

Gun is mind

Bullets in her face

thank you for asking

In response to the New York Times interview "We Pressed Trump on His Conclusion About the ICE Shooting. Here’s What He Said." with Donald Trump held 7jan26, my comment: 

What is equally nauseating to Ms. Good's horrible encounter with awful men imposing their deadly will on her -- is the callous and hypocritical narrative of the event by Homeland Secretary and President.  

 

Such intentional gaslighting, being told what we actually see is not what we are seeing, is the stuff of terrifying control and abuse.  

 

We are being trafficked into false narrative and dystopian future.

 One more thing -- Maybe its just me, but there's something darkly comical about the scenario where a reporter walks up to a man holding a bloody knife with a dead body at their feet, and asking the question of the perpetrator "How do you feel about your encounter?" 

ekpyrosis and onagrcracy

 I take swaths from Chris Hedges today on substack. Sometimes intellectual heft is the only solace. Where else do words like "ekpyrosis" and "onagrcracy" pop up and display themselves?

Ekpyrosis, the inevitable conflagration that destroys the world according to the ancient Stoics, is part of the cyclical nature of time. There is no escape. Fortuna. There is a time for individual death. There is a time for collective death. In the end, with weary citizens yearning for extinction, empires light their own funeral pyre.

... 

Our high priests of war, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, Stephen Miller and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Dan “Razin” Caine, are no different from the fools and charlatans who snuffed out empires of the past — the haughty leaders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the militarists in imperial Germany and the hapless court of Tsarist Russia in World War I. They were followed by the fascists in Italy under Benito Mussolini, Germany under Adolf Hitler and the military rulers of imperial Japan in World War II.  

...

These stunted human beings are unable to read others. They threaten. They terrorize. They kill. The art of power politics between nations or individuals is far beyond their tiny imaginations. They lack the intelligence — emotional and intellectual — to cope with the complex, ever-shifting sands of old and new alliances. They cannot see themselves as the world sees them. 

 

Diplomacy is often a dark and deceptive art. It is by its nature manipulative. But it requires an understanding of other cultures and traditions. It requires getting inside the heads of adversaries and allies. For Trump and his minions, this is an impossibility.

...

The Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce quipped that fascism had created a fourth form of government, “onagrocracy,” a government by braying asses, to add to Aristotle’s traditional triumvirate of tyranny, oligarchy and democracy. 

 

Our ruling class, Democrats and Republicans, piece by piece, dismantled democracy. In Germany and Italy, the constitutional state, as well, collapsed long before the arrival of fascism. Trump, who is the symptom, not the disease, inherited the corpse. He is making good use of it. 

 

(THE CHRIS HEDGES REPORT, Grand Illusion, We are cursed by what the historian Barbara Tuchman calls the “bellicose frivolity of senile empires.”, CHRIS HEDGES, JAN 08, 2026, SUBSTACK) 

I'm happy to read those who still have their wits about them.

I seem to have severely misplaced mine these days. 

ohne zu wissen, warum oder warum nicht

 Tires hissing road

This cloudy morning

Eaves dripping

Ice agent

Blows out brains

Of poet mom

Breaks my spirit

The lies told

The ugly lying mouths 

I withdraw

Deeper within

Darkness

Giving hard

Cold truth chance

To thaw

nos yeux ne voient pas ce qu'ils voient, paraît-il

 Good is murdered

nausiating noem 

refuses truth

Good dies

trump lies

heartbroken cries

Good is gaslit

blatant dissembling

ugly, ugly, ugly

una collina spoglia

Back 2000 years ago there was a stated confidence that if you ask God, you will receive.

Over those 2000 years not a whole lot has come from such confidence. Yet the words are repeated like a mantra wishing to be true.

As though belief were all you needed. 

Whatever we ask God,

we shall receive,

because we keep his commandments

and live the kind of life that he wants.

His commandments are these:

that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ

and that we love one another

as he told us to.

Whoever keeps his commandments

lives in God and God lives in him.

We know that he lives in us

by the Spirit that he has given us.

(--from 1 John 3:22-4:6)

 We've been disappointed before. How many times over 2000 years? More than a few I suspect.

Maybe to get a favorable prayer response you'd have to pay to play. The way it works with President Trump. Pay him, and your requests are granted. Pay him a lot and big requests, big pardons, are granted.

I admit to liking the idea that one "lives in God and God in him." It's a good script. Fits in print. The idea.

These days prayer feels like someone quoting the Constitution and the Separation of Powers -- both regaled. Good copy. Fits in print. 

I admit to packing my valise and boarding a train to agnostic unbelief. It's not a far destination. A cup of coffee and a tuna fish sandwich help sustain the trip. Countryside passes with little beckoning. Fact is I could just get off anywhere and feel right at home in an aborted attempt to reach the last station.

The carefully crafted rails of scripted testament would go on with no rider. There would be broad fields rising to a bare hill from which to look back over the landscape. There's no one there. 

It's fine that so many ask and ask and ask. The sick ask. The dying ask. Those who want more for themselves or their families ask. Warmongers ask for a blessing. The well-fed ask for continued good luck in the stock market. The baseball player rounding third in home-run trot makes sign of cross in a public show of gratitude. The trudging farm laborer prays to make it to his casa and dinner.

I'll leave it there. In the field. It is dusk. Birds have sung and gone. So has the sun. 

The lonely expanse doesn't evoke anything but the dying of light and cooling of temperature.

The rails curve in silence.

Here is the only destination without travel plans.

Whether or not there's a cat snoozing on your lap, the moment, its bare offering, passes . 

parti sans laisser de traces

 Where did I go?

I was here not long ago

Now I don’t know

à l'intérieur et à l'extérieur

 Long time ago, Augustine (354--430AD):

That quote, "Men go forth to wonder at the heights of mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the long courses of rivers, the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motion of the stars; and they pass by themselves without wondering," is from St. Augustine of Hippo, found in his Confessions, highlighting how people marvel at external wonders but overlook the greater wonder of the self, made in God's image, and the divine within.  (—from ai re Augustine’s quote)

And there it is.

The ‘divine within’ — is the natural without.

We look, from within, as the without.

Behold what is within without; behold what is without within.

Augustine saw it. 

We are within what is without.

θεοφάνεια

Epiphany

That which is

Of itself

Shows through

What is

Itself

Now

Each being

Realizing

Wholly

Itself

Aseity

dont talk of hope, i ve heard that word before

 Maybe hopelessness 

is more desirable 

than trying to be hopeful.

These days hope is 

irrational swag.

Supreme Court 

took away hope

Said president could do

Justice-free

Anything he wanted

Republican congress

Took away hope when they

Took paralysis drug and

Sit stone-faced 

staring at nothing

Democrats are looking for

A roadside diner

For quick breakfast

Before beginning

Hibernation escape

Church opens 

Collection envelopes

Finds quarters 

Immediately depositing

Into pedophile account

No, hope has sold out

Of stores and hearts

Leaving empty aisles

Empty ventricles

Empty eyes

sometimes old zen masters are just old

Quote on screen: “There is nothing outside.” (Linji)

       Oh, stop it!

Ok, there is something outside.

       No, thats not it. There is nothing inside.

Look, now you're just talking smack.

       I don’t know how to tell you this — you’re dead, and there’s nothing either inside or outside.

. . .

[screen goes black, there are no credits, a voiceover is heard saying “Are we done here?”]

there’s a new figlio di dio in town

 Our teacher, 

(Beloved and bedeviled)

Donald Trump, tells

 us it is ok to punch

 in the face anybody 

we want to punch.

All the prior

Education we had

Is now overthrown

By someone trustworthy

Who lives an

Exemplary life.

The guy from Nazareth’s

Time  is over

We now have a new

Savior and redeemer

Who tells us good is

Bad and evil is good

We’ve waited

A long time to hear such 

Debilitating fallaciousness

From the new

Il capo dei capi, 

non scherzo.

blasted zen teachers

  Yo, Dogen!

     Yes?

Waddya mean “Life is one continuous mistake!”

     Just that.

Really?

     Really!

at distance sitting in with sangha in augusta

 Fusatsu

The Ten Grave Precepts

Kennebec River Zen Center

I’ll be working on — “See the perfection; Do not speak of other’s errors or faults.” 

(A slog, for sure.)

never underestimate a throw-away phrase

 God showed up

Where I was

Just sitting

“How are things

In your country?”

God asked —

“Damned

If I know,”

I said —

“You are,

And you do,”

God revealed

Funny how

Words still

Mean something

what is is never not what is

 Dawn doesn't care

About human stupidity

It shows up

Bringing light

To darkest

Night

Saying — here

Try again

How kind

The cosmos

Suggesting life

Without ideology

zen is not difficult, it is impossible: don’t try it

 No barriers

No boundaries

Still

No disturbing

One’s

Edgeless  edge

Zen students

All, we reside

In cornerless

Whole

Not stepping

Over, nor

Remaining behind

This very place

This very

Moment

An entirety

As it is

Each particular

Nescient glance

sorry, can’t hear you

If I had

Something

Hopeful

To say

I would

Say it