hello, dsm-5, i'd like a consult

 I no longer

think

I follow

trump

whose thinking

is 

pig-slop and

rotten cabbage

but it's

ok

those who

love him

tell us

he's sane and

we're not

so, there's that

but don’t open your mouth

 When nothing

Is being

Said

Listen carefully

What you hear

Is nothing

Worth repeating

in the beginning

 

At Tuesday Evening Conversation:

In the Beginning

An Intimate Origin Story 

Monday, 12jan2026

 

Brian McLaren reflects on the miraculous creation of the cosmos and everything in it:

The first and greatest surprise—a miracle, really—is this: that anything exists at all…. The first pages of the Bible and the best thinking of today’s scientists are in full agreement: it all began in the beginning, when space and time, energy and matter, gravity and light, burst or bloomed or banged into being. In light of the Genesis story, we would say that the possibility of this universe overflowed into actuality as God, the Creative Spirit, uttered the original joyful invitation: Let it be! And in response, what happened? Light. Time. Space. Matter. Motion. Sea. Stone. Fish. Sparrow. You. Me. Enjoying the unspeakable gift and privilege of being here, being alive….

Genesis means “beginnings.” It speaks through deep, multilayered poetry and wild, ancient stories. The poetry and stories of Genesis reveal deep truths that can help us be more fully alive today. They dare to proclaim that the universe is God’s self-expression, God’s speech act. That means that everything everywhere is always essentially holy, spiritual, valuable, meaningful. All matter matters.

Through the book of Genesis we encounter a story of goodness and interconnectedness. Genesis tells us that the universe is good—a truth so important it gets repeated like the theme of a song…. Every river or hill or valley or forest is good. Skin? Good. Bone? Good. Mating and eating and breathing and giving birth and growing old? Good, good, good. All are good. Life is good.

The best thing in Genesis is not simply human beings, but the whole creation considered and enjoyed together, as a beautiful, integrated whole, and us a part. The poetry of Genesis describes the “very goodness” that comes at the end of a long process of creation … when all the parts, including us, are working together as one whole. That harmonious whole is so good that the Creator takes a day off, as it were, just to enjoy it. That day of restful enjoyment tells us that the purpose of existence isn’t money or power or fame or security or anything less than this: to participate in the goodness and beauty and aliveness of creation….

According to the first creation story, you are part of creation. You are made from common soil … dust, Genesis says; stardust, astronomers tell us … soil that becomes watermelons and grain and apples and peanuts, and then, they become food, and then that food becomes you…. Together with all living things, you share the breath of life, participating in the same cycles of birth and death, reproduction and recycling and renewal. You, with them, are part of the story of creation—different branches on the tree of life. In that story, you are connected and related to everything everywhere. In fact, that is a good partial definition of God: God is the one through whom we are related and connected to everything.

https://cac.org/daily-meditations/an-intimate-origin-story/ 

no sh*t, really

 But he shot her

Dead

   That’s ok

Shouldn’t there be

An investigation?

     Don’t worry about it

But he shot her

Dead 

     That’s ok 

where is away, as in run away

 I suspect

A time is coming

Moral insanity

Will kill immoralists

There’s no need for further

Fret, something (fate?

God? Inner incongruity?)

Will destroy ugly immorality

We won’t believe our eyes

Bad administrators (et al)

Will melt like nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark

Proving art and life reconstitute what is good

lame, as bird calls me out

 I saw Jesus yesterday

Limping in Hannaford 

I prayed for this

Limping Jesus

“You're praying

For me?” Jesus said.

“Yeah, I am.” I said

Looking for soup

this one, this one, this one

 Dawn

Fingering beads

He prays:

Deus meus

Et omnia

Fiat mihi 

Voluntas tua

Secundum ΛΟΓΟΣ

(λόγος) 

Verbum tuum

Prosit!   

He prays

Fingering beads

Dawning

Divine Expression

as 2am rolls around

 I want to be awake when I die

want to see the darkness 

step up to my face

to hear senses say bye bye

brain switch off light

feet disappear beneath knees

I won’t have anything to say

no prayer, no bargaining --

what a shame to leave

undrunk

coffee milk

in refrigerator

huh, what trouble, indeed

 Maybe Hobbes was right 

and Locke wrong.

I hope not. And I don’t.

Hope is the stretching of luck.

Perhaps I’d rather not know.

Have some tuna fish and ginger ale

Contemplate Jeremiah Johnson

Chewing on rabbit from spit

As fellow mountain man rides off

we miserabilists

 Schopenhauer cheers me.

Sometimes to work out what something is, it is useful to contemplate its opposite. Arthur Schopenhauer is probably the best known miserabilist in the history of philosophy. Although he was once prosecuted for pushing his landlady down a flight of stairs, he was not on the whole an evil man. He thought ethics should be based upon compassion, and the compassion he felt both for animals and for his fellow humans can often be glimpsed in his writings. He was not bad, but he could be very grumpy and was a thorough pessimist. Even if he conceded occasionally that things could be worse, he probably would have added: “And they soon will be!” He even wrote a book called Studies in Pessimism. 

 https://philosophynow.org/issues/171/Happy_Thoughts

Although, I do hope his landlady recovered without much suffering.

Apart from her, I can think of several political landlords for whom a non-lethal tumble down to the well of a staircase would not be an undesirable occasion.

“Happiness is a mystery like religion, and should never be rationalized.” G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

Please, ignore my thinking, I am a religious man.

bury them far away and deep

 The mean and ugly ones

Are already dead

May they go away 

Leave us in peace

Finding whatever distorted

Afterlife they’ve fashioned

time always tells

 No argument

No factual evidence

Will convince

Liars and corrupts

They are wrong

Only time, heart attacks

Cancer or a stroke

Will get their

Attention — how’re

You guys feeling?

five stanzas, thirteen words, seventeen syllables

To be

Free

Becoming

What is

Is

Itself

To be

Free

All

Alone

feels like unnaming suffices

 Faint blue gray

Morning eaves

Drip

We are all

Alone

No bird sings

Cracked shell

Scattered on 

Snow

nessuna chiamata

 Mostly quiet

This dark night

Nothing else

Only itself

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

in the few seconds remaining, i’d like to say

“Nothing is more important than family.” 

(That’s the copy for an advertisement for the ACLU.)

It doesn’t surprise me they’ve become Buddhists --

“Nothing” needs to be explored

I notice that my primary strategy is to give up

I leave things, jobs, houses, organizations --

positive take, letting go; negative take, bailing out;

as plane plummets (state, soul) jump and tumble

as I fall I ponder what will happen when I hit ground,

(here it comes! here it comes!) 

I think I'll pray -- what will I say?

ok, I’ve got it, "Dear God, my name is . . . uh oh” (sp*#@!lat)

as your soul, so the land

Rethinking my life

I now know uselessness

We have a president 

Who is troublesome

Not I, not anybody

Can do anything

About him — so we 

Watch and wonder

Exactly how he will

Kill us, democracy

America itself

why we don’t care what happens to them

 In the inch

Of Maine 

Where I live

No bombs

In the mind

Of America

It can do

Nothing wrong

In the realm

Of right and wrong

We pass, preferring

Fear and doubt

There are no tanks

On road, no missiles

Destroying homes —

We are safe and sound

depletion

 One by one

I let fall my interests

Soon, nothing left —

Nothing gained

mots difficiles

 Q: Have you learned nothing?

A: [thinks a while]

     Yes, yes I have.

Q: [unsure of the ambiguity]

That’ll teach you.

 A; [realizes he has nothing to say]

     [and can’t say it]

rarely and reluctantly, closeness itself

Do you write poetry?

    No, I don’t.

What do you write?

Words 

Oh! 

 “As birds’ wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight” (Williams et al. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. Vol.1, 1909-1939 235). https://www.theintima.org/re-embodying-medicine-william-carlos-williams-and-the-ethics-of-attention#:~:text=Yes%2C%20profound%20concepts%20arise%20in,about%20the%20process%20of%20observation.

No one would accuse me of writing poetry.

Czesław Milosz ended his poem Ars Poetica? with these lines: 

The purpose of poetry is to remind us   

how difficult it is to remain just one person,   

for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,   

and invisible guests come in and out at will.

What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry,   

as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,   

under unbearable duress and only with the hope   

that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49455/ars-poetica-56d22b8f31558

 Goethe wrote:

"Words are but noise and smoke" (or "Names are but sound and smoke, / Obscuring heavenly light”         (--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Faust, Part One)

 It occurs to me that what we call “God” is our worded approximation of inner experience finding Itself in the appearing landscape. 

For some folks this is ‘seeing' God. For some this is ‘hearing' God or ‘speaking with’ God. These are perfectly adequate approximations. 

 

approximation | əˌpräksəˈmāSHən | 

noun 

a value or quantity that is nearly but not exactly correct: these figures are only approximations. 

• a thing that is similar to something else, but is not exactly the same: the band smashed up their equipment in an approximation of rock star behavior.

            . . . 

approximation

noun

1 a general approximation is that a ten degree rise in temperature doubles the rate of reaction. estimate, estimation, guess, conjecture, rough calculation, rough idea, surmise; guesswork; informal guesstimate; North American English informal ballpark figure.

2 we can only look for an approximation to the truth about these matters. semblance, outward appearance, likeness, resemblance, similarity, correspondence, comparison.   (Dictionary)

It has been said that no one has ever seen God, except:

• John 1:18: "No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known" (NIV).

• 1 John 4:12: Also states, "No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us”. 

Perhaps poetry is the energy of the transcendent breathed into language. 

And for our Christian brothers and sisters, what they call ‘Christ’ is the embodied expression 

of God languaged into human form.

Rumi wrote that "Silence is the language of God; all else is poor translation.”

John of the Cross said, "God's first language is silence.”

Perhaps real poetry is more deflection than reflection. A via negativa. All that can be unsaid, all that can be unseen, residing within each ding-an-sich (see Kant), there, but unmanifest:

In Kantian philosophy, the thing-in-itself (German: Ding an sich) is the status of objects as they are, independent of representation and observation. The concept of the thing-in-itself was introduced by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, and over the following centuries was met with controversy among later philosophers.^[1] It is closely related to Kant's concept of noumena or the objects of inquiry, as opposed to phenomena, its manifestations. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing-in-itself

Poetry is the process allowing things to be themselves with, perhaps, appreciation and contemplative respect.

Our tendency as humans is to make things other than they are. We wish to fashion things according to our preferences. We want to own things. We want to own persons. 

To be well-within-oneself, to let something be-itself, is a hard-sell for our acquisitive nature.

I’m not saying that the best poetry is unwritten.

But close to it.

Intimately close to it.

parlare per dissuadere qualcuno dal buttarsi giù

 The last

Funeral you

Attend is

Your own

I will

Not commit

Suicide in

Winter

Too cold

Hard ground

Mittened hands

Slippery ice

Nor spring

Too muddy

Black flies

Mosquitoes 

Screw it

Death has

To be

No bother

The way

Orange juice

Or farina

Just happens

The other

Side of

Fresh coffee

Buttered  toast

does anybody know what time it is

Thursday

Is 

One more

Reason

To 

Stop

Naming

Anything

Ready?

What is

Today?

Eh?

I manage

To stay up

Til midnight

And it’s 

The wrong day

Happy 2 January!

Everything

Is vacated, just

Another Friday

A snoring dog

Shikantaza

Near full moon

but it moves (eppur si muove)

 Finish Suor Maria Celeste’s story along with that of her father Galileo Galilei. The book was Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel. (1999).

The delight of it. The trouble they’d seen.

The hubris of power and choosing belief over learning.

How we deprive others and make them suffer.

license plate said fitzie

 Remind me

How anything matters

But eyes recognizing

Simple love

As it occurs

No fanfare

No grand bows

Brown paper bag

Three people hug

Absence of fourth

Middle of B&Gs

Rockport Maine

Last day of year

a measured voice, an immeasurable truth

Amid the noise, a calm wisdom, with a perfect name, Jane Goodall:

https://bsky.app/profile/cajunblue.bsky.social/post/3mbck5q65qs2s

cheers!

we want to know what love is

 Walking harbor

After hugging man 

whose wife just died

Brings me to Quaker sitting

Hands gassho and clap 

Enfolding obscurity

mise en scene

A play in four lines: 

 Let’s pretend god exists.

     Pretend?

Yeah, pretend.

     Who do you think you're talking to?

[long pause]

[nothing else is heard]

Critics will love this work. They’ll compare it to Sartre and Ionesco. It will probably have only a brief run off-broadway, then on to the college theatre circuit. The costs these days are staggering.

It’s the final stage direction that will fill columns in daily newspapers. They’ll ask — how is it possible to hear nothing else?

You, you in your 3rd floor walk-up in Chicago— you tell them!

fixated

 Too cold

Ice, snow in dooryard

Too cold

Body, heart, mind

energy transferred

Doris, our elder, sent this Merwin poem yesterday: 

To the New Year 

With what stillness at last 

you appear in the valley 

your first sunlight reaching down 

to touch the tips of a few 

high leaves that do not stir 

as though they had not noticed 

and did not know you at all 

then the voice of a dove calls 

from far away in itself 

to the hush of the morning 

so this is the sound of you 

here and now whether or not 

anyone hears it this is 

where we have come with our age 

our knowledge such as it is 

and our hopes such as they are 

invisible before us 

untouched and still possible                              

 —W.S. Merwin

He might be writing about the new year, his true self, or, perhaps, God. Poems are like that. Once they leave home, they are both homeless and belong to everyone.

I ask God:

    Who do people say you are?

        You talking to me? 

    Yeah, you.

        People think the damnedist things. 

    Like?

        Like I'm breath.

    Are you, breath?

        Yeah, I am.

    What else?

        Some say I'm everything.

    Are you?

        Yeah, I am.

    What else?

        Nothing.

    Are you?

        Yeah.

Talking to God is awkward. I know God doesn't talk out loud, that I make it up, phrase whatever comes to mind. I know that I'm probably just having an inner dialogue with myself. 

Merwin wrote 

from far away in itself 

to the hush of the morning 

so this is the sound of you 

I like that.

God and my self and the new year -- each sounds that way.

Saying nothing other than distant hush, stillness, sunlight reaching down.

In 1957, as I entered high school, I read Allen Ginsberg in a poem saying "Poet is Priest." It was a line in his "Death to Van Goth's Ear".

It caught my attention. I'd just turned twelve. It's when I began my love of poetry. It had a sacramental implimentation.  The implication for me was an exclaustrated creativity that cycled through my years, then decades, into a lifetime of being just outside the monastic cell of religious horarium, just outside the monastic enclosure whose signage seemed to say -- "stay away, but stay close."

Consecration is an inner act of reverence to all that belongs.

When the priest at mass echoing Jesus used to say "Hoc est corpus meum" (This is my body) -- I heard also "per omnia secular secularum" (through all ages of ages, now is forever, all is what is here). My bastardized translation and odd understanding threw me into the scripture of prophecy, poetry, and projective verse.

In developing his poetics, [Charles] Olson drew from a wide array of influences, including mythology, the history and geography of Gloucester, and the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Olson believed that the act of poetic creation should be connected to a primordial dimension of human existence. He wrote in his landmark essay “Projective Verse” (1950) that poetry was a form of “energy transferred from where the poet got it” to the reader. In distinction from the “closed form” of conventional poetic meter, Olson proposed an “open field” that “projects” organically from the poem’s content—i.e., the perception of the poet who interacts with and yet is an integral part of the poet’s immediate environment. Olson used the duration of a human breath, a basic human function that conveyed a poet’s vital energy, as the measure of a poetic line.  

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Charles-Olson#ref1106576

I would read Olson, Creeley, Williams, Merwin, Ginsberg, Rich, Snyder, Antoninus, Kinnell, Eliot, Pound, Duncan, Empson, Edson, Harjo, Hirshfield, Paston, Basho, Issa, Buson, Takahashi, Sakaki --among many others.

Poet was priest for me.

Poems, scripture.

The poetic, my monastery.

Today, in this cell, this poetic -- i.e. "an imaginative sensitive emotional thoughtful expression" (dictionary) of what is revealing itself -- is the muted vocation that cloisters me in daily practice.

This by Takahashi:

Destruction

by Shinkichi Takahashi

        English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto

            Original Language Japanese

The universe is forever falling apart --

No need to push the button,

It collapses at a finger's touch:

Why, it barely hangs on the tail of a sparrow's eye.

The universe is so much eye secretion,

Hordes leap from the tips

Of your nostril hairs. Lift your right hand:

It's in your palm. There's room enough

On the sparrow's eyelash for the whole.

A paltry thing, the universe:

Here is all the strength, here the greatest strength.

You and the sparrow are one

And, should he wish, he can crush you.

The universe trembles before him.