come on along get happy

 I know you think you’re

special — you’re not — unless it’s

nothing special — eh?

oh, that’s why many do it

 Drugs and alcohol

Are edge of death inquiry

Is life worth living

day of picidae

 It crosses my mind

Stark symbol of sūnyāta

Shades every tree —

Carving picidae wood chips

Shaping dropped freedom to Earth

colloquia commutati (changing conversation)

 Conversation is the sacrament of wording inner inquiry face to face with another.

There’s no trick to it, except for the part where you avoid trying to be smart, ignore the temptation to be contrarily snarky, and give up the pretense that you’re not who you really are.

Otherwise, it’s a walk in the park.

And grace follows.

grace fills the clean mold of this moment

 At prison this morning, two poems by Ted Kooser:

Flying at Night

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations. 

Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies 

like a snowflake falling on water. Below us, 

some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death, 

snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn 

back into the little system of his care. 

All night, the cities, like shimmering novas, 

tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

--Ted Kooser, Published in "Flying at Night"

And: 

At the Cancer Clinic

She is being helped toward the open door 

that leads to the examining rooms 

by two young women I take to be her sisters. 

Each bends to the weight of an arm 

and steps with the straight, tough bearing 

of courage. At what must seem to be 

a great distance, a nurse holds the door, 

smiling and calling encouragement. 

How patient she is in the crisp white sails 

of her clothes. The sick woman 

peers from under her funny knit cap 

to watch each foot swing scuffing forward 

and take its turn under her weight. 

There is no restlessness or impatience 

or anger anywhere in sight. Grace 

fills the clean mold of this moment 

and all the shuffling magazines grow still. 

—Ted Kooser, from Delights & Shadows, Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA 2004

The joy of looking at, and speaking with,  such good poems and willing participants.

it isn’t very hard to do, pretend

 So much of contemporary culture is dissatisfying.

Siddhartha Gautama was right about the suffering.

There’s a lot of it around.

There’s a lot of people who inflict it.

wood plate in drainer

stone under yew bush

bamboo wind chime without breeze

I become recluse

quiet of house silent soul

no memory no regret

given a chance

chipmunk on front porch

should be gone by now out screen

open door -- cat naps

acknowledging other times, the caved

 If I were a philosopher I would question the ontological foundation of truth and the epistemology of knowledge as revelatory of accurate discernment.

If I were a poet I’d investigate the existential thereness of inner reality where word resides speaking itself up from inception through reception into expression with lamenting joy.

If I were a theologian I would follow the journey of God inside/out from centerless center to edgeless circumference while listening to soundless silence turning its head to discern the lovely motionless movement of the inchoate through everything emerging into manifestation coming to something without knowing why.

But I’m not.

I am a mind and mouth agape at the idiocy of my beloved brothers and sisters attaching themselves to the idiocy and sucker-show snake-oil ruse of a deficient man running numbers on a gullible audience.

All day today, reporters fact checked Trump’s statements, proving them lies. But lies have never damaged him; they reinforce his dominance by forcing subordinates to agree that the person in charge gets to determine what reality is. Victims must surrender either their integrity or their ownership of their own perceptions; in either case, once they have agreed to a deliberate lie, it becomes harder to challenge later ones since that means acknowledging the other times they caved.

(—Heather Cox Richardson, Letters From An American, 11Sept.24)

Such reality is fallacious.

Mendacious.

And yet, for many, their morning, noon, and evening hemlock.

a madman

speaks drivel

promising a mouse

for every pocket

calling himself 

retribution and

fomenting

vinegary dissociation

an I-scream pop

of poison  

 It’s still the same old story.

We are suckers being born every minute as minúte mimesis.

community

 We look at those who’ve died on 9/11

They are in our yards on our front steps —

I bow to them to you to us as we watch and remember

Right here, in front of us, they step and turn and circle our lives

desolation and degradation

 Watched Philly debate 

One person was clear and sane

The other, (a shame)

gone away, there it is

Reading  Richard Kearney’s Anatheism: [Returning to God After God], (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture) 2011.

Looking up a reference, I come across this:

The game of “fort-da” was invented by Freud’s grandson, who was then one and a half years old (1955: 14–17). In the simplest form of this play, the child had a piece of string attached to a wooden spool which he threw from him, murmuring “o-o-o-o,” then pulled back, saying “da.” Freud (and the child’s mother) interpreted the first sound as the child’s version of “fort” (“gone away”), the second as the German for “there” (as in English “there it is!”). Freud associated this game with the child’s attempt to assert mastery in play to compensate for an emotionally fraught situation where he had no control, his mother’s occasional excursions from the household without him (1955: 15). Freud also linked the empowerment of this early game with the child’s apparent lack of reaction to his mother’s death several years later (1955, 16, n. 1).

—Derrida/Fort-Da: Deconstructing Play, by Alan Aycock

God after the death of God, whether in one’s personal life or in the cultural milieu wherein no easy recognition of the God once known (or thought to be known) is made.

Where has God gone? And what the possibility of return — in what conceivable or experienceable shape or form? Or, stranger still, what kenotic self-beyonding manifestation would be discernible?

To speak of God is to word energy that conceivably might morph into a temporary encounter-able moment.

In the depths of silence, that coming-to-word is our attentive consciousness readying itself for a potentially felt passing mystery. 

There and gone.

To return, once, (more)?

watch

 It is time

You ask, What time is it?

You meet yourself

the first casualty

Twin Towers up in smoke

bodies falling to ground

I wish I could trust that

truth is being told

battery notion of soul

memory is not the thing itself

meaning is itself

and remains here

nothing travels with the soul

wordless watching

 jump into oblivion

or be crushed by millions of tons

choice on 9/11

time moves through space

God is time — hear it

We are contemporaries 

We, with time, are — here

o-range-ing causes and conditions

Like the wind that blows hard

he goes nowhere in a hurry

threatening everybody

sixty one years, gone, bye

 Watch film Parkland about the hospital in Texas. Listen to Mark Lane. Recollect the early sixties.

Still interested in the Warren Commission Report following JFK killing.

The kill shot. The evidence. The things misrepresented. The odd conclusions.

The curious thing about truth is how it hides in plain sight yet requires clear-eyed and clear-minded encounter.

That's all. 

A sad event. 

An incomplete and unsatisfying experience of deferred integrity.