everywhere
he is everywhere
in the empty
in the empty, empty air
he is the blue
lost
to the cloud covered sky
the silence
in the welcome here
and the cold stares
of distant compassion
he is the whispered words –
“stay quiet…”
he is the loving intent
in the command
hide your sin
and be embraced
beloved invisible

they disappear
these people around me
vanish as if they never were
strangers and acquaintances
lost to silent scythe
cut down like wheat
well before harvest’s due

yet their light lingers
like ghosts of stars long dead
still seen
bright shadows in the eye
for now

but…

these mannequins of air
do not dance the same
nor cry and laugh
as once they did
before they fell asleep
leaving sanguine images
fading in mind’s mirror

it seems
every word
every combination
of every word
has been written
and
there are no new words
who knew words?
it seems

all the colours
have been seen
every smell
is in and out again
while each crack
in liberty bell hearts
has been followed
described
annotated
cataloged
numbered
and hidden away
no more poems
beauty and love
just autopsies
describing the dead
it seems

what more
can be given
it’s all been
done…redone
our songs
croak endlessly on
from dry throats
past cracked lips
to soothe parched skin
even pain
is not what it was
nothing is real
anymore
we play at it
while our muses
starved to death
for our
aMUSEment
it seems

so why
why keep writing
why add

o
n
e

l
e
t
t
e
r

a
f
t
e
r

a
n
o
t
h
e
r

because
we bleed them
and
where they land
life
for a moment
is felt
anew

it seems

I have noticed something in recent years with the rise of Facebook I would like to call “Facebook Outing” and I want to talk about it a bit. Let us create a definition of the act for the purpose of having a baseline from which to build our discussion.

Facebook Outing – Verb; The act of posting on a friend’s wall in a way that makes public a detail about said friend’s life that they have not actually publicized yet.

For instance –

“Hey Roderick…loved that diamond ring i saw you buying at the jeweller’s the other day. Anything you want to tell us? :-)”

These posts are almost invariably ended with happy faces sort of in the way needles at the doctor are ended with lollipops; Helps to take away the sting.

There are loads of other examples…”Hey Mary – I hear there’s a bun in the oven! Congrats!!! :-)” or “John – sucks that the cops pulled you over last night…hope the ticket wasn’t too big. :-(” (notice the sad face variation on the happy face…communicates sympathy).

The whole thing is akin to walking into a crowded room or a party and shouting to a friend on the otherside something like ‘Hey – I see you have purchased a new car…I noticed it in your driveway last night while I happened to be wandering by – how do you like it? :-)”

I admit to being puzzled by the whole outing act and find it intriguing from an anthropological point of view. There is a little bit of “I saw it first” action combined with something like gossip given the nature of the medium and the fact that one could just as easily message, email, call or otherwise communicate directly to the individual in question. The fact that one doesn’t suggests the importance of ensuring lots of eyes notice said post and said poster.

I suppose from an etiquette (or netiquette) perspective I find the act rather rude and somewhat presumptuous. It has never happened to me (not yet but now I expect some humorous ones to start cropping up) but I have noticed it enough to wonder about it.

Have you ever been “Facebook outed”? If so post a comment and let me know how it felt and if I am off base here.

I have never been one for mysteries because they require patience and I am not a patient person. I am, in fact, decidedly impatient.

Nevertheless I cannot ignore an entire genre of literature my whole life and claim to be a lover of books and the written word and so I decided to delve into probably the most prolific mystery writer out there with 80 novels and is the best selling author of all time having sold four billion copies.

At any rate I have been reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd which was written in 1926 and feature her main Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. I enjoy reading old books. I like the details of life and how it was lived pre:iPod etc. I like how the language was used differently (clew instead of clue) and how people talked to one-another.

I am by no means a Christie expert by any stretch but I can say that I feel her strongest point so far is in how she writes dialogue. The interplay between characters is incredible and charming. There is a great deal of dry sarcastic wit and a clear eye for how people think.

At one point Christie has Poirot make an observation about women that I believe is quite profound although it would be easy to gloss over. Poirot says:

“Les femmes,” generalized Poirot. “They are marvelous! They invent haphazard – and by miracle they are right. Not that it is that, really. Women observe subconsciously a thousand little details, without knowing that they are doing so. Their subconscious mind adds these little things together- and they call the result intuition. Me, I am very skilled in psychology. I know these things.”

She is also good at developing multidimensional characters. I have to say I am enjoying her writing and will read more.

And me happiest when I compose poems.

            Love, power, the huzza of battle
            Are something, are much;
yet a poem includes them like a pool
            water and reflection.
In me, nature’s divided things—
            tree, mould on tree—
            have their fruition;
I am their core. Let them swap,
bandy, like a flame swerve
I am their mouth; as a mouth I serve.

And I observe how the sensual moths
            big with odour and sunshine
dart into the perilous shrubbery;
or drop their visiting shadows
            upon the garden I one year made
of flowering stone to be a footstool
            for the perfect gods:
            who, friends to the ascending orders,
sustain all passionate meditations
and call down pardons
for the insurgent blood.

A quiet madman, never far from tears,
            I lie like a slain thing
            under the green air the trees
inhabit, or rest upon a chair
            towards which the inflammable air
tumbles on many robins’ wings;
            noting how seasonably
            leaf and blossom uncurl
and living things arrange their death,
while someone from afar off
blows birthday candles for the world.

He moved secretly and in the dark to a higher perch for a better vantage from which to see the eternal city. The name was a mockery. A final pathetic painful joke told by those who never really knew her. She was not what she used to be. It was like looking at a well preserved corpse that drunken people tried to animate in their own horrific stupidity. An attempt to claim that life was still somehow within. But it was a corpse all the same and the people who lived in her were eating her alive…slowly decomposing her until there would be nothing left. Perhaps this was what continued to draw him back again and again…he could identify with her.

Roma had died a long time ago, betrayed by her own children and left to the ravishing hands of the Huns, Visigoths and Vandals. The rampaging darkness from the north had raped her and stolen her beauty while the strange exotic Mohamadians had stormed up from the south to finish her off. Together they washed away her children and left these lost vagabonds in control. There was only one true Roman left in all the world to mourn her death but there were no tears in him. He could stand here and look out over the pale moonlit bones of his mother and yearn for older days, better days…but they were not to be. Nothing was the same any more and he was as dead as she was…perhaps moreso.

In the pale moonlight he was cold stone; an empty statue doomed to non-existence forever it seemed. He was the golem of a dead Jewish carpenter, animated but empty and without words and when he began to doubt all that had happened and sought sunlight or the solace of the empty churches, the one would make himself known again in pain and the world would rush in and an aching 2,000 years of vagabond scraping proved that doubt was futile.

He could stand in this place for days…weeks even if it weren’t for the rising blight…life-giving sun that seemed only to destroy what little was left of his soul. He had done it before…taken to the catacombs after the invasions and laid in a grave nook for weeks; unmoving; neither cold nor warm…hoping perhaps that the gnawing emptiness would leave and he would some day simply feel the grace of fading away. Of course he had long since lost hope that his end would every come. So he waited, followed the rules and waited.

Longinus Marius Albinus, one-time centurion of Rome, stood unmoving on the topmost bones of the old imperial palace on Palatine Hill and studied the lights of the parasite that called herself Rome but was not. Below him was the Circus Maximus…a ghost now but once a place of life and laughter.

The herald of dawn, Aurora, was rising in the east in all her rosy hope-filled joy and with it shades of the sickness stirred within. It was time to crawl into the earth like the cockroach he was and await the coming gathering.

————-

There were dreams. One would think that the dead do not dream but they do…most vividly, and the dreams of the dead are not pleasant. Longinus remembered. In the sleep that was not sleep he saw the images of lost life and what once was. Flashes of life like colour in a black and white film rolled through his inner being. There was Sabina in all her glory…all that he ever wanted in life wrapped in skin the colour of Mediterranean sand and hair of honey. Lost to him because of duty. There was Aurelia who stood in his mind’s eye as his strongest accuser and his heart would burst with shame and sadness if he had one; if he could feel anything…

there are no problems
in these halcyon hours
when the breeze is heaven’s breath
and every living thing is a song
on the air, on the earth

there are no problems
when all that is seen is child’s play
dark east Indian feet chase light Hutterite
in the bliss of “who cares?”
barefoot grass trodders milling
at aimless play as though
tomorrow is not nor ever will be

there are no problems
beneath a sky this shade
amidst the electric hum of life lived
while green is life in the nook of everywhere
and light is transparent gold on the wind

there are no problems
when the world holds its breath
to stop itself right here, right now
staunch denial of before and after
a great cry to every power that
“this is where we stand…we will go no further…”

I was having coffee with my good friend Ben this morning and conversation eventually turned toward the concept of unseen blessings. I am not a huge proponent of the common attitude “things could be worse” because it offers no hope and no comfort and sounds incredibly patronizing…still there is something to the idea of the unseen blessings.

In this broken world where we have asked God to “step away” as it were he has complied with the request and removed his presence somewhat infinitesimally; enough for us to have a small understanding of what the absence of God would be like…a taste of the Hell we would choose.

So in this space we find ourselves praying for all sorts of things. We desire miracles and visible blessings for one reason or another. We seek healing, the raising of the dead, etc. in much the same way infants seek constant affection, candy and toys. These desires reflect a perspective that is often blind to the hidden realities of God acting in our lives in a myriad of unseen ways.

Sometimes we are given a glimpse through the veil into just how much God is actively doing in the world that is incredibly miraculous. Take Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans for example. Now I do not believe Hurricane Katrina was God’s judgement on an immoral New Orleans as so many other misguided people have said.

I do believe that God used the circumstance to give us some insight into his unseen blessings. People felt that things were reasonably corrupt and evil in New Orleans before the Hurricane…some wondered why God would allow such corruption. After the hurricane when the police, fire and military presence was essentially wiped out of the city; when all semblance of government seemed to disappear, we were given a quick sad view of what a world without the restraining power of God could look like.

New Orleans became a free-for-all for murder, theft and all form of chaos for weeks after the disaster. It reminds us that the very presence of government and protective services, however corrupt, has a somewhat restraining effect on the ever present waves of evil that desire to wash over the world. In this circumstance it wasn’t until these restraining powers were removed that people came to truly understand their value. Somalia is another current example of what can happen when the invisible hand that restrains evil is removed for a time.

In the same way we really do not understand the blessing of God in our lives as he continues to act as a buffer between us and the deeper evil that would consume us whole if it were allowed.

There are times when we need to take a step back in our varied circumstances and ponder how God has blessed us by deflecting deeper evils from our lives. We may be poor but we have family. We may be sick but we have hospitals and treatment centres, etc. A loved one dies young but there is the blessing of having known that loved one at all.

Take a few minutes to ponder how God may have and continues to bless you in all things despite how poor you feel your circumstances are right now.

“For in the day of trouble he will keep me safe in his dwelling; he will hide me in the shelter of his sacred tent and set me high upon a rock.” – Psalm 27:5

Just watched this movie and I have to say it is probably the weirdest, strangest, compelling movie I have seen in a long time. It is a samurai-carnival-western-opera that is really difficult to rate.

The acting is not great but as you watch it you suspect it really isn’t supposed to be. The writing and story are also kind of lame but in the best sort of spaghetti western 70’s kung fu movie way. Great cinematography like it was filmed in technicolor back in the 40s.

It is very gory and violent but in a cartoonish way. I don’t know how to recommend it except that it seems like the kind of movie that could draw a cult following. The kind of movie that might get better each time you watch it. You will have to decide for yourself.