some men
younger than i
lie rotten in their graves
while i…
i lie rotten in my bed

little sounds,
a taptaptaptap
in the mix
makes you feel
the press of silence
on the edge

In the military
we would go to the woods
and disappear,
sunny and hot and hidden
In the poison ivy;
face paint was mud and green
I was lost in the crowd, unseen,
In the trees or on the plain
Or standing in front of you
screaming and shouting and shooting:
camouflage hid it all…
I was the invisible man
amongst men – transparent

The world never changes…year after year, decade after decade, century after century – we simply find new ways of being exactly the same.

“Jesus was the only One that ever raise the dead.” The Misfit continued, “and He shouldn’t have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can – by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,” he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.”

– Excerpt from Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find.

Sometimes you get to a place in a story where it is so amazing that you don’t even realize you have stopped breathing – this is what Flannery O’Connor does to me.

it was spring that came
good and buzzy hot
and tore through the bones
of an old and cold winter
til’ the dead cracked maple
spilled a new wet blood
from a heart once ash
now beating gold and amber
In that bless-ed warmth

this bubble time
is an illusion thought up
by another
and we are but visions
of some sleeping god
that spring forth to an end
but maybe,
if we keep our heads down
we can survive the awakening
to become day-dreams

dese tings dat is done
dey is done as can be
never ta be undone
always dere ferever
hiden in sum goneaway
a place removed…
like a blind curb
dat keeps its cummin
trippin da feet from unnerneath
so we is fallin and fallin
till our eyez iz opennen
an we cun look ahead
‘stead of down an back

He was always so desperately sad, as if a great tragedy was coming one day that could not be contained in the moment and needed to be spread throughout his entire life.

He was always so desperately sad that he became numb to it until it was like he wasn’t except in the small destructive things he did to him and his.

He found his distraction in the outer things like black clouds racing as sheep being herded to the horizon by the north wind or busying himself at the practice of being human with all of it’s many complex nuances: smiling, talking, feeling, laughing and the ever elusive love.

There was a place to land in the exercise – never so perfect to seem the creepy android but not so poor to seem alien…the best place was the somewhat broken.

In the mean time he kept the social life of a shark, swimming to whom and what he would – consuming.

a father’s love
is a different sort of miracle
that makes you seek after it
the rest of your incomplete life
like some precious thing held close
and lost when you weren’t looking