Unconfirmed Rumor

I’ve just learned, from an anonymous and nonexistent source with unconfirmed high-level access in practically every company, government, or organization you’ve ever heard of, including the suppliers of several curbside hotdog stands that are particularly popular in the blocks surrounding the State Capitol Building of Idaho, there in Boise, many you never have heard of, like the ones who are buying up credit default swaps on the Treasuries of certain American States, but buying them at the behest of other states, counties  and municipalities. . . 

Well, the point is that she is said to have certain connections, and that there is some possibility, however remote, of her knowing some things that might be worth sharing. And the word “she”, though habitually used here, should not be taken to be a real indication of this person’s gender or self-identity.

Well, she tells me that there’s an organization, an intelligent actor, that secretly controls all of the major conspiracy groups, even including itself. And it directs those groups to act in patterns that are sometimes predictable and most times anything but.

And that it all started as a plan to make a very few people unimaginably wealthy and leave most people either struggling or failing in their struggles to keep alive. But social engineering and architecture are dynamic, changing processes. Sometimes the changes go in the wrong direction; sometimes the right. So, due to a flaw that had been present from the very inception of the projects, the social engine continued to spread beyond the point of its planned final achievement, and wound up enslaving even the elites into a compulsive addiction/devotion to the belief that it would be possible to manipulate the oneness, the perpetuality of the universe, and achieve some sort of selfish personal good from that.

Fat chance. There is no “personal selfish good”. The phrase itself is a contradiction, an absurdity. For a good to be a good, it must be fundamentally good. And selfishness is not fundamentally good.

Welcome to the world, little Scarlett Jane!

Love Without Fear

Life Could Be Simple

It could all be so much simpler
If you found a way to feel for me –
Something like the way I feel for you.
Much simpler. So much simpler.

But life is far but from simple.
And sometimes, when you fall in love,
The road ahead is anything but straight or smooth.

   And because of all of this, tonight I’m lost in reverie,
   Longing long and lonely, lonely hours away.
   It’s as if I were enchanted; seems so beautiful, but still,
   I wonder, will I ever see again
   That shining fascination in your eyes?

It would all be so much simpler
If you found a way to love me now,
If you felt for me as I believe I’ll always feel for you.

But life, it isn't simple,
No more so than is the fellow
Who could fall so far and deep in love with you.

I can scarcely comprehend
The kind of heart or mind or man
Who could fall so far and deep in love with you.
But that appears to be the man that I am.
And I do.

Lift + Thrust

Half-formed possibilities drift above me, nebulous, light,
Clouds across a slow-moving sky, vague, moody, protean,
Like interrupted dreams, ephemeral,
They fade before my concentrated gaze —

And then, below, spread dense and wide,
The ground on which I tread,
A firmament of mass and past,
Of oh, so many deeds done, half-done, undone,
Left behind, or simply dead and gone.
All the life I’ve lived till now.

Steadily I rise, but does the lightness overhead
Draw me upward?
Or am I lifted up from below?

Change, for Better or for Worse

I once had a cat who was deathly ill. Not for long, of course.

Really, he was my wife’s cat, a cat that she’d had when she was a teenager, some 6 or 7 years earlier. Now we were newly married, and one day she got a call from home, her mom telling her the cat was doing poorly and she was thinking of having him put down. My wife thought that she just might be able to save the cat, or at least that she’d rather blame herself for the cat’s death than blame her mom, and that prompted a quick drive to Mom’s house and the introduction of a very old and boney Siamese cat to our small household.

We already had a younger cat — maybe two, I’m not quite sure — but this new addition did little to disrupt the local feline social structure. Mostly, he slept. Occasionally he would move. He would also eat a little, poop a little, make a God-awful vocalization now and then — something like Eartha Kitt, but angry and with a bad sore throat — and every few hours, we’d give him a subcutaneous infusion of fluids (sort of like an I.V. drip, but it doesn’t go directly into a vein) since he wasn’t drinking any water and tended to be dehydrated. My wife worked for a veterinarian, and got the sub-Q equipment there.

So anyway, here lay this old cat at death’s door for weeks and weeks, even months. Much longer than you’d think anyone could linger at that particular threshold. Day after day, the same routine: Sleep. Eat. Sleep. Poop. Sleep. Fluids. Sleep.

Then one afternoon I notice he was up, exploring around the apartment. He seemed curious; at the very least, he was looking for a new place to sit or lie down.

I was so happy! Here was improvement at last. He wasn’t lying just lying around anymore. He was becoming more active. He must be feeling a lot better. What a wonderful, encouraging development!

Within a day or two, of course, the cat died.

I had seen his change in behavior as a sign of improvement, while a more fact-based view might have seen the change as nothing more than that: a change, period. He had lingered long, just this side of death; now something prompted him to change his behavior, and it should have come as no great surprise that this change might very well give him just the teensiest extra bit of a shove that was needed for him to cross over.

“Fascinating,” you might say. Perhaps with just the hint of irony in your voice. But what exactly is the point of this story about a cat’s journey into death? Well, I’ll tell you.

The main thing is that it’s good to be aware of one’s own natural tendency to put a positive or negative emotional spin onto any change in circumstance that may occur. You can see something as a change for the better or a change for the worse, but on the most basic level it really is simply a change, nothing more and nothing less.

If your general disposition is to see just about any change as an opportunity for improvement, you’re pretty much on the right track in seeing changes in a positive light. Likewise if you’re generally disposed to see change as a bad thing. That’s pretty natural. The big mistake comes when you unconsciously assume that your own personal and selfish preferences happen to run in parallel with the inevitable, natural course of history. The fact is, a coin is just as likely to come down “tails,” even when your own personal preference is for “heads.”

So, accept change. Embrace it. And watch it, to see where it leads. You may find yourself celebrating new possibilities, and that’s wonderful. It’s a lot of what encourages us to keep on trying. But don’t be too surprised if, in the end, those rosy possibilities don’t turn out to be “certainties,” after all.  

Substrata

How like a ragged, worn and weathered tombstone,
The standing chimneys are of burned-out houses.
And how like ancient, papery skin,
The faded, brittle billets-doux of past romance;
The lines of praise, of love eternal,
And written in a heart-felt hand.
O, who’d have thought those inky lines
Would so outlast their fevered sentiment.

How like a severed limb, or entrails, drawn,
Spread out and splayed for public show,
The memory is of lost, past love,
Irrecoverably gone.
Yet still its echoes, phantom pain and phantom pleasures,
Repeat in benthic murmurs deep within the soul.

How like a palimpsest, the tissues of my heart:
Writ fresh today with new love’s tale’s enchantment,
With vast potential, possibility, adventures for imagining;
And still, barely below, beneath the thinnest of veneers,
Lie other tales, vestigial as textures etched,
Crazed and crackling webs,
Unforgotten wounds and scars and healing.

Low Light

Standing quiet on a dark, grassy hillside,
stars and clouds above,
scattered oaks and scattered cattle my only company.

I run my fingers over the camera’s controls,
guessing blindly at focus, aperture, shutter speed, framing.

Lock down the tripod head.
Lock up the viewfinder’s mirror.
Allow the camera to rest, settle, still.
Now take into my fingers’ grip the cable release, and… press.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight, and SNAP, the shutter closes.

The 20 or so seconds of processing time between exposure and display
seem an eternity to my impatient mind, but are nothing
compared to the 2 weeks I would wait as a teenager
for the drug store to deliver my prints. Nowadays
I can see my results, re-adjust the camera,
and make a second or third attempt,
all within a matter of minutes. 

Perfection is still far beyond me, but its nearer approach
seems now more swift, and my imagination

more in tune with my abilities and those of my camera.
Yet, still.
Instant gratification simply takes too long.
And more desire leads to more suffering. 

Now, there’s a business plan for you.

And despite my imaginings and my camera’s attempts
to capture a frozen moment forever still,
still the stars and planets continue on their charted paths,
oak boughs sway in the light breeze,
and cattle low and shift in the low,
low light of this midnight meadow.

4/26/2016