Once Upon a Bedtime

and other silly things

From Ulysses - Ithaca

What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged from obscurity, silently, doubly dark, by a passage from the rear of the house into the penumbra of the garden?

The heaventree of stars hung with humid night-blue fruit.

What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman?

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

You and I are just two tumbling dice

Cast into the world to show our many sides

Someday, you know, our numbers will be up

but for now we just careen

Off firm edges, with any luck

Where suicidal honesty meets broken human will

and too-good-to-be-trueness second fiddles to a thrill

Where kill-cat curiosity and dead-eyed friendships hail

And Herculean confidence self sabotage and fails

Here I build my simple nest

and continue to begin

to forge a safe and solid place

My soul to rest therein

Human being

being true

now triumphant, soon be blue

Stagnant and amorphous

predictably so new

honest, good intentions

waiting to come true

Miscreant by day

is monstrous in the night

surrender and acceptance

Being in the daylight

Human being

being true

now so fickle, soon to choose

Con de Saint-Exupery

Otra vez, me encuentro

Al principio precipicio

Dos pasos lejos, o tal vez sea tres

Esperandome.

Volveré a volar (lo espero igual)

Para oir las estrellas, la risa real

MYefFABLEeffigy

1. To look through two sets of eyes, upon two separate lives that have only a blink of a difference, and see a bridge that was recently built.

2. To span space and time, all things real and potential.

3. Bigger (and with more letters) than other words like surrender or belief. 

4. Proof that infinity, by any other name, would be just as complete.

The boy rolls with the punches

amused and bemused by their feeble abuse

The young man rolls too, but now from the punches,

become commonplace in his fresh, cluttered life

And what of the man worn bare by fists?

Let him be simple and let him be brave

And God grant him the serenity to walk calmly forward,

toward his fate

Much of what I’ve written here reads, in my mind, like an allusion to something else. It is something I haven’t been able to identify outright and describe as it really is. This ineffable thing, I admit, is God. And I thank God that it is my God and not the god of culture and religion. Here now is my latest, most direct, and equally doomed attempt:

I support my own natural tendency to believe that we are all connected. Here and now are two reliable witnesses who can attest to that fact. We are also all made of the same material stuff, having a common source. I go further, like countless others before me, to say that all this material stuff, and the connections (here and now) binding it, are literally the form of God.

However instinctually satisfying this realization is, it would be easily forgotten by me, if not for its implications. On second look, I see that a God has been made out of myself, and out of every other… Will I be a merciful God; clear-eyed, strong, honest, and kind? Or will I be a vengeful God; frustrated, destructive, disillusioned, and vain. Thanks to the goodness of God, not only am I capable of knowing the answer to this question, my life shapes it.

And this, all of this, has been my prayer. I’m asking For the love of God, to let me live in such a way that I better express myself. And God, as a result. Seeing my prayer (here and now) is to see the answer before me. And I thank God for that.