Tightrope Walking

I make a rushed appointment with the Ghost.
These scheduled haunts: dispassionate, absurd,
But still I daren’t renege upon my word,
And break our strange engagement at the coast.
He whispers promises of sweet repose;
Baptismal seas, black waters yet to be explored
I run, no longer resolutely bored,
To Land’s Demise, the beach where He plays host.
Once there, I rush to greet my spectral guide
And much to my dismay I find Him gone!
But: “Further in! Still further in!” He cries.
I dive to where I heard His murmur rise,
And chase it till, exhausted, I sink down
And there I find the sleep for which I’d pined.

Hampshire Acid Trip (Pt. 1, Euphoria Morning)

AN IMPORTANT NOTE BEFORE WE BEGIN:
Words,
As inadequate as they are in expressing
Our frail human condition
Become wild abstractions
When our abstractions become concrete.
And right now
I feel like Moses
When he had to translate fire
Into a code of ethics.
Each crease and crevice of your brain
Is another book of scripture
And if you want the truth
It’s best to go straight to the source.

Just thought you should know.

My spiritual survival kit:
2 tabs Lysergic Acid Diethylamide-25
Acetaminophen
Ibuprofen
Notebook
Pencil
CD Player equipped with Lateralus

2:20:
I drop out
I turn on
I tune in
The sky is calm and cold
As I lay beneath the shade
Of that great New England oak.
My restlessness is amplified,
Mocked by the stale beauty that surrounds me;
By the stock-still sun
In the blue-screen sky.
Impatient and indifferent,
I wait.

2:50:
I dodge cornstalks
I pluck apples
I weave in and out and in
And out I come the other side
And still I can’t shake myself
Wake myself
From this ever present daydream,
Forgetting that the paper is writing my story now.
Faulty paper, or
Faulty story?
Still nothing.

3:30:
It was the tree that caused an uproar
All knots and eyes
And aren’t I just
Creating fanciful lies?
Sinking thoughts such as these
I must strive to overcome
If I wish to become
Weightless
Selfless
Transcendent.

4:00:
“It’s a learning experience.”
I feel anything but enlightened,
Bombarded with sights and sounds,
Clowns in claustrophobic cars;
A noise pollution contribution
That places polished chrome bars
Between me and my liberation.
I give up,
Go home
To feed my head.

4:30
I am plagued with doubt

But music
Is my anodyne.

4:40
The world comes alive
Before my kaleidoscopic eyes!
And suddenly I understand
Why the Moslems decorate God’s house
With patterned tiles,
Channeling the raw beauty
That lies behind
Whatever lies behind
Cheap Catholic iconography.
And – Oh! – the colors
Black and White
Red and Yellow
Red and Green
A holiday delight!
I am reborn
Or rather
The world
Is born anew
Behind closed eyes.

4:45:
I sever the tether to my brain.

5:11:
Allow myself to forget my pain.

5:16:
(Euphoria Morning)

Eternal

I am eternal I am eternal I am eternal and sometimes I have to repeat it three times or maybe four times or more times because most days I feel so irreducibly human that I forget it and I pine for things that kill me and I want it, I want to just hasten the process and get it over with and sleep forever and leap onward to the next great adventure and then I remember...there is a next great adventure and this life is just another sick-sad moment even when it seems to stretch on forever and ever and I'm too small to see beyond it except when I take god for a piggy-back ride and I stand on the shoulder of the giant of giants and I like the view so much that I want to make a home there in the sky and build a tower, a tree-fort perhaps, in a redwood and be one of those hippie envirofreaks who chain themselves to the highest branches in protest of "the man", whatever man, attacking whatever man that comes by and defies me, throwing my Birkenstocks in fury at the destruction workers, (not worrying too much about my pacifist ideals because they're wearing those big yellow hard hats and they're sitting behind the thick-paned glass of their bulldozers) not caring about any cause in particular except myself, proud of myself for having a cause and isn't Cause all that really matters because we're all going to die anyway and we might as well delude ourselves into believing that we're doing more than just soiling our way through this lemming march towards Death, as I'm sure the Lemming-in-Chief does when he leads his troops into battle against the mighty Ocean, because they are Many and He is just One after all, I can take him, he looks pretty old anyway in all those paintings, old Greybeard, let him hurl his lightning bolts from the sky and I will be one step ahead of him laughing always, he's gotten slower with age (that arthritic elbow of his) but the funny thing is that he keeps stubbornly chucking those bolts and they come thundering down all around me, with a redundant near-miss inaccuracy that lends me to believe for an instant that perhaps there's something at work here beyond my own superhuman bolt-dodging skills (if you can dodge lightning you can dodge a ball) because he keeps missing me by fucking inches, well less than inches really but to delve into smaller increments I'd have to use the metric system which I don't really understand and I'm sure god doesn't either because my god is American of course, bleeding Red and White, Black and Blue, because he is forever true to the covenant he made with his Chosen People around 200 years back when we decided to slap his name down on the dollar and make it sacred and I suppose he bleeds a little Green too, I know I do, shackled to this fucking tree with moss growing out my ears and I am earthbound once again and I've lost my entire perspective and I'm wondering what I'm doing here because it's now late November and it's really cold and I start to rue the fact that in this dream sequence I am a vegan (it seems to fit with the persona) and I can't even dream about having my Thanksgiving turkey and the least those hard hat men could is step down from their bulldozer thrones for two seconds and dip something, maybe one my handkerchiefs (I do get to wear really sweet bandanas in this dream sequence, on the plus side) into some of that leftover gravy that my mom makes so well and touch it to my lips but then I realize that would be the death of me because I sure as hell don't have the strength to forego Thanksgiving dinner for the sake of some stupid tree and so I let myself down off those chains and I let the whole world down as the hard hat men bulldoze my tree on national television and now I'm left standing there, alone, without a Cause, all because I couldn't say no to my big fat appetite and I'm angry at god because those shoulders just don't seem quite so broad anymore, because my god is not sufficient for my insatiable desires and I realize that perhaps God is not the problem but only my narrow conception of Him and so I run back into His arms in need of a Savior and realize that as big and clunky and unmanagable as my heart seems sometimes I need a God who's even bigger, so big in fact that if I ever actually beheld His Bigness I'd run around screaming at the top of my lungs like a frightened child, like when I saw Jaws for the first time, awestruck in horror, witnessing his Great White power, mechanical, effortless, until I went hoarse and lost my voice forever but I wouldn't even know because I'd have already gone deaf from the persistence of my own screaming, losing all of my senses, my entire sense of self, truly coming to terms with the notion that I am eternal. Blissfully.

The Last Apparition

This is a work in progress.

The Last Apparition

Some people are haunted by ghosts, but a few others pursue them and haunt them back, wrestle them to the ground and wring whatever blessings they can from the wraithlike forces that drive them from one moment to the next. Jack Daly was one of the second kind. Everything in his life that was tangible and concrete he held under his thumb, and he conducted it all in circles like the whole thing was a board game (one in which he never went to jail and passed Go more often than most). Still, a circle, no matter how perfect, turns in one itself and repeats, and the better one is at retracing its path the more boring and predictable that it becomes. So many people reach this epiphany, yet are chased back into the welcoming arms of the familiar by that mean spirit that teaches us to treat the unknown with fear and contempt. It was this particular specter that Jack followed down to a one story house by the university to buy certain drugs that came with the promise of an escape from the loop.

Jack picked Claire up the next day in the afternoon, a Saturday. He kept the mushrooms in a plain brown box that he typically reserved for the storage and transportation of items of a more dubious nature. At various points in its storied history it had stored firecrackers, spraypaint, cigarettes, condoms, black toenail polish, videotapes, and an old handgun. The pistol was a six shooter, the sort that cowboys used to use, that he had gotten at a pawn shop. He parked the car across the street from their deserted school grounds, and they chewed the shrooms carefully and held them between their gums and lower lips, like chewing tobacco, just as Bolak had taught him. “Riding the magic school bus”, he called it. It was a term that he was rather fond of despite, or perhaps because of, its childlike innocence.

They walked across the boulevard hand-in-hand, slowing oncoming traffic. They sat on the swingset where Jack, bigger than the other kids as a child, used to push the others up and up until they got too high and their path became violent and jerky. They would scream and Jack would laugh like it was a game but knowing even then that it was something more sinister. Claire would pick flowers and look on in wonder he made the kids soar and hang poised in midair for a moment that seemed to stretch on forever, looking spectacularly like writhing insects caught in a spiderweb. She mistook their frightened shrieks for peals of laughter, and even the children themselves would admit to themselves, a little uneasily, that they had enjoyed themselves. But today there would be no pushing, only sitting and waiting as they swayed back in forth steadily like the pendulum on a grandfather clock, keeping time with the breeze as they waited for the psilocybin to open their doors of perception. There was electricity in their silence that hung thickly in the air, forming dark rain clouds overhead. Jack felt with unshakable certainty that he had summoned them. He felt his higher brain tingle and kick into gear and he smiled. He knew that today the very laws of nature bent to his uncompromising will. He stretched out his arm eastward and held the mountain in the palm of his hand, and immediately he knew where to go.

* * *

Jack strode purposefully out of the bathroom with the details of own dripping features bored into his brain. It had been raining, and hard. In the desert it rains often in the spring, in furious sheets that leave you gasping for air when you open your mouth to the sky. The rain permeates deep beneath the skin and envelops every capillary and tendon in a cold, insulating cocoon. This torrent, like all of them, evaporated as quickly and with as little fanfare as it came, the only testament to its visitation being the boy who stood alone in the tram lobby, at the top of Sandia peak, shivering for more. Water streamed off of his hands and matted hair and collected in pools at his feet, though it seemed to be leaking slowly from somewhere deep inside of him. His hair, strikingly dark with saturation from the rainstorm, was plastered loosely to his forehead, and his smooth brown arms dangled at his sides. His plaid shirt hung open, buttoned halfway. Heavy with rain, it clung to him as if had grown and stretched to fit him from birth, and though the definition of his lean, angular frame was evident beneath the cotton fabric, one could hardly imagine him without it on. His appearance gave the impression of perpetually self-assured, battle-ready tranquility, the sort of pure and complete relaxation that you see so rarely in nature, like a cat in the moment before it pounces. His eyes betrayed his purpose. They were fierce sea-grey patches of intense tumult, daring you to look the way a charging bull dares you to stand in its path. Amidst the deadly calm of his musculature, his eyes stormed violently at the center, like an inverse hurricane. He was a civil war, both sides without a cause, raging silently.

If only they could see him now! His parents, his teachers, his friends, all who thought they knew him so well, all of whom would die for him if he asked it. He had a handshake and a smile unique to each of them, crafting a persona tailored to each of them whims. He could read them all so well, and control them accordingly. Yet for one afternoon he was free of them all, free of the pretty circles he ran around all of them every day without lifting a finger.

Only Claire could look into those eyes without blinking and watch the clouds roll away. She was careless and bohemian, orphaned at an early age. She lived with an aunt that she rarely saw, who worked nights, housing her and feeding her and little else. She wore black in the summer and sundresses in the winter. She loved all the commonalities and collective experiences of nature, human nature in particular. When she was small she would tear the wings off of grasshoppers and dragonflies glue them to the backs of snails and other flightless things, saying that it was not equitable for one race of insect to monopolize all of the soaring beauty of flight while another plodded along on the ground, doomed to a life of grounded drudgery. She was self-indulgent in the extreme, and Jack could neither understand nor control her in the way he could so many others, which was why he feared her. They had been dating for two years. He figured it was the closest he could come to loving someone, and he kept her close because he always suspected that she saw right through him.

“Where have you been?” Jack demanded. In his drugged up stupor, all of his emotions were ramped up, including his frustration with her incorrigibility. He noticed how untouched and unencumbered by the rain she appeared, and shivered again with longing, but this time for her.

“What does it matter to you?” Claire’s accusation came accompanied with a shimmering laughter, like breaking glass.

Jack ignored the comment, as the powerful awe he felt at his experience quickly overcame his annoyance with her disinterest. “I went out down the hill a bit, to the ski lift. The trees tightened in on either side of the slope until I was hemmed in, wrapped up under their canopy, like a cocoon. Little streams ran beside me and became rivers, and the mud underneath flowed faster than the water. The whole scene teemed with this inexplicable, chaotic beauty. Life was flowing out of every pore of the earth, all around me! Jesus, look at me! Look at all of this!” he exclaimed, the rainwater still dripping off his nose.

If anything had ever lived in Jack, it died long ago, before Claire ever knew him. He was incapable of commanding sympathy, and that is why she loved him, but still she couldn’t help blinking at him a little sadly as she watched him struggling to wring every false drop of life out of the world that he could and claim it for himself. He was pursuing some nebulous idea of greatness that existed only in his head. He was unable to recognize the mirage, and thus unable to recognize the source of his insatiable lack of peace. She smiled softly.

“That sounds lovely.” Claire paused as Jack looked at her expectantly as if demanding a kindred tale of discovery.

“I sat in here. I watched people,” was all she offered.

“How can you stand to watch them, these people. Jesus Christ! They make me sick. Herds of sheep, shuttled up and down the mountain so they can huddle in tourist shops and tell all of their friends they had a $13 basket of chicken wings at the top of a mountain. Brainwashed from birth. There are robots, living among us…did you know that Claire? How can you watch them? There’s nothing to see. There’s more life in every one of those pine needles on every one of those trees in that forest, than in this entire crowd. Show’s out there, babe.”

“Getting shuttled up and down the tram…isn’t that what we’re doing here too, Jack?”

“Don’t compare me to them! Honestly. You don’t believe we’re the same as those people?”

“More than you think, Jack. More than you’ll ever know.”

Even in the face of her quiet consternation, his brazen, arrogant passion always captivated her and took her breath away. She loved him like she had never loved anything else, despite himself. His delusions were so powerful, especially at moments like this, that they became real to everyone around him, even to her at times. He stirred her and broke the mold for her in a way that nothing real ever could. He was an exception to her belief that it was the universal aspects of man that made him great. She reveled in this and it brought her great joy to know that on some level she could relate to these common aspects of everyman, everywhere in the world across all geographic and cultural divides. Yet Jack stubbornly refused to accept this. He glorified and celebrated only the mountaintop experiences, those high and lonely aspects of his personality that separated him from everyone else. He had power over others specifically because he had worked so hard to sever every last remaining human connection that he had with them, and fill that space with some sort of airy, spiritual currency that only he could see. Whatever it was, it puffed him up with some hollow brand of pride that left him always wanting for more. As she watched him rage with so much passionate conviction against everything she held to be sacred in the world, she couldn’t help but admire his dedication to his own misery. He was the sovereign monarch of a court of one, ruler of nothing.

“Think about it Jack. We all come up here to be shaken from our routine, and all the things that imprison us down there, if only for a few hours. We all want the same things. Why can’t you see that? Why can’t you be happy with it? It’s not all so bad as you believe it to be.”

“It’s beneath me.”

“Damn it Jack! All that power that you think you have is worthless! You’re beholden to them! You’ve let them shape you twist you, drive you away from yourself! You’ve become this tragic, misshapen figure, all because of the contempt you have for the spirit that you share with everyone. They’ve forced you to deny the essence of what makes you human! They control you Jack, and you let them.”

Claire breathed heavily as all of this exploded out of her, pent up somewhere so deep inside of herself that she hadn’t even realized that she felt these things until now. But they were all true. And they both knew it.

His eyes went dead. He stared at her for a minute and then turned to go.

“I’m taking the next tram down. Don’t follow me.”

She didn’t, and somehow she knew this would be the last time she saw him.

* * *

Six months later, Claire sat on her bed and turned over the note written in Jack’s sprawling script and read it for what felt like the thousandth time:

I don’t care if it hurts.

I want to have control.

I want a perfect body.

I want a perfect soul.

On the front was scrawled “FOR CLAIRE” in big block letters. She’ll never forget the silent accusation that burned in Jack’s parents’ eyes as they walked over to her after the funeral and handed it to her.

“Maybe this means something to you.”

It did. They were the lyrics to a song by Jack’s favorite band, morphed into an ethos, a last ditch effort to tackle his Last Great Apparition. He followed it to the next life with an old cowboy pistol.

A Letter to a Friend

This is a letter I sent to a friend, discussing matters of faith. I hope maybe this is enlightening for anyone else who reads it.

Sorry its been so long. Chunks of time are few and far between but I have some now and I want to address some of the things you said in your e-mail.

About the lack of authenticity you feel at church:

This is why I didn't like, still don't like, and never will like the Catholic church. Or the concept of church. Or religion. I hate all of it. Jesus uses the word church twice in the gospels, in reference to the body of beleivers, and never to a building. You answered your own question in your e-mail. Why should people need other people to lead them in worship, in order to know God? They don't. Your faith is personal, and you take responsibility for it. It shouldn't matter what other people think about it. Don't worry about the people at your church, maybe they have faith and maybe they don't, but don't let that affect your faith. Christianity is a relationship with God, who's Word is manifested in the person of Jesus Christ. That's the only guy who we depend on for our faith. Christianity is about Christ, not people who call themselves Christians. I challange you to leave the church, to work out things on your own. There is just as much spiritual deadness and hypocrisy in the so-called church, if not more, than anywhere else in the world. Its great to spend time with people of your same faith, and worship God, and that's why church is awesome, but don't depend on it for your faith. The fact that people feel "closer to God" when they watch you play is a testament to the power of music to carry you away, and put you on another plane spiritually. Yet a feeling in itself is not true faith, and you are correct in being skeptical. And just because you lack faith right now doesnt mean that God can't use your music to affect you in all kinds of things. God uses everything to his ends. Men create pain and spearation from God and each other through their rebelliousness and the evil that they do, but God takes that and repares it and makes it whole and beautiful again.

"Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God's wrath through him! For if, when we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation."

Romans 5: 7-11

God heals and fixes what we break. Just because we screw things up, or just because we may not be doing something for the right reasons doesn't mean that God can't turn that around and use it for good. When people were preaching the gospel back in the day just to bring Paul down and bring attention to themselves and did so without any real faith, Paul says this:

"But what does it matter? The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice."
Philippians 1:18

About your statement: I'm not sure if faith is for everyone...

Religion is not for everyone. It's not really for anyone. It's a human construct, designed by men to try to fit God into a managable box so we can have both God and worldly things at the same time, get our "spiritual high" at church and then go live like dogs the rest of the week. If that is what you are referring to, then your correct, absolutely. But if by faith you mean "a belief in Jesus Christ, that he died for us and lived a life perfectly in accordance with the will of God" then that statement doesn't make any sense. Either Jesus is who he says he was, or he wasn't. Those are the only two possibilities. So, if he was, then faith in him is without a doubt for everyone, because by accepting the Holy Spirit into our hearts, believing that we are reconciled to God, and living life by the example he set for us because we beleive him when he said he was the "truth, the way, and the life", we are set free. If he is not who he says he was, then faith is for no one, because there is nothing to have faith in and there is no power in the things we say that we beleive. And that is what you must decide for yourself, and I challange you to read the Bible and live it out and learn about that power for yourself, irregardless of other people's opinions, for what do they matter! They live for temporal things, transitory things, things that flash and burn and die in a plume of smoke. It's true that a lot of people are weak, that they hide behind their faith and use it as a crutch because they are too scared to think for themselves, yet are not bold enough to actually live out a life in service of God, in accordance with his teachings. They taste neither the rushing highs and lows of money, sex, drugs and power nor the peace and strength that comes from true faith. They are slaves to a law they don't fully beleive in, and slaves to the world around them! How unhappy are people like this. You and I have never been these people. We always have sought after truth. When we lived apart from God, we sought after all of the pleasures of the world, testing each and being disappointed over and over again. We know that there's more to life than that. We both want freedom, and were scared away by church and the Bible and people who lived joyless lives in service of God's law without knowing God. But the follower of Christ tastes life and freedom in its completeness. Everyone's a slave to something. I am choosing to bond myself to the will of God, to righteousness, to eternal Love, and in doing so I free myself from the passions that have held me back for so long. I am happiest in communion with God, worshipping him, talking about him, studying and discerning his will. What purpose to we have here, if not to glorify him?

"What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! Don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness."

"I put this in human terms because you are weak in your natural selves. Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness. When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the control of righteousness. What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of? Those things result in death! But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves to God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."

Romans 15-23b

That right there says it better than I ever could. am by no means am I pretending to be some pillar of godliness here. You know me. But God is righteous, and when I seek him, and join myself to the body of Christ, than I am made holy. And I'm learning...slowly.

Freedom in Christ

Come take my hand,
You pinstriped Rapunzels with barcoded windows and doors.
The body of Christ has eyes that see,
You proud, myopic fools!
You yearn to be gods,
Though the Living God yet dwells within you!

Throw down the stones,
Break the chains by selling all but your Self,
For therein lies the Carpenter's bench,
Which cannot be broken.
Clean up your Temple,
Providing light for the work of the Holy Ghost.

Let's raze to the ground
These monolithic penetentiaries.
Come dance and sing the Song of Life
With me, O Children of God!
Let's raise our hands
With cries of joy and dance among the rubble.

Tear down your towers
For the Lord Himself lives not among the stars
But in the slums and in the hearts
Of all who bleed His Blood.
Burst forth from the womb
And free yourselves in faith to Love, and to Live!

A Sea, Black with Ink

This seemed

To me

The place

To be -

Interred

Beneath

The ink

Black Sea.

You and

I did

Settle where

Our words

Composed

The life

We Shared.

Each breath

Became

A tale

Of years

The air

We breathed -

Our hopes,

Our fears -

So never could

An idle phrase

Pass from

Your lips

To mine.

______

Now when

I wake

At night

I see

White lights -

Not stars,

But just

As bright -

Burn by

The things

I meant
And said
Upon

The Isle

Of your
Godhead.
Beacons -
With pure
Intent,
Of course -
Will coax
Me in
With no
Remorse,
Reminding me
The price that's paid

For naked honesty.