rolling back, back to the very beginning
now with eyes to see
love is a present from father to daughter
yet love is not a thing
love is a midnight drive to fetch some pills
yet love is not an action
all we can do is point to where love is
a direction outside space
the mystery of the rose’s velvety beauty
they believe they know
they think they can speak of love with a flip
emergent as a utility
from the pragmatism of evolution’s hand
just a shade of affection
but if i say your idea of love is too small?
for love is of the stars
love is the substance of the infinite Lord
and He is naught besides
the simplest of all, simpler than nothing
why any of we all exist
once i knew what love was, the illusion
so sure i was I KNEW
the mystery so plain in what my poetry said
but when i looked within
i found i held a husk long empty of sweets
to see with humble eyes:
love is the nothing that is everything
the oblivion that gives
for have you ever wondered? do you not know?
love was there ere light
when suddenly one discovers they are found
for this is what love is
infinite in story, as it was meant at the first
to be found… everywhere
Category: Wonderland
Other 3
This is my third, and final excerpt from my other book, The Gospel According to Judas. It’s about Cartesian doubt:
Descartes said that it is useful at some point in the history of our minds to doubt all things. He actually didn’t go far enough, in that concluding the Cogito, “I think therefore I am,” this lends, for its own purpose, a certainty to basic logic. Because it is logically that if I were not, then I could not be thinking. Substantively, therefore, as far as we are used to very fundamental things behaving, it is irrefutable. One might think someone daft, in fact, if he were to say that such a reliance on logic is in any way deficient. But if we do not hold that this is sure, that things could possibly behave in ways they never have, even if not in any case we have studied, we come upon a very interesting viewpoint. It is to say that we do not notice that miracles happen every day, simply because they happen every day.
Let me explain. If we do not take for granted things holding together: solidity, cause and effect, time itself: we may begin to see how awesome is the most common of things. Try it. Look at the basic building blocks that you may perceive about the universe. Things we do not in any case doubt that they could fail. It may be difficult: these miracles happen every day, they sustain us hour by hour, second by second. How magnificent the verymost mundane. If you begin to perceive how awesome are the most common experiences, you begin to spy the mystery of the God who is love. The very fact that there is such a thing as quality that may be felt: that there is feeling at all! We may begin here finally to make sense of things. And therefore, to wonder.
For we are born wired in the ways of space and distance, and the ordering and passage of time. We are born knowing an astounding number of things. How is it we first grasp at anything with our hand? The knowledge of sending out the correct signal from the mind, we are given. How is it that we imitate a sound we hear? Such correlation is an amazing thing, not one to simply take as standard issue. To think of one thing as tasting different from another, to look and to comprehend size, many vs. the one; spectacular is such faculty.
Now this is beyond astounding, too: we are born knowing how to learn. Anyone who knows what it takes to teach our machines to do the most rudimentary form of learning will tell you that it is no small thing. No, indeed. And in that vein, pleasure and pain we are born knowing, too, born comprehending, no less. It doesn’t even require the learning, the tools we need to learn other things. Play and boredom, too: how we understand what to pursue in the courses we take; also given us, a higher form of pleasure and pain. They are a higher form of abstraction, like existence itself, known only by the things that exist: play only in terms of the games that invoke that sensation, “fun”. All these are given you.
The question is not, “what do we know?”, but “what can we forget?” Can we truly forget the notions of time and space? Can we forget being? For if we truly wish to do as Descartes advised, we must forget these things. Let us to forget functioning of any sort: can we do that? Perhaps that is the key. This is to doubt the logic of the very of mundane, that logic which allows one to be certain that when one says, “I am”, he cannot be refuted. Let us then be able to refute that, to think in a situation where nothing makes sense, and maybe we can go deeper down the rabbit hole than Descartes himself thought it went. And then perhaps we may worthily approach that lesson that Jesus Christ gave my own self, while I was in the pit: “Work is magic.”
oblivion
the patron saint of oblivion
twirled zero cigarettes on each fingertip
with shadows scampering around the edge of existence
there is a list of things i have not yet done
wallowing in the limpid pool of lesser importance
they sit there and stare at me, and wait
growing more eyes as they brood
time is not an illusion, for change is real
distance i have dreamed makes me small like hope
and sometimes i am the dream of myself
like the smoke of prayer ascending to heaven
i breathe fire in its imaginary state
awaiting the Judgment in constant apology
sometimes disgusted by how much i actually believe
to light a candle and careful of its metaphor
how could it all make such blinding sense?
as ancient crimes still cry out from the earth
what have i trapped behind these eyes?
here i am, watching the crows make a murder
here i am, diving into my head armed with sarcasm
here i am, waking up as the dream slips away
hell never thought someone could figure it out
how to punch a hole into eternity
and i follow, out of all dreaming
where every action is a beginning
the engines of heaven where light is forged
i have given my soul to its proper owner
and i burned in love till only love remained
Other 2
The following is another excerpt from my other book, The Gospel According to Judas. It’s about this one time I had a vision of Jesus Christ:
There was this time that the Lord [Jesus Christ] showed up in my visions saying he had just come from Hell, saying he had “burned it dow-n!” He looked a little… tweaked… like he had been through quite a trial. A little bug-eyed. And I don’t remember why he brought the subject up, but he also said that he was — and I’m quoting, here — that he was “gay as a maypole”. (It’s a line from the movie Love, Actually.) I was like, OK. And then he paused, and I paused, and he was like, aren’t you going to ask if I was being serious or not? And I was like, no Lord, why would I care about that? He asked me about asking him a few times. And I never asked. It was one of the proudest moments of my life, you know, now that I look back on it. Really, why should anyone care?
There are some people who think that somehow, being Christian makes them just better than everyone else, and therefore, able to judge more rightly the good from the evil. I ask, why is it that they speak of love and have nothing in their heart? Why would Jesus turn away those whom they marginalize? Your idea of God is too small. Your idea of love is wrong. Who told you that the eyes of hate are the tint by which the Almighty views the world? Surely, the perverts and the addicts precede you into the Kingdom. How can you think you mean so well? You damn righteous people and raise yourself as the judges. As you have judged, may you then be judged also. And there will be wailing, and gnashing of teeth.
Heaven will not be governed by the precepts of restriction. It will instead be a reign of freedom. For the Lord came not to enforce the Law, but to free us from the rules. I was once having a conversation with Rachel Maddow, in my visions, sometime after the Lord had said he was, again, “gay as a maypole”. (She didn’t ask him if were serious or not, either. And by the way, I think he was joking. Sometimes hard to tell with the King of Kings, though.) We were talking about such things as being gay, and what it means for such people as far as Judgement goes, from God, and judgement from man. We got into a very interesting idea about what Heaven was going to be like, and for whom it was for.
The War was going on, and I had caught wind of the Devil’s rules of play: it was “anything goes.” So OK, the Lord was like, if that is what you want, we of Heaven can do you one better: Heaven will be a place where anything goes, as well: any kind of twisted pleasure will be available to those who get there. The catch is that you have to be a saint to qualify for entrance, and we do things only if it is right to do so. Given that, leave your hangups in Hell. Gay, straight, transvestite, S&M, whatever sexual thing you’re into, no problem. Drugs? Pot, acid, speed, heroin, coke, or even none of the above — we cater to every taste. Why should those people of Heaven be denied any sort of pleasure at all? Why else would it be called Heaven?
Just remember the catch: saints only need apply. For most people, that’s a long(ish) stay in Purgatory, but the majority of everyone do end up at that level — saint — at least, in my thinking about it. To come to know what is the right, and to let go of the aberrant urges of that which within you dies: the right is true freedom. What is right? Not to follow the rules of man, but to love! Have you not heard? Has it never been revealed to you that God is love? The Heaven of love is one where all are welcomed, and so is for all those who welcome others. If you would shut anyone else out, you yourself will be shut out. And that’s the kind of Heaven I want to be a part of. And that’s the kind of Jesus Christ I believe in.
experienced
i find what moves me is the night coursing through my blood
the elixir, night, from vials where dreams are distilled
i find i feel naked without my chains, wandering on purpose
and the dreaming drags at my heels, me without my wings
the wind blows about voices which all miss my exact verbiage
so much sadness, pools about to burst in the house of wisdom
i have seen love come from out of nowhere, hope unheeding
even as the rocket’s red glare blinded me of anything else
sometimes to crawl out of one’s skin, momentarily nonexistent
until the moment when you meet yourself in the vast void
how cruel is the mirror to display whatever truth, how kind
there is power in the desire to be alone, mostly untapped
time as if unreal when no one shares the spaces in between
i have desired to taste the fire out of which desire seeks
and dreaming: it is to touch the world through the ether
have i understood not that innocence is infinite till lost?
the end of the world to be spectacular, unless it’s yourself
i know where i will be when the sky splits open: flying
for fear is merely not to understand where reality ends
even the darkest of horrors can be approached with kindness
and where have i been to know the secrets of the changing?
i to forget myself when asked to lead down the path i blazed
only to be whole when without the self, except the humor
love i have experienced as a gentle breeze… that knew me