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A Sunday Rerun

We are never good enough.
We will never measure up.
Injecting guilt into life.
Injecting fear into wrong or right.

For each life choice is being watched.
Not just by God on his omnipotent cloud
But by the congregation with their soap opera frown.
Each year is a repeat of the same old stories.

So and so got pregnant out of wedlock.
So and so doesn’t like boys, I hear.
So and so is not a true believer, I fear.
So and so asks too many questions.
What day of creation were the dinosaurs made?
Why do non-believers have to burn in hell to pay?

So and so is dating a doctor.
So and so’s house just went into foreclosure.
So and so’s son is in rehab we hear.
So and so drinks too much beer.

The rumor mill churns each Sunday morning
From my old church where my parents met.
Most card carrying conservatives they vet
Each and every church member, eventually to forget.

The dance starts out in a glory
As we fall in love with a new member’s family.
I hear they moved here from Georgia for law.
They have three children; we need our church to grow.
I hear they don’t like football, so I don’t know.

They didn’t join the country club because he doesn’t golf.
How can a lawyer not golf and be one of us?
He surely is in the wrong city to practice much.
I hear their teenagers really don’t believe.
Last Sunday, their boy asked about Adam and Steve.

I spent a lifetime in the church.
I sang in the choir from our perch.
I was in youth group and held hands too much.
I asked too many questions and didn’t learn enough.

This is my background and my religious story.
I must apologize for Christians in name only.
The message of Jesus Christ is about love and respect.
Not about building walls of judgment to neglect.

Not about injecting religion into politics.
Not about taking away the freedom of others.
Not about forcing social issues over progress.
Not about supporting a do nothing congress.

Many of us are still recovering.
The damage has been done.
Many decades later
These stories keep playing as if a rerun.

Feb 20, 2012 | Categories:writing | Tags: | Leave A Comment »

Graduation

 

I graduated from building blocks to tic tac toe.
I graduated from Tonka Trucks to Lego.
I graduated from Ewoks to G.I. Joe.

We pass the baton from one generation to another.
Degrees earned and Resumes written.
Skills acquired and careers gotten.

I remember sitting in school thinking about all the nonsense I was learning and if it could be used. I conjugated verbs and learned of present tense in my past tense. I solved word problems with abstract equations. Not knowing the future of my people or my nation. Not knowing I had a choice as a child that was never given.

I demanded chicken nuggets and Sloppy Joes.  I didn’t know of preservatives or growth hormones.  I didn’t know of monoculture farming as the storm was brewing. I didn’t think of my carbon footprint wherever I went.  Because I lived in the land of rock and roll.  Heavy metal, birth control.  Mullets long and hair fluffed tall.  Jeans were tucked, reds were smoked and Zimas drunk.  Menthol’s green, Nintendo magic mystery machine.

College came and things changed. The angst of youth turned into the apathy of the group, pregnant with choice.  One long buffet of food imported, boxed and delivered to every freshman feeding at the trough of life.  The freshmen fifteen turned into the freshman thirty because no one ever got dirty.  Sweat was something experienced between air conditioned containers.

The music changed.  Heavy metal lipstick on a pig.  Stolen guitar riffs from the sixties mixed with rap hard and dirty.  Lyrics were lingering and searching for meaning.  Trying to find the voice of a generation devoured by choice. Years were lost finding tokens and building avatars.  Playing video games while playing drinking games.  Never knowing hunger or thirst.  A generation depressed for having so much.

I graduated from beer bongs to whiskey.
I graduated from Tupac to 50.
I graduated from a small town to New York city.

Brooklyn fever, dot com boom and bust.  Then the airplanes hit. The twin tower’s dust covered the world.   Finally my generation was ready to die. No more lusting for my father’s war.  No more Korea or Vietnam, for this is a young man’s land.  Hands were raised, promises were made and broken.  The truth not found, the lies abound.  Sworn in to fight for peace in distant lands.  So many deaths, soon to be forgotten.

As we limp from one war to the next, trading one sandbox for another, our toys are the hottest.  The best money can borrow.  Remote control flyovers with Hellfire missiles.  Our drones are passing overhead as families and children are blown to shreds. We have trained for this playing Zelda, playing Halo, playing Call of Duty.  I understand war.  I now know why my father was silent.  There is no honor in this.  There is no honor in this.

Each night at the dinner table I make choices.  Each mouth full a conscious decision to correct the past.  To allow myself to understand that I have allowed this to happen.  That I am to blame.  To educate my children that they can refrain.  Not forcing, not pushing, but nurturing empathy.  And just like that, tonight it happened.  My little girl said she doesn’t eat chicken anymore. Says she doesn’t want them to suffer.  A new generation is at bat.  Soon to be aware of the many mistakes we did exact.

I graduated from a child to a man
I graduated from being a meat eater to vegan.
I graduated from apathy to taking a stand.

Feb 16, 2012 | Categories:writing | Tags: , , | Leave A Comment »

Children of the Flame

Hands in soil as we toil.  Labor intent on solving hunger and thirst.  All spare ground newly found and used to farm.  To mend. Roofs turned into nurseries.  Muscles tense.  Tendons enhanced.  Working hard for this, our second chance.

Time is transient.  One day moves into another amended only by the seasons.  All movement set by the moon as the days swoon.  Swelling, breathing, heat, humidity, moisture balloons.  This rhythm universal.  In sync with nature’s lot.

iThink of the time when iCould watch movies from my father’s iPad.  Images like magic telling stories all day.  iTouched everything.  The world was at my finger tips.  All knowledge known, shared and feared.  For we did not know where our food came from.

iRemember all these things as if they were a dream.  Sitting in our kitchen picking food from a cold metal box.  Cooking over an instant fire.  Sifting through the food we forgot.  Throwing out what had rot.

Tendons tense.  Muscles enhanced.  Sweat rolls off the body down to the ground, where it will help with the plants we raise.  Where each drop of energy is part of a phase.  This coming and going.  This working for eating. For a good life is worth living.  Hard and lean we continue our toiling.  For we have not forgotten from which we came.  The children of the flame.

Feb 12, 2012 | Categories:water, writing | Leave A Comment »

The Cleansing

A sphere rotates
Inside energy migrates
From the land to the sea.
Connecting everything.
The stars.
The sky.
The clouds.
The streams.
The rivers.
The oceans.
Morphing together as one.
An arm, a leg an eye.
Pulled inward and outward.
Cleaning the Earth’s blood.
The soil.
The plants.
The water.
The animals.
The bacteria.
The debris.
One cycle filters clean.
All organisms, one body.
Life and death comes and goes.
A system in balance, time flows.
The adaption.
The technology.
The growth.
The mutation.
The cancer.
The war.
Second cycle filters near.
Ending human greed and fear.
Body, mind, spirit are one.
Gaia will not succumb.

Feb 08, 2012 | Categories:water, writing | Leave A Comment »

The 100th Monkey

We work our days.
We continue to play as
Dividends are bundled and traded.
Futures bet against and faded.

So that we might extract oil from sand
To keep the same experiment going, again.
Continual growth no longer charted.
The population has boomed
And we all know there is little room.

Peak oil has passed
As we watch the sands of our hour glass.
Holding on to the only way we know how.
So few garden or own a cow.
So few hunt and fish.
So few can survive off the land.

So what can we hope for?
That there will be an awakening.
The 100th monkey’s mind expanded.
Consciousness upgraded and rebranded.
The occupations will continue.
Our citites will turn into communities
Who collaborate for change.
Choosing passion over rage.

No need to kill, torture and maim.
The fiat currency will crumble.
The governments will tumble.
The people will prosper
Through the new vision offered.

Fresh game laid at the feet of humanity.

Show us How to Build the Lifeboat

Feb 04, 2012 | Categories:water, writing | Leave A Comment »

The Word


The wind blows.
The birds sing.
The water flows.
In the beginning was sound.
A frequency that blew through the ground.
Rising volcanoes from bursting stars.
Energy compacted and thrown so very far.

The up and down of a wave
comes from our lips as sound is made.
Attempting to describe all that can be thought.
Reaching for the heavens from which we were brought.

I write these words to heal wounds.
To sew empathy into the lips of baboons.
So that they might think before they speak.
So that they might use words instead of sticks.

To work towards peace instead of conflict.
I enter keywords that might be sought.
Peace, Love, Empathy, Occupy, Evolution, Revolution.
May these words be found and used to contain
the hate that flows through our veins.

May this metadata be tagged, liked and shared worldwide.
So that through our keywords we might find God.
The elusive universal oneness that is inside
all who seek.

Who seek truth.
Who seek wisdom.
Who learn to forgive and forget.
That Google themselves and do not regret.
For in the beginning was the Word.
The sound of all creation
which can bring together all nations.
To one Om.
To one breath.

Jan 30, 2012 | Categories:writing | Leave A Comment »

Like a Mud Slide

Before I comment, please explain to me.
How is Jesus throwing corrupt traders out of the temple equivalent to Occupy Wall Street?

Because Wall Street worships money with a religious zealotry.
Because Wall Street lobbies for corporations, not for you and me.
Because a corporations main purpose is profit and greed.
Not to produce the food and water we all need.

But we are each entitled to an opinion, you see.
Perhaps, comparing Occupy to Jesus is unfair.
Before I respond what does Occupy mean to you?
I don’t see the connection from my personal view.

To me, Occupy Wall Street is demanding accountability from our leaders.
To try and break the bond between government and its global corporate bleeders.
Who are drinking blood from a stone.
Who bet against bad loans knowing they would win.
Then bankrupt, they took the taxpayers money again.

Too big to fail.
Too big to go to jail.
Main Street became a ghost town with store fronts closed.
Citizens lost homes to banks who foreclosed.
So CEOs could have their multimillion dollar bonus cake and eat it too.

It is a clear comparison.
In his rejection, Jesus traveled to Jerusalem for Passover, where he expelled money traders from the Temple,
accusing them of turning into a den of thieves through their commercial deeds.

In the same reflection, Occupy works to remove the thieves from government in order to make our leaders
representative of the interests of the people, not the corporate steeple.

Point, set, match.
It’s perplexing that more Christians aren’t involved.
I am vexed.

Clear comparison? Are you kidding me? This ‘comparison’ is the farthest thing from that.
Y’all call it a ‘movement,’ I call it an ‘embarrassment.’
To me, OWS is a silly activity full of spoiled, disorganized, uninformed people .  
To me, they were either stoned, confused, or extremely unfocused.
UNFOCUS is the only thing shown us.

They really have noone to blame but themselves.
That being said, they have all the free will to complain.

The clarity was strong enough for you to respond several times.
If disorganized means WORLDWIDE within weeks, then we are a virus and contagious.
We are a mudslide, a tsunami and our momentum has patience.

Your perception of OWS as “drugged out hippies”
Where did you draw this conclusion from, huh?
Did you even go to your local Occupation… son?
You think you can front when Springtime comes?

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.”
- Stephen Colbert

Jan 26, 2012 | Categories:writing | Tags: , , , | Leave A Comment »

Riding a Bike

You see life.
You feel life.
But it passes you by.
The calmness in the sky.
Not a cloud in site.
Colors changing, eternally.

When we ride bikes, we think
where are we going.
When we work, we hope
our fortune is growing.
When we vote, we believe
that it will count.

We practice worrying
as if it can improve our position.
Somehow change our direction.
But in truth, through worry
we fast-forward
to the next point in time.

Making life a photo album with no present.
Only the past and blank pages waiting for the future.
Never aware of the now, we vanish.

Not knowing the purpose of biking is the ride.
Not knowing the purpose of working is the work.
Not knowing the purpose of voting is the vote.
So we might have a choice.
So that we might be alive.

This world will continue.
Governments will be born and die.
But life, it will always keep you in the flow
so that one day you might know
that this moment was all you really ever had.

Jan 21, 2012 | Categories:writing | Tags: | Leave A Comment »

Talking to Ghosts

There are so many people with the same boot to their neck, day after day, as the world watches a global financial train wreck. You should know most, if not all of this.

There is not enough food to feed the world’s hungry. Not enough empathy to comfort the needy. Corporations have bought and sold governments through preaching the gospel of greed.

There is not enough water to quench the thirst of the growing deserts since modern man seeded the land. To produce more food only to kill the soil. To have genetically altered foods create disease.

As we continue to fight for equality. For the right to love and marry. For all, the right to adopt straight, queer or transgender. We continue the fight for women’s rights. We fight against bigotry and bullies. Against all who who impose their will without regard for the pain of others, human or animal.

And what can we do? We say our prayers. We meditate on mantras. We talk to ghosts.

We realize the power of choice. Like the bus boycotts of yesteryear we choose not buy products with our pay that might reinforce the same stereotypes that fed the fear and hate Dr. King helped hold at bay.

Forty four years later, we march. We occupy space be it physical, mental or digital so that our captors might know that the dream has not been realized. Only when “the people” are equal to their leaders. Only when the military machine begins to buy books not bullets. Begins to teach reading not killing will we begin to reach the mountain top. And when we get there we won’t stop. Humanity will unite.

We will be one with Earth. We will begin to voyage into the galaxy that gave us birth. We will look down from above and see all the hate we endured, turned into love.

Jan 17, 2012 | Categories:writing | Tags: | Leave A Comment »

The Removed

Removed.
The enemy is a target
A bullet is a round.
A village is down range.
All tools to rearrange
ones humanity.
To make killing easy.
One shot one kill.
All soldiers drill drill drill.

Removed.
As we find photos.
Soldiers pissing on bodies.
Abusing prisoners, no apology.
With ten years of Gitmo.
As children ask,
“Where did daddy go?”
Nobody knows.

Removed.
Taken away forever.
No charges to answer.
A hood over his head.
A concrete floor for his bed.
ALL tools for war.
Nothing sacred for
the removed.

Jan 13, 2012 | Categories:writing | Leave A Comment »