THOUGHT OF THE DAY

I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone.

— Robin Williams 

 

CLOUDS OF GREEN

This morning the universe
continues its raucous life:

Crabapples spray glory.
Then the universe 

sits for a moment
as if in deep thought.

Tender new asparagus
up along the tracks. 

The universe stands up 
and shrugs.

“I guess you just do 
the best you can, right?”

No, I thought. 
That can’t be right. 

There must be an explosion
of a billion particles in this place.

Then spring in the  
meadow of the body.

Everything multiplies, 
divides and washes

over green grass. 
This must be how 

we become streams,
shadows, dark roots, I think.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY

“If I believe in anything, it is in the dark night of the soul. Awe is my religion, and mystery is its church.”

―Charles Simic

THE SAYINGS OF TWILIGHT JESUS

 At the park Jesus sits down on the grass to have a sandwich.  “I feel like I’m  sitting on bones, memories that don’t belong to me and I’m afraid the me they love is too small.”

 

Jesus hopes they play good music at his funeral, the kind that has not yet been written.  “You know, I’m nothing but an ancient mindful joy.”

 

Ladies and Gentlemen, from Los Angeles, California...

THOUGHT OF THE DAY

“It was the time of year, the time of day, for a small insistent sadness to pass into the texture of things. Dusk, silence, iron chill. Something lonely in the bone.”


—Don DeLillo, from White Noise (Viking, 1985)

Ray Manzarek, The Doors, 1939-2013

In the beginning was…
I don’t know, Ray, I don’t know.
Let’s call the living to dance
so when the music
of the soft parade’s over
spirit remains—a strange spell,
a puzzle solution, a whirlpool
of borderline dreams
of one or another stumbling fools.
The hand of fame, good night.
Bless the blood of the heads bent.
Where the Yes—voices shout. And
like in a fairy-tale, in the darkest time,
music, a drum out there in the sunlight.
We gotta go, gotta take a little ride.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY

"And I have stepped into your dream at night,
A stranger there, my body steeped in moonlight.
I watched you tremble, washed in all that silver.

Love, the stars have fallen into the garden
And turned to frost. They have opened like a hand."

— Thomas James, from “Tom O’ Bedlam among the Sunflowers”

EXIT AND BEGONE

Peter Jamus, "Chair"

Something tells me to look at
the radical angle. My eyes burn.
It’s fear, it’s dread,
like caged wings.

Something tells me to describe it.

Like spiders at midnight.
Like a dozen murdered bodies.
Like a thousand savage words, or
strychnine—so many uncorked
vials here.

The hand of fear rises up
like syphilis and brain swell—damnation
and on the third day, resurrection.

Something tells me this is good.
Something tells me: You are a soul.
(And a soul depends
on a soul—)

Lord, make me small
so I can see with your largeness & feel
something divine, closer to the ground,
on harder surfaces--

& suffocate all remnants of fear:
groans, beasts, nightmares & the cliff’s
edge—dreamstorms of apocalypse.

Here, now let an unrestrained song
of outrageous sunshine begin
and brighten as it carries.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

ee cummings

THE SAYINGS OF TWILIGHT JESUS

Jesus was born dreaming with a crazy-eyed intensity, “Today is the sort of day I’m in love with everything I can name.”

With only a few days left on earth there’s not a breath of wind. “I will die in a fit of laughing. We are all temporary in this unexpected parade. My story seems pale compared to the thousands of others in all the boneyards of the world.”

THOUGHT OF THE DAY

"The point is to understand everything, to realize everything, every impossibility, every stone wall; not to reconcile yourself to a single one of the impossibilities and stone walls if the thought of reconciliation sickens you; to arrive by way of the strictest logical syllogisms at the most repulsive conclusions on the eternal theme of how you are somehow to blame for the stone wall itself, even though once again it is abundantly clear that you are not to blame at all, and in consequence of all this to sink voluptuously into inertia, silently and impotently gnashing your teeth and reflecting that there isn't even anybody for you to be angry with, that an object for your anger can't even be found, and perhaps never will be, that this is all a fake, a conjuring trick, a piece of sharp practice, and there is nothing there but a morass, nobody knows what, nobody knows who, but in spite of all the mysteries and illusions, you ache with it all, and the more mysterious it is, the more you ache."
 

- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Notes From The Underground

Even In The Spring

O the invisible wound where

Devotion offers little blessing

Gives any answer

But a slow burning ache

From the unquenched fire

Of a dream 

Song of another world

Tongue of blue sparks

Not a single shaman

With a private language

Can explain the holy sun

Without wondering why

The sky collapses

Eyes do not see

THOUGHT OF THE DAY

"When I wake up just before dawn and hear the throbbing voices of birds as they echo against the silence, I am overpowered by yearning. When I ride in the dark on stark roads through dry, bald hills, I ache with desperate longing. I don’t know what I am longing for, maybe for some place of my own within these images, some place where I fit, instead of being the one human being still awake, the only thing moving across the hills in the arid darkness. Maybe that ache is loneliness. I haven’t found a name for the feeling yet, nor do I know exactly what awakes in me. But instinct warns me that it is too potent for me, that my soul is on the verge of cracking when I feel it that way. I cannot handle the sheer power of those wild emotions by myself. I have to find some way to share them. That is why I write. It’s instinctive. I just have to—because it is awake like lava in my blood, and sustains me."

— Rachel Corrie, Let Me Stand Alone

The Sayings Of Twilight Jesus

Jesus used an alias or two like  Midnight Walker and Sam James.  He'd often say, "Dig this, property is death."

He was always dreaming. This morning waving from the window of a passing train, tomorrow dressed in a bright green shirt and a red cape. He'd panhandle your change and say, "Consider me a stray on my way through the dark tunnel home."