'I Wasn't Looking At You, I Was Looking Through You'

The sky reveals more stars where I go to seek refuge.

There, the only light in the sky is if there's a high school football game up the road.

And from there, I gain a fuller understanding.

The smaller celestial bodies -- the ones that are dimmer, fainter, weaker.

It's rare that I ever see them.

But it's there that I do, and they compel me to see something I've never seen, if seeing is the way to describe it.

Their dimness. Their faintness. Their weakness. Outshined by the brighter orbs of energy.

I've been missing the point.

The sky isn't a dark tapestry painted with lighter and darker and bigger and smaller specks of light. It isn't a drawing or a painting or a schematic or a progression of notes.

This is an all-encompassing space, functioning with laws within laws within laws.

From the largest scale expansion of the universe to the smallest elements of quantum physics, where an entire universe functions within an atom.

Countless potential dimensions.

But until now, I've not gotten past the third one.

This is living. This is accepting.

This, the ability to be aware of the space you fill and the space between you and everything else ... that's the recognition of our intimate role in the expanse.

We make constellations of our immediate celestial neighbors. Big and little serving utensils. Half-men-half-horse creatures. I've spent more time pointing out the faint stars that barely make out Orion's penis than looking beyond connecting the dots like a children's menu at Applebee's.

What of these barely visible dots of light?

These are the blemishes. The pieces of sand on the photograph.

Or ...

Now ...

The truth of the space between everything.

The living space.

And the understanding that we are as close as we choose to believe and as far as we are afraid to be.

'Look In Their Eyes, Ma, You'll See Me'

Fear the time when Manself will not suffer and die for a concept,
for this one quality is the foundation of Manself,
and this one quality is Man,
distinctive in the universe.

The home phone rang today in the middle of the day.

I put my book down and briskly made my way through the hall before the fourth ring, thinking that maybe my wife or someone else who knows I'm home right now because I have to work tonight just needs to ask me a question.

I soon as I put my finger down to answer the call, though, I knew that I would be answering the call of someone who doesn't know me but who wants something from me anyway.

I usually know this when people call me Christopher, which is my first name. This man didn't do that this time. It happened the other way.

He asked for my wife.

When I told him she wasn't here, he asked if I were here husband.

"Yes."

"Hi, I wanted to see if you'd be interested in joining the (was it the Committee? Association? Coalition?) To Stop Illegal Immigration."

And time quickly slowed down to sub-seconds within seconds.

It wasn't just the irony. It was the affirmation. The confluence of past and present and fiction and reality.

Here I am, on a quiet day before I have to go to work, reading the center core of "The Grapes of Wrath," doing what I should have done 15 years ago when I tried to bullshit my way through book reports.

You know, it's the one about scores of family being forced off their land by invisible banks and compelled to head west to magical California, where there's so much promise and opportunity because a handbill told you so.

Only to find so much hatred for the disheveled masses seeking refuge and just a small slice of the excess left behind.

Where people are dying in abstract ways, but mainly as a result of the phenomenon of people de-humanizing other people. Which is the same as death, if you think about it, because you cease to be a person if you can't fight your hunger and your pride to remain what makes you a person.

As all good art does -- or even just a sublime combination of a few words does -- you are able to think of what the essence of something is through a story told about it, the story you have molded into a prism through which you see a certain thing as it is.

That's why Jesus spoke in parables.

And it's why I love to hear the tales children spin on the affairs of matters.

But, to the man seeking to enlist soldiers into his association/committee/coaltion to battle illegal immigration, let's just say ...

"No, I'm not interested in that."

Peace, Motherf#$&a!

I've noticed that when people are into peace, and they use their cars to express how much they're into peace, they're usually really, really into peace.

It's rare that I ever see a car with just one or two bumper stickers.

You know, a modest-sized, flowered peace symbol centered just above the rear-window brake light? Or a simple "What Would Jesus Bomb?" sticker on the bumper of a Prius?

No, if you're into peace, and you're really into peace, nothing less than a Peacemobile will do.



I did see a minivan the other day with one simple sticker: "GOD is NOT a REPUBLICAN ... or a Democrat."

That helps me lend a person some measure of credibility, knowing that a conversation isn't going to devolve into an eyes-glazed-over treatise on how communism actually won but the media covered it up.

But if you really want to enforce the one-car-length rule of road safety with me, get me behind a car with a bunch of peace stickers on it. It's not a roadside conversation I want to have while we wait for the jackbooted, fascist agents of pain to scribble down an incident report.

And if you want me to screech over to the shoulder, put on my hazard lights and beg 911 to send an ambulance to extract me from my truck and spirit me home ... put me behind a Patriotmobile.

Some Days ...

Some days, I just can't believe some of the things I find myself saying.

Or, I guess, how I find myself saying them and how unaware I am of how strange they sound until I do some self-conscious meta-reflection.

"So, what's going on today?" a colleague asks me.

"Oh, not much," I say. "Jesse Jackson showed me some pictures of a dead guy. And a guy stabbed his girlfriend with an ice pick. Not too much, really."

You want to know the scary thing?

His response.

"Yeah."

If You're A Dreamer ...

I will not play at Tug O' War.
I'd rather play at Hug O' War,
Where everyone hugs
Instead of tugs,
Where everyone giggles
And rolls on the rug,
Where everyone kisses,
And everyone grins,
And everyone cuddles,
And everyone wins.

It's not always the exact one my 4-year-old son wants me to read from his favorite book, but I always find a way to add it to the list of poems he challenges me to do justice to.

One day, we all will leave this world as we know it. Leave behind the shells of ourselves.

And what is it that we will have offered the world?

My occupation these days is to describe, day in and day out, how people destroy their lives and destroy the lives of others. And these are my dreams.

Man, it sure is a struggle these days to offer something.

...

They say summer's over. And I suppose it is.

I noticed this evening that there were no fireflies.

And while it's hot still, the water in the pool today somehow managed to have the slightest chill to it.

As I look back on the summer, I remember everything you remember about a summer. I've lived a a few summers now, so not a whole lot of it seems as new as it used to be.

But one thing I think about is the smell of my home.

It's something I noticed over the summer.

When you spend several days away from home, you return to find that you actually can smell exactly what it is your home smells like. That won't be happening now. Summer's over, and I won't be away from home long enough to notice.

It's kind of like when I went off to college and then realized how badly my Mom's apartment smelled of cigarette smoke because everybody smoked inside and how I went to school for all those years with my clothes smelling like that.

Except better.

Our home has a natural, wooden kind of smell to it. With a little hint of something that I can't quite express.

(It's difficult with smell. It's one of the senses that you can't recreate for someone else in secondary form. You can't record it for posterity. Simple memory won't do. You have to have the original).

It's a pleasant smell. I'm happy to know that when people come into my home that it's that smell that leaves them with the impression that we all get when we first enter a home.

It reflects what I would want people to think about my home.

The thing I don't think I'll ever know is whether my clothes smell like that.

I suppose I'd have to go without clothes for a while to know.

But it'd be nice if they did.