"Your Kibbles Or Your Bits"

Spot works in the open air cubicle next to me at my home office. While I'm coding or doing prep work for the next day's patients, she earns her bit by catching butterflies and lizards and taking a lot of naps. I know it's a rough job, 'cause she has to stop by my work station several times a day to complain.

"How come you get AC and I have to work out here in the heat."
"I'm the boss."
"I feel like a boss."
"I could promote you to boss of june bugs and cicadas."
"That come with more food?"
"Nah."
"Forget it. I'm'a go take a nap."

Anole Dreams

We crawled up into the sky
Away from gravity
And its monsters;
We perched up in the lattice of night
And slept
And dreamt
Of safety and sunlight.

Disbelief

This thing
Sprung whole from disbelief,
Would not lend itself to fathoming.
Words wrapped around it
Seeking purchase;
Some small hold
For syllable or sound,
A nook of metaphor
Or adjectival cranny
In which to attach
And lend perspective.
But language fell away
Like chaff from a perfect grain,
Leaving it bare,
Incomprehensible,
Gravid,
Unspoken.
Leaving you
And me
Here,
In disbelief.

A7 Eludes These Thick Fingers

I miss the way the finger tips on my fretting hand would tingle when I first started learning to play guitar. It was like very small Roman candles going off every time I would touch my thumb to them; my body celebrating learning something new. Now, as I build calluses and they start growing slightly numb, I feel glad the work is paying off, but how I do miss the tingle.

Embers

I've seen the passions inside you
burn it all to the ground;
I've watched your face,
tears streaking ash,
lips pressed to white lines
against the anguish;
I've seen you lose everything
you thought you were
to the fires you can't control;
And I've seen you get up
and start again.

Not A Mirror

Violence is almost exclusively a product of disregard. The exchanging of another's humanity for one's own valuations. Question any valuation held above another's humanity.

No More Waiting

Pinned to the earth, watching the unwatchable sun suddenly replaced by a soul blinding void threatening to become the world but for a searing cage of silver: I would like more, please.

Eclipse Adventure 2017

Made it to Missouri. Another couple of hours tomorrow morning to reach prime totality. Biggest issues will be northbound traffic and the weather.

Let me just say Arkansas is a beautiful state. I really need to spend more time there.

A Whole Years Quota

I was digging through some archived bits looking for the progenitor of a story currently bubbling up through my grey and came across a place where I had jotted down this:

"Bread for myself is a material question, but bread for my neighbor is a spiritual one." -- Jacques Maritan

I don't know where I came across it, though I'd put money it was an article by Chris Hedges, as I am not otherwise at all familiar with Mr. Maritan.

Curious about him, I Wikied him, then went looking for other of his quotes for a quick sense of what words of his had landed in the hearts of the world.

I wouldn't normally do this, at least not without digging a bit deeper into things myself, but I found myself sparked by some of what I found, so I'm going to put them here for now:

• Let us not go faster than God. It is our emptiness and our thirst that He needs, not our plentitude.

• God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth

• To redeem creation the saint wages war on the entire fabric of creation, with the bare weapons of truth and love.

• We do not need a truth to serve us, we need a truth that we can serve

• The first step to be taken by everyone who wishes to act morally is to decide not to act according to the general customs and doings of his fellow-men.

• God's love causes the beauty of what He loves, our love is caused by the beauty of what we love.

• Every work of art reaches man in his inner powers. It reaches him more profoundly and insidiously than any rational proposition, either cogent demonstration or sophistry. For it strikes him with two terrible weapons, Intuition and Beauty, and at the single root in him of all his energies... Art and Poetry awaken the dreams of man, and his longings, and reveal to him some of the abysses he has in himself.

• We don't love qualities; we love a person; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as their qualities.

• A man of courage flees forward, in the midst of new things.

• The poet knows himself only on the condition that things resound in him, and that in him, at a single awakening, they and he come forth together out of sleep.

Things - WIP

There are things we believe,
Embrace like dew covered lovers,
Or wrap whole in self
Like downy babes;
Things we hold more dear
Than truth and satisfaction,
than appetite and future.
There are things . . .
Then there’s you.