THE BRAVE NEW LAND

In every moment there is a question. Within every question there is a moment when each of us asks about the relevancy of each moment, and the awareness of existence. My computer screen is dirty because I haven’t learned how to clean it, and … likewise, my most current painting is bleeding beneath gesso from another artist’s work. It sits there on my easel now as I write about my birth parsha, Noakh. My school work sits lazily waiting for attention, and my drawing table languishes in mostly ill-attempt. The world around me is beautiful, but dormant, however wanting… And, all this is before the eruption about to occur. It’s an unknown, this eruption from the earth. We all know what follows: flamboyantly spouting doom and rebirth as we tremble and drown within the womb of our new lies, told and then reclaimed with the ignorance of stealth, revelry in the reality of rebirth… and into moments anew – ish. (image: The Last Column)

We don’t exist in one time, we exist in all the times. Branching occurs naturally and we ride them all, encompassing each moment. We must only become aware of the path to arrive at perfection.  

  My Dad - He was the tallest man I knew of, not only physically, but mentally and spiritually. It wasn’t always very easy to talk with him, but when we did, and when I needed him, he was there for me completely, without any hesitation. He loved the garden, loved his wife, loved his children, and he loved his work. He was an urban planner that conceptualized a perfect society and implemented his and other’s ideas to build environments to sustain a perfect population of residents. And it worked, right up until the time when his job ended, 10 years before his forced retirement … due to corporate takeover. The American dream, of building from scratch a perfect world, a society that worked together for the needs of all its members, became sullied. Fear of not having enough and greed began to shake my father’s foundation of hard work and faith. My father grew up in a working class family, his birth father having left him and his mother when my father was only five years old. His stepf...

The glee in her eyes told the story from the beginning to its end. Well, except the part where we all jumped into the air screaming… My young student stood at the back corner of the room, eyebrows pursed in concentration. She inched her way forward, begging my attention, with a paper plane she had folded; also begging… So, I agreed. She could throw it in one direction only, towards the garbage can in the opposite corner. She grinned before our lesson, and I knew she would try it. I breathed in as it flew, around one student, then another. It arced to and fro, ascending then dropping down, but (no way) just enough. Then it swooped up, stalled, and came down … exactly into the corner alcove… It landed perfectly into the trashcan that I had asked for, a hole in one. We all screamed as we jumped from our seats, TWO POINTS! And then our lesson began.

It’s cold, and a love-couch. It must be the contact, the surface It’s got to be the shallow stuff, the breaking-the-surface thing That thing that sings its way into the bowels of the thing, that thing Tension that breaks and becomes self-realized. The stuff of source, which is never seen That thing Then, there’s   the other thing. The one open on the other side, of things That thing But, I keep looking at the glass between, the skim-off of cream at the seam Of that thing It lurks behind brain-matter, waiting to sing, that thing Like it never was, it disappeared without a trace Nesting Wrenches

Inspiration is an impulsive phenomenon. Or … the light of the impulse of the flame of inspiration creates itself into the opposite, the muck underneath, the foundation of wealth that resides under each dump. I beg to differ, however, since the place I think of when down is up, the happy-place. That place bursts into fireworks and phlegm, it soars into the unknown. I like it, and when it goes. It comes from nowhere, but lands now. It builds itself into stars and hiccups, slipping. Shine lands on foundation, as it calls and disappears timely. The plain of pattern stains tattoos onto film. Flatulence’ don’t exist, the grey-zone we believe. It rams into the animal in front and welds all pell-mell into the mohel. It never actually sings. In the spire of will, we want wafflery with it, neat squares to glisten and mine – digging deep in order to shine, the ton of milling and shavings pour down until still. The difference is nil, ton and void, since the arch flows up again then down. It is...

HEY, MOISHE! - click here  -  I wasn’t displeased about sitting in-between my parents – and I had the TV-clicker, so pressed it and began to watch. It was a convoluted revenge story developing, and I knew it. My mind fluttered between whether I was in control, or if my hand was being forced. We all watched for a few segments of time, and then I got bored and nervous. I fast-forwarded super-fast to the end. Then the bullets started flying. The screen we watched became systematically shredded, with fibers and smoke fluttering like worms in the wind, but still smoking from ashes flipping from behind. I suppose I was just angry. It was irrational, considering the love that I’d had. They looked at me in the dream like I was criminally-insane. Mouths hung wide and low with eyes pinned to my lapel, lower than my sight could even see. I mumbled nothing and moved back to the carnage, and stewed—then I woke up. It was good to remember, as I do now, building bridges and zip-lines straigh...

There’s a rule and two others that I found while navigating the Ramon Crater. Back in Boulder there was a devil’s thumb, but this was different. In the crater I rediscovered three of them, rules of thumb, rules to live by, and rules that were meant. The devil is fantasy, I always suspected, but the cultural paradigms sent down in time would never relent! So, in the crater, I stuck my head in the desert, into the sands of time, and I learned as much as I could, till mostly I was spent. And spent I was, coming up from the barren lands down below, on the globe we live upon. I kept learning long after sundown, the rules to live by … and, until now, not making a sound. Rule one I learned from my father, as we hiked in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the highlands of California. We arrived at a campsite daily, with packs upon our backs, to find that others had left things behind. My family was small, only four with my mother and brother, but we learned that leaving a place better than when we c...

There’s a knowing left under the world that reminds me of me. I think it sometimes, this knowing, but it leaves soon thereafter, spitting nonsense into my memory of it being. The life it left always tilts my reservoir of love but never touches my lips up, never begs to begin. I sing, I dance, slamming it out unseen, but always tasting the wishing in which it began ~ image:  Etrog in Space, 10-2016  

The alarm split my head open as it went off. My new phone wasn’t normalized yet, and school had just started for the year. It was loud and shocking, but my day needed to begin, nevertheless. Swimming through tasks uncompleted and filling all of my inboxes, I awoke and shuffled towards my morning routine—bathroom, dressing in the dark, tip-toeing downstairs to awaiting animals … feeding, coffee, and contemplation of things to come. Fat ran into the house when I opened the back door, our friendly neighborhood cat, instead of sauntering through my legs for food as I tripped in the dark out onto the back deck. It was strange. I saw Pizza hesitate on the deck-rail, his front paw fluttering as if testing the air for safety. But, with a clink and a spatter, the cat food landed into the metal bowls secured to the kitchen window-sill with wooden cut-out frames and super-sheva. I returned to the kitchen to begin to feed the dogs, Roxie and Dude, scooped Dude’s food kernels with a different pla...