I'm at the empty poem-bottom of life
falling through hope deeper than deep
down to a nowhere-somewhere
where my soul blindly sulks

Must hang on to that nothing
falling free, bumping into space
the walls of which are darkness
the groans of which, unhinged

Tis a journey to a new land
where surprises lay in the breeze
and flowers sprout  to blossom
my blood longing to Spring

The sun will bring new insights
the moon-still night delights
and God will be my life-shield
causing demons to book their flight

The drop requires much patience
a suff'ring truth, a dread
with pounding on the down-swing
kneading me into bread

Can't tell where I'll end-up
but up is where I'll end
though my feet flounder while falling
the bottom will be my friend

I'm running on the edge of tomorrow
waking in hope of life today
being true to my feat's inspiring

discovering me along the way



The great moment of my life will be death, to die by choice, giving myself to Love, in freedom, with no turning back-a holy release.



We are all beautiful before we grow old.  But it is when we grow wise that we are more beautiful than youth.

...his relatives came to take him away since people were saying, "He is out of his mind."    
-Mk. 3:21

maybe

they're right

Christ is damn mad

or
the earth's
damn mad

or
something's
damn mad

'cause I'm damn mad

mad at the dam-ness
that's damnable
around me

that's damnable
around us

including
our own dammed selves

cursing each other
with ev'ry damn
that dams
our mad hearts
with those 
damnable dams  




"I'll come to keep you warm." 
- words of a long-standing friend

Fruited-faithfulness

He offered to warm me

and I would take it

I would take him this cold night

as the snows rise upon the fields

to blanket and hold the heat

Yes, I'd take him for warmth

midst the chilly-breathing atmosphere

I'd take his warmth any day

a love-gift he offers me

For something deeper than flesh is touched

something years alone witness to

Here, being is being with

is being without words

or intercourse

but fruited-faithfulness

Through baptism and loving, God has His hooks in us through the Holy Spirit who dwells in us.  It is difficult to shake God loose from us.  We can neglect and forget about God's presence within us, even abandon God but God tenaciously clings to us, refusing to release us to evil.  God will always be present for us and with us.

 No Black Indians in the Museum

As only America can do
the Indians appeared as colored shades of white
pure and uncontaminated

Is it possible that my ancestors changed their skin

while greasing their hair?

Did their pigment slide off after their bath?

Is it possible that their tales were a mirage
as they looked toward the Mason-Dixon Line
while marching West toward Nebraska?

Even the naked amazons were displayed in shorts

lest their brown pricks offend their host

No Black Indians blurred the surrender of Geronimo

in his favored place near the Great White Chief

America must be pure

Keep Blacks far from the History Show

lest the casinos remove their support

justa

too many justas

heard them all my life

justa guard

justa clerk

justa janitor

justa nurse

justa lector

justa jerk

justa nigga

justa clerk

justa boy

justa toy

justa mu-tha

justa thoroughly

some thin' disregarded

soem thin' discarded

a substitute

and nimcompoop

all justas

with no justice

a justa thing

being a justa nothin'

heard it all my life

*The Everlasting

nothing

lasts forever

-Jerry Schroeder, Cap.

Look at Death

Look at Death

Watch her steps

Listen as she sets foot

takes a breath

blinks an eye

She's here, by and by

Stay put

You're fine

Invite her to tea

When she hugs you, Smile

She'll lay you to rest

and guard your sleep 

All matters  of things shall be well.
-a personal revelation

living in suicide

impotent and puzzled

i can't get angry without

yet not knowing how i feel

it's buried that deep in me

sleeping in my mercurial swamp

nursed by the cypress leaves 

harboring the poisonous moccasin

they coil in my faceless gut

unhappy with unhappiness

angry with discontent

loving without love

this aint' living

though it's the living i've got

so i hang myself with crammed feelings

tossing me about from limb to limb

dangling like a lynched outsider

thrown o'er a bridge to swim

am i a danger to society

a predator for the lost and forgotten

as if the last testament of my glory

is entry into the realm of the dead?

this is a wretched state of being

of living with myself as if damned

struggling against insanity

pretending i'm not really the bed

*Only by living life can you free yourself from it.  So live it to such a degree that it befits you.
-Karl Jung



*Certainly all historical experience confirms the truth - that man[humankind] would not have attained the possible unless time and time again he had reached out for the impossible.
-Max Weber

*Waiting for Warmth

the water is running

as I stand before the mirror 

waiting for it to warm

to wash, shave and comb my hair

waiting, too, for something else

a coldness in me to go

in the light of a love

that won't run out as I grow old

in the winter a stillness stirs

my eyes pool

a spring clears my way

washing me with tear 

-Jerry Schroeder, Cap.

*After I Tie My Shoes

an island

rises 

around

a lagoon

of delicately balanced

delay

I linger there

in the surf

of the coming day

to notice how

nothing

moves

every

where

-Jerry Schroeder, Cap.

song of the disinherited

yes
i would like to tune my voice so as to speak with a song
but my lips can't form the text in such a way
as to bring truth to the fore
for my throat reverberates with an agony of images not my own

theirs must be spoke  with a tinge of pathos
with a stroke of conviction
so that we'd hear the truth within
not our ears but our guts
in the heart of ourselves
as a word forgotten
a sound turning us toward them
as if they were ourselves
someone important
someone humane
someone to care for

that's what i'd like to issue from my mouth
such a sense of guilt
as to move us to act for once
with conviction and not money alone
with money but with love as well

so
bear with me
as i make low grunts and moans
so as to disturb
so as to perfect the sounds of caring
so as to carry the tones that stir to action
holding to a center rich in silence
silence to hear the voices rising from despair
hoping for someone like you to come along
and join them in their song

poor jesus

we dress him in theology, atomize him with dross
then kill him with sentiments and bury him 'neath floss
while with our halitosis, we subdue the cross

if Jesus were a Punk, at least he'd be somethin'
but we manacle his feet and mangle his person
snip his balls and skewer his lips

his agony is us, believers who mistrust
the good news of him cause it's not politically correct
he's a nigger-slave, a German-kraut

a sneaky Jap, a Russian bear
clothed in pink, in red, black and green
any ideology we're against in the twistings of our pen

poor Jesus, in ideologies pressed
i'd snatch him from heaven
and clothe him in flesh



*It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.
-Frederick Douglas



*Love wants eternity; it's closer to death than to life: nothing can prevent it from sooner or later being crucified.  Only friendship comes back to life.  But the world does not care for the kind of love which opens up, even here, onto the beyond.  Such love is frightening, like everything that is not chained up; it is both liberating and disturbing.
-Jean Sulivan


*The greater scandal is that love is preached as a tranquil, social wisdom, confusing it with the natural love of family, or with philanthropy.  It is not the coupling of husband and wife that the church blesses...but the asceticism that marriage implies.  Marriage without austerity is the modern form of prostitution.
-Jean Sulivan

what happened to me that i died at ten:

too many falls? too many beatings?

too much blood purpling my skin?

hounded by memories ans suppressed rebellions

these pull me down with angers and doubts

i flounder searching for answers to dark queries

carrying me into the cesspools of distrust

into deep gullies of hovering despair

who cursed me with so much pain?

have my eyes failed, darkened by cataracts

blocking any light or hope of redemption?

i stand in the dark night of my soul

searching about for light to clear a path

an entry to a way i need to go

none appears and i knock about on the walls of my failures

stumbe into the debris of my iconic mistakes

claw at the curtains shut in my escape

when will the day of awakening arrive

when the moment of eureka?

i know not but inch along like the blind without a cane

hoping to sense the pitfalls before they suck me in

hoping a voice informs me that the road is straight

that there's a door ahead somewhere

with a crack at its base, where the light sneaks in

and the base boards are loose

and air slithers in to feed a nose

who feels what i feel?

who knows the road i've been on?

is all life bad or an ugly dream

stuffed into attics where musty air clings?

answer me

crazy!

the beggars have gone crazy

fending on hunger

shuffling listlessly down alleyways

they poke for scraps in garbage bins

remnants of superfluous food

dumped to keep the city clean

i look into their ragged face

and see the lines starvation makes

whittled by the elements in all due seasons

hand outstretched, begging for a mammonic gift

my hand should stretch, asking pardon

while drawing in their beggar's breath

i should bend my head, requesting a blessing 

and wash the feet of these long neglected

but i give nothing more than a glance

an emphatic No quavering in my spit

walking quickly, n'arily a glance

*How does one give life without bringing death?  Who has resolved the enigma?  Hades and Dionysus were the same god.  A sacrament was necessary, a seed of resurrection, so that lovers would stop being afraid, would no longer spy on one another, and together would pass through the gate to the universe of persons.

Those who love one another want proofs.  And when the proofs have been given, when they have said, "I love you, I love you," with a voice that was only the sigh of the flesh, sometimes nothing more remains of what had been proven except habit, social necessity, and money.  When people love each other, they want each other completely, but by devouring one another, they are lost.  Woe to someone who wants to know the other completely.  Even more wretched is the one who believes he has succeeded!

-Jean Sulivan

hidden matters

i.

walking the Projects Gallery floor
i was stopped by a red-house of anger
a 2x4 stationed beside its lips
filled with words of silenced pain

it was as if it were
a hanging piece of mem'ry
a trail of tales long buried
now stretching to Today
a storage-bin harboring sin
polluting the grey cavities of some brain

ii.

i pondered the flights in my soul
the flotsam of sin nailing me to a cross
the contents of my red-house of anger
maintained discretely above my nose

hidden matters rose within me:
murderous rage of an abandoned child
racial slurs covered with burrs
the loneliness of being left alone
night after night in my red-house hiding
cowering like an arsonist with a torch inside
to burn toys meant to make one smile
to fill brothers with a terrifying fear

iii.

i slipped away with luggage in my head
relieved that i harmed no one on the way




*What does it matter if the cities are drab, the streets mean and ugly, so long as we bring them a beauty from deep within us.  Inner warmth can make those cold, hard streets friendly.
-Jean Sulivan

*Not to laugh, not to weep, not to detest, but to understand.
-Jean Sulivan

i don't know what it is that moves me

sitting here bored as the fumes from the factory
waft through the open door      staring

a tv screen of bland people talking

floating across each other with nothin' to say
doesn't move me

all's bland this morning

and in me      a dull-weighted mind waits for somethin' to happen
which must happen      within

while i ponder or squander

perhaps      it's better to sit here doing nothin' it seems
and see with open mind      what might occur

perhaps      one thought will raise a sensible remark

offer some bone with meat to chew on
or mem'ries will rise from the basement of my mind

or      my heart might touch an emotion      carrying me back in time
perhaps God will stop while passing by
smell my blood and notice i'm lost

perhaps      peace will be that much more

for a moment      established in the land because
i sat still long enough      to bother no one

anyway      i'm here sitting and waiting

bored and drawn      awaiting whatever will be
for the next hour or half      or      which ever comes first




*The Christian world had grown afraid.  It wanted everything to be in order, smooth and shiny; it wanted to reconcile the taste for power and prestige with interior liberty and freedom. When Christian liberty becomes the heart of people's existence, they lift their heads and raise their voices.  Like animals who panic and turn tail, who can smell danger faster that the wind can carry it to them, the scribes and pharisees showed an obstinate and endless patience as the strove to immunize and neutralize society against the threat of liberty.  For joy, which is born of freedom and only from freedom, is a deadly peril.  It shakes walls, enlarges the soul, strips off old skins, and tells the stranger, the blacks, the Chinese, "You are my brother, my sister."  To the atheist it says, "We share the same belief"; to the prostitute, "You are no worse than many others; in fact, you're more honest."  With its sense of humor, joy sees Christian liberty as rooted in faith; in its winnowing-basket it sorts out what is alive and what is only of archaeological interest.  Leaving the past behind, joy strains toward the future, treating what has been already been achieved as of little value.

As long as liberty and joy could be restricted to rituals, to certain special days and designated times, the defenders of religion were content.  Since it would be too risky and too costly to allow freedom to intrude on their everyday life, they decided to live only on the outside and fell back on official ceremonies, reassured by the good will that such observances presume.  They hoarded much of their energy by not really living, and used it up by practicing extreme caution while taking close notice of others.  It's hardly surprising that so many have left the church without regret or remorse, deeply convinced that they were faithful to the best that was in them.

A person is alive only to the extent that she achieves spiritual freedom, radiating the spirit of alleluias, no longer responding to external commands, having become one with God - who never gives an order because He is love.  Civilization, culture, the Vatican, the pope, and the church exist only in order to permit each of us to become alive and free.  I think people like Strozzi do more to expand human space than the cosmonauts.  What he represents is the leaven at work in the dough, which will take some time to ferment.  People like Strozzi are opening up the spiritual space for a new renaissance.
-Jean Sulivan

*People are born only at the moment they come to terms with spiritual liberty.
-Jean Sulivan


*The Christian world seems to have patiently accomplished the feat of transforming the most scathing part of its message, Paul's song of liberation, into an object of sickly hymns and mental illusions, a refuge for misfits, leaving atheism to rediscover the explosion of liberty at the heart of life.
-Jean Sulivan




in my head was a single conversation
robed like royalty in an amalgam of antagonism
it said
there's too little blood feeding dead trees

neath the brains of the dead
lay the blood of the slaughtered

as enemies
they won't kiss
but their bodies bleed

i hear them drowning in whispers
like soldiers drugging themselves for bravery
churning and chugging out the drama of war

they drag us to death
as if we needed the ride

who will stop them once the engines roar
once reason knows marijuana as fuel for the road?

even our leaders sleep upon peace

why fear?
we'll love them with might
digging them from their privileged graves
piling their bones upon the festive fire

joy will fill our hearts
and we'll wonder why we waited so long

*The true birth of a person takes place when the spirit takes over - not thoughts, not ideas, but spirit - when prejudices fall like dry fruit under the wind of liberty, because mental attachments are mortal than those of the flesh.
-Jean Sulivan


*Death does not always come just a the end of life.  There are a great many living dead among us, people who exist only as part of the crowd, content with merely being on stage in the theater of the world.  Those who have not awakened, who have become rigid in their values and principles, vises or virtues, who are intent on making themselves believed, have betrayed their baptismal names, even though they pose as venerable defenders of the good, the honored, and the blessed.  They have not yet been born. People are born only at the moment they come to terms with spiritual liberty.
-Jean Sulivan

he

he was like a moonless midnight

something to be stared into

until ones eyes formed a familiar something

a face one knew

an aura-producing body

lit like a voice once dead

standing silently like the night

bearing a light beyond the mist

he was like a prehistoric creature

some Madagascan bug moist and light

dancing on a green path of moss

love-making without a mask

yet close to death

perhaps

it would be safe to dance like him

touching the earth

as if it were the only home we knew

or cared to know

with divinity near

he bore into the darkness

the face of fear

the face of flight

the face of terror and shouted

stand fast

this too shall pass

then laughed thunder into the sky

and rained down tears

to flush away the fears

he was an epiphanic magus

drawing night into the embrace of day

playing with darkness

repeating the sounds of children at play

he is the revelation of Silence

his story weaving within our own

am I a dead man walking    imagining release from prison    smiling
un-embittered toward the falsely blind in life    innocent and cased in their
icy lips of death

all for a moment    with wide-opened mouth    a bit of heaven smiles the
sun's birth gleam    releasing beams    warming eyes    picturing Juan

here beneath the sun    where tree-shadows cleave and grey skies flee in a
muddled mess    I rest to cool and sooth    to balm and rub my aching feet
awaiting the darling silent-night    the Noiseless One    Who cloaked in
darkness whispers   I'm here

why is it    with all-Jesus around    we un-Jesus everything and run
to the roaring demons we choose    while he sits silent on the stoop to our
room    a cavalier    destroying fear    and the Death of night

when victims scream    and souls stumble in the shadows of their lives
when we cloak our being    and corset our skin with drugs and rye    he
uncovers pretense    shoving the angelic aside    to eat some meat and
hoist a drink    unbinding guests    and showing the way

*...Someone who withdraws from society and breaks with its prejudices - of course he's going to be different.  Think of an artist who has maintained - or rediscovered - a childlike perspective, who doesn't see things in the ordinary way.  The crowd simply does not understand him.  They only know how to see what they have already seen.  It's the same story with a person who has a deep interior life.  She becomes a puzzle as soon as she plunges into the very depths of the soul, and when she returns to everyday existence again, she seems enigmatic.  When we hear about Cure of Ars lighting his fire with bank notes, we think he's crazy.  And Catherine of Siena shows an equal lack of common sense when she spends the night talking to an assassin, and accompanies him to his execution the next morning, receiving his head in her hands.  We're amazed at Francis de Sales when he breaks his fast by peacefully munching nuts - which makes it impossible for him to celebrate Mass.  From his point of view, it was more important to give pleasure to the friend who had presented him with this gift.  And we have just as hard a time understanding the Son of Man as he approaches the fig tree.

You remember that day when Jesus, followed by his disciples, comes upon the fig tree which has no fruit.  Jesus curses it, even though the Gospel says "it was not the season for fruits."  Voltaire lets out a guffaw.  Bertrand Russell, one of the leading thinkers of our time, is exultant: "Look at what Jesus did; he was neither wise nor even very smart."  And there's nothing more enlightening than to tell the story of the fig tree, or any of the hundreds of paradoxes in the Gospel, to respectable Christians: their faces are suddenly overwhelmed with incomprehension, bewilderment, even panic.  They're like cattle on a cement prairie.  As if what Jesus was talking about were figs!  In fact, the story challenges all of us who are so quick to plead necessity or common sense, to defend our habits or our laziness, so clever at offering explanations, so ready to justify, to erase, to invoke time or age or the season as excuses.  Men and women are made for the unexpected and the impossible - the Gospel keeps reminding us of this.  We may even have to pluck out our eye in order to see.  "God" means there is nothing that 's impossible.
-Jean Sulivan

attracted to darkness and the underground of crime     where the thugs make
play and the prostitutes prey     where killers love blood and laundered funds

standing in the quicksand of filth and strife     smelling of ordure Jesus sets
to save     many are rats in the sewers of life  

dwelling in the bowels of indiscretion     in the hell of the righteous never
sinned     they sink into mire attempting to swim

clinging to to the cross while tossing dice     darkness inhabits the channels of
minds      while hearts hold visions of a freer day

clawing for escape and picnicking on the edge     they claim their loss and
bungling search     their desire to upend their collapsible dream

outside

you were always outside

you lay bent

folded in twain

awaiting birth

wanting contractions to begin

but they lay still

needing a nudge to budge

a movement within

none could midwife you but you

being both fetus and womb

you hold the force to deliver on course

stretch, contract, accept the tear

birth the child gasping for air

*We must stop using theology and law as instruments of control, unless we want to produce a world of slaves - and ultimately of rebels.

-Jean Sulivan

*...poverty is not a matter of whether the cross you wear is made of gold or wood, or whether or not you own an amethyst or an American car.  Poverty begins in the depth's of one's existence, in the language and style which emerge from the depths of night.  Poverty springs from the heart, out of an experience that remains unformulated, in words still heavy with darkness yet shining with light, the only kind capable of evoking friendship and a taste for the impossible.

-Jean Sulivan  

Why imprison me?
What's your fear?
Is it that your secret might be revealed
and the cover o'er your sins fall away?

The burden in your hiding
maximizes my transgression.
So, what is your fear:
that I might descend the cross and blabber all?

i've been duped by truth

i trusted her promise of freedom

that an honest mouth and an open heart

had no enemies to fear

so why stand i denied

whipped like a slave of old

branded a jew in yellow

marked with a plague of hearsay

laying in this womb of agony

long thorns pierce my lips

circle my hands and feet

even a scream is invitation

a stamp affirming my inanity

so i swallow a thousand times hard

shutting the throat that bellows innocence

i damn my tears with a smile

cursing the god of the hard-hearts

jesus is cheap anesthesia

a quick-whiff that drugs the pain

before he returns to cook my ass

 a nigger under siege

history repeats with crowds and thorns

a donkey haltered at the base of the cross

will  you call or come

o good and faithful servant

will  you come cursing censures

justice dripping from the corners of your lips

like a magma the side of a belching volcano

*Each one of us, each group, each class, has a special way of acting and living.  For a long time now the people with power wanted us to believe that their moral law was the only true one.  They had a monopoly on morality.  But what interests me is this: what seems immoral to us is actually moral for a particular individual. After all, the gangster has his moral code, and so does the prostitute.  You have to start with that, and to be ready to set out along with them, beginning today, over the long road traveled by history and the Bible.
-Jean Sulivan


*You have to accept living persons on their own terms, with their own reality.  Instead of flinging values at their head, you have to take them where they are, whether on the level of instinct, or law, or freedom.  As for values, I don't  know what they are.  Yes, I do: they're idols.  The moral law doesn't exist in come cut and dried form when you are dealing with human beings.  'Order is already present,' Claudel said.  'Why torment yourself when it's so simple to obey and when order is already present?'  But order is not a simple given. Laws are not the work of some director-general, administered by delegates. Morality comes into being when life calls out to us.  It is created and brought into existence within the agony of history by each individual in turn, not in some arbitrary fashion, but organically.
-Jean Sulivan

*Things As They Are

underneath

an ember

in the night

stirs

from cell to cell

 from each to each

put there

under the spell

of reasons

from above

when things as they are

become clear

then

stirs a temper

underneath

so then

cell by cell

each

learns to leave

the fear

-Jerry Schroeder, Cap.

*Skywater

in

not telling how

without touching

they met

far enough with the other

to rain

the cry of heaven

upon the dry

of earth

to draw the earth

of father

to the sky of mother

so

a child

named

Silence

Everlasting

is 

born

to be known

thereafter 

as

no

other

-Jerry Schroeder,  Cap.