dead

bam, bam he's dead
shot near the water-front
where the ship dropped him  off
and life became a  scream

this is not the kingdom of God
but the kingdom of gods
proclaiming the righteous manner of their dreams
of life without death
and death that never grieves
of dead people walking alive
and the living full of grief

he's dead
laying it the root of trees
resting for the angel's grace
held above the immortal rest

a has-been mockery of a win

dead

dead
dead



*To pray is to set out, to love, to write, to paint, and to die at each instant.
-Jean Sulivan


*...prayer rises up from the heart of life.
-Jean Sulivan


*Prayer is not perfect, Cassian says, if the one who prays is aware of himself and realizes that he is praying.
-Jean Sulivan

*...we often try to use God as a tool. Praying is a struggle. It's a matter of going beyond faith in one's own thoughts in order to rediscover the original faith.
-Jean Sulivan

winter winds

do you know why the haggard winds blow through these forests
why the tees bend as if bowing before a lord?
"nature!", it's said, "nature!", as if all reas'ning shouts, "humbug!
on the mounds of frigid meadows awaiting summer's return

the prince of winter crawls through the fields of tight trees and homes
searching for entry where a once open wedge or door sought closure
against the butts of brazen skunks losing gas with fetid stench
covering what one would not smell except at night, in the moving dark

winds, you turn the twisters of autumn toward the barren-blank of spring
covering the fields with cycled whiteness that the winter-wife has blown

walk on! walk past the snow drifts lifting tiny vessels from their piles
and throw the white ghosts cross the lawns and fields expansive space
wanting someone to sneak by, wrapped in a cloak of protective veils
warm as warm can be when chilled near the evening's fire

Three poems by Jerry Schroeder, Cap.

Pain

it is winter

all  is green

I turn

attention

to

the pain

slip

into night

into

knowing

how

the door

opens

Carry

this 

instrument

I 

carry

body 

present

breath

blown

I 

find

performs 

best

when 

I

play 

beyond

me

Blind

I do not

hurry

because

listen

more

because

touch

more gently

because

I long

to

see

dead in your coffin

why do we look at you?

why do we stare?

will you return to smile

as long as we smile like you?

we bring our fears and anger

our disgust and hate;

we bring our flowers and "wish fors"

for  you to contemplate.

o, this slow trudge to your wake!

these dragging feet, these folded hands;

these mem'ries we long regret,

our hearts filled with spite.

i wonder, wonder, wonder,

what you'd think or speak,

what feelings you'd regurgitate

if i lay down atop your grave.

so, speak, i beg you, speak!

say something worthwhile for once

cause what's been has not been good

as i suckle these thoughts of you,

thoughts i long to dissipate

cast into the liquid fire of hell

or throw with hope towards heaven

to free me with might or light.

o, these feelings heat'ly stirring

these emotive reflections in time full-borne

of you and me and several others

present, spying, now that you are gone.

*Faith is not communicated by means of doctrine only, but in spite of and apart from it, to everyone who believes that something opens up beyond human experience.

-Jean Sulivan

*...in the last analysis neither laws nor rituals create love; they imply it. The death of Jesus radically challenges for all times those social mechanisms that substitute culpability or repression for love.  "All men naturally hate each other," Pascal says.  "People have used desire to serve the common good, but it's just a pretense, a false image of charity; ultimately, it is only hatred."  One has to want to be a dupe to believe that love can be harmonized with worldly prudence and good will, with the "virtues" that help arrange our comfort or a "justice" that is nothing but the organization of universal greed.

-Jean Sulivan

i.

long, i want to cry out the sadness sitting on the edge of my face
as if awaiting a salvation or some snatching up, waiting
with the forlorn mass, in a near yet hidden door
where entering might heal and sickness begin to run

oh how i sense its urging to arrive where longing stares
searching about for the one who'd understand the staring
who feels the eyes aching for soothing words for the soul
looking at green bubbles skirting like gray clouds covering the air

ii.

what am i looking for standing here, stirring, tossing mold
staring at you hugging, kissing, arguing, appeasing through tears
wanting peace to reside again and again with the wine, the grain
the Hennessey of mind that dragged you thought the door

i sit thinking, crying, hoping, wond'ring, wishing for some carnage in me
that might set me free toward the west or any direction that life might
challenge me, alone, alone, alone, poised on a ledge
like a hippo at the zoo waiting for the gate to fall and it be gone

trespassing on a path leading to the frost from where the gorilla calls
heading home, where,er it might arise, awaiting the Sun to shine

We are perfectly imperfect
-Rupert Dorn, Cap.

swinging on the high-spot of a renaissance world

swinging on the high-post of an approaching renaissance world

ready to defecate as the lions straggle about my feet

i wander through memories long resting in forgotten fields

where my mind floats with the lost thoughts of a forgotten child

me, shepherding my brothers through a daily splash of life

when father's gone and mother's slaving in the nest-egg of hate

while the nations war's and the niggaz wait with spite

in the everyday breathings when the promise come-late

yow-e!  yow-e!  yow-e!  i scream

like a pinched nerve caught on the edge of tomorrow's reign

awaiting the day of redemption crawling toward a door

to set free the caught and trapped, victims of despair and hope

ah!  i breathe and let go of the afternoon of vile tribulations

like a burst of fresh air moving on into the night

to wrestle with the unknown-known that flaps us all about

in the mystery of the human, dancing toward the Parousia

one day! yes! one day we'll flay and flag no more

for a newness to surround and clothe our fluttered souls

but like some discoverers of a distant and heated galaxy

allow our jaw to drop and our mouths to fly with praise

death is our greatest freedom, our release from the strangling mess

when what we'll want will be the biggest surprise of all

thus we wrestle on with tattoos clothing our gagging mouths

in hope that peace will be our exit and joy our entry into home

*...when Jesus comes along saying that the greatest command of all is to love God and to love our neighbor, he too is asking us to pay attention.  If we are to love God, we must first stop, look, and llisten for him in what is happening around us and inside us.  If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors.  With our imagination was well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces.  Here it is love that is the frame we see in them.

-Frederick Buechner 

walking on the far-side of a photograph

sometime i walk on the far-side of a photograph
when the emotional tones scratch my empathy

i bow my head and flee life a frightened child
unable to peer into the heart of life-revealed
covering-up my blinded eyes

i sink into some green out-of-doors
into a cavern to dismember the human scene
then run to a lighter ground or floor for some escape
where bar-b-ques won't taste like blood
nor see bleedings as if from innocent harm

so i hang my emotional notes on a speeding car
pretending i am some mighty superman
fleeing to the gotham press of a more accepting time
reporting deeds as if free from shock



Humanity was before humans were.

We all pass our titles on to someone else.

There's always someone smarter than you in some way.

I wish you were naked so that I'd see you
look at you full-empty, a hidden affair
like Adam and Eve in paradise where they lied
before they threw their curses to the Wind
and let the serpent slide to a Nothing on the fringe

But I can't see you since we chide our empty flesh
behind frills and thrills of allurements and whim
to cover what's real, what's ME, what's giving life
that opens eyes and minds and biases of every sort
that cannot be hid yet might bring Death
because that's the price one pays for being "self"
even in the chronic world of civic fragilities
and bored purities of pilgrim freaks

Oh how I want a new world to rise from the jagged lies
that have made us slaves of carbon-coated sheets of green
that smell of shit because they pass through perfumed lips
speaking sweetly, with death, of the non-considered
awaiting their entry into the galleons of stinking ships

The Day comes, riding on the Promise of longed for dreams
spoken over ages, before our acquiring brains and shame

I wait with laughter and smiling tears, now long in patience
for the latter-day surprises none can escape



*Christianity is wishful thinking.  Even the part about Judgment and Hell reflects the wish that somewhere the score is being kept.
Dreams are wishful thinking.  Children playing at being grown-up is wishful thinking.  Interplanetary travel is wishful thinking.
Sometimes wishing is the wings the truth comes true on.  Sometimes the truth is what sets us wishing for it.
-Frederick Buechner

book after book, I bring the page-markers in

as if they've waved "Farewell!" to my gobbling eyes 

as if Time has spaced us into another world

where Death's no more and there's no rhyme to Time

a stratagem against fear

stand up in your own blood

shining with might like all others:

red with murder

and the colors of hate

stand while you weep

and the blue waters fall

into a waiting pool

and then

then...

decide who you are

and when you decide...

fly

*...it must be repeated, the memory of Jesus can be merely a glance behind, sincere veneration of a past that we see ourselves reintroducing into a life sprinkled with pious thoughts and symbolic acts.  But we will always have to go through the disappointment and disillusionment of Golgotha and the ascension.  To remember is to experience him as alive here and now in the unknown and to laugh at learned theories about the empty tomb, the appearances, and all the archaeological material with which people distract themselves; it means coming out in the open and creating a new relationship.  Because as soon as that happens, it relativizes all the ideas, old and new, that we have or thought we had.

-Jean Sulivan

a lost-child found

i.

we are children's eyes searching

or dog-needs wanting

old man

old woman

looking from old years forward

where long we've walked

back-glancing

or car-riding

where short we've rode

pris'ners never touched 

persons briefly loved

needing one word for life

a touch of hand

of mouth

a nudge

to lead us home

ii.

in his eyes i saw us

he

 a lost-child found

looking as the newsmen jot

the tale they're about to tell

delivering us to jail

us

each of us

buried

carried  in his eyes

*We will never catch up with real people unless we start with the body of the earth, which is also our body.

-Jean Sulivan

*There  is a time for a borrowed, tranquil vision, for everyone and no one, for knowledge, confinement in an invisible shell, with joy painted on our faces-sincerely painted because we believe we are in top form.  And another time to be wounded, to laugh at having believed we had encountered God, to blush at having said it, to enter a kind of nakedness in discovering the artificiality of ideas that we had imagined were part of us. And in this way to begin to exist in a more relaxed style, more available to the first comer.  You can be like someone who all his life shouted out his faith, which he believed was his own, and suddenly, perhaps at death's door, realizes that he is surrounded by darkness and asks himself, "Have I been lying?"  Better to wake up before you're laid out for burial.  Someone who believed he was in the desert, discovering new lands, asks himself if he hasn't simply followed his natural instinct for comfort....There is no spiritual life which does not encounter deception and disillusionment, suffering and confusion.

-Jean Sulivan

prodigal

there then
stay put
near the worn-log pile
waiting for the pigs to rise from the slop-pots
of their evening stew

stay put
as you edge toward the door
lurking at the corners
for some stew to fall near you

i understand your lot
i feel the urgings burn your belly lost at sea
as you search for some gesture
that'll tell you you're in

but words move slowly
slower than you'd hope in your time of need
when the hunger eating at your mem'ry
tears holes in your guts open sack

and you're wanting
hung'ring
for a simple food or snack
for a taste of pig's garbage
and a word to come back

to come back
to come back for more snack

while you weep
yes, weep
as the pigs plan to atack'

why do i kick you

kick you out of the hollows of my room

out of the spaces where you sit

longing

looking

looking for some escape from the encircled mood

drawing

and pulling me downward toward the floor

where the fishermen skim

searching for barracudas

that feast upon the shore?

*The end of the Road

of course

it's always there

waiting for me

too begin

feeling

my way

through whatever

darkness wants

to show me

there

the ten thousand ways

are never exhausted

and fear

flowers

-Jerry Schroeder, Cap.

and so it was

and so it was...

i thought i'd write a poem about hardship's
when the phone called me to its ear , its mouth

i stood listening to the speaker speaking
to me about hellos and goodbyes as we ride
into the corner of another time

for goodbyes there were
goodbyes to the times before i was what i am
to this times hello to all assurances of moving onward
on to the tomorrows that waved to yesterday's so-long

i am sitting here
sitting before this machine with words
wondering if my next days will be pleasant
if tomorrow's rain will wet my head alone

this is a strange degradation
this wondering about the assurance of my flight from hell
from the prison that would have slain me
choked me in the gases, its chlorophyll

but i marched onward onward into the new days lying ahead
accept the blazon banners offered to my hand
to shake fire from their silent reds and grays

onward onward toward the whatever-life-can
to be whatever rises from the dreams and efforts a hand
to go for the gold where shit lay stewing in green mold
and find the vision that sleeps within my hold



we want

we want

some word to say

like Hi

Good-bye

some sound
to block the space

in which we stand

we want something

in this empty

dry

wasted version of air

hanging like a drug infested
polluted bag of goo

we humans

cough out humor-draughts

of nothing

laughing, like suicidal-plentys
where the numb
pack their empty pockets
with hope for something more

we stand
at the edge of humor

waiting for the laughter to rise

and feed a smile

relieve a cough

and be
for a moment

a monumental New

*...it is the sermons we preach to ourselves around the preacher's sermons that are the ones we hear most powerfully.

-Frederick Buechner

*We can love him, we can learn from him, but we can come to know him only by following him-by searching for him in his church, his Gospels, in each other.

-Frederick Buechner

hunting for nuggets

don't know what the reign us in the air
why the queen of life is searching for a king to sip
what the boogaloo is, the trap
the ever small crawling about that fills ones pants

who asks the questions
speaks abut the rotting justice in the land
as the prophets push truth across the airways in the sky
to open ears and eyes holding lies as guardians of the way

i want to know to know what to know why you're holed
up in the circular well of closed-walls and panes
why you're scared to hear some words to set you free
throw you back onto the playground of life and love

you want love like a thought digging neath the realm of magic
hunting for nuggets in the flight from truth

want something with feelings with firmness and form
a container emitting the vibrations of care

i understand i do like a moist vibration from the distant blue
like a lone egret standing in the pond like a stable post
awaiting a fish to swim near the motionless wanting heart
with gratitude to catch whatever swims within the reach of its beak

i understand i understand waiting with an anxious eye
for someone to pass by to love to hold before we die
before the sad tears of death start rolling down ones eyes
and the soft-ground of earth fills the hollows of our good-byes



*Evil cannot be destroyed, it can only be redeemed.
-Anon


*To kill evil, one must kill the significance.
-Anon


*Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive.
-Rainer Maria Rilke

pound

i.

pound sky the message of freedom
pond hell from the clouds and stars

let fall swiftly the light shining as moons
waiting for a new earth to bloom

ii.

music of lamentations swell the air
weeping tears for the mockery of love
pounding like rocks the bangs coating the sky
ready to pound pound the night-flights to light

pound the ears the mouths the expectant joys
of parents hoping their children return from war
praying with smiles and tears and urgent peace
while polishing guns to kill the enemies unseen

iii.

oh God I cry against our angry patience hanging
dripping like grenades from our scattered minds
spinning with thoughts seeking some good on the earth

hear oh hear our revenge rising from the dust of our deaths
sleeping full behind sanctioned eyes closed to the lights
of celebrations never played for them in the park

never paid for those who believe that death is the first meaning of life
never hung where you hung where we now stand watching
where we stand crying hoping for some new tomorrow today
today today today oh yes today waiting wanting Life today

let go

wanta scream
stand like a boxer-boulder
at the corner of Hartford and Main

my looking -mouth open
ready to wail across the anxious way
the mobbing crowd crawling round the blocked escapade

hoping to find a door through which to fall
as the sounds of verbal blockage
spread upon the street

tis the moment of jubilation
release of the multi-jagged daggers
rolling in my head

let go
let them roll off the winded air
drop into the bucket of some waiting heart

mine's ready to bust
burst and break apart
with the many years of holding muck in my mouth

blow
let go
release the burdened mem'ries harming my ageing years

my hurting eyes
my hurtful fears
my hurting years

the red lines came
and rolled around center stage
laying themselves before the gawking light
like a night light searching for a glow

and ev'ry line scrawled a word
a word signifying a wond'ring thought
initiating a revolution of type
that could fire a volley of might

words flared with excited rage
shout Jesus-Jesus
on a crawl of wasted-page
revelations not knowing where to grow



*As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me   Just as Jesus appeared at his birth as a helpless child that the world was free to care for or destroy, so now he appears in his resurrection as the pauper, the prisoner, the stranger: appears in every form of human need that the world is free to serve or ignore.  The risen Christ is Christ risen in his glory as Redeemer and Judge.  But he is also Christ risen in the shabby hearts of those who, although they have never touched the mark of the nails, have been themselves so touched by him that they believe anyway.  However faded and threadbare, what they have seen of him is at least enough to get their bearings by.                    
-Frederick Buechner                 

don't know

don't know

just don't

no

just don't

u no

that it's a swift mirage

of streams we chase

 looking for the end of dreams

carrying us into the heavenly bliss 

on earth 

where ne'er a bliss

be found

nor caught

but dreamt again

again and again

till the end 

of our days 

on earth 

begin

*Thirty-eight centuries ago humans like us stood there at Stonehenge under the deep dome of the night sky and understood something about human life for which the intellect alone is too shallow.  Only the heart is high and deep enough to hold this vision.  Only life lived to the full measures up to the task of contemplation.

-Brother David Steindl-Rast