Manila Madness

i.

the dirt, the dust

the diesel in the air

the dodging crowds

the gaudy jeepneys;

the daring clashes

the space claiming

the street crossings

the suspension of fears;

the dance of wants and musts

the "have to's of dogs and men

of poor and upper class:

this is Manila Madness

its struggle to be

its laughter and pain

of being without 

and getting by

in the zany liveliness.

ii.

i wonder about 

the happiness we wear:

our vulgar wants

our slow suicides

our premature deaths

our money madness

our lives being scrubbed

antiseptically clean! 

*As the stories of our lives unfold, conflict is inevitable and even essential in the attempt to achieve balance. Countless plots are possible.  We move from narrative to poetry, from farce to tragedy, where according to Aristotle, there must be a purging if one is to be purified and prepared to accept the hero's fate.  We move from equanimity to despair in search of an elusive wholeness, knowing it is not possible to chart one's own course with assurance.  As obstacles confront us, we are called on to find our way.

-Editors(Parabola)

*The bridging action of healing appears to be not an isolated act but an ongoing process.  Another way of envisioning this process is as call and response: the Divine, the ultimate expression of wholeness, emits a call or a pull towards itself.  The sufferer, the one who is ill  or incomplete, yearns to respond to that call.  We are all such sufferers, and we are all heroes when we admit that we are incomplete and at the same time accept the pain of being drawn out, through healing, toward the Divine.  We see that healing is not passive; on the contrary, it demands the most active participation and a willingness to suffer.

-Editors(Parabola)

Lazarus at the friary gate

a mountain of silence

Lazarus squatted at the friary gate

a mute beggar

hands tuck within his lap

his mind fixed on a gesture

a blessing pressed upon his head

that he might kneel 'pon gracious knees

before me with my folded hands

with eyes fixed above, toward the perceiving God

i lifted then his pressing hand

raised his arm to touch my head

saying forgive me please for all my sins

wanting the blessing that he could give

held within his out-stretched hand

The rickshaw man rushed through the streets

pulling the tree budding new leaves

blood-red as if on fire

He ran as if fixed on a goal

Was he Christ racing toward the Hill

bearing wood that wound form his cross?

It seemed that ev'ry jeepney that followed

was a nation longing to taste his blood

*...some things simply aren't going to get better.

-Sidney Poitier

*I want to feel good about what goes on around me.  I want to feel good about the way I'm thought of.  The way I think of myself.  Good about how my friends see me and how they feel with me and how they accept me.  I want to feel good about the things I do.  For myself and for my children, for my wife, my friends and my community.  I want to feel good in other ways too.  I want to feel pleasurably good.  Ideally, I would like life to be as close to an orgasm as it can get.

-Sidney Poitier  

noose

if i commit suicide Lord

will you hold me in the noose

let me swing in the breeze of comfort

drop me gently to the floor?

i awaited your visitation

but patience met my fiend

anxiety won the argument 

and dead is how i swing

may my face register peace

as i enter into your door

hug me in your light

dark has been my life

despair they'll say

midst thin anger and tears

but you alone know

the things i couldn't say

my words held back

against a dam of concrete stares

so now i swing loose

arms and legs falling free

entering into your paradise

on this noose which set me free

having let myself go  

falling into your arms a prayer

*Voice Lesson

out of a suitable

silence, a cave

perhaps, a mist

you come to

the awe

hiding in loneliness

out of infinite

attention to nothing

above

or beyond you

you

sound

-Jerry Schroeder, Cap.

*Some people don't want to know of the presence of personal demons: they pretend not to know even when they do know.  And there are others whose consciousness merely dances around the edges of their dark-side reality all their lives.  Those folk never step close enough to look even one demon in the eye.

-Sidney Poitier

when i shut my eyes

a crown of thorns flashed

as if a caution light

was signaling my life

read with any comprehension

he sat and could not read

with any comprehension

for his eyes fell tired

as his brain dried

thus ev'ry effort to read

fell dead between his knees

he could not read the letters

forming words before his eyes

but only chase them down

with each nod of his head

words as if foreign

incoherent as is smoke

paraded across his cranium

like ghosts pursuing ghosts

was he ignorant?

was he dumb?

his IQ often said No

but this afternoon in the library

he could not comprehend at all

*At eighteen I was plenty old enough to damn well know better than that.  And if it sounds like I've rendered a self-assessment far too harsh in light of my age, trust me, I haven't. I was wrong to embrace that crap. Spending  my impressionable years operating in the real world on such wishful thinking wasn't only too costly, it was also dangerous.  I well remember as a young man learning day by day to test my wings in life by stepping farther away from my ignorance.  Then one day, at a bold distance from the safety of that ignorance, I finally spotted my demons - first one, then another, then another.

-Sidney Poitier

Madness

How does one address madness:

kill it with  a grin

chop it with a machete

poison it with arsenic

address it with love?

When scrunched faces babble, do you hide

lest the idiots devour you like rare hammered meat?

Round and round the foul taste of hatred tests.

The work of Disdain circles our eyes like mesh.

We see through filtering lids 

rosy slits, redirecting the sun.

The hair that's pulled is not ours but theirs.

The extracted teeth are those of fiends

named and disposed.

Violence is sweet, revenge ever souring

shoved 'neath stairs where the morgue is housed.

What we smell is dead

fertilizing the earth as rotting flesh.

What we keep are records of recall

recalling whom to repay

a thousand times to repay.

It's beauty like the blood-strained grass

near the shrapneled trees salted with flesh.  

No one screams, mouths agape

only a whimper to record the pain

as children play among the dead.

Normalcy's their mind-set.

Today's the same each day.

They'll play again tomorrow

with madness and the blood. 

*When I was quite young, with no awareness of the personal demons within me or the different forms and faces those demons could endlessly assume, I developed a belief that the hard work of good, honest, fair-minded people with a passionate commitment to justice would bring about a world in which a life of dignity for all would be the rule.  A world in which opportunities to pursue fulfillment would be limited only by the outer margins of one's individual ability.  I had come to believe that problems of race, ethnicity, color, education, sexual preference, class, and poverty, and the attendant afflictions left in their wake to plague the modern world in their names, would be successfully resolved through the efforts of those same good, honest, fair-minded people.  A new progressive force with insight and cohesion was in the making, thought I.  The ills of my generation would ultimately be addressed.  Frictions would be tamed, tensions neutralized, and out of the hearts and minds of good men and women would come the way to a better future - one in which we would all lend a hand at weaving the strong cultural thread of our social diversity into a more caring, a more human community.

Bullshit!

-Sidney Poitier

You

are the Gathering Darkness

the Black Hole

imploding

into my Self

Light

bathing my feet

dust 

i see dust pouring down the hillside

an avalanche of particles rushing toward the road

their swarming million spermal movements

heading toward the city by the sea

in the swarm's head, Darkness

droplets sparkling with the brilliance of the sun

latching upon a host of quarry

in flight and on the run

grace touching whomever it can

*...a scarcity of money goes a long way in shaping the vocabulary of a community.

-Sidney Poitier

singer of sorrow

i led myself into the pleasure dome of death

hell burning my conscience with devilish delight

collapsing into recriminations repeat in my life

i can't even cry

tears evaporate before reaching their ducts

i roast in repentance which even that i doubt

surviving on a struggling wormy-kind of faith

like a centipede moving in cross-directions

pleading for mercy

hear me through my broken mouth

my unclean lips

pity this singer of sorrow

with tattered soul

and tainted guilt

*...our life is grounded in our true Mother Jesus in the foreseeing wisdom that he has from without beginning, with the might of the Father and the high sovereign goodness of the Holy Spirit.

-Julian of Norwich

*All shall be well, and you shall see for yourself that all manner of thing shall be well.

Julian of Norwich

faith 

there's hope in Your rising amongst believers

observing You from the rear of a mirror.

Your dark countenance reflects a question

when communicants gather 'round Your Body longing

staring at Elements hiding Your presence.

You're a Man laying cloistered

beside the tears of his lovers

sequestered and submerged

neath their mottled hopes.

Has their faith betrayed them in their wanting

or is waiting the page upon which

the vision of You is made visible?

They hang on to invisible threads

belief throws out into the abyss.

As they gulp You down in bread and wine

is it madness in them

as them march from the gathering

to the struggles of day,

struggles with themselves, their mates, 

their children, their state?

What holds them when the challenge of belief 

meets the commercial world

where the steel-slabs  of curses 

bore their brittle hearts

and they, against the harshness  of fate

break forth to Golgatha

with patience in their gait?

Whatever You model

they have added to with prayers.

What flows from the deep of their lips

is nourishment for the journey ahead.  

mothering gaze

ever trapped in the desert of my dreams

my wishes, my hopes frustrate your every move

my futile struggles with the Silent God

and the paltry gods i have come to know

even Jesus is a mere grumble in my gut

more a lucky charm than friend

i lean on him in times of disgust

through acts in which i weakly believe

i satanize myself

sporting dried up virtues

as if these were nourishing fruit

for the hungry ones who follow

i am burdened and heavy ladened

a strayed sheep naked without wool

a coin lost in the common latrine

swine condemned to the Galilee Sea

keep me somehow in the corner of your eye

your gaze holding me somewhere between blinks

and when you sleep may i appear in your dreams

a mosquito boring your flesh

your blood offering meat

your large eyes encompass me, staring at me

i understand the look upon your face

it's compassion for the broken spirit

a mothering gaze offering support

thus i stand again upon my failures

lift high my head and wipe my nose

you're here, your eyes speaking

a motherly gaze offering support

Nanjing's Pain, Nippon's Shame

the soldiers marched in

hungry for sex

bayonets in hand

to conquer the land

and hungry for sex

gathering the populace

to fulfill their need

to spill their seed

conquering the land

for the hungers of sex

woman and child

course for the hour

knifing the men

slicing their heads

hungry for sex

labium ripped

by rape, by hand

riv'lets of blood

from vaginas fled

from the addictions to sex

silver swords were drawing

fresh springs of blood

people were falling

and displayed like dolls

for the glory of sex

three hundred thousand

eventually lay dead

piled into mountains

as if they were crowns

for satiation by sex

Nanjing screamed, Nanjing moaned

Nippon lost in the rivers of blood

staining boots, staining name

departing from Nanjing

hungering for sex

many faces gaze

into Nippon's hist'ry-eyes

splattered with the blood

of the thousands who died

still hungry and unsatisfied

pulse-line

standing naked for a police line-up

but found wanting, lacking balls

blood poured forth from the hierarches' bodies

melting those nursing on cancerous breasts

black flight

 i should take you away away 

but to where should we go: 

to Frederick Place replaced upscaled 

gentrified 

sealed; 

follow the crowd 

escape with them to suburban-haven

old 

but safer than the graves we left?

i should take you away 

but we 'd return from whence we fled 

cause the cycles of displacement 

will bring us here again

can't cry

can't cry

anger has dried my soul  into a waterless hole    an empty cistern

numb and cold

grief like a harried widow droops near the bald pond

lamenting stunned emotions

i would like to cry my angers    cry poison from my prison

cry doubts of God's embrace    cry wasted belief

cry the confidence of the assured    cry ashes grasping for spent straw

cry for heaven's sake    cry from barren clouds hanging like dry breasts

for a starving child

cry from dead eyes where the tsetse flies suck puss to fill their empty guts

cry envy that it might hate enough to fill hell a thousand times

cry 'gainst the complacent crowd reveling in my handcuffed fate

cry for prisoners within safe and gated mistakes

cry 'gainst the sinlessness of righteousness that revels in no-fault grace

cry through the opera of the night    where might is right

and white is might    where Jesus won't cry for American guilt

i want to cry

but what are tears for the guilty

but a dumb response inculcating sin

and hiding the guilt of the accuser's faults? 

Tensioned Silence

silence

at once arrogant and shrill

speaks truth about relations

louder than words could cloak

as these stand at the threshold looking

staring blank past their eyes pleading

their lips sealed against knowledge

that would free the caged Bird

silence

like God is silent

yet slaying

like God can slay

speaking

holds them tensioned

attending to each other's absence

and presence

brushing each other

like a whispered hope

a fermenting dream

believing that one day

someday

forgiveness will bloom

embrace

kiss

and wonder why it took so long 

to speak

*Solitude is not necessarily a retreat from communion.  The deepening of subjectivity can be liberating for others.  A day can come when you will belong totally to yourself - that is, to what created you, when alleluia breaks forth.  Then you'll no longer want to wall yourself  in, and in communion with all things you'll rejoin the universal in a vital experience.  You will still sweat blood, but a tiny unshakable joy awaits you in every corner.
-Jean Sulivan


*Don't take away anyone else's certitudes.  Everything ripens in its time.
-Jean Sulivan


* Strangle the phrase with which you were going to compare the present with the past or fear for your future.  Leap into the present instant; the past or and the future are contained within it, and it carries its load of the eternal.  Stop torturing yourself, poisoning your own life.  Disappointed hopes, a broken heart - she has wounded me to death, he has destroyed me - what vanities these are!  Happiness is not in happiness; it's in the unending process.  Then let's get going, live as long as you're alive, do something, something absurd. Or better, who knows, if you've just had dinner, quietly do the dishes.
-Jean Sulivan

failed words

where words do you fly when the wind wounds your neck

choking accents and penults with your insults and jokes?

where do you flee in the maelstrom of lost pleas 

in the porridge of silent mush you serve to keep us free? 

i wonder why we nibble on the vomit of your hatred

on the stale sewage of its dark and failed dreams;

why we chase after the crust of rotten damage

stinking beneath our closed eyes and clouded ears.

longing for a hope that will lift us from our graves

where are the words we anxiously long to hear

to be polish for our hearts, nourishment for our minds?

where are the words nursing like piglets on their momma's tits

content, peaceful, ready to nurture the ark?

*Refuse to live only for work,money, the illusion of happiness, the distant future. Your sons will take care of themselves.  They are no more important than those of the janitor. Therefore, reject efficiency at every price and any action that isn't meaningful to you. Give top priority to the decision to create a space and time for games, gratuitousness, the unexpected, for what can be neither bought nor sold, the instant: "enduring love."  People don't decide to love, but if the way is cleared, love sometimes survives. These are suggestions which, without being necessarily Christian, are sufficiently in agreement with Christian experience.

-Jean Sulivan

*It's harder than you think to prosper in society such as it is, to accept its ruling ideas, without participating in inhumanity.

-Jean Sulivan

*If you're caught in the daily round, let your anger build up: it's an indication of hope. ....You'll have to be willing to lose respectability and all false social virtues, but you'll give joy to someone, to a few -  and that's enough.

-Jean Sulivan

when across God your prayers scratch
the surface of his face, smile
because the roots of your hatred
have bled again for you
and bleeds more as the blood drops
falling upon the bodies of the struggling ones
striving to live beneath the stone piles of hist'ries hates
history's continued battle-cries of the small or great
of the gods we all strive to imitate
and displace in the heaven of our immoral dreams
immortal plight playing at our feet as poisoned snakes

smile.  smile as the waters run
as the sun speaks to the haggling scars
kissing what would have been our horror-grace
waiting to rise with the buried one
now risen one
the buried one rising as our Sun


*...whatever rises up in her against society is also that which secretly is in league with it.
-Jean Sulivan

*Be suspicious of the rebel who uses her insurrection as stepladder.
-Jean Sulivan

*Destroy prejudices, liberate yourself, liberate me.
-Jean Sulivan

*Since it's useless to cry out, smile at yourself, since you're not so brave every day.
-Jean Sulivan

wall of gray windows

this wall of gray windows and scratched glass
closes me in an atmospheric tomb of dancing fleas
waiting for a dog to fly by or flee

we stand in the cold of its empty hall
it's shadowed sun and balding glow
wanting some light to illuminate the day-stars rising

to lift what seems like miracles of people crying
weeping because their laughter had run astray
resting in a fragrant ball where the bumble-bee flies

empty, empty, empty of pollened berries or flowery moss

who knows what to think, expect, sow
when darkness hugs the eyelids like a napping mom

feeding her babe hanging near her lip, clawing
searching for a breast to beat or lap
to take into the land where children rest

where sweet lullabies hover like glass above the door
wanting to fall and crash upon the expectant floor
but can't because the wind has blown



*It's impossible to grow without dying.
-Jean Sulivan

*Destroy prejudices, liberate yourself, liberate me.
-Jean Sulivan

*Since it's useless to cry out, smile at yourself, since you're not so brave every day.
-Jean Sulivan

help!

help!
help!

help the shadow-people
the hood-bound hucksters
stuck in the trays of her national glue
sunken worms struggling for earth
to feed
to wear the dust of dignity
betrayed and slain
stained like Abel's Cain
the power of White
too clean to perform
a violent rite

help!
help!

help clear the air of poisonous flairs
the bottled-botch
that holds your history's sins
locking us in your pens
where you belonged
innocent of shameless blame

help!
help!

help US stare
into the mirror of truth's uncovered mirth
and weep the filth from bleaching bones
placing Blacks in crippled-carts
begging freedom from legal slaves
and smashing love
as our gift with life

head's in a pot of magic-moving
thinking it can turn about on silver dimes
with sensations of the after-glowings
of love or the taste of fresh apple pie

don't know why this spin refreshes
or sends me into the realms of the dead
but i sit watching the blurring sweetness
fall o'er the face of my love

strange echoes seep up from the past
of longings more unsettled than truth
of lost journeys into the darkened future
into the place i'd like to call home

but i sit at the window of torn farewells
near the door where dreams long to appear
and wait, stilted and partially shackled
with cold envy clinging like a kiss

ah, my shadowed memories and heated longings
my short dreams of all that could have been
i stare at the door where death may early enter
awaiting the fire's sweet after-life

tho broken and disappointed through countless ventures
peace with life is what i've stoked



*...crowds are caught up in the rush to conformity.  Lured by money and success, they become raw material for dictatorships, and for the democracies which are partly or already dictatorships.  It sometimes happens that men decide to excel in order to institute reforms.  They usually end up destroyed, content to mediate between various tendencies, to adjust appearances, to bring laws into line with customs.  Others set out to be revolutionaries.  But to employ violence against these evils is to bear them in oneself.  As soon as a cause triumphs, it's time to oppose it in the very name of the value that created it.

My preference is for rebels, those whose sanity leads them to relativize the ideas and automatic reflexes that society produces in them.
-Jean Sulivan

do i believe?

i.

do i believe
i'll commit suicide
if i leap sitting here
neath "foul weather"?

it's a ? i ask
...but y?
fear?
of saying gd-bye
& movin' on?

what's in me
...or not?
courage?
failure?
mistake?

i wonder.

ii.

o Gd,
come to my assistance.
wash my sin away;
let we grow
[n] be a new man
...woman
or ever what i might b,
might be
...w/grace.

iii.

yes,
i say!
yes!
some art is madness
2 c.
b free.
b alive.
survive the sadness.

well, then, toward where do you stare
when the sour wind beats upon your breast
to shake you
stir what's weak in the worn frame of "genuity"
without the "in"
without the standbys, the make-up
we pretend to have when standing straight
without fault or sin
or any human broken-self within

ah! what a mess we transport like graves
even before death ever caulks us in our tombs

i wonder
staring toward the forever long forever
why we play our foolish games
pretending to be masters of the fractured world
gods of the universe dancing with death
when many cry, waiting for some seasonal grace
for a touch of light
to smash the darkness known so well
yet sick

o, to have an eye wide enough to see
grasp the momentary grace gliding past our face
spilling tears
heating hearts
pushing feet to walk a moment ahead
feeling the breath of God slide where we stand


*The West is the third world of the spirit.  Its sadness can't be fathomed; it's the sadness of those who are separated from themselves, insatiable.  The poverty and destitution of the third world still leaves room for fraternity in collective agony.  In the West agony is individual.  Old and young, sick and handicapped - all are placed in the charge of specialists but are irredeemably alone.
-Jean Sulivan

*Technocratic rearrangements are insignificant and can offer no remedy to the illness secreted by a profit society.
-Jean Sulivan