empty minds

dying from a pornography of bilious suppositions

an incessant supply of tortured words

we collapse like fattened whores

drunk on the wine of debauched dreams

hoping for release from programmed fears

that hold us captive to junk food mush

coursing the cells of our starving selves

our wills flattened by laws and courts.

to live or be larger than narrowed whims

passed on to us by gaseous heads

we die at their hands

in suicides hatched by the dim witted

a people too blind to think or reflect

having lost the truth of ourselves within.

thus we gaze into glass coffins

hoping to spot the next coming

who we'd like to be whenever discovered

when uncovered by studious researchers

buried with our empty minds

and they assessing who we are.

*Reflections of Alan Jones:

  -The persecuting personality is marked by clarity and precision. There is no room for indecision. There is nor room for guilt.  There is no room for doubt.  Such are the distinguishing marks of a totalitarian state or totalitarian church.  The divided mind, the uneasy conscience, and the sense of personal failure, bring us in their own way to the fiftieth gate, the the place of faith; and it is at that point that they lose theirs crippling power and become vehicles of hope.

  -It cannot be claimed that believers are better that unbelievers, or that the coming of Christ (for example) has made the world a better place to live in.  Believers may claim modestly that because there are those who believe there is a glimmer of hope in the world; but they can claim little else. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, describing the terrible situation in England during the reign of Stephen baldly stated the "men said openly that Christ and His saints slept."  In Shusako Endo's novel The Samurai, a samurai in seventeenth-century Japan says these words to the emaciated Christ nailed to a massive crucifix:

I...I have no desire to worship you...I don't even understand why [these Spaniards] respect you.  They say you died bearing the sins of mankind, but I can't see that our lives have become any easier as a result.  I know the wretched lives the peasants lead...Nothing has changed because you died.

  -The terrible cycle of blaming others, of finding a scapegoat, or persecuting the marginal, is brought to a halt everytime believers repent and accept their guilt.

-An uneasy conscience and a sense of guilt are two of the distinguishing marks of a believer.  Wherever human beings have a conscience sensitive to moral failure there is the possibility of change, because the believer knows that he or she has been an accomplice to all the crimes committed by human beings against their own kind and against the world in which they live.  We, the believers, acknowledge our guilt - whether it be due to cowardice, inertia, indifference, or ignorance. Believers experience a radical solidarity with the guilty, and this sense of solidarity prevents them from treating others as disposable or as insignificant.  Guilt for the atrocities of the world makes us all one.  Father Zossima in The Brothers Karamazov identifies with all and loves all.

Hate not atheists, the teachers of evil, materialists, even the most wicked of them, let alone the good ones among them...Remember them in your prayers thus: Save, O Lord, all who have no one to pray for them, and save those, too, who do not want to pray to thee."