it is

as if we can't spot God

anywhere

ev'rywhere we look

God hides

so we write God off the map

out of sight

where'er we search for presence or sound

for some indicator that blinks

when'er we think God's around

so shout a word of thanks

or shout

"Where are You, o Mighty-hand"

tho it's not in seeing that one sees

but hearing

list'ning through the off-beat marching

among the blanks of ones despair

or the naked-pines singing

when the wind blows

or lays still

when anguish is the highest form of searching

we might chuck looking

staring into the Dark-Night

cause the moon will not shine

when the Sun stands still 

still with the Wind

waiting for the End 

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -The reality of evil is absurd only because we begin by imagining God in terms of human power.

  -The Father communicates by abandon and silence, right up to Calvary itself.

  -Miracles have nothing in common with theater.

  -They occur when a certain tension of faith and love is produced in the hearts of men and women.  A crack, a flash, breaks open the nothingness of appearances. 

 -Miracles speak of the central fire

there will always be something

always wishing for another path

another face

another something

that's diff'rent from what we be and see

another might

another flight

that might lift us up

from our plight

but No!

there won't be

just can't be

no being what we want

in this humankind un-kind

broken and smashed

greedy and hungering for another's spot

or land 

or life

or what'll ever pull us from our plight

our plight of greed and lust

of all

or bust

how live with it with a smile 

doing our best to make a little peace

bowing our heads 

releasing a tearful cry

thanking God

enjoying our tiny piece of life on this earth

'till death do us cease

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -The epiphany of the body, the incoercible desire for a perfect life, is inscribed in nature.  The contempt and despair of a large part of contemporary thought is simply the passionate repression of that desire.

 -It's an impossible dream, since life endured only by virtue of the flow of creation, destruction, and re-recreation.  The Bible says that one must have confidence in the impossible.  But desire has the power to arouse phantasms while creating parallel paths by which to escape the fear that is the other side of desire.  Eternal life in the hereafter resolves the difficulty.  But the Gospel doesn't invite us to that eternal life of nostalgia, in a white world of concepts.  If eternity doesn't exist here, it has no reality at all there.  Besides, all notions  of space and time disappear.  Saints, whether officially recognized or not, have not sought happiness merely in the hereafter, but in the kingdom here and now on behalf of concrete men and women who were their neighbors.  They couldn't stand by, seeing evil and death reign, for they didn't know anything about the limits of the ego.  If their language seems strange to us, it's because they don't share our idea of identity and because they express human unity in bodily rather than ideological terms.  In the same way, artists, writers, and scholars worthy of the name don't sculpt, write, or carry on research in order to gain future glory but because of their need to create, to escape narrow limitations, to breath deeply, and to express both their pain and a sense of abundance.

  -Above all, Jesus proclaims the transformation of mind and heart here and now.

  -How can we remain true when, even if sincere, we think or act in terms of obligation - that is, what we feel we should think and do, not what we really are?  That's how hypocrisy develops.

  -The illumination proposed by the Bible is directed above all at the conversion of one's mentality.  It represents a liberation of the body and its reflexes.  The word that enters our ears descends into our heart before being expressed by our lips and our physical gestures.  

tongue-tried and twisting is the way i feel

trudging along the pathways of earth-life

plodding through mud and the garbage of strife

with laughing-heads and the google-eyed

with inflated worth and the lost of mirth

oh how the crush of empty falls on ones face with costs

of attempts at escape and the denials of lost

of impersonal  haves while living in want

searching ones hands for the dime that might get lost

struggling, juggling, moving along the path

unsure where to turn, to look or burn

but we move on walking where we can

searching for a handout looking for bread

some place within there's a call and charge

to focus with glee as best one can

to answer the prayer stand clear and tall

through fog and shadows with the mysterious trolls

oh the journey we take while roamin' this life

attempting to stay sane while clawing for Cain

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -God cannot lie since (God) has no external appearance.

  -God is betrayed in reality, not in some scene from a play.

  -Jesus'  silence about his identity is also the Word of God.

  -It is precisely through the deconstruction of prefabricated and idolatrous images, whose clarity is misleading, that the human characteristics of God are revealed.

  -Jesus is what happens when God speaks freely in a man or woman.

open this page?!?

why?

...cause when the ancestors buried fam'ly 'tween the lines

their cries rose above the land

ring in a new day of ears to hear

the past dances like gnawing insects in search of food

roamin' o'er the baggage of "forgotten" grime

laying beneath the tombs where the servants died

it's a strange, divergent journey, i know

but homeward it will carry us

like smoke rising from a womb

where birthing is an initiate

and the rejected are enthroned

strange are our travels along the Avenue of Hope

observing and pointing

eyeing what's about

but Love guides us along the Way

singing Hallelujahs with a sway

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -Noting will ever replace for a child the experience of being completely loved by a father and mother.  Let family life be intense but brief, aimed at healthy pain and new birth.  For everything tends to substitute itself for the maternal womb in order to keep us in the cave of illusion: money, art, pleasure (when it leaves no place for joy), love (if it's only a remedy for boredom), religion (when it mollycoddles us), every memory, happy or unhappy, that walls us up within individuality.  We are not yet born.

  -If you are a father or mother, be one as briefly as possible.  Don't need your children too much in order to exist.  They'll make you pay for it.  Let the time come quickly when they choose you.  Let your plans, worries, and good advice perish with you.  Not all of you will see the year 20__, but your children will be in the best of health.  To turn them into carbon copies of you is to assassinate them. That's why many of them fade away without saying a word, without even cursing.  Nature arranges things properly so that sons often rise up against the wisdom of their fathers.  There is too much docility and imitation: boredom will asphyxiate the world.  Be secretly pleased, therefore, by your children's insolence, without pretending to be young yourself and without any favorable prejudice for that foolish stage of life.

  -An enduring total love upsets the conventions, laughs at pretentiousness, and makes a couple both poor and all-powerful.  But societies dedicated to unlimited growth, at least among certain groups, have made marriage a functional association to be exploited by advertisers for economic ends.

  -Mary Immaculate invited us to live in the face of death, not to reject sex but its dictatorship. She stands for active expectation, the plan and the execution of a world of resurrection where it's not a question of dominating or devouring, and there are no longer either men or women, mothers or sons (or daughters), in the womb of the universal body of love.

  -The Gospel...implies constant revolution, rousing those who hear it from the sleep of fable and magic, as well as from any political absolute.  It's impossible to choose; one must accept the tensions which are those of life.

a moment of sun shines briefly

o'er the face of day

where the clothed naked ones

pretend they're the captives of night

oh what beauty and sorrow

captures their minds

gliding dangerously 

on an illusion of time

tomorrow tomorrow

their tears will cry

their paradise having slid

into a mem'ry of ghosts

the Sun will shine 

*Every story has a story.  Every story hides a story.  Behind each story sits another story. 

*"...there are no pain-free options.  You have to chose which future you're going to live."

  -Andrew Anthony

*"...you never get a second chance to make a good first impression.

  -Peter Galbraith

*"Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced."

  -James Baldwin

*Reflections of a Jean Sulivan:

  -That the evangelists reported with such force and clarity words and acts which were not in agreement with their own thinking seems to me a powerful sign.

  -After choosing the apostles, Jesus lives wandering life with them in fraternity.

  -Not that Jesus didn't love his mother.  But what he wanted above all for us to know was that his mother was not loved because she is his mother but because she kept the Word.

why why why oh why

do the master-heads believe the dumb-clucks are ailing

don't know why but their butts are always sticking out in the way

stinking up the land with mischief and funk and dirtying the common good

something needs to change

like tire-tracks scurrying the grassy-greens of gold-courses bone-dry

and the banks of rivers filled with the enemy-air of poisoned grass

what the hell says the sleek bureaucrats hiding behind their funds while running to other lands

bucks in hand and billions from a scam

while the lambs of small-folk pretend that one day they'll reach the promised  land

they're a joke of impostors stringing their lusts o'er the sky-labs of wretched wealth

constantly high-jacking the poor with the bitsy picks of trash they conceive themselves to have

it drives me nuts to smell the garbage of the American dream

and prance about the hay fields with buckets of coins awaiting the dollar bills to fall

i wipe my face with the cloth of my flesh hoping that the schmuck dissolves and the trash files away

but the future is cursed and the fire-flies enjoy the fourth of July once more

meanwhile

all about the nation the death-holes begin to fill

while the scattered toilet tissue of the cursed and the proud

scour for for some tiny piece of greed attempting to keep themselves alive

a pity

what a pity

Eyes  seeing not

Living in the "A"

'tween the Red the White and the Blue

in the land of the free the monied and the new

we Blacks walk about like statues on parade

like addendum coloring the scene

decorating the corners hoping to dress them New

Whatever we were before the beginning

whatever we were at its shores

we are the remains of an afterthought

expected to remain out in the blue

like some Thing bought new

One long pain marching o'er the years of strain

one long color-band drawing lines on shifting sands

one long for-get-it-all pretending we be-long

while the talking-heads pass by gauze-less without eyes

Been a long difficult journey moving silently across the line

hoping for an entry bell that'll whisk us to the front

but whisk we'll never be but walking there we'll get

making noise and ringing bells stirring flags creating sound

being true to what is core-ly ourselves

Humans with a gut

with a Soul about our heart

within our heart within our smarts

alive and breathing well with God somewhere in the lot

awaiting their eyes to see what their eyes are seeing not

awaiting Their eyes to see what Their eyes are seeing not

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -From the outset language invites the child to disassociate herself, making her live in opposition to her body and the world, not with it.

  -...if he is to give life to society and prevent it from petrifying, it is important that he become joyously himself.

  -The Gospel is a plea for the essential solitude of a man or woman who genuinely wishes to meet others.

  -The family sometimes can become more than a hot-house of prejudices and slavery.  Ties of spirit can become stronger than those of blood.  That is its specifically Christian goal.  In any case, the person who wakes up will sooner or later choose his own family, from which his relatives are not necessarily excluded.

sometimes 

like a torture chamber

we are words apart

a block of ice

or

divorce

but who knows why

or cares

since it's simply

me

or

you

or

money

that buys us out

to let the world whirl by

in a zip-locked bag

smocked

and mashing against some rock

some where

somewhere where

we may never row

never know

never ever be towed

for safety

our moment's Now

this moment

to make or brake the other

be friends

or smack each other low

until death do us part

our "marriage" has a shot

a shot

a hot shot

or

plop

it's plop

dead on the spot

plop

*Self Portrait

again

I am

interrupted

fallen from a frame

too tight to welcome

patience

to wait until nothing

remains

resting on silence

ready

to perform

for the first time

again

                             

                                               -Jerry Schroeder, Cap.

*Reflections of  Jean Sulivan:

  -The spirit of resolution and decision that [people] of action bring to business, Jesus applies to prejudice, closed minds, and customs, everything to which the powers-that-be are attached because they need sleep or the excitement of the crowd, depending on politics.

  -Making people laugh is dangerous.

  -No one has a right over anyone, not even God who makes us his friends, as St. John tells us.

  -Jesus cares about fraternity and spirit.  As Claudel says, "Spirit is not in the body; spirit contains the body and completely surrounds it."  Jesus draws us beyond the universe of birth and death.

  -Who is this man who accepts us as we are, invites us to exist within chance and time, without hiding places or privileges, and yet beyond time?

i see so many straggly creatures across the pages of Time

they frighten me like parental fights without love

hatred upon heated-curses

stretching a million miles across life's callous seas

i smell the ugly words of maggot-mouths

filling the air with jackal-gas

smothering decency with the commonness of filthy-flames

burning upon the grains of sands

what can i do to change our stance

alter our course of destructive spikes

our seductive might that destroys our life

encasing us in our silly flights

set to ruin what's blank in our sight

i'd like to know

[although i think i do]

what sank we One

without gratitude

or rank

*Reflections Jean Sulivan:

  -Because the Gospel knows what human nature is like behind the veil of its pretenses, it can remind us that a system based on abundance and greed is radically deprived.  As we come to recognize that the earth is finite, we discover an insatiable dissatisfaction in our hearts.

  -The liberation that the Gospel aims for is first of all interior, which is as true for the poor as the rich, and in the absence of that liberation, all changes are only a matter of appearances.

  -The Gospel doesn't know social justice as we know it; it deals with interior justice that can express  itself only when we search for a social justice that doesn't confuse itself with economic expansion.

  -...who has ever told the truth without encountering the cross?

  -In general we tend to denounce in others something that's also part of ourselves.

Don't know

God what is it I want:

You or some substitute;

some creature that needs faith

while blocking You from the frame?

I don't know at times.

I feel lost and abandoned:

out on the prairie

while tornadoes bear down

to suck me into their mouths

taking me where I would not go

You not being around.

Where should I go to expect to arrive:

to a heaven annexed to hell?

I don't know.

I feel companioned

like a psycho talking to himself

to whatever self can be found.

Touch me as I cry for help.

Let me know You're somewhere 'round

that I might grab some hope

some pole with a flag of truce

white like people who've damned me

assigned me to non-personhood

those years when that was chic.

Turn toward me.

Kneel beside me at bedside

where the angels weep

and the moon floats away

before I fall asleep in hopelessness

anticipating another day.

Kneel near me 

and breathe for once.

I need You "to be"

even when I doubt

to break the neck of my suicide

as I slide  toward hell.

Kneel behind me now

and breathe down my back

like a Spirit who cares.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -The truth is that we no longer have the sense that the individual has a personal reality.  You're mortal Filed, spied on, manipulated, the individual is just raw material caught up in a program aimed at the future, based on polls and statistics. He is crammed with false hopes before being painlessly eliminated at dawn, unless he's prettied up in a funeral parlor, the better to deceive others.

  -Besides, people today are often dead before their time, as soon as they leave active life.  Aid programs for the retired, the third world of the elderly - dramatize their abandonment by a society whose purpose is simply growth and pleasure.  The unemployed, too, relegated to non-existence, have a foretaste of humiliation and death.

  -Societies organized in terms of scientific rationality are noting but bookkeeping enterprises.  That's why they fall under  the law of the explainable, of platitudes and boredom.

Thomas Who!

Who are you Thomas Flood

Thomas Floyd

Thomas Fludd

who sired three kids

with Sophie Stuart

Native-Black

mother-shunned

loved or used?

Where did you hide

that you could rise

to sire a child

when sex was desired?

Did your fam'ly know your underside

or had you learned from their wiles?

Irish they say you were.

Did you speak in brogue?

I'll never know.

Did you jump ship

to buy a slave

or is your hist'ry fixed

in Virginia's armament?

Your grandchildren

never saw your face

sat on your lap

play at your place.

You never visited

their alley shacks

their Georgetown flats

their burial plats.

You disappeared Thomas Flood

fled to heavens that kept you hid

but ever on their minds.

Your children hardly knew you

though they bore your name.

I've searched for you

but found no trace

though it was your red

that covered my head

when I was born

your seed that lightened my flesh

turned me yellow at my birth

bringing Mendel's law full-bloom.

Thanks great-great-great grandpa

your legacy has stretched far.

Your hide and seek has birthed a freak

a burden of my being.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -As in most revolutions, opposition groups generally aim only to redistribute wealth, without raising more basic questions about relations between humanity and the earth.

  -We live in a state of darkness because contemporary societies understand salvation as simply the satisfaction of desires.  If our lives have no spiritual foundation, why question its satisfaction?  But the excess of desire, whether satisfied or frustrated, opens the way to sadness and inhumanity.

  -Everything is taking place as if the repression of eternity and hope was leading to a frenetic search for security in an effort locate eternity in time.

  -It's hardly surprising that one of the most significant phenomena of our time is the denial of death.  It's a menace that comes from elsewhere, a catastrophe that falls on us.  Everything is done, to an absurd degree, to prolong life.  We talk about respect for life while ignoring the fact that in many areas of the world the average life span is only thirty years.

If I won't talk

then I choose the non-spoken

letting life be

not mumbling about what is or isn't

The still-word will die

and I'll die holding it in

Mine is the choice

and I will die staying the course

*Love is the most valuable thing in life.

                         -Chinese fortune cookie

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

-Societies, like individuals, live in a state of divorce from the earth, forgetting that its roots are also theirs.  The pollution that is the result of this divorce is the symptom of spiritual asphyxia.  Hold-ups, taking hostages, and all kinds of graft are only the most visible expressions of an insatiable greed.

-The need to exist qualitatively is not what moves most people but the desire to own and accumulate.  There is a conspiracy to convince them that only quantity brings happiness.  Television, advertising, and journalism aim above all at quantity, even books and ideas, like  other products of our consumer society, have to submit to the prince of this world - money.

-For a long time technology was only applied to our environment and to objects contributing to our material well-being.  Now science and technology act together directly on our reflexes and thought-patterns, exploiting whatever is mechanical in our thinking, at the expense of our secret experience, the intelligence of the heart, and ultimately of liberty.

yellow tree

standing in the failing-fall

you are the sun against the steel-grey fog of morn

nowhere to go but shine

a promise awaiting 

the brilliance of the large-light

If I won't speak

then I choose the non-spoken

letting life be

not mumbling 'bout what is or isn't

The still-word will die

and I will die

holding it in

Mine is the choice

with the will to die

staying the course

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -Jesus is on the road with the prodigal son, and he's also with the father who waits on the hill for his son.  Always on the side of the poor until they allow their greed to become a substitute for wealth, until they begin calling their taste for luxury and comfort justice.

  -For Jesus the worst folly would be passively fitting into a society presented as the only one thats's possible and reasonable, but which insanely destroys, both psychologically and spiritually, both those who profit from it and those it eliminates.

  -From Jesus ' point of view accumulation is crazy.

  -An unhealthy mind never stops preaching about the vanity and alienation of all commitments.

  -Only one way to be a disciple - grow young again.  That means learning how to die, to make oneself free, a traveler with almost no baggage. No acquired positions, no regrets, no decorations.  Let the only dream of your life be - to wake up.

  -If he is condemned and executed, in the last analysis it is because he makes it clear that reforms and changes are not only to be made externally, but within ourselves.  Such a message is unbearable.

media prostitution

i can't stomach prime-time canned humor

nor the hourly rehash of yesterday's news

the confessions of talk-show dummies

chattering away our lives

the insults of judges mocking

the sanity of the courts

it's a deduction of the senses

where sensibilities ought reign

the control of our appetites

with the abundance of choice

we're fucked up and over

by the frightened and greedy

envious partakers

of media prostitution

thank God for Hip-Hop

and its no-shit allegiance

being the paranoia we swim in

soothing o'er our scars

*If Death doesn't get you, something else will.

*"God" is not a narrow, little word that anyone can use to have or gain power over me.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -...when he says,  "What, you see the mote in your brother's eye; don't you notice the beam in your own?"  [Mt. 7:3-5; Lk. 6:41-42;], it's not just a matter of comparisons.  That would simply mean accepting the mediocre wisdom of the world.  It seems rather that at the very moment the I judge someone else, anyone at all, I become blind, whether or not I'm open to criticism by others.  Those who judge others place themselves beyond communion.

  -...one who has reached some degree of self-knowledge wouldn't know how to judge anyone, because the same impulses live in all of us.

  -...morality doesn't exist for others, but only for oneself, a necessity because of a light that dwells within us.  People are not lost or saved by either their goodness or their evil but because of the attitude they have to their goodness or evil.  The just man proud of his virtue, of which he considers himself the proprietor, is far away from the kingdom as someone who seeks pleasure outside of its human context.  Law is the substitute for goodness for anyone who doesn't spontaneously turn toward the good; in general such an approach merely conceals envy and an absence of love.

  -In the Gospel no one owns anyone or has rights over anyone.

 of

of tabula rasa's and rows of welts

of high blood pressure and bleeding nose

of tumbling down stairs and bloody beatings

of sparse mem'ries and an exceptional aunt

of constant corrections and brewing anger

of torching toys and touching butt

of too many niggers and segregated lives

of poison run wild and venom in the heart

of dreams unreachable and an open mind

of hatred embedded and childhood abuses

of minding children and being too young

of depressing language and inflamed killings

of so many "shoulds" that became depressing

tying me down to the bottom of hell

a dot on a page in the hist'ry of race

a destructible exclusion discrimination swelled

...and the toxins swelled, poisoning the heart

destroying the soul, before one started

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -It's impossible to wall up the word-parable without killing it.

  -...if the word is nourished and linked to the deepest needs of the individual, it's energy is boundless.

  -I know it's illusory to think that any society would ever be able to eliminate all forms of misery and horror; indeed, such a society would ultimately be inhuman.  But how can we be on the side of the humiliated without taking action against the oppressors?  Love cannot exist without anger.  Don't we know that there is a type of love of the poor which is simply complicity with the structures of society that created poverty?

  -To love each other in God, in Christ, within the limits of a particular clan or class, refusing to understand the influence of culture, money, and power - the consubstantial, almost invisible violence that is done to people every day - is relatively easy and can be done sincerely.  All that's needed is to bow to the "evidence" offered by one's own prejudices or self-interest.  Such love becomes harder when we take sides here and now, against what really prevents people from coming together - against the exploitation of work, the world-wide supermarket that dictates the law of the jungle.  Because in that case a price must be paid.

  -To be blessed with faith can be simply the infantile happiness of someone who has placed limits on the Word and enclosed it in a cocoon.  Someday it may crack.  One truth stands out: Christian love is only a mockery if it doesn't strive in some way to make us neighbors.

the prison of the mind

the prison in our mind    it's that that drags us round from cemetery to cemetery   from tomb to tomb 

where our stinking pasts are laid

we long to douse the smoke-clouds hov'ring above the smoldering of our deeds   the garbage-pit that yawns as we eye our smelly past   here we stood attempting to burn the rubbish that taints us   the refuse of sins thought long discarded in the dump we called "home"

we're like fools in dunce-caps facing the wall of rejection   twiddling our thumbs waiting for some trapdoor to spring   hurling our vision into bas-relief on the wall of lost grace

like dour virgins posing for a date   we sit staring into cameras that hold our image without a soul   seated and staring into the coated-glass   hoping our Mate will ring and lead us to Spring

but will we remain stuck on the hinges of old queries    trapped in questions that philosophy can't resolve   as we travel the road hungering for Light

*God Is Love:Father-Son-Spirit 

*For the Church/church to re-discover itself and be effective, it must break away from the political systems.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -To be unable to hear the Gospel without a shiver, beyond feeling and thought, on the verge of weeping; to know that this condemns you in the eyes of the enlightened; then, after spending a good part of your life resisting folly, pretending to be reasonable; wanting a foretaste of sanctity, praying for it, in order to be able to speak loud and clear.  But in that case we would be silent.  For how can we dare to proclaim words which are fulfilled only in our imagination or in rituals performed within a cultural circle and when we haven't extricated ourselves from lies?  How can we transmit the Gospel if we only have the courage of a rabbit?

  -A mob, to the degree that it is a mob, can't hear a spiritual message.  When a crowd (a large number gathered in one spot) or the public (a large number spread over a wide area) gets excited, it's never on behalf of truth.  Truth is used as a pretext.  A crowd is convened by physical laws.  To move the crowd - means first keeping some distance from it.

  -Jesus: a man who causes divisions. He travels overnight into pagan territory after arguing about Jewish observances (Mk 7:24).

  -Unless there is an effort to turn oneself inside out, the Gospel is reduced to information and factual details.

  -...the prostitute is you and me, caught up in society's universal prostitution.

  -What matters is here and now.

a person in five phrases

i.

held in the vise of despair without visions of hope

nails sharpen into swords and the stomach sours

becoming a volcano of spite.  yet i walk about normally

with the abnormality of insanity crying for deed dolls

washing their dirty faces to see mine in a clearer light.

but can Pepto-Bismo coat the sorrows

that already make me blush, the flush wholeness

into the life i bear, to muster whatever laughter i can bundle

like a hyena after a kill?

ii.

i reach through the fog that sits at the center of my mind

and touch whatever of limbs limp toward the earth

stretching to touch a caring one somewhere in the universe

a prisoner shackled and manacled upon the torture floor

waiting for the CIA to enter and smash the dead soul of me

into some meaningful life so that questions arise.

they see not blood not hear streams of screams.

they bruise not humans with a name

but immune, beat those with answers that kill

some self more barbaric than they

they say.

iii.

the one-color world bothers me.

i look into the eyes of grey and see darkness.

all about are smiling faces with glued expressions

and i am frightened by the sincerity they bring. 

the tenor of their conversations is noise

unhealthy at the end of all.

iv.

a humming in the atmosphere reminds me of a butterfly.

somewhere between a need for freedom and healing

the spir'tual and the mental fall apart.

it needs to return to the flow of life

unable to maintain position o'er the mythical sea.

attacked like children chasing a fleeing ball

it's a slab of flesh destined for abuse

to be chewed upon, then vomited into a trough.

it's how i feel, atrophied: gnawed and discarded.

what is this death in me?  regurgitation?

an attempt to reclaim a life

before the surgeon arrives to apply the knife?

v.

i'd like to film the world with water and light

with clapping and exuberant laughs

but my limbs fall limp and my spirit faints

feeling lost among the lonely

fumbling in search of meaningful land.

we speak as if we're innocent, but it hurts.
                                          -ken stewart

that gnawing worm

who owns the worm gnawing within

intimate like a sexual being with a face

someone we sup with or greet;

a worm like Adam and Eve's

strolling with us in the night-light

in the garbage that tickles our nose

and draws us to vomit;

the worm that's that close

that we befriend it

and train it to live in ourselves

and appear "right" with others;

the worm that circles our garden

the one that haunted Cain?

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan

  -Instead of satisfying our desires, Jesus sends us back to ourselves at a deeper level.

  -...Jesus offers no plan except to go on to his death.

  -...his only desire is to tear us away from the known and marry us to another time, making death a path to life, after which everything - morality, politics, economics - takes a new direction toward something both impossible and necessary. 

The virtue lies in the struggle, not in the prize.
-Chinese fortune cookie

beyond beyond

the search is about love

the looking about

the catching at a glance

the chance, the sought

the never caught

the up, the down web-ways

the in and out of site after site

with bodies, same bodies

on a different face

without breath, flat 

untouched, hoping

hoping to touch some spot

to see, to find a piece

of my self, missing 

long spent, departed 

long never there

tis a strange journey through

the surf-tide through me

valleys of despairs and mounts

the expectant plateaus of me

the salt-flats of the desert 

my desert and flatland of my wants

my wish to find someday

the ever best-absent something

called love

yet i continue on

letting go, releasing want

the beast, the albatross

swinging 'round my neck

to let it fly, released

to find new shores

o'er which to sail

new waters of fish

new lands to rest 

build a nest

lay down and die

cause here i cannot rest

or be, discover me

but somewhere Beyond

beyond beyond

*Orange

good day

good night

a jazz

of juice

good day

good orange

say 

I

my mouth

all music

from my

good night

we eat

well

we eat

we

                                          -Jerry Schoerder, Cap.

*A thought of Jean Sulivan:

  -...without denial pleasure is degraded and...joy is never the product of self-gratification.

in the likeness of our god

the cruel gift the dark gaze

the neoconic birthmark

yelling heil hitler heil hitler

we're hitler hailing

calling forth his ghosts

for new hungry hosts

for new examinations

and new exterminations

for new-jews re-imagined 

by the sure purification

of the ole human race

to form a new people

in the likeness of our god

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -Was it necessary to hold God back?

  -Your mission is to turn us back toward our center so we can find strength and love in ourselves.

  -People were so attached to formulas justifying submission and pain that the formulas had become sacred.

  -The benevolent backward glance one gives to an age past is never anything but disguised pity.

  -Hers was a system of social pressure justified by pious ideology, which neutralized criticism while permitting the wealthy to further enrich themselves and the powerful to rule.  Because of it, my mother was never able to connect the Gospel that lived within her and her social existence.  The message of liberation gave her neither assurance nor pride, and was ultimately only an inner melody distinct from the conventional language that did her thinking and directed her life.

  -...if we consent to be what we are and descend to the immemorial common basis of reality, we will happily discover that we are being guided.

  -...no society, however just and free, could be human if each person did not have his and her own space.  One needs space in order to have access to one's own spirit - not as a shelter, but as a springboard.  I also insisted that today and the present moment are more important than any projects or plans.

sign of peace

peace sign

cold sign

un-feeling

shoving-away

sharp stabs

soft hugs

get goings

with push-aways

death proclamation

its chains embraced

and i would flee

it's killing me

from this i plead

its slaying dead

the Desired, not given

poison's in their head 

where's Jesus?

where's the Lord?

where the human touch?

where the warmth?

who bears the gift

in frame and name?

where and when

the peace we long?

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -I do not know.  No, I don 't know if Jesus is the son of God.  I'm completely ignorant of the meaning of those words.  My mental certainty is unimportant if my eyes, my gestures, my steps do not confirm it.  And if Jesus is risen, it is at this instant, in my relation to my neighbor - who is everyone, including my enemy.  Every faith which doesn't speak out against prejudice and the barriers of race and class is nothing but an ideological and sentimental luxury.

  -I am saying a very simple thing which is scandalous only for those who are blind.  If you possess faith as a mental object, if you're tense over it, disturbed, almost sick about it, if you have "problems" with it, then lose it and and lose yourself.  Perhaps faith will then be able to find you and take hold of you.  If there was one thing in my limited experience that was electrifying, it was this: Several of the people who first impressed me became rigid in what they called  their "faith."  It became a neurotic attachment to a system, a culture, a past, or a certain idea of the future

  -No one can ever express the totality of faith.

  -Those who write for sheep are bad disciples.  I'd be ashamed  to keep quite.  I'll arrive at the gates of paradise with my rejections and my doubts and will cry out with the leper, "I believe in you, Jesus of Nazareth."

ichthus

i long for you Christ

fish-food for the human soul

meal of the hungry

morsel for the poor

savior from hunger

my primal need

*Life is a gift.  Celebrate it.

*Reflections of Jean Sulivan:

  -In the spiritual order an abstract affirmation satisfies only the person who makes it.  It falsifies our progress along the way and degrades the poem of faith.  Such people take a little girl and tell her, "Jesus is the Son of God; he has risen.  You have to believe this as well as other things."  Faith then becomes something ideal, a sort of artificial satellite of the mind that we can never catch up with, and end up by rejecting, or which we accept with a kind of dualism.  This faith is an illness from which we must recover.  Jesus the miracle-worker is the center of the stories.  We love God and with and others in a sublime interior space, which is simply a way of hiding and is ultimately a form of self-love inside the magic circle of an established vocabulary.  In this way an ardent, intolerant faith often exists with sterile lives, and with no sense of fraternity.

  -...the Gospel is linked to gestures, glances, and breathing, that it was made to be offered, eaten, and to become ourselves, reinvented, replayed, to merge with our silence as much as with our voices.

  -Jesus speaks of himself allusively and progressively.  His disciples understand only much later, when they understand at all.  No one has ever finished understanding.  Don't have too much confidence, therefore, in those who say, "He is here, he is there."  He is always elsewhere.  To put forward a framed and final image does nothing but transform Jesus into an object of devotion or theme of reflection - which is precisely to make use of him to protect oneself.

 -...the ultimate meaning of Christianity is not a world of ideas.  It is a risk freely accepted when weakness and humility call out to us.