Our daily bread

bread buttered with tears you see

bread craving our hungry lips

bread filling the bellies of lives;

bred that smells of war and pain

 the fractures of rape and tortured minds

the neglect of love and abandoned friends;

bread torn apart by friends we know

fam'lies that pound us into dough

bending wills, reshaping souls;

bread, Your bread, spit upon the poor

to whom we toss out crusted spite

avoided in clubs and on city streets

blamed and cursed for being near:

this is the bread that's daily

the bread upon which we prey

the bread You offer us pray upon

with tears of shame and re-memberings

to shape us whole as nurturing bread;

this is the bread we're given to eat

bread to be given as hope to feast.

when our teeth grind the host

blood unveils the whisp'rings of our lips;

Your Christ leaks through what we intend forget

each drop of Him falling 'pon the weak of us;

and when Your priest holds aloft the sacred bread

it's us You see

each clown acting out their own charade

our false and tainted scripts revealed.

skilled Molder of the Human Clan

knead the dough of us anew 

that we might feast without guilt

bearing the shame that truly frees;

and You weeping with Love

with tears to wash our crusty hearts

press forgiveness into our filthy hands

the Bread You unstintingly give.

-Think straight.  Stand up.  Walk tall.

-May your crosses be steps in the Resurrection Dance.

-Sometimes you gotta get mad to do somethin'!

    *street prophet in San Francisco

*Thoughts of Jean Sulivan:

-Spiritual life...is possible only because of not-knowing.  The mentality that presents faith as natural betrays it while pretending to serve it.  That's why a rigid faith is merely flight from oneself and over compensation.

-Believers almost always imagine that faith means certitude.

-Learn to recognize the faith that reveals a secret despair.

-For me the absence of doubt would be disturbing.  Not the kind that suggests flight, laziness, a preoccupation with oneself in the guise of intellectual difficulties.  I'm speaking of an active doubt that hunts out prejudices and every kind of idolatry, an ongoing discovery that grows stronger by overcoming all obstacles.

nude upon a cross

if we saw you naked Jesus, we'd stone you

nail you to a cross

the thought of a naked prophet

what horrors you'd bring to mind

don't you know we're respectable

what would your mother think

to hear you're nude upon a cross

no matter that 

don your under-shorts

there are morals to uphold

don't scandalize the children

in the realm of the righteous

we don't care who you are

*"Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

  -Martin Luther King, jr.

*Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

  -Samuel Beckett

*We all can speak as if we're innocent yet we all are guilty.

*"...the good simple people in his novels...are what the wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity toward those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those (for) whom he ought to live, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels as the opposite.  From the one who feels the opposite, I make my evil characters; from the one who feels as a man ought to feel, I try to live my life.

 -Charles Dickens to Fyodor Dostoevsky

*I'm gonna stay Black and die. What the f-ck! 

a sleepy breath 

a bird's invite

a kitten's purr 

a beating heart:

Silence between

silence heard

*Thoughts of Jean Sulivan:

-The path towards faith is also a matter of unlearning things.  Spiritual sanity resides in a  youthfulness which spontaneously rejects everything that is static.  Almighty God, King, Lord,  Prosecutor, Judge, Spouse, Lover of the soul, Father - get rid of all those words, and thousands of  others, until nothing is left.  Nothing, that's our name for God, condemned not to intervene, for fear  of making us all immature.  That means we shouldn't be afraid to use the most everyday words. Only  you know what you've put in them - hidden love, deep laughter.

-Remember, God speaks through the lips that happen to be there - those of the unbeliever as well as  those of the saint and through the silence of those who no longer have anything to say.

-Don't expect manna every morning, comrades.