The Throned Men

Who are you,
crazy evil demon genius
alone with your thoughts,
quixotic?

Dare not wander or doubt.
No scripture preached
nor dogma taught
asks this of you
(or permits it).

We alone are the throned men,
we alone rule on free will.

We have written for you a song
to which there are no lyrics,
drawn for you a map without roads,
written for you a book without word,

and the thinking among you shall lay in ruin,
bludgeoned by the scepter of faith.

For we alone are the throned men,
and we alone rule on free will.

Pizza Delivery

Yesterday I hosted a drum circle at my apartment, an opportunity to bask in the abundant good energy of good people. After a typically-late Saturday night at work I crowbarred myself from bed shortly before noon on Sunday in an attempt to make the apartment look habitable.

I was hungry already as I was straightening up, and the thought of hosting 8 or so friends in my sparse surroundings seemed somewhat less than gracious--I own no food other than a box of oatmeal, several bags of dried garbanzo beans and lentils, and perhaps some soy sauce. Maybe. I don't even own paper towels. I seem to live the life of a hermit. Regardless, I wanted my friends to have food available so ordering pizza came to mind, and I called Duccini's.

Thirty-five or so minutes later my phone rang as is the custom of delivery drivers here in the District. "Pizza is here," a simple, older voice said. "Coming," I replied.

I emerged from my wrought iron front-door gate and bounded up the steps towards the street. The pollen was falling like a Rocky Mountain snow storm and spiked, vibrant blue tulips were waving back and forth in my front yard. DC in April.

"Hello," I cried towards the minivan with the glowing delivery cap attached to its roof. An older man, perhaps in his late 60s, most-probably Ethiopian, emerged around the back of the van with a purposeful walk, my two boxes of pizza, and a sly smile. He looked up at me as he drew nearer.

"It is a beautiful day," he sang to me, slowly and sincerely.

"Every day is a beautiful day," I suggested. He stopped walking and just looked deeply into my eyes.

"You, my friend, should write poetry. Do you write poetry?" He glanced down at the flowers.

"I do."

"Ohhh!" he exclaimed. The pizzas came my way. "$18.69." I handed him $23.

"You,"--again that penetrating look through my eyes, maybe analytical, maybe fascinated--"have a beautiful soul."

"We," I corrected him, "have beautiful souls." With this I reached out my hand. My calm, soulful delivery man grasped it, shook it, and then brought it to his face and gently kissed a dry kiss on the back. And then he was gone.

It is there, it is always there, but only if you have your eyes open.

The Battle of the Grey

The dried tendrils of Earl Grey tea were traitorously "plink plinking" into the filter of the small cast-iron Japanese teapot that my youngest daughter had proudly given me for Christmas. She had her first job, hostessing at Applebees, and was eager to prove her membership in the semi-grownup world by finding and purchasing the perfect gift of her own accord and with her own earnings. Built into that small teapot was another message: I get you, and you get me, and this teapot proves it.

On this particular Tuesday I was angry at the tea. The sight of the canister on the pantry shelf brought with it promises of the sort I wanted to hear. The water boiled eagerly in the water kettle and gave off a youthful whistle when it was ready. The tea, however, revealed its true self in the meantime; one can't just scoop loose Earl Grey -- it resists the intrusion of a spoon, stubbornly sitting, refusing to part. Sand you could scoop with a spoon. Sugar you could scoop with a spoon. Flour, popcorn kernels, butter, blueberries -- damned near anything in the world will avail itself to the scoopage of a spoon. But the Earl Grey fights back. You can defeat it -- you can muscle your way through it, but in so doing you employ blunt force and break the promises held in the perfection of the tea, and thereby you also destroy, strand by strand, the peace of mind that lay sifted and ready in the canister to begin with.

Unable to tolerate the idea of punishing the tea I was left grasping for alternative methods. Smallish ice-tongs came to mind, maybe a fork would be less intrusive, less harmful to the tea, like a pitchfork to hay. But no, these, too, seemed wrong. Why was the tea fighting me? Why did I care? It's just tea. Loose, dried plant leaves with neither conscience nor soul. And yet there it lay, like so many things in my life, offering promise and conflict woven together like a warm, itchy woolen blanket.

I decided the only honorable way to encourage the tea out and into the filter of this quiet, confident little teapot was to tilt the canister and help the tea out with a fingertip. That's when the traitorous sounds of cold, dry sleet "plink plinking" on the roof of my car came forth, not sounding like tea at all. I'm not sure what tea leaves are supposed to sound like, but they do not sound like sleet and they do not make me think of car rides through winter storms. My father always drove -- he was an amazingly good driver, knew every trick, every nuance of the car. Owning a car in the 1940s and 1950s was just different, I think, and forced you, the owner, to open a dialog with the car by which you both managed your way, awkwardly at times, through life. Like most relationships, these were fraught with good times and bad, tough lessons learned, and a hard respect forged in the end. Driving through the sleet meant that Dad was in control, he and the car were talking to each other, the world felt even safer than normal, because the one man you knew could tame this was at the helm. Along the way words would come your way, teaching you gently about this relationship. "You always want to gear up early in snow or sleet. Higher gear means less power, less power means you're less inclined to lose traction." You didn't respond to these as they came other than to nod, maybe let a meager "Uh-huh" pass to let him know that you had heard him. Human sponge. Listen to Dad, as Dad had listened to his father before him.

But this was tea, and I didn't want the tea to remind me of sleet or resistance or to bring to the forefront anything that may have been wrong with my life at that moment, on that day. The tea was supposed to hold my hand, stroke my hair, and say "There, there" to me softly while I sit on the couch and stare out the window. And those people walking by, right outside my window, I know they don't have issues with tea, or sleet, or life, or just being happy with the littlest of things. No, those, I just know, are reserved for me. No one else knows that the tea can be traitorous. They walk by my window and here I am, fighting the moral conflict of the ages in plain sight right in front of them, and they don't even know.

Comfort Is My Enemy

Comfort is my enemy,
challenge my fuel,
failure my foundation,
flaws my color.

Knowing is my cancer,
it destroys me, kills me,
and these are my cure,

my joy.

All I Want for Christmas is a Chance

It was four days before Christmas on H Street Northeast in a section of Washington DC that clings to the northern edge of Capitol Hill and is known to locals just as "H Street," nothing more. Tired buildings lean broken and vacant among their rebuilt and freshly-painted peers as revitalization has come to this long-downtrodden part of town, and this economic momentum has brought with it people like me who work in the businesses that now pepper the formerly-quiet neighborhood.

This day a man stood in the bright sunshine on the sidewalk in front of the bar I manage, gesturing somewhat wildly to someone (real or imagined I did not know); this is not in its own right anything of note, as the homeless wander the streets pretty regularly in this city and the regulars on H Street are among the most flamboyant. Wild gesticulations are hardly worth a second glance in a world where folks have conversations with lampposts and shout poetry on the corner to imaginary audiences.

Something about this presumably-homeless man caught my eye, though. Perhaps it was just the way he stood or the expression on his face, but I walked to the window for a closer look. Maybe in his mid-thirties, he was unshaven and clearly drunk as he was having a hard time standing without swaying. His face was intense as an undercurrent of anger seemed to flow through his eyes. His clothes looked old and second hand, but the ill-fitting sport coat over his shirt seemed to suggest he wanted to look cleaned up. And, under each of his tired, dirty arms, was a child.

A boy of maybe 4 and a girl of perhaps 6 or so stood by him, his dirty hands resting on the clean shoulders of their new clothes as they looked into the lens of a camera trying to capture the perfect moment, the pressure of which was obvious on the man's face. Perhaps it was his one chance to offer these kids proof positive for the future that he had been there, if only that day. A memory for a lifetime.

In what feels like an ever-more callous society I would challenge you, you who have never been close enough to touch a child whose normal could be this, a child whose smile could ring so hollow on the heels of Christmas: while you are counting the piles of gifts under your tree, chastising a spouse for forgetting the batteries for that special toy, bagging your mountains of trash and carelessly ripping open your bounty, I challenge you to look in your hearts, and to see our obligation to change the path for children like this and to have compassion for the adults that too many of them become. 

When, in 30 years, these little children become this broken man because we did nothing, I will ask you -- as you scream about their entitlement mentality and their babies on welfare -- I will ask you what you did to help, because I cannot believe that the thinking among us can blame that little boy or that little girl for the future that was lain so crudely at their feet.

A Poem

Arms raised high,
bloodied fingers claw heaven's floor.
Foolish gods laugh and dance, as
cobbled feet drag over stones
and men of faith chase the extraordinary,
each other in tow,
and who is left but the thinking
to clean the blood from the earth.

Blessed

Ere you wish to bestow on us
your songs of thankfulness sworn,
of blessed gifts from heavens on high,
silk, and triumphantly worn,

your shepherds who have had the truth
prescribed by them from above, 
whose thinking lay stashed for another day.
You are blessed, they say, to have love.

You are blessed, they say, with your health and your work,
you are blessed, they preach, with your youth,
yet where is the heart of the fickle above
less concerned with substance than couth?

"Eat now," they sing, "from this body of God,"
"Drink now," they sing, "from chalices gold."
Their words are the cloaks we inherit at birth
and we young learned to hide in their fold.

If blessed then how not cursed are we
when fate -- your model, not mine --
so decides, that blessed is the dog at your feet
thought and soul decaying and dying?

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,
blessed are the angels on high.
Preachings of blessedness fall on deaf ears,
for blessed, as a concept, is lies.

The Choice of Hapiness

Ideally, happiness -- a state of mind -- a perception, if you will -- must be able to exist regardless of the results of life's excursions. That does not render the excursions themselves pointless; quite to the contrary. Much is to be gained from the journey itself. But if you agree that happiness should exist independently of these journeys, then the logical extension thereof is that it is not that which you seek that brings the happiness but a preexisting choice. A results-based threshold of happiness is doomed.

Suppose for a moment that you were the sole living being on a planet with a limited food supply. You need the food to live, yet you know there is not enough to last you your natural life. To not hunt the food is to die a certain death. To successfully hunt the food brings a sating soon tarnished as the thief time steals from you; thief winning, you die yet.

To not hunt, is to die. To hunt, also, is to die. Choosing to stay at home in the mind means the self will live a happiness that is swaddled in the blind cloth of awareness, as if our lone survivor could manufacture boundless food in his mind.

For betting on a threshold of results, you will surely die.

soul marches on? A Re-post from March 2010

lying in a field of fire
soul above me
stretched thin
battle weary
i am awake
i am asleep
i am all people
marching, righteous.
and the man says
we’re moving
but i don’t know
if he’s talking to me
or to my soul,
and so I march,
and i go
i stay
i fight
i die
and i live
or perhaps it is my soul
that marches
i can no longer tell.

Nowhere Man

I like Facebook. I was in early, and I’m on a good amount, but lately I find myself dreading even logging in. Political rancor, mindless repostings of unverified quotes plastered over the photo of a famous so-and-so, and shared links to things I don’t care a lot about have driven me to risk not finding out about your dog dying/daughter’s graduation/photo of your dinner.

It got me to thinking, and the thinking got me absolutely nowhere, and I love it.

Let’s straighten a few things out:

·      I admire people who have opinions.

·      I enjoy debate that occurs in a positive, constructive manner.

·      This post is not really about Facebook or politics.

·      [spoiler alert:] We are all always nowhere.

I have a friend in LA who is by no means a stupid man who remains 100% convinced that 9/11 was a Bush manipulated plot to start a war, drive up oil prices and make the Bush family billions of dollars in profits. And you know what? I cannot prove him wrong.

Then I had a little epiphany one day, in response to a posting from him, an epiphany that led me to think: What if you are right? Does it impact my day? Or my life? Does it change my opportunities to be a good father to my children or a responsible participant in my society? And now this thought process has come to me again, a tattered and bloodied victim of the thoughts, opinions, and ramblings of a myriad of people who seem to care and who, in their caring, drag us all into a garbage-filled gutter where the broken are left to die.

It goes like this:

            Facebook => Crap Feed => Disgust => Revelation => Freedom

The flow of these random streams of rancor lead me sometimes to insight and sometimes to disgust. So many people, so many opinions, so much energy being put into arguing the rights and wrongs. My brain freefalls – things used to be this way (or that way), it used to be worse (or better), it has never been this bad, the country is falling apart (or maybe no – maybe this is what makes the country great). It’s endless AM radio static in my brain, and it’s horrifying.

Then, I return to my conversation with said 9/11 conspiracy theory friend, and I remember: it doesn’t really have to matter.

He thought that the World Trade Center event was a hoax, and he was angry at me for not believing him. And whether he was right or wrong didn’t matter, because I have chosen to live my life in the now and the now does not require of me to know the answer to his questions. All the now asks of me is compassion and awareness.

I, today, still get worked up over politics. I get worked up over xenophobia, homophobia, and allodoxaphobia. Even over the very concept of “nations.” Sometimes I get scared that we’re messing it all up. Then the revelation hits – again – and the shackles of my fear fall like dirt to the ground.

It just doesn’t have to matter. Today – today alone! – I will be presented with more opportunities to do good and to be good than I am capable of seeing. Stephen Batchelor teaches us a particular Buddhist meditation that I use often: "Since death alone is certain and the time of death uncertain, what should I do?"

Not very often is my answer: “Worry.” So this debate leaves me exactly, happily nowhere.

T'ai Chi

I spent the day in Annapolis yesterday, with my father and a friend -- my father because I invited him to spend some unstructured down time with me this week, and my friend because he needed an escape from his apartment.

After lunch we sat on a bench by the water and smoked some good cigars, talking about boats and life and watching the world go by. A man, white and maybe in his late-30s, did t'ai chi in the sunlight near the edge of the park, methodically and purposefully. Two younger black boys, one thin and one heavier set, both maybe 13 or 14 or so, were doing skateboard tricks up and down the curbs nearby. Tourists streamed through, as they do, chatting and taking photographs.

Then the most amazing thing happened.

The boys were staring at the man and they started to mock his practice. He saw them, it was clear, but he continued through until he reached a stopping point a good while later. I looked away for a moment to my boats and my cohorts, and when I glanced back I saw him demonstrating a basic move to the thin boy, who was facing him, mirroring what he was doing, trying, clearly, to understand it. Skateboard down, lying on the ground, a relic from a moment just gone by when mocking was king and t'ai chi was freaky. Hands up. Hands down. Up as we fill the lungs. Exhale and dooowwn.

"No, no, no! Like this!" his heavier-set friend said. A second skateboard fell to the curb, and in that moment the three of them were there, strangers so oddly brought together, doing t'ai chi in the sunshine in a park by the water in Annapolis, straight out of nowhere.

How many such moments take place in the world in the course of a day? Am I left to lament the fact that it isn't more or to celebrate that I experienced this one -- perhaps so small and so large all at the same time?

My City. A re-post from July 2012.

It's walking to the bank. It's diversity. It's tamales for breakfast and Jon Wye and protesters by the White House. It's stickers for causes and girls in dresses on bicycles and dog walkers and Marine One. It's Dupont Circle farmers market and lamb from the country and an herb garden in the back yard and friends close by. And at this moment it's my city.

It's There if You Look. A re-blog from August 2011.

The many fallen blossoms from the crape myrtle leave traces like a patina on the stoop in front of my apartment. They look planned, they look like art. I hose the blossoms away several times a week in a ritual that seems to serve no purpose but for the satisfaction of the ritual itself, maybe for the feel of the splash of the water on my bare feet, sometimes cool, sometimes warm, maybe for the sound, maybe for the act of doing something while doing nothing at all.

This pattern, this patina, painted, stained on the canvas of my world, leads up the stairs to the bricks of the front yard which find themselves impervious to the lingering memory of the tree that shades them. Here the blossoms rest and rot and the bricks find them irrelevant other, perhaps, than how they get stuck in the cracks between the bricks like popcorn does in my teeth at the movie theater. These blossoms, too, I beg away on a water ride of unparallelled excitement that takes them to the sidewalk, to the curb, to the street, where their adventure takes turns that leave me behind, watching. They're my kids on a bus on the first day of school. They're my parents driving away after a visit, my cat wandering away to experience all that which it can't find indoors. I feel good. I have done what I can.

It's August, but at 2 am the bricks feel cool as I sit. I'm not supposed to be sitting outside writing; I'm supposed to be asleep. But this city around me is calling to me in so many ways, reminding me so strongly that there is beauty everywhere, in everyone, in everything, that I don't think I can go to bed until I've tried to alert everyone. I'm on the deserted island and you're in the plane flying overhead, and I need you to see me, to see the beauty I've found, see me waving.

I don't know what the soundtrack to city life is supposed to be, but in my now, at 2:23 am on a Wednesday morning, I hear mostly crickets. Every once in a while some people walk by, wondering why I am on the stoop with my laptop, I think, walking, purposefully, maybe home from work, maybe home from a date, giggling, holding hands, talking earnestly but maybe insecurely. Every 10 minutes or so a car drifts by, excited, heading home, eager to rest finally and maybe bask in the glow of its day, its night. Sometimes though it's a cab, creeping by, hunting, predatory, moving too slowly. I feel like the cabs see everything and yet see nothing at all, certainly nothing that I see. Once though I got into a cab in Chinatown and Jimi Hendrix was on the radio. "Nice music, " I said. "You know who this is?" asked the cabbie, challenging, almost confrontational. "It's Jimi Hendrix," I said, "the greatest guitarist the world has ever known." "My man!" said the cabbie, to me, not about Jimi. That cabbie liked me a lot. I think maybe that guy sees things that I see.

In the midst of it all acorns drop here & there, intermittent and unpredictable like shooting stars, dropping onto cars, dropping onto the street, bouncing, "ker-plunk"ing, rolling away, a fraction of a second of hostility followed by utter silence. I'm not sure how the acorns feel about dropping onto asphalt. I'm thinking they must feel sad or maybe useless, directionless. Maybe we've all fallen onto asphalt before, metaphorically I mean, found ourselves feeling out of place and sad and useless and directionless. Maybe the acorns are supposed to remind us of this. But maybe they are just seeds that drop and they're not supposed to remind us of anything at all. As I sit, I don't really care. But the acorns, they "ker-plunk" repeatedly, regardless.

Mostly though it's crickets, steadily chirping away, and trees, and leaves, and a moon like a homing beacon staring at us through a haze of clouds too restless to stay. If I were a cloud, I'd stay, and watch, and listen.

A Rose. Re-posted from April 2012.

There is a particular rose
that grows high and leans south
through the fence of a house on T Street.

And when I walk home from yoga
this one red rose greets me at nose height and says,
"This is what you practiced for,"
and so I stop and inhale it
with my eyes closed.

My Narrative. A re-post from May 2012.

I was envious, in my youth, of the boys with the thin hair
that cooperated like a Quaker child, submissive.

I have been envious of the shallow people who seem to know joys
that to me are as far away as an understanding of the universe.

I have watched the soulless men who work and count
days and dollars
and I have wanted to understand how so that I could pretend to like it, too.

I have lived the narrative that is me,
a crazy man saddled on a zebra
riding in the brush next to the highway
sneaking through fences,
staring at your discarded washing machines,
wondering where the cars are going.