When was the last time,

you hugged your brother,

you American Capitalistic,

blue-collar or merchant class,

maybe middle-class

Christian you, your brother —

you know the one who

stands in line to get a job,

any job for that matter, or

his sister, your sister,

who stands in line next to

your brother in that same rain

for hours – the two of them

who when they come out

of the rain when their number

is up, and that number is called

with a certain disdain

have to face some faceless,

officious, condescending

bureaucrat who hopes eternally,

because he or she sits

in a dry place in a gray,

aluminum, glass, dry-walled,

soulless room and hasn’t

stood outside in the

cold, November rain that he or

she might, by the grace of the

good, white people’s God,

spend some federally

mandated Christmas break-time

with the senators, representatives,

lobbyists and the billionaires

behind them all at a $500 a

plate holiday fund-raiser

for people who despise people

like your brother, your sister,

the officious bureaucrat

and you, too, old man?

“Perhaps,” she said, “you find it difficult

living in a morally bankrupt and hate

filled nation,” the author had written

and the reader lowered the book down

to his lap and mumbled, “That’s right,”

feeling depressed which even the early

winter Arizona sun couldn’t alleviate,

so he decided to focus on using words

he found interesting and had circled from

the novel  starting with chapter eleven

and use them in their order of appearance

in a sentence: So sangfroid, he persevered

in the face of the persiflage of human

nature which couldn’t stop him from

annealing those frivolous, youthful

traits and grow up as he sat under the

mansard roof inhaling the pungent

odors of the abattoir while the

patissiers stirred the pot for pastries

in the room next to him just before

he disported himself like a chicken

under an early winter Arizona sky

and then he lifted the book from

his lap and continued with chapter

thirteen.

My wife’s mixed media sculptures are a lot like carpentry.

Once the fabric is cut and the wood is sawed and the clay

is molded and the rest is glued it is pretty well history.

My poetry is much like gardening — moving words, phrases,

line lengths, endings, beginnings, working the soil

of the poem’s bloom.

The pressure is on; she has to get it just right

and I just have to till the soil

sometimes at midnight

under a full moon.

This is my 500th post,

and while I would love to think

that I’m the post-host with the most,

I’m afraid many would say,

“Oh, he’s just really verbose.”

He didn’t know if his anecdotal experience would be

statistically verifiable, but, for example, he and his

wife and recently adopted Chocolate Lab spend four

winter months in Phoenix, Arizona, so the local rest-

aurant review T.V. show the two humans love, has

eight months of programming the couple doesn’t

see (and sure, granted the filming doesn’t last all

year but surely it’s more than four months), but there

it was upon their return – a re-run restaurant review

they not only had seen but, because of said review,

it was a restaurant they had visited the previous

spring before leaving for parts northeast – a visit

which only earned mixed reviews from the two.

Same for cable and network shows they hardly ever

watch. If they say, “Gee, we never watch this, but

there is nothing else on, so let’s do it,” and there you

go and wouldn’t you know? It’s the one show they

have seen. And so they ask an existential question,

“Has this, statistically unverifiable experience, happen-

ed to you?”  Sure, they thought so and the dog, to his

credit, slept through the frustration and loud voices

shouting at the T.V.

The poet and photographer are

two-in-one at this man’s site.

Apparently the branch broke and

fell from quite a significant height.

The poet with the camera ever present

clicked from a perspective just right

and promptly announced that for cocktails 

it’s just the right time of night,

or afternoon, or morning 

or whenever the ice is just right,

as it always is in the freezer

with the freezer door shut tight.

Cheers!!!

For the poet/photographer’s “Event,”

see: http://jessmerrill-photography.blogspot.com/

The history of humanity is war, pestilence, rape,

mayhem and horribly painful death at the end

of a rusty sword, and so while he genuinely be-

moans his father’s premature death when he,

the son, was just a teen and his wife’s premature

death when he, the husband, was in his late forties,

the man assumes that if things had been otherwise

(like his dad had taken better care of himself and

hadn’t had a heart attack and then could

continue to  work and didn’t get depressed

and then didn’t take his own life and his wife had-

n’t had a bad car accident nine months before

she died which sent the veins in her head scrambl-

ing just waiting to explode), they would have had

the opportunity to live reasonably long lives free of

war, pestilence, rape, mayhem and a horribly pain-

ful death at the end of a rusty sword. And so, the

man feels the same way about his life. He tries to

stay in shape, eats well, and jogs four days a week

to live as long as he can with the full expectation

that is the way it is without thought of war, pestilence,

rape, mayhem and a horribly painful death at the

end of a rusty sword, and so he gives thanks

while realizing that much of life at the end of

December 2013 and the beginning of January

2014 is still about war, pestilence, rape, may-

hem and a very painful death at the end of a

rusty sword, and to that ever-present reality,

he says, “Lord, have mercy.”

Ar-bi-trar-y, so much of life is ar-bi-trar-y. 

How does one believe in bene-vo-lence

of any kind, no less the divine sort when

the ar-bi-trar-y hits hard, fast, down and

dirty and so, well, ar-bi-trar-il-y?  It’s

hard, so hard, especially when a parent

dies young, poof, in a heartbeat and the

children feel clobbered upside the head

for years and years and flinch in their

very, wary hearts at the very, maybe out-

rage-ous, notion of a bene-vo-lent God

who really cares even as they sit in the

pews listening to the preacher who hap-

pens to be their dad.

“My kingdom is not of this world and those who worship God, worship in spirit and truth for God is spirit,” to paraphrase a couple of quotes by a very prominent early first century rabbi,

(The son of humanity has nowhere to lay his head.)

which meant simply that political power exerted through a reign of oppression and terror and colonialism was not his way and that land had to do with stewardship and not at all with ownership or even

(This land was made for you and me.)

the kind of “gift-ship” which can be turned into “owner-ship” and often is, as in “God gave it to us and not to you so get the hell out or we will kill you.”  And here’s the rub: That Jesus’ kingdom is not a worldly

(The son of humanity has nowhere to lay his head.)

kingdom is what most American Christians have affirmed from the days when life was so bad for some Christians they sang, “This world is not my home; I’m just a passin’ through,” to those who just wish

(This land was made for you and me.)

to worship in the spirit-land of justice, mercy, self-sacrificial love and peace lived out, of course, on terra firma (where else?) rather than some misguided, misunderstood, pre-ordained

(The son of humanity has nowhere to lay his head.)

territorial imperative (in a West Michigan town populated mostly by conservative Christians, home owners don’t want people stepping on their property. Even a toe on the grass is trespassing.), and that is just it

(This land was made for you and me.)

for a small minority of evangelicals who still think of real estate as God’s great gift to some in the Middle-East and, for sure, not others who have been inhabiting those parts nonstop for a couple

(The son of humanity has nowhere to lay his head.)

thousand years or so, a notion which is causing hell on terra firma and not much heaven there.  And these Christians sit around in their comfortable homes on their tidy plots of land they think

(This land was made for you and me.)

they own far away from harm waiting for Armageddon in that hell hole of holy land they helped create while they wait for their Jesus, the conqueror king, to descend, bless certain tribes by his great dispensation and

(The son of humanity has nowhere to lay his head.)

arbitrary meanness. Lord, have mercy on such thinking which makes God into an authoritarian, critical, judgmental and, over all, nasty tribal deity with a small “d,”  for sure very small “d,” if even that.

(And this land was made for you and me.)

The late, great Rabbi Friedman

said at one of his conferences on

Family Systems Theory back in the

90’s, that the media is geared, designed

and oriented to scare the wits out of

the public so that the public would

get hooked on fear and keep watch-

ing, listening, reading.  They knew

our drug. He ended by saying,

with a smile on his face, that when

we returned to our hotel rooms, we

should watch the evening news, local,

state and national, to see if he was right.

And then he just chuckled. Wow! It is

really scary out there we realized. 

The next day, he suggested we stop

watching the news if we wanted to

save our lives, marriages and families.

That was pretty scary, too. And so,

for all the bad stuff that somehow

we were aware was happening out

there between the late 90’s and now

of which you don’t need a long litany

at this particular moment because we

all know intuitively about wars, pest-

ilence, droughts and terrorist attacks

just to mention a few calamities, we

concentrated on how well everything

in our world works – the toilet keeps

flushing, the furnace warms, the air con-

ditioner cools, the dish washer cleans

dishes, the clothes washer washes our

clothes, the hot water heater doesn’t

leak from the rubber hoses into the

condo below, the lights go on and off,

the car starts most of the time and air-

planes make it to their destinations

most often safely, but we don’t need

the news to tell us that like our cars

which get into a lot of accidents to no

one’s surprise.  Then, assuming life

was good and safe, after all, we suc-

cumbed, watched the evening news

and realized our worst fears, for

really real.  We had gone to Target

after Thanksgiving and before Christ-

mas and used our debit card – massive

fraud. Yikes! Destitution here we come

and just as Congress is cutting back

food stamps as we were told by smiling,

buxomy, blond women on Fox News,

which to be honest, sort of helped digest

the bad news. Then I thought, just like car

commercials, they found another old way

to keep us watching – bad news from blonds,

what a winning combo! “Honey, could I

have another bourbon straight up, three

fingers while it lasts?”