The Lab chews his bone

and then he looks up at me.

I look. His tail wags.

The dog hears something.

A snow blower roars loudly.

The dog’s ears perk up.

He loses interest;

looks back at me for some food.

I shake my head no.

The dog quickly sleeps;

he awakes and chews his bone,

then nudges my arm.

He’s hungry and bored,

and I don’t help the matter

by just typing this.

He speaks wordlessly,

“Come on, Bob. Get me some food.”

“Sorry, Bud. Not yet.”

Resigned, the dog turns

and walks to the sliding door,

looks out and then sighs.

No reason, arbitrary, capriciousness —–

chased by an eighteen wheeler of death, the

man has just had a recurring argument with

his wife, mundane, frustrating in a broken

down Plymouth Valiant (metaphor anyone?)

valiantly enters the Southwest duel, on the

road not at the corral. He cries, please, please

– up and down the desert highway of life, the

man indomitably, shrewdly draws the death

machine to the edge and then over to its dino-

saur death. Score one for the ordinary, some-

times argumentative, all-times fallible family

man; zero for death, for awhile. He sits in the

desert overlooking the severe drop to Dante’s

Inferno and ponders. Humanity vs. the deus-

ex-machina of death versus the compassionate

God of Jesus and Sophia. Please be careful on

the via, the highway of life, the man thought.

The roadway had killed too many of his loved

ones and there were way too many crosses on

the side of the road along the way.

Madison Avenue knows it;

porn producers produce it

with more honesty — put

a really, really, good-looking,

sexy blond up front on T.V.

and every backwater, back-

woods Neanderthal male in

America and obedient, pass-

ive, do as you are told Christ-

ian women as viewers and

the news on that channel

magically becomes Gospel

Truth. And so goes the

grand delusion as we walk

our way, ironically, to the

guillotine of Robespierre, the

revolutionary who became

the mass murderer of the

masses when he got to be

the one percent of the one

percent and all this at the

urging of the one percent

of the one percent who

think, delusionally, that

that will somehow benefit

them, which, of course,

even Robespierre must

have known to the contrary

or there would have been

no one left in France to

make, let alone buy, French

fries and all because that

ultimate one percenter of one

percent Marie said the poor

could eat cake.

The pre-winter, swirling, snowy wind

beat against the house as they watched

on T.V. the professional golfer who had-

n’t been seen around much in several

years, drive the ball right down the mid-

dle of the fairway of a tournament during

the off-season in the golfer’s home country

on the other side of the world. He looked

old, really old, prematurely old, but what

can you expect? He did watch, in utter, un-

adulterated horror as his young, beautiful

wife was crushed between two vehicles as

the couple was unpacking luggage at a

swank hotel in a major American city

hosting a really, really big PGA tourn-

ament years ago. But, as they say,

golf goes on.

Moved by the muses,

the time of night

and by the fates,

I’m going to throw

my glass

into the fireplace.

Oh, no I’m not;

the fireplace is

fake;

and the CD of a

crackling hearth,

make no mistake,

is also fake.

I’ve gained my

senses, after a

time-out brake;

the glass goes in

the sink

with last dredges

of wine down

the drink

and tomorrow

morning, I’ll

be sober and

cast off the last

vestiges of

demon drink.

I think.

I love the images Word Press provides;

they are so Zen and besides,

I don’t have to choose pictures;

I can just write with wonderful fixtures

provided for my readers to imbibe.

The poet of the day

has won big, really big prizes

for her years and years

of self-psychoanalysis;

some would say exhibitionism,

through free verse,

some stanzas, truncated lines

but always a certain rhythm method.

She is particularly vivid when

it comes to sex,

which surely is one of her

polarizing traits.

But, hey, to be perfectly

(can we be perfectly?) honest,

the rest of us

who put pen to paper or

words in the processor and

either use standard letter, word, sentence, paragraph

transition sentence, introduction, body, conclusion

or the cadence of word, line, maybe

rhyme, and hopefully, always rhythm,

are working out all those relationships,

aren’t we? But

mostly (and perhaps most regrettably)

without the particularly vivid,

even raw,

images when it comes to sex.

He’s a fine chap, really – salt of the earth. This guy gives you quality work for an honest price. In fact, while doing a plumbing job, he will stop occasionally to let you decide which part to choose. When asked which he would choose, he always says, “This one costs half as much and does just as good a job as this other one,” and because of things like that, I keep calling him to do work for me when needed. He is always there. He’s good as gold.

Same with my car mechanic. He’s been caring for my cars for twenty-seven years. One time when I was out of town, two thousand miles out of town, something went wrong with the car. The quote I got was exactly how far I was out of town – 2,000. I called my mechanic. He said don’t worry about the clanking noise just drive it home and I’ll take care of it.

Sure enough, two thousand miles later, he had to tighten a loose bolt, which, if it had fallen out anywhere along those two thousand miles, wouldn’t have hurt anything. I had to trust my mechanic. He’s good as gold.

My plumber and my auto mechanic live in the same town and belong to the same church. There’s one thing I won’t do with them – discuss religion. And I’m a preacher.

Once, I had a landscaper from the same town who went to a different church but same denomination. There are a lot of churches in this town. He wanted to know how, in the sweet name of Jesus, I could believe in universal salvation. I’m not even sure how he knew that.

“There is a literal heaven and there is a literal hell and unless you believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, the latter is exactly where you are going; the Bible says it; I believe it, and that settles it. How can you call yourself a Christian minister?”

I just shrugged and avoided the conversation as much as I could. After all, he was a good landscaper. He finished trimming my trees, got in his truck and left without saying goodbye. That was the last time I saw him. A week later I got an outrageously big bill.

See?

Now a landscaper is one thing, but a good plumber and auto mechanic? Priceless. I just might be willing to believe in a literal heaven and a literal hell to keep those guys. Next Sunday I think I’ll give an altar call.

Lifeless leaves flutter in the bitter November wind.

Snow blows back and forth at the whim of the wind.

Snow swirls up and down like a Whirling Dervish.

He watches out the window at the howling wind.

His heart feels cold as a winter’s windblown birch.

His heart feels like a leaf against a fierce wind,

which blows off the Big Lake into the valley.

Life tries to cast his heart down and to the wind,

but the love of his life strengthens his heart like

an oak leaf swaying in a summer, zephyr wind.

The author wrote, “Currently,

we’re unable even to articulate

how profoundly Calvinism is

different from prosperity-gospel

theology….” My, my, said one who

lives in the geography of prosperity-

gospel theology masquerading as

THE CALVINISM; it’s so hard to

counter all the money that flows here,

there and everywhere the pretenders

toss their filthy lucre. The adminis-

trators of distinguished institutions

of higher education, so dependent

on finances to keep the doors of their

ivy-covered halls open, close their

eyes and hold their noses as they affix

another mega bucks name to a really

nice, new building on their campus

even if that building was erected to

the gory vain-glory of an ever so sick

eschatology that looks forward to

Jesus’ militaristic, hyper-violent return

to kill everyone but the predestined,

elected, covenant kids with blond hair

and blue eyes and some Jews, too;

my, my how unlike and more

compassionate than HItler’s

Arian view.

Lord, have mercy.