i hear tell there is a flower
which blooms only in the darkness:
if light were displayed upon it
would it immediately turn to dust.
now, how it is it may be
i have heard but scant the rumors,
rare few who faintly claim
they have seen what the flower
in its cool nethers may be…
palest of the white petals
which seem to be suspended
in air, so gossamer is its stalk…
these folk who breathe the subject
of this invisible, impossible flower,
others whisper they were born
and were nourished there,
in blackness deeper than night:
better to view the mysteries
of life, of flowers only darkness sees.

[Leaders of the anarchist movement in Amsterdam] call their public demonstrations “Happenings.” These paintings, these poems, and these demonstrations… are the expression of men who are struggling with their appalling lostness. Dare we laugh at such things? Dare we feel superior when we view their tortured expressions in their art? Christians should stop laughing and take such men seriously. Then we shall have the right to speak again to our generation. These men are dying while they live, yet where is our compassion for them? There is nothing more ugly than an orthodoxy without understanding or without compassion.

There are two significant questions: “What do you do?” and “Why do you do it?” The correct answers (yes, there are correct answers) are, “I serve God,” and “Because I love life.” And if you don’t believe in God, it then becomes that you serve a nobler purpose, a greater purpose than what you are, what is larger than you. You know what these things are, I need not tell you of them. Think Doctors Without Borders. And if it is not because you love life that you do what you do, what alternative do you suppose would be worthy? That you love death, that you would put your effort not in the anima of the world, but its entropy, its decay, its end? Surely not. And yes, there is beauty, too, but life is the most precious of the beauties, n’est pas?

Max Ernst: The World of the Naïve

Click on the pic for a larger version.

memory is fraught with distraction
awake, my senses, for love is near
once found, will she be of sound
the barest of whispers i know is there
like dreaming of a surer ground
believing in ethereal certainties
finding the one who you have become
that love was always there, here
at the beginning, every second new

The beginning of my new book:

Judas volunteered.

I was Chief Gunner in the War in Heaven, and my codename was crowfeather. I had been first contacted on October 7, 1988, around 9pm eastern daylight time at Carnegie Mellon University — by an infinite light, like Yang of Yin and Yang, the trim of God’s light; which told me I was not that light (and I was nothing compared to that light) — center everywhere, circumference nowhere — drafted, to fight the good fight. In the war in eternity.

There never was a Hell, only a Black Iron Prison, superimposed over the world, visible only in a psychedelic nightmare. If you look in the painting, Garden of Delights, by Bosch, in the third panel, “Hell”, you can see in the far back the building I visited (more than once) when I was imprisoned for a short time each time there.

But Judas Iscariot, the one that was lost, what became of him?

Read what I have so far at The Gospel According to Judas…

shadows of coins
and coldness i mistake for wet
i am surprised at being me
(my hands are of oil
my lips of honey)
as day folds over into night
dreams turn a new page
where i am solemn unwritten
remembering magic in my touch
five days and i blink
i am here, no longer dust
one penny to pay the boatman

Browning … tells us that what won him for Christ was this, that while others tried to soothe his angry conscience, and kept urging that, really, things were not nearly so bad as he was making out, Christ looked him in the eyes and told him bluntly that he was a desperate sinner, worse, much worse, even than he realized. And that, queerly enough as you might think, the man was not discomfited but heartened. Here at last, he felt, is one who understands and knows the facts. And since His desperate diagnosis is so accurate, may not His optimism also justify itself even in me. Well does He know what is in human nature, and yet, knowing the worst, He has still confident hope.