Ali ibn Abi Taleb, Trustee of the prophet Mohamed and Gate to the knowledge of Islam said:

About those who sit for dispensation of justice among people but are not fit for it.


"Among(1) all the people the most detested before Allah are two persons. One is he who is devoted to his self. So he is deviated from the true path and loves speaking about (foul) innovations and inviting towards wrong path. He is therefore a nuisance for those who are enamoured of him, is himself misled from the guidance of those preceding him, misleads those who follow him in his life or after his death, carries the weight of others' sins and is entangled in his own misdeeds.

The other man is he who has picked up ignorance. He moves among the ignorant, is senseless in the thick of mischief and is blind to the advantages of peace. Those resembling like men have named him scholar but he is not so. He goes out early morning to collect things whose deficiency is better than plenty, till when he has quenched his thirst from polluted water and acquired meaningless things.

He sits among the people as a judge responsible for solving whatever is confusing to the others. If an ambiguous problem is presented before him he manages shabby argument about it of his own accord and passes judgement on its basis. In this way he is entangled in the confusion of doubts as in the spider's web, not knowing whether he was right or wrong. If he is right he fears lest he erred, while if he is wrong he hopes he is right. He is ignorant, wandering astray in ignorance and riding on carriages aimlessly moving in darkness. He did not try to find reality of knowledge. He scatters the traditions as the wind scatters the dry leaves.

By Allah, he is not capable of solving the problems that come to him nor is fit for the position assigned to him. Whatever he does not know he does not regard it worth knowing. He does not realise that what is beyond his reach is within the reach of others. If anything is not clear to him he keeps quiet over it because he knows his own ignorance. Lost lives are crying against his unjust verdicts, and properties (that have been wrongly disposed of) are grumbling against him.

I complain to Allah about persons who live ignorant and die misguided. For them nothing is more worthless than Qur'an if it is recited as it should be recited, nor anything more valuable than the Qur'an if its verses are removed from their places, nor anything more vicious than virtue nor more virtuous than vice."

May Allah be pleased with them both.

Sister Cities

They thought I was a Marine Barracks.
They thought I was a tire burning.

Patches the Horse (must be related to Skidboot the Amazing Dog)

Sully's Bucket

I've a thing or two to tell ya pard that I think you ought to know,
About that rusty bucket Sully carries down below.
You're not the first one, stranger, who laughed at Sully's pail.
You're the only one who's laughing now, the rest have heard the tale.

When we were young and handsome, had some ten years in the game,
Old Sull he had a partner, and Jim Riley was his name....
The four of us together, we were working side by side.
That's how come I chanced to be there on the night Jim Riley died.

Well the blasting had been easy, it was running out like sand.
An we were mucking out the ore; those days we mucked by hand.
And we were nearly finished, and I hadn't heard a sound.
But something must have happened, "Cause Jim Riley yelled "bad ground."

When we headed for the timberin', Sully must of took a spill
‘Cause when we looked back in there he was pinned beneath his drill.
The ceiling it was groanin' now, all set to drop its lid.
And Sully pinned beneath his drill was sobbin' like a kid.

Now there's men can watch their partners die, not throw their lives away.
But Riley wasn't one of them, he wasn't built that way.
As soon's he seen what happened, "Hey, hold on there Sull," he cried.
And before he had the words out, he'd thrown the drill aside.

Well, they headed ‘round the ore car, Riley wearing a big grin.
Guess he never knew what happened when the hanging wall came in.
Sully reached the timberin', his face as white as chalk.
And Riley, four yards back of him, caught fifteen ton of rock.

That day Sully's pail was buried, he ate from Riley's pail in tears.
And he's carried that same bucket now for almost twenty years.
So you can laugh at Sully, because he's mean and drinks a lot.
But don't laugh at Sully's bucket, it's the only friend he's got.

-Anon, Bisbee Arizona, From the Mining Museum Archives

DC Madame commits suicide.

I hardly think so.

Movie Trailer from the Bisbee Skate Crew:




Man...these kids. Too much. They are just too much. I'm so glad we know these nutcases.

United States committing genocide on its border with Mexico by using Death as a Deterrant.

The Funnel Effect (http://www.ailf.org/ipc/policybrief/policybrief_020607.shtml) was and is knowingly CAUSED by securing the borders with Mexico in areas that are passable, relatively safe and had been used for decades if not centuries for the natural immigrations of Latin American peoples. The United States knowingly created an open "no man's land" in the Sonoran Desert to be used as a deterrant to immigration. The deterrant used?

Death itself.

And it's working but not as a deterrant. It is successful simply as a means of killing illegal immigrants by torturous means.

Truth of the matter is....I lived in Saudi Arabia where there were over 18 million LEGAL foreign workers. Want to know how that country achieved a somewhat fair solution?

They made the business owners who imported labor pay for the worker's health care and made them provide housing. Sure, it wasn't perfect but it was certainly better than what the US has managed to do.

Confused about life? Take this 10 minute Ninternship and you'll be just fine.

BBC Journalist admits to drinking the 9/11 Kool-Aid (****Jim Jones Highball):




I'm still quite amazed that people buy the 9/11 story as portrayed by the government of the United States. Are they nuts?

Absolutely. It is called Mass Hysteria and it is alive and well in the minds of so many Americans.

About the only thing that is "alive and well" in them if you ask me. Sheesh, one out of four teenage girls infected with a genital disease or two and the United States with 1 out of every 100 citizens in jail (when we constitute a mere 5% of the population of the world and that is a startling statistic).

For that matter, here is an ALARMING FACTOID:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/978043.html

Now....put the thinking cap on for a minute (and a change). Israel bombs a what?

A NUCLEAR (or as Bushies say, nucular) REACTOR in Syria (luckily it wasn't one) and no one bats an eyelash at the POTENTIAL DISASTER this would have been had it actually been what Israel (and the US) said it was?

Duh. I mean DUH.

Here is the Ninja's famous Recipe for Disaster:

"Janoubi" means "One from the South" i.e. South Lebanon.

The Colonialist With A Thousand Faces
- Allah bears witness that there is no god but He, 3:18

Up on highway eighty
you can see what fire does
and what it does not.
I have to wonder about the two
British ladies in Tombstone
who wanted to go to the
Chicawow-wows, to Apache lands.
One of them
just now wearing
her new wide-brimmed hat,
one of them hoping
for the Organ Pipe National Forest.
She tells me Britain
has history and you've got Geology.
Like I don't know
what we call in these parts:

diddly squat.
Oh! such mighty deportations!
La ila'ha il'la Huwa,
mammoths in caliche,
this is my beloved slag.

See that here? The color of the map
in Yuma is gray. There is a reason
for that. Go up the San Simon way,
take the Gleeson road
but first stop by and see
what the fire does not do
over time
to the miners and the mining.
Trust me, skip Las Vegas.
We're all just tourists,
those are all my fathers
and as I shimmy into town
through the Mule Pass
it is all very new to me.
Once again, the long way.





T-bird At The Gila


"Advice: learn poems so that you don't have to write them.
Strategies are useless testimonials."
- The Book of Warnings, D. Whitehead

This pretty life is death's comma,
we are in between, constructing
the darkest layer in the top soils
over which the eagle flies
with the owl, as same as the bug.

Once I stood on a reservation
for Indians and thought.
The wild wisdoms entered
into the world's recorder
like drugs with the cackle
of gypsies and caw of old birds.

When suddenly! Like that!
…the newest grand canyon opened
her secret vaults to receive
the sound and reek of vomit leaving the throat
of a drunkard who turned in and then, sped away.
Ah, the stories the rocks will tell.


*The key to understanding the witness of the Creator Himself is the key to understanding it all. There are no tricks to reading or writing when you realize the simplicity of that little tidbit in the first place.

Allah bears witness that there is no god but He, and (so do) the angels and those possessed of knowledge, maintaining His creation with justice; there is no god but He, the Mighty, the Wise. 3:19, The Proof known as Imran (the father of the Virgin known as Mary, Miriam), pbut.

Corey, Andrew, Dustin and Sean (my son's four undead fiends, r. A rather creative entourage of ghouls and actors.

Free Palestine

http://www.palestineonlinestore.com/index.html

Round up-ready Soybeans to Downing Street,
BEYOND GREED to the wha? GENE POLICE? Indian Cotton farmers committing suicide? What the hell?

What's wrong with the bees?

THIS. You see, bees secrete a substance on their abdomens that serves as a type of eugenics. Allah created and driven eugenics...not the human kind. It is used to control the size of hives and is entirely dependent on what the bees consume (pollen).

Monsanto. 90% of the agricultural market...that's a monopoly and there you have it...Soylent Green, Agent Orange...no. Just plain old garden products..that's what's killing the bees. The byproducts of these agents are known as PCBs and are as bad or worse than, Depleted Uranium. Bovine hormones injected into cattle to increase dairy production by at least 20% are worse than Depleted Uranium. DU is the tip of the industrial trash iceberg....it's far worse than anyone suspected. Far, far worse. And yes, DU is basically nuclear WASTE with fins which is deposited on unsuspecting victims of war crimes and occupations (Iraq, Lebanon, Iran to name a few)

You think you are safe if you don't live in Iraq? Nope, yer not. Not anymore.

Boycott them. Towns and cities need to enact restrictions and ban these Mega-Conglomerates from doing business. Forget about the Drug War or the War on Terror...these are the folks that are killing people and of course, the bees.

Substantial Equivalence is basically the creation of FAKE FOOD. Yes, Virginia, that is why a watermelon doesn't taste like a watermelon anymore and exactly why we can eat a watermelon without "all that suffering" involved in the SEEDS. Imagine!

Flipping unbelievable. Perhaps the best part of the video is George Bush Senior's cameo appearance on the DE REGULATION committee visit to the Monsanto headquarters.

EMS? Thousands disabled from the consumption of L-Tryptophan? Well of course. When I worked with the world's foremost metabolic specialist in Riyadh (Dr. Pinar T. Ozand), we basically used amino acids which were missing due to congenital "inborn" errors of metabolism (from consanguinous unions which tend to produce a variety of results) in order to establish "normal" human metabolism i.e. which is basically the result of glucose metabolism (Kreb's cycle, remember it? probably not). People think that these little chemicals are innocuous but I'm here to tell you, they aren't at all innocuous.

From the Proof called The Bee:

[16.4] He created man from a small seed and lo! he is an open contender.

[16.17] Is He then Who creates like him who does not create? Do you not then mind?

[16.56] And they set apart for what they do not know a portion of what We have given them. By Allah, you shall most certainly be questioned about that which you forged.

Test your IQ by taking this "awareness" test. Go!

Everything's Connected




Trust when he says he was
in a coma for five months,
no one lies after a coma.
If they sleep, they sleep
only a little and insomnia
doesn't seem to bother them.
We all walked outside
together like that,
into the back alley
a perfect back alley
in a slow motion town
on the border
where I sat and considered
Framingham, Massachussetts.
A whole town measured out
grace in urine cups
and xrays. One by one
they told the truth about it
and Chagas is what you call
an emerging disease.
It gets up into your heart
after years of living on the edge.
I've seen those things on leaves
yet still, I never kill
a single one of them
or scorpions but I do
run away like a kid
fighting wasps. Once
I showed a furry
little beast to a poverty
stricken woman
and she crushed it.
It was a tarantula,
we're all just flesh and bone.
She was the first
to notice the invasion,
and ran up the hill
crying fee fi fo fum.
That was before the war
and power surges
took everything
we thought we owned.
It's one of the best things
that ever happened
but now, I don't take
any chances and put
nets over my bean stalks
and count them every day.

The back alley of this piece:

Assassins

At the Copper Queen

The Framingham Demonstration

Smile Train goes to Haiti



Go to the link on the right hand side of the page and give.

The amazing Skidboot




A Long Way To Pocatello Tonight

Have you ever seen
such a clean crowd of people
sitting in their folding chairs
listening
chortling,
have you ever seen
such a thing?

I have.

They're just everywhere.
They want stripper poets
killer poets and poets
who kill themselves
for a living
as ornery as that
must sound

to the untrained ear

that doesn't know
too much about
poetry but alot
about sitting in an audience.

It's a long way to Pocatello tonight
isn't it? I know it's a long way
but do tell me, how far?

Once, we met Rothenberg
and he knew about that distance
to Pocatello. Just discovered it.

I might just tell him tonight
how far Pocatello is
when there is no audience
and life is just a watch and a wait.

Iraq, the Lost Generation of Youth

Hope at Crowhaven Farm

If only at eight
I hadn't seenCrowhaven Farm,
deliberated on it
during the long nights
when the rats
scurried around
in the ceilings,
if only at eight
I hadn't seen
the way they put
bricks upon Meg's chest,
called her a witch
and they were
all dressed up
for Thanksgiving,
if only I hadn't seen
Crowhaven Farm
in 1970,
my life would have been
not as it is
but as it was.

A Long Way To Pocatello Tonight

Have you ever seen
such a clean crowd of people
sitting in their folding chairs
listening
chortling
have you ever seen
such a thing?

I have.

They're just everywhere,
they want stripper poets
killer poets and poets
who kill themselves
for a living
as ornery as that
must sound

to the untrained ear

that doesn't know
too much about
poetry but alot
about sitting in an audience.

It's a long way to Pocatello tonight
isn't it? I know it's a long way
but do tell me, how far?

Once, we met Rothenberg
and he knew about that distance
to Pocatello. Just discovered it.

I might just tell him tonight
how far Pocatello is
when there is no audience
and life is just a watch and a wait.

The Balfour Declaration in a "nutshell":

Arthur Koestler wrote that in the letter "one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third." More than that, the country was still part of the Empire of a fourth, namely Turkey.

(The Letter is on the Masthead)

It was decided by Lord Allenby that the "Declaration" should not then be published in Palestine where his forces were still south of the Gaza-Beersheba line. This was not done until after the establishment of the Civil Administration in 1920.

Then why was the "Declaration" made a year before the end of what was called The Great War?

"The people" were told at the time that it was given as a return for a debt of gratitude which they were supposed to owe to the Zionist leader (and first President of Israel), Chaim Weizman, a Russian-born immigrant to Britain from Germany who was said to have invented a process of fermentation of horse chestnuts into scarce acetone for production of high explosives by the Ministry of Munitions.

This horse chestnut propaganda production was not dislodged from the mass mind by the short bursts of another story which was used officially between the World Wars.




Sailing to Byzantium
by William Butler Yeats

THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

ON the poetry of Donald Rumsfeld

I Land in the Lilacs

My irises aren't really
mine afterall but all the same
they are touched carefully,
split and soaked, ever-lasting
dutiful to the ages
and then some.
Rhizomes gently laid into
their earthy sockets
produce secret after secret
from who knows where,
who knows where.

I saw this video some time ago while looking at other videos of the Mexican Airforce UFO sighting. I didn't know what it was really...just a video of some kids playing soccer and then yelling and running away.

This video however explains what is seen on the cell phone video:



Pretty strange actually.


The 2008 Texas story on CNN:



Witness reports on the Texas sighting:



Hey Radicalann, do any of these lights look like that one out at the Rifle Range?

The Sherrif (from the Arabic Sharif):

A new Voices on the Wind is online now. Voices is a local ezine put together by Leslie Clark who teaches at Cochise Community College here in the boondocks. I'm not sure how long she has been at it but for sure, this issue is truly one of the most fabulous of her concoctions to date if not the most fabulous. Ms. Clark selects a theme and the poets attempt to address it as they see fit. I'm often puzzled as to how this works but it does. This time, the poems are each and every one fabulously well suited to the theme of Disparity.

This perfect line is from one of Cappy Love Hanson's poems titled Getting Well. I met Ms. Hanson when she traveled into town for our collective reading which was transmitted into the airwaves of the world by Bisbee's very own KBRP.

"Every time I fall down sick and rise up
surviving, I know Death’s held me in his foul
palm like an apple, poked me with a blood-blackened
claw, and judged me not yet ripe."


Yes. Exactly Ms. Cappy Love Hanson. Exactly.

Voices on the Wind Volume 33, Voices of Disparity

The Etiology of Mr. X

as if it was blown into the halo of park lightsbetween strike three and batter up - Darla Whitehead, Pack of Lies

Yesterday about noon, this fellow
finds us out in the sun and says
he wants his test done now.
We of ambigious natures, nurses
working towards Armageddons
big and small, tow each other
like bricks into rooms
full of camphor and prevention.
It all starts there in the clinics,
under chairs where little girls
run to scream and hide. Big boys
grow pale and old men come to us
before they die to talk
about their daughters, to talk
about their sons. It has been
a long time of such things,
keeping the secrets of nature alive
in our pockets and cupboards,
writing down our sincerities
in diaries on demand. Up front
there are drawers full of history,
treacherous rumours named Murphy and Cline.
His hat suits him well I think
as he chatters on about his deeds.
What does this to us all?
What cause is there to explain?
I've lived and loved and laughed
this much and cried about the same.

Cold Radiations

A purse is robbed
and bothered.
All of them turn up empty,
every one you see.

At night in a dream
the perfect death is planned
and mourned. The djinn cries
generated automatically:

when a purse
is rubbed into the lamp,
the warmth of hands
inside all the last pockets,
faith in all the answers,
and mail order novenas.

Mother's purse was never like that,
equipped
with a fold out cup,
her Salem menthols
and a pack of tissues.
No genies. She opened it
close to the air cooler
in the dispensary
where Billie Alexander shelled
out Doan's for diamonds.
All of the patients trying to get out
the pill shop doors and windows
like cattle in the chute.
The cold air drifted up,
under long ago
into the Arizona radiations.

When her purse turned up empty
as they all do,
the origin of novenas was unknown.



Except for one thing – pills are past tense, history, just one of the obsolete dosage forms that are part of the trivia of the history of medicine. Even the rare holdovers from the glory days of patent medicines, Doan's Pills and Carter's Little Pills (once known as Carter's Little Liver Pills) aren't pills, they're tablets. The word "pill" may still be with us, but the pill – a dosage form made by combining some active drug with an inactive ingredient (soap, bread crumbs, or rose petals were common) that would give it volume, and honey, or later, glycerin (which might be added to keep the pills from getting hard), and rolled into a ball – is gone.

http://www.medhunters.com/articles/oldDosages.html

Luna Park, Beirut Lebanon

Other images by Galen R. Frysinger @ here and listen to the wonderful Lebanese National Anthem @ here Oddly enough, it sounds just like the Mexican one.

That is the nature of Lunatic Park. The digital image known as Lot's Wife was taken at the same park. Goes to show...people perceive things quite differently!

San Pantaleone Sees Anne Sexton

On The Corniche In Beirut

Becoming a parody of oneself is not so bad when you figure everything is a bit fetish, the tickling tease of the ego." - Dr. Soandso, 1990, Commencement address, Bryn Mawr: "The history of stereographic photos revealing ladies' bloomers and the moral controversies of our time.

Oh that divine itch!

The fuel of the fire, man
-the fractional distillation
-the rising to the top
-the sparkling rumination.

Oh that jet fuel!
How it makes us fly!

A system of clockwork,
spins its spine,
the Hurly Gurly
at Lunatic Park,
the Hurly Gurly
at Lunatic Park,
ferris wheel and gypsy
in our hokey hoboken
on the boardwalk
lit up in the dark,
the sea is waiting
to see under her skirt
her frantic nipples
and her eyes so alert!

Our Hurly Gurly of Lunatic Park.

Z Flies

Part of the reason is the desire
to keep pace with the frantic show
of tomorrow, yesterday in the bin
swept toward the infinity of amnesias.
Everything is a deliberate parable,
the fly who drifts away
with his delicious meals, unretrievable -
that wiley thief -
to the great dreams we cannot recall.
Limbo! Oh paradise of purgatories
is the hell of the ancients, this sphere
a masterpiece of vain and partial speeches.
The people come and go, unaware, save a few.
They wipe their brows, carry bricks and lipsticks,
dance their jigs. Everyone is so familiar here
with marks on their foreheads to the tightening
of their ears. Smiles, sighs, puffings.

The sea is only a tremendous bucket swarming
with a few fish where currents are
mysterious maps under the most popular of orbits,
she keeps her gemstones there, near the edges
yet the divers want so much more,
want to see the habitats of the blind.

Limbo on this contiguous shore,
a great divide between salt and drink,
that mountain under this dome described
and traveled, such slight migrations to and fro.
The weakest birds who fall in April
are found in those sad positions
without ceremony or feather.
They do die trying don't they?
Smile. They die trying.


References for this poem one two three four obleo

Terrorism Hits Eratosphere Poets
Mass defacement attack threatens community

In a shocking display of disregard for human life and property, Moroccan Jihadists blast poetry message board on March 8, 2008 and leave thousands in their wake wondering what next, the plague? The attacker hackers relayed a public statement (somewhere or 'nother) that they hoped to help the Dying Palestinians and investigations continue. Get your up to the minute coverage on this Breaking News Nonstory at:

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/Forum13/HTML/000136.html

Oh brother.

She used to say, Patience Mathilda

The closer you get, the louder it seems. -Darla Whitehead, The Book of Warnings

I am homesick all the time
for paradise, as we all are
when we desire sugar -
opera and plants make it
go away for a while
but it always comes back to
these new jobs and papers,
all this rent, the neverending
trauma underneath the haze.

In tutte parti impera e quivi regge;
quivi è la sua città e l'alto seggio:
oh felice colui cu' ivi elegge!

Little Bo Peep ammonia,
Mr. Don Terry sells old jars
that hold a particle or two
of the previous owner's crop.
She taught me to say bean pole,
he taught me to get some rest.
The labels come off easily
when everyone is sleeping
but I caught that goat didn't I?

The rest of the day doesn't matter
light is just an envelope, clocks
go round and round. It isn't
just an act.


Mary Shelley's Mathilda

Moon Canyon Fire

http://www.kgun9.com/NewsArticle/tabid/1112/xmid/20045/Default.aspx


BURN, from Ode to Seven

We tried to burn the town down
a stampede put it out
as an afterthought
right near the big circle
that drains into several
asphalt tributaries

Wood Canyon, Spring Canyon
Pearly Street-

We should have known
by the water marks
on the library walls
the flood couldn't take
it down neither,
a hundred some years before.
It just kept on melting.



Wow....amen.

Look Here Archival Works/middle easte

Archival Works




The goodness of words

it all starts here
with the goodness of words
the feel of words
sound, taste of words
coming out of the mouth
the pen
coming out as new born babes
fighting breathing
all at once
release sliding out
sliding and sliding
laying still
gasping
goodness all around
eyes and more eyes
looking in, looking out
blinking
wet and finished
smothered in ink
blood tears
out at last
free,
no more aimless
floating in another's
sea, another's supply
no more silence
only words
coming out
fast and ripe
cry baby amen
cry allelujah
amen
hosannah in the highest
hey amen
this crib is a church
this cry is hunger
amen allelujah
this is for love
this for pain
cry all over
again
again
cry amen
try a little harder
make it a little broader
fill as much of this space
with cry amen.

Easter: Paul to the Corinthians

It used to be that forty days
was enough time
to tally everyone's sins
starting with burned palms,
Mardi Gras and Schmirnoff's,
all of it clamoured
to BE
in the words of Paul
to the Corinthians
-that was before I knew
what Ephesus looked like
under the clear blue Turkish sky
-before I saw the library
and the brothel ad
chiselled into the stones
of ancient avenues-
it was there and then
fact took precedent
over the great fictions
regarding very specific crimes
and indecencies-
when I saw the employment
of natural reason
in the cause of genocide
over there in the Promised Land
-indeed I determined the promise
to be nothing more
than a barbaric token
where nothing really existed
but the lack of ethics
and good politics-

Where has reason gone
that you would subject yourselves
to such meandering gossip
tailored to your hopes-
casual and unrelenting?

Advent and resurrection aside
your logic better add up
in the end
to righteousness, lest
you find yourself written
into the history
of the Angry God who studies
intent better than action
and waits your return...
the event horizon beckons
your better self without breath
or substance, gravity is not the issue
on the lawless ground, only an afterthought
to your stubborn network of subatomic
particles on their way through
obeying the higher commands
without handicap or false intention..
unstudied and wiser than the books
written over and over
in caves and bar-rooms
throughout time.

In Riyadh, God sends snakes

Right before the fourth inning,
and my third cigarette taken in the parking lot,
the home team and the away team
gather near what must be the naval of the earth,
to see a sand colored snake
laying on the mound-
as if it was blown into the halo of park lights
between strike three and batter up,
by a Riyadh summer storm or divine intervention.
James Joyce would have stood clapping in the bleachers
for this proof of one moral second
near the center of everything right here.


Hymm

A weeping man and his boy
at salvation's door
gunpoint.
The deadly gaze of a soldier
a photographer, the world.
Surely it will win the Pulitzer,
we all say
gasping on Friday afternoon
before another dinner
and the stretch of time
stolen from a mere
ten year old boy.

They so easily forget,
what they themselves
remind every slave of
in clips shedding crocodile tears.
They forget Goliath
in imagined largeness.
The great heaving machine
plunders and rapes
with the rapture of a criminal.

I once saw a baby
murdered at C'anaa,
his scalp peeled forward
from his pillaged cranial vault
as the peacekeeper wept.
A whole family shredded
like coconuts, opened wide
at their table.

You want me to paint sunflowers,
write hymms?

We drove through the South
past a village, marked
by the bones of houses
and a rusty sign.
Knowing full well, treason
galloped before us,
taking with her
their flesh and secrets.

I arrive at the border,
declare myself dangerous
armed with bloody stones,
praying for their destruction
like a Moses in Sinai.

Addendum to Hymm:

I will use my mouth
as a bomb,
my heart a plane.
Launch rockets from my womb
if that is what is left me.

Emily Dickenson is not my mother.

Do what you want with my clothes,
burn them bury them.

An Occupation in Three Acts

In this scene
we consider the actress
addressing the entire
Syrian armed forces.

During Act III
she is butchered on the third floor
of the abandoned building
the Syrians use for recreation.

When the climax
takes place
audience members
are asked to walk out.

Back to the opening scenes
in which Courtney or Faith
stumble onto the remains
of an occupied building.

In the farthest room
are wine bottles and a flak jacket,
twisted pieces of old rope
and pictures of half dressed women from magazines.

Other rooms have similar items,
old pieces of rotten bread,
discarded clothing
and cigarette butts.

In the closing scenes of Act II
Faith or Courtney find belief
in the creator and sustainer
of the entire universe.

When we return to Acts I and IV
we are reminded to applaud
at certain preordained times,
the moments of liberation.

The encore is performed
while Faith or Courtney
rise into the air
suspended by thin bungee cords.

American soldiers advance
dressed as dancers in full regalia
lifting her spirit
from the refuse of her occupation.


Ode to Wolf O'Meara

Arriving dressed as the Canterbury Tales
no small effort, I placed my keys
in the wife swapping tray of American Beauty,
decided to keep my Ice Storm legs crossed,
mind all a-whirl, dancing in the mizzling rains
which could be seen through a window
made of polar bear skin and whale fat,
a real Iroquois squaw-maiden in the Long House.

What could be done about the matter
anyway? I was there, riding in the Range Rover
man-made comfort interior with the radio
playing What's that flower you have on/
Could it be a faded rose from days gone by?
O vey! Miss Ellen Steiner might agree
that I'd learnt the paux du chat in a room
occupied the next year by Sister Miserable Josepha
but in my mind, it was here, in Yellow Knife
where the snow blowed cold, the will stiffened.

My human body trembled, it danced, it weakened
the snow blowed some more, a desert freeze
if you will, the shag carpet near the bookshelf
contained particles of food from the maiden voyage,
the bookshelf held Ecce Homo, My Book House
and several dozen anthologies of trout poems,
mostly. Some editions of Wordsworth, unabridged,
one by Alice Notley born in a river entered once,
and only once, by two poets. She wasn't there,
no need to be available to the press at press time.
You miss your friends in these times,
alone and looking through the whale blubber.

You also miss Wolf O'Meara in times like these.
Nothing like the town drunk to make things a bit lighter.
Listen to him tell the story of the town Vet
stitching up another bar-room fiesta will you?
"Walk in Beauty" Wolf often said and I gave him
a photograph of a Mexican girl in a party dress
walking towards her front door (if-you-could-call-it-that),
walking through a sea breadth of reflective monsoon mud.
A parting gift and his wife Patty long gone at the time-
cancer, alcoholism, the etiology of broken hearts.
How they loved one another, how young they were
when they entered our-ville, still sexy.
Still with that Hollywood glow that they entertained
as the clause for all the impropriety they wreaked
on the city council.

Yes, you miss Wolf in times like these,
alone at Yellow Knife and it's so cold in there.

San Pantaleone Sees Anne Sexton on the Corniche, Beirut

"Becoming a parody of oneself is not so bad when you figure
everything is a bit fetish, the tickling tease of the ego."
-Dr. Soandso, 1990, Commencement address given at Bryn Mawr, "The
history of stereographic photos revealing ladies' bloomers and the moral
controversies of our time."

Oh that divine itch!

The fuel of the fire, man
-the fractional distillation
-the rising to the top
-the sparkling rumination.

Oh that jet fuel!
How it makes us fly!

A system of clockwork,
spins its spine,
the Hurly Gurly
at Lunatic Park,
the Hurly Gurly
at Lunatic Park,
ferris wheel and gypsy
in our hokey hoboken
on the boardwalk
lit up in the dark,
the sea is waiting
to see under her skirt
her frantic nipples
and her eyes so alert!

Our Hurly Gurly of Lunatic Park.

Published Wicked Alice

Oriental Storms

I

What would be good here is to sleep through the hierarchy
let it rip open by itself and all alone in itself
without me to introduce it to my voice, the sleep one
which chatters into the nonsense of nonwaking, the miracle
of losing touch next to the boulder breathing, cat purring
the whizz of appliances at night, snap of the clocks each
per room divided into the drops of faucets and drains,
each passing unnoticed falls into the curvature of a steady building
on this precipice near the sea of hidden color.

II

buzz drip drop whizz galore
a symphonic clause of night
the cat bats around a piece of plastic
the wind rattles the big metal door
occasionally a jet removes itself
the anxious boarded people sit strapped
if only one could see them there
praying good lord praying
don't fall into the sea, don't drop
the wind rattles entire shackled tenements
runs in a river through the shafts
chimneys full of air until the glass
shakes like a fun house mirror
lightning over in the west
part of it from Istanbul some of it
having touched the Hagia Sofia
where the cistern serves water
to the dead, the big door arched
over one thousand kings and consorts
and the small side doors for the poor.
Cisterns and drains, the same.


III

Just back from Turkey eh?
Food was great. We spent Saturday waiting in the car
for the business men. Against the law she said
for covered women to enter the government buildings!
Yes I said, that was Kemal Ataturk's business.
We sat up in the hotel bar, we could see everything
but not the Bosphorus, stood near the double bridge
Asia and Europe, you did? Couldn't enter the mosque
because we'd just had sex at the hotel and a drink
but that is a tourist attraction anymore I said
she didn't know nor did she know
to buy a ticket to see St John's arm encased
in a golden jacket, absconded with by the Turks.
Five days of eating at restaurants.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

IV

buzz drip drop whizz galore
the whizz of appliances at night
the cistern talks to the bottom
of the catacomb
each eye closed for a time to the miracle
of losing touch
another jet to Istanbul on takeoff
the wind whips the big metal door
the heater off and cold
and out there, the sea without a color
under lightning, under the oriental storms.

Goat's Rosary

Derrida's metaphysical framework displaces the facts of mimeticism -
Peter Goldman

Say: I sacrifice myself to the martyrdom of dawn,
in all that is secret within the secret itself,
this goat whose basic inner desire is unknown,
wears this rosary, in every awakening there is all knowledge,
all reason yet on momentary reflection it evaporates
with the cool mists of early morning fog, the whow-wee
calls to the mule, Man is Dead!
All over again, each day the secret is maintained
or related as the stranger in the copse,
the evil tongued whisperer filled with contempt
for all that the Dreaming Eye sees and obscures
with the regularity of the Opening Eye.

On the cross it is said our Jesus doubted
the final cue to his incumbency and ever since
that final propitious moment all things ensue.
Baptisms, bloody engagements, adulteries..
nothing really changes from one of the other moments,
Abraham abrogates Isaac for Ismael, the displacement begins
and is repeated as casually as fratracide does.
The clap of thunder recites itself in the Universal Whimper.
Floods and earthquakes, beasts with three heads, insolent,
scantily clad women take over, chaos produces the kind of order
which was clarified in the twinkling of an Eye,
this Universal Eye with no stake in the prize
for all is already in possession for he who creates,
who intends only to destroy and rebuild,
for that is the Game of Time imprisoned in the special wrath,
of moments, hours, deaths and births,
the shower of our blinking and these tears,
within the glitter of some laughter.



September in Riyadh

These are the days
when silence fills
spaces where no
words would do
eyes meet eyes
wondering which assailant
will lose,
which will proceed
into the final chapters
the author of a new history.
These are the days
when flight is more
than wings or sailing
when the notion
that all is not at rest, is
and so many more hours to come.
These are the days
when coins are thrown
like so much schrapnel
through the skies
paying the price
that must be paid
for carnage, for success.
These are the days
our children will remember
like bracelets of molten steel
lacking charms, relentless
the days when they will ask
if it hurts to die
and when will it happen
and to whom
These are the days
when work stops still
in the gaze of a stranger
walking blindly in
a barrage of alien scenery,
when nothing seems to have moved
for endless hours, billows
of towering smoke
odorless on the screen

These are the days
when I let them
watch cartoons -
all day long.

Flight

The exact moment
you disappeared
from the radar screen
a night sky stripped
from stars
when reflections stop
the talk between themselves.
I, just awake
one world still
open to the next.

Were you coming or going?

Just another day.

She and I get along better than most,
I do the talking and run when we near the dumptsters.
She does the smelling.
The brindle's carcass is rotting up by the corner store,
wet and hollow like the rats she used to leave in bits and pieces.

We've made plenty of friends, the masons on the corner,
the old man that died last month, his widow,
school children waving in the rain and our good friend Jacko.
Jacko waits for us, rain or shine to take him along, pull him over
his fence, tears in his eyes.

We've got a pack.

Some of us have given birth and starve in down pours,
others have gone on, look at us from above, Boots.
Oh Boots. She was something. Waited for us down at the garbage,
nipping at my heels occasionally in gratefulness.
Don't know what happened to Boots but we still call her,
every day on the hill strewn with waste, perhaps hers as well.

There's Broken Kitty. We scooped up his boy one day,
eyes gouged out, blind. Fed him and let him go to his creator,
watched the Vet insert the needle deep into his tiny heart and it
stopped.
Buried him the same day as another, one of eight pups,
mangled by a person and a car contemptuous of life.

The Vet told me his father wasn't at ease with this,
this taking of life. I had to laugh.
It must have been a strange occurrence...two animals in one day.
Nevermind I said. Nevermind.

I've taken human lives. Three exactly. One accident and two on
purpose.
The inoperable baby suffered along on a trickle of air until I undid
it. He breathed his last breath in relief.
Another, eleven years on this planet and the last two leukemic
coded seven times before we agreed, the others and I,
to stop informing the intern on procedure. Knowing the intern would
forget.

Knowing the vet needed absolution.

But the other, oh. Ninety three years old and a lesson for me.
Pains in the neck should never be confused with heart attacks.
Funny in a way...he'd have gone on to reach a hundred if it weren't
for me and I'm sorry, I suppose, to that old man.

But she and I get along alright. Monitoring all this.
Monitoring the births and the poisonings. The litters
and the availability of food at the dumpsters. Smelling.
Monitoring the Syrian soldiers and the skidding traffic.
Monitoring the ill at ease people, going to work each day.

Our pack grows and shrinks irrevocably.

A Note About Paul


They thought I was a tire burning.
They thought I was a Marine Barracks--Sister Cities

This is a piece of obsidian,
a crocodile tear from Apache land,
this is the way a squaw makes amends,
it is, natural glass.

Like lemmings on their suicide march,
over a ravine-scraped into a pouch
this is where you point
through the superstition chain.

Double back to this year,
that proletariat under various
types of calm and unrest,
all the same, natural glass, not a tear.

How many weird sisters to make
a necklace like that! How many
obsidian tears must we hear,
weird weird sister?

Diabolical graces, evil lies
in the trust of the trance, this is
the superstition chain, this is
what you call, several necessary goodbyes.

This is the zahir given
in a lapsed remedy,
old men, old ties, old sameness
this is a cochise tear, not a bolshevik revolution.

This is the way it is, this is the return
to the superstition chain, the code
no one dares to understand the zahir
as what was split, what has landed.

Not iron or phosphate, not fractional
distillation, this is natural glass,
a tear and a reunion, a proletariat
on the notorious ground sought after, sought into.

The Lazarus

Abu Riyad found me again, down on the lower road-
must have seen me pass by his house,
checking to see if his dog came back.
We go through this all the time,
he is still looking and so am I,
so's my dog, still looking...

JACKO JACKO, come 'ere boy
is what the thunder said.

Last time I saw Jacko, Abu Riyad
was beating him, no, he'd shaved him for the summer
and cut him down to his scalp, exposed his spine,
Abu Riyad was miserable and sulking, so was the dog.
Jacko had a mercurochrome tatoo, monkey's blood -
Abu Riyad's answer to everything.
Then Jacko ran off again and stayed gone.

Somewhere in the rain and starving,
or on a front porch, he's there
we both know he's somewhere, just not here,
but we keep looking:
past the skinny lame dogs
past the giant Russian on the corner
past the abandoned sheep dog
past the beauty parlor next to the bridal shop
near the dry cleaner down from the pharmacy,
we keep looking.

Abu Riyad hobbles down the hill pretty fast
to catch me on the lower road
near the place where I found Lady giving birth once,
used to bring her food once in a while,
her dogsbody is somewhere in the rubbish,
almost a year now -
she watches with eyes from a photograph -
I recall her long miserable teets
and shrunken thighs, the way her pups
grew up with her and she never left them,
even for the next litter -
three generations under the same rotted couch.
She and Jacko passed the languid coital hours of dogs
there, across from the dehkena where every old man waves,
I am memory scooting by.

Abu Riyad catches up, and my pointer sniffs his boots.
He says something in Arabic I don't understand,
The dog and I wander home, a bit sadder each time.
Abu Riyad is getting too old for this.

The Pelvis

As women we must
protect ourselves
and daughters:

from green card seekers
and noise makers,
from insufficient funds
and defects in plumbing,
from hosts of maurauding males
and temptation get thee behind me,
from wrinkles
and cysts the size of a golf ball,
from eating disorders
and too much salt,
from underwear stains
and chalk dust,
from history written by victors
and Victor's history,
from having children too close together
and infertility,
from drinking in the closet
and DUI's,
from rapists
and adulterers,
from monsters under the bed
and ones under the sheets,
from slashed wrists
and overdosed best friends,
from memories of love
and reading Lolita,
from talking too much
and talking too little.

We women must protect,
virginity in all of it's guises,
the way it follows us to the grave,
held in our pelvis
in some part of the bone.

II

He is the kind of man
who gives back
what he took
so long ago it doesn't seem to matter
anymore,
a boy who pilfers an apple
attached to a string
in the corner market stall.

III

Getting caught...

The UN Sounds Blue


There are jackels out there in the fields,
guarding a hundred ghosts,
dead Roman soldiers
disintegrating near Saladdin's castle-

-a bat skirts through the early morning air
swallowing and swallowing-

The UN makes another patrol
down the thistle lined roads of South Lebanon
the sun will climb over the horizon
one more time
to make a small history
as if Christ walked here
sweeping for land mines
in the frost cracked hills.

The jackal out back is innocent if we let her be
leave her to her pups.
Their cry sounds like a herd of goats,
or a hundred frogs,
or dying birds,
a plague of locusts.

We could catch one and give it a name
create a race of stray dogs
sought after by collectors of uncommon things.
but a god damned hunter shoots her anyway-

As bats witness to Rome and Geneva,
the weary eyes of the UN
hide in jeeps and tanks,
big white tanks
their blue flag courses in the wind
flappity flap flap flap,
it sounds blue, like blue flappity flap
in the cold southern wind
full of jackal.

WARNING: you won't know where to turn next but it is such that you are in a welkin of some definite plausibilities. Not for the faint of heart or the archaic. It isn't that type of place. There are so many brothers in the world, blood brothers, half brothers, dead brothers and Jacks. There are always the Jacks. You have the doogs and the Lanny's and the brothers of the elk which is a rhyme to the starry blisses. It is a long story of beginnings, endings, tragic and blistering comeuppances. There are no politics in this world. It might be said that Carmen is a fine place to be when one trades one's soul with sisters and mothers, darling kittens. You've got so many Mira Labs but it is only the current one that matters her eyes full of shame and contagion. You help up that dog in the rain: Pip on down through to the bassett hound with three legs moving through a steady course to the most Noble Imposters and Just Buddies. The tricks are all there but you don't know where to turn next. Is it the sea calling? What is it that is ringing? It must be the lilacs again, always ringing and the peaches falling. A rhubarb tale disguised as a hallowed pie. A baptist pie, a cherished fruit. This is the last one of its kind. The machine ex post facto of the Anchorites with the tiny windows, peeking out into freshly fallen snow....freshly fallen snow. A silent kind of reverence towards the ancients of Mogollon where in the deep hollows of summer, fresh from the fears of gypsies up near the creaks, a lonely man sells his Russian memorabilia declaring he is being chased by the wealthy landowners who know for certain Rasputin. Hunted. He is wanted. He believes this with his almighty heart. His windows are boarded up. Butterfly mimics in the flowers have utensils that listen and pray to whatever is going on up there in the lava bombs, a sister walks by because she is in on it. She is totally in on it but we've got to go. The man mentions a place called Hafr Al Batn and we agree to never meet again but only silently. Only in the perfect sun.

The Ninth Inning

Poets and bugle players
employed by wars,
clasping hands
with death and it's gathered mourners.
Breathing a line
whose phrase escapes
and must be repeated over
and up and over and down
embroider and careen
with a soulful exertion
that lays the crusade
to waste.
A tangled play of
soldiers forgotten,
chaste and dying so very slowly,
drumming, agonal rhythm,
fingers dance heart fingers and heart
dance dance dance fingers and heart.

what everyone of us must run from
what every soldier has seen

the truth of cancer,
of the pitcher's father
the mother the pastor the daughter
your uncle my dad someone's dog
a girl you dated before me,
young and leaving
all too soon.

The pitcher's father arrives
before the last play
as his boy shows his worth
in solidly delivered strikes,
mortar shells
driven with an unnatural force.
His mother hard and clear
in the bleachers, managing well I'd say,
thins bravely,
her strength nothing more
than the vacuum suck
of the surgeon's mighty will,
a lieutenant with soldiers on the line,
the surgical oncologist.
Words on his face
holding the end of the season
between forefinger and thumb
orders to march.

When the Music Comes In, It Comes

In the beginning, it was written over water
written across a broad staring canvas
stretched as taut and meaningless, without a mountain.
Clouds ascended the steam of creation heavenward where God sighed,
and apathy reigned over the lack of distinguishing features
on the earth, the Great Plains never suffered
but the land waited and it waited. Some of it,
waits still, open, level, the grasses.
Water came down, oh how it came down, a deluge
of which it is written there is punishment
defined by groups and pairs, a boat full of collage.
It came down, it carved the great Canyons,
the Bryce, the Grand, Everest, the Andes,
carving, sculpting, resulting
rivers and rivulets, mammoths drinking
shark teeth even still in the Sand of the Arab,
the dry dwelling sand mongering Arab, feet cracking.
The divide between the ocean and the mouth of mighty rivers,
rivers that held still the voice in rushing waters.
It was then written, the sound of it. Carried
down through the ages, repeated by sacred apathetic warriors
called the Angels. Calling out in the canyons,
This is how it sounds! It sounds still.
But then, how it was! Empty and floating
over the flat land and sea without an ear,
without the appreciation of an echo, the canyons.
So playing is the piano, the concerto, the crescendo,
for this is what the thunder said. It said, itself.

March Hawk Press Poetry Prize, Deadline at the end of April:

http://marshhawkpress.org/index.htm

The Ancient Batteries of Baghdad

http://www.ancientx.com/nm/anmviewer.asp?a=11&z=1

Unbelievable.

Those particular clouds
will never return again,
not even once.

In the Bureaucracy of Meanings

Yes, there she was again. No one understood but the three of them. Not exactly anyway. Who could fathom such things in a place such as this. This, this place which is a bit like the old one but without all the heartaches and nuisances. People come and go you know.

There was this fellow you see. I think he delved into Shinto or something equally grand and unimaginably de rigeur, pertaining to the hobby-horse context you know. I contacted him and he planted in my mind an image of a teak-wood deck. Yes, a deck. There is no thing more pleasant than a deck with nice people sitting upon their deck chairs and embellished by their very own late-in-coming happiness. Nothing.

I don't know why it bothered me so much but it did. Well, not bothered really but intrigued to the point of not wanting to really know much more at all about the two of them. Smiling, somehow practical but not really frugal or to the point of being exceptionally well rounded in anything but this Shinto stuff. It was so completely satisfying to know this about that fellow that it bordered on what one might call cynicism. Predictable. Not the outskirts of reality at all but appearing to be so only it was too late for such inimicable conversions to such things as Shinto or even the laid back cuisine that must have been just steaming itself to pieces in the sparse but richly appointed kitchen. I can't really explain it but that is how it appeared to be in that frame at least. Other frames could have contained similar examples or maybe not. It did not matter.

One frame is all one needs to calculate how much expertise goes into styling oneself into what oneself believes one already is, should be, would be or has to be in order to feel what some must call satisfaction and others call happiness.

I think I'll call him Stuart and she can be his Donna.

As always, we can discuss things naturally or the way we always did before, like a team. Life is full of things accidental but only because the ignorant cannot read between the lines or to the end of the page. Those ones do not last when the first foothills come into view. There is a place to rest there if you like or we can call it Pirtleville. Pirtleville is as nice a place as any in a large swathe of desert full of such places as Cascabel and Tuba City. A couple of houses here and there, a horse maybe and some broken down cars is always a must in a macabre arrangement such as that. It's a nightmare really. Alone and nothing to do but work on feeling a little less so.

It was a long time ago but if I remember right, he smiled just a little too often in my direction. It could be my imagination but I hardly think it matters after all these desperate years, to come to that sort of conclusion. It was a fill in the blank kind of relationship really. No one got hurt except when they wanted to. And then they did...like a bunch of pre-programmed foolhards but lacking the necessary profundity to get really mad about something. It was really rather fake but all the same, looked kind of real to the outsiders. Oh...the outsiders showed up like they do in certain episodes found in certain pieces which I am relatively sure no one can remember. But I can. Pull the curtains aside and say supercilious things like I told you so. And I did that too. Folks like us are good predictors you know. It is actually quite frightening to live like this. Dangerous even. Almost got me erased from the ongoing plot at least three times.

Yes, we can call it Pirtleville. Few paint scenes like that anymore. It just doesn't pay very well to be honest.

About Real Estate

There is a fear going on
out there in the calla lillies.
Everyone knows about it
yet no one seems to mind.
It's an empty oh no
even though it was
an ordinary old thing.
There was a house
of big and empty
that I wanted
all of a sudden
or maybe it wanted me.
I don't know why
because there isn't much
I want anymore
and a house opened
and empty is never greedy.
But I wanted that
and that
scared me too.
But still the question
remained, why?
Why want that?
Because it is big or
because it is empty?
Or maybe because it was sudden
and it never seemed to be there
before. I know it was never
there before. I'm sure of it.
So it is this slow panic
of normal intensity, a generalized
fear about everything
and everyone knows about it.
It's an empty oh no
and they talk about these parts
all the time. Just a little
every day and without the index.
Hopeless. Well fed. Insatiable.

The Bookmark

These houses are either
empty or sad, constantly
changing hands -
in the dusty keep
of the ages, the dark tunnels
of heat and mouse steps
voices come and go
to those places and back
where funerals are less eager
to offer rides and pastries
a body transparent
a body not her own
a body of work
a body
with a finger trapped
in a book to mark the place
a body sewn to the finger
trapped in the book
a gold crown waiting
in a nearby town.

The rain is patient this year
April is patient,
the lilacs that live
two hundred years
the scrub oak
the generations of poppies
on the hill scattered,
are all patient.

Why is it that people cry
over corpses and why is it
they do not cry about death?
You've seen one die
you've seen them all.
No one goes there to visit the dead.
No one goes there to cry
or whisper or clasp.
They go there to wonder
about themselves
with mouse steps, riding
side saddle in the aisles
careful not to bunch up
or bump into one another.
Their faces tell lies and more lies.
No one thinks they'll get caught.

Emphasizing the Sagacity of Such Things:

"Time will come when one's safety lies in ten things nine of which are in staying aloof from people, and the tenth in staying silent." - Imam Ali Al-Rida, May Allah be pleased with him and his Ahl Bayt.

One of the features of this blog is found on the side bar under the heading Lessons from the Ahl Bayt. The Ahl Bayt is composed of the immediate descendents of the last prophet Mohamed (SA) and number exactly 14 (including the prophet himself). One of the words which is oft repeated in the writings of the Imams of the Ahl Bayt and wholly underestimated in our day and age, is "sagacity".

What I have found as "this" situation i.e. the world's situation has evolved in the last decade or two that I have been investigating it, is the idea that many people must certainly feel a kind of embarrassment at the level of tolerance Israel has been indulged with merely for claiming that they are The Chosen People. Chosen for what one must wonder and to what ends?

In any event, as the world watches on......Israel continues on its own self destructive course and what a long path it has been.

I am silent on many things anymore because what I've learned after years and years of trying to tell others about the miserable ignorance existant in the world today is that you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink or think. The Lessons from the Ahl Bayt however are as current as they were back when they were uttered over a millenium ago:

"Time will come when one's safety lies in ten things nine of which are in staying aloof from people, and the tenth in staying silent." - Imam Ali Al-Rida, May Allah be pleased with him and his Ahl Bayt.

Epocholypse

Had I been able
at the time
to record the sound
of blankets, it would have
been the fossil
of tears embedded,
blood stains in ash,
tremendous piles of ruin
in the equality of the eons
and similarities of time.
Not abandoned as a child
nor treated unnaturally
according to the era
in which these blessings
are accorded:

say: pews, votives, statuaries
milk money, for these thy gifts,
pretty rocks and mirrors
of all kinds,

I am hopeful still.
Whole civilizations
rise and fall because of this
thready pulse within them.

Ya gotta love that Zionism!

Did you know that Israeli Jews killed sixty Palestinians since yesterday?

Did you know that the Palestinian Authority has suspended talks with Israel?

http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/959608.html

Did you know that the US has deployed a warship (The Cole) into the Mediterranean, just off the coastline of Beirut?

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=2&article_id=89440

Linn Dinh on War

Israeli Jews continue to wreak chaos, bloodshed and murder in Gaza Strip:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080301/ap_on_re_mi_ea/israel_palestinians


...um....Death to Israel? Is it okay to just say, Death to Israel for their crimes against humanity?

Incident of the Camel Driver's Hands,
narrated by the Sixth Imam of Islam, Jaffar As-Saddiq:

“A man was trailing a woman when she was busy circling the Ka’bah. The woman was raising her hands in prayer when the man placed his hand upon her arm; at that moment God glued his hand to the women’s arm.

People thronged to witness this strange happening in such great numbers that all movement was hindered. A person was sent to the Emir of Makkah to inform him of the incident. He gathered all the scholars around him and together they tried to settle on a suitable resolution to the problem. Many ordinary people also assembled, interested to know the sentence that would be pronounced for this crime.

As they all stood perplexed over the issue, the Emir finally said, “Is there anyone from the family of the Holy Prophet (s.a.w) here?”

Those around him said, “Yes! Husain Ibn 'A'li (a.s.) is here.”

That night, the Emir ordered the Imam (a.s.) to be brought before him. He sought to know the ruling for this incident from the Imam (a.s.).

First, the Imam (a.s.) turned towards the Ka’bah and raised his hands. He stood in this position for a while, after which he supplicated. Then, approaching the man the Imam separated his glued hand from the arm of the woman by the power of his Imamate.

The Emir asked the Imam (a.s.), “O’ Husain (a.s.)! Should I not punish him?”

“No,” replied the Imam (a.s.).

The author says: This was the kindness which the Imam (a.s.) had exhibited towards the camel-driver, but it was the same person who repaid this act of kindness by cutting off the Imam’s hands in order to snatch his (a.s.) belt, in the darkness of the night of 11th Muharram. (Ashura)

List:

Fajr Prayer
Index work for poems
Study Tuberculosis Core Curriculum at the CDC
Policies and Procedures PH II
Resume for Anna
Gardening, dig dig dig
Housework
Gardening and more gardening
Dhur and Asr Prayer
Nap
Housework and Gardening
Dinner considerations if any
Dog walking
Maghrib and Isha Prayer
Dining, if any
TV
Sleep, sleep, sleep