100314 one moment

one small contribution to this Domestic Violence Awareness Month

100314
—
define “love” for me
give me one moment
of clarity, where
the contradictions
rest uneasily
among one-another
as strange bedfellows
stand in solidarity
one by one, battling
a fork-toothed tongue
tasting the air
greedy with expectancy

you hold my heart
in your hands
every time you say
i love you
my defense crumbles
and falls away
i will not stay
and watch the blood
run as your words
puncture me to punctuate
the growing gap between
want and need
promise and deed
your self-image
and the life you lead
the soul you nurture
and the demons you feed

mind empty
i remember
as i bleed
how it feels
body healing
when we experience love
as a mutual feeling
we do, don’t say
in a liminal space

“love” has no word
no song, no phrase
show me what you mean
prove to me
that the symbols of sound
waves have more substance
than the actions
they once described
long before
we imprisoned our memories
in these linguistic confines
we knew love, then
without knowledge
thought or need
to hide with fear
inside a lie

i sip my tea, slowly
breathe, focus
drink, and dream
to lose myself
in small, good work
toward a life worth living
with a love supreme

092714 let go

092714
–
sometimes, its ok to slip and let go
sometimes, its ok to cut
bleed and let the blood
flow, sometimes
its ok to feel lost and alone
breathe, strangled in thoughts
sometimes, we need to

let loose and scream
wake up, cheeks wet from echoes, terrible dreams

and sometimes the fear will not let us sleep
sound in darkness, impenetrably deep
around the part of us that feels pain
pining, agony, the reason we cry
the part that still loves, burns and beats
to death and alive
you say you hold your heart
in your hands, wrung dry, sometimes
its ok to let a part of us die
—
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/170/

Click to access your_life_is_your_life.pdf

“why not dogs?”

This is a rambling response to a question someone I respect posed in her blog:

How can you advocate for a bill to “protect animals and their owners from harm” and eat another animal that night for dinner?  How can you allow another animal to go through the terrifying, horrendous, oppressive, and murderous process that it takes to get its body or its products onto your plate?  Because it’s not as cute as a dog?

domestication itself is oppressive.  we shouldn’t “own” anything.  we shouldn’t have “pets” — that’s just another euphemism for anthropocentric system of the enslavement and control of other species.  and we shouldn’t be thinking in inherently abusive and exploitative terms such as “resources” (“sustainable resource management” is an oxymoron). [all that begs the question, what SHOULD we be doing?]

Assholes, baboons and collapse: The ABCs of human sustainability

Premise: Modern industrial civilization is rapidly depleting the land-base on which most animals depend, even though it has existed for a fraction of the time of past civilizations (which all similarly collapsed).  We surround ourselves with an ever-increasing imbalance of technomass (things of our own handicraft) away from biomass (things we coevolved/were cocreated with), creating an unprecedented and interlocking matrix of metaphorical mirrors.  How could that do anything except breed excessive narcissism?

Waiting for industrial civilization to bring itself down will nearly completely destroy the ecosystems on which we depend. Consider also the fact that the ability of so-called “civilized” humans to make effective, sustainable use of our local land-bases has atrophied (and I think I’m being generous here) to near-complete non-existence. Acorns? Milkweed? Cattails? These are edible? How? What about these berries — they taste sweet…what do you mean they’re poisonous?? You mean you want me to squat and poop where?

Conclusion: The decline if our land-base coupled with our relative inability to subsist directly on what little land-base remains will present us with a perfect storm of effective scarcity. This means that the human herd will need some serious thinning. In other words, the human herd will thin itself one way or another, and we can either be intentional about it or just let it happen.

Implications: If we aren’t intentional about our thinning, then the sociopathic, narcissistic assholes will divide, conquer, dominate and prey on the vulnerable, and we’ll all have a much more miserable time of it than is necessary.