The Last Path

Heavy Steps across the rainy night. There are some things you can't fight, some fights you can't win, some weights you can't bear.

You are floating far away, in some darkness seeking light, wondering what it was you were trying to fight.

Light.

Strive for the light, at all costs strive for the light.

Though your heart falters, though your flesh fails, though your bones splinter, go onward into the night. It must eventually become day. It must at some point turn into afternoon, and echo with the voices of children as they play their games.

Theirs is the peace. Theirs is the place we long to return to.

To the sunny afternoon and the breezes, that lolling through the tall pines lay at last upon your old and weary face.

Grace will take us to that land, to the afternoon of our youth when all that we saw rose up and out into the vastness of the Infinity that we were a part of.

Grace

The warmth in the thunderstorms of night

In the end it is the only path that is left to a man.

It is the path that we were meant to find.

It is the path we were born to follow.

One foot

and then the next

on and on

building like the start of a thunderstorm.

We will awake one by one and rise into a newness of being.

There is the promise, the hope, and though seemly silent, it sings to the believers, to the seers, to the fools, to those that have given up on every other way.

What is left after all?

Can you carry one photo?

One coin?

One flower?

One petal?

All that you take is all that you are, and ever were.

When did you lift your hand in aid?

When did you answer another's pleading?

Come soul, come oh weary one.

Awake!

Take heed, hold up your head, lift your feet, raise your arms.

Holy, Holy, Holy

Grace

The sound of one man's bare feet padding softly on the warm desert sands.

Why do you search this tomb? He is not there!

He has risen.

How the Old Men Killed the Grizzlies that had Eaten Them

The snow hangs on. Its an onslaught, a blizzard, maybe the last blizzard, trying to reclaim lost territory, it’s territory, northern Michigan, trying to claim it’s own, it’s men, it’s fishermen, ice fishermen, it’s children, it’s rough-shaven smelly old carharts clothed, broken toothed old men that should have fallen through early January’s thin ice long ago; or maybe the stubborn ones who even tried in April, whose shanties went under and had to be salvaged when the ice was only a dull memory of aching fingertips; old men who should have died from cigarettes or liver damage or from the stupidity (or thick-headedness) of driving broken-down rusted-out beaters without brakes; old men who should have died but didn’t, who instead of dying have disappeared, displaced by transplants from Detroit or Flint or Chicago, displaced in their poverty by tourists-turned-locals who believe that they have been assimilated by the old locals who don’t give a damn about the woods and water that have sustained their souls; but the truth is that the transplants have displaced them and they have moved further north and deeper into the dwindling woods, into the U.P. and up into Alaska to die in alien woods; old men that got eaten by grizzlies which they in turn killed by transforming themselves back into the old rusty lumps of iron ore and lead sinkers and tangles of cat gut that they really ever were in the first place, that and the big clots of black gooey chewing tobacco, cigar butts, tar and nicotine, and the sticky residue of evaporated Coca-Cola, and coffee stains that they only ever were. They bled on the land and pissed on it. They and their fathers before them lived off the land, off the fungus and berries and the meat and organs of the creatures that fed off the land, and both the animals and men smelled of the brown swamp water that saturated the black decomposing mud of places only they had tread, the places that were themselves displaced by the blonde sand of fill dirt and developer’s bulldozers (not that the old ones shunned the chainsaws, nor the hammer- many of them walked about like specters, white with spackle and drywall dust, spent by the work- they themselves built the very thing that displaced them even betraying themselves by becoming the same as those that had displaced them). So the old places have vanished, have been stripped away and covered with a new veneer of laws that attempt to preserve the very thing that they have eradicated, to preserve for the elite the very land that they have torn from the hands of the old timers who had abandoned it.

Zanzibar Shores

There was an Island and it was far away from now, and the sky was almost always blue. The city was ancient and you could lose yourself there amongst the jagged narrow streets. I can't speak but for the hundreds of images that I still recall. There was a crack of blue overhead in the streets almost always in shadow- and the scents of coffee, and ginger, and cloves. The ocean broke ever peacefully upon a shore where once Portuguese cannon balls flew, where once great ivory tusks were piled high on limestone floors, where once men were chained and sold and sent away forever in exchange for gold. Every morning, callers greeted the rising sun from minarets. Bright red, purple and yellow fabrics dried above rusted tin roofs. I'd wander aimlessly for hours until my eyes were full. I'd go to a small roofed dock on the Indian Ocean, and fill notebooks that were sent from America. I didn't flirt with tourists, or dive, or go on spice tours. I'd spend nights sleeping buried in labyrinth-like rooms within the heart of stone town. Very often I'd find I was feverish from some illness. Was it typhoid or malaria? I did not know. I was ill three days once, with fevers near 104 and all I did was read William Carlos Williams until my mind was gone. I beat the fevers though, and came out of those dark rooms with new sketches of Muslim tessellations. I sought the sun and the ocean breezes, and the solace of still having nowhere to go for days. I ate for strength and swore off beer. I turned back to my writing. Did my writing have a purpose? I worked things out through writing. Put things in their places, uncovered old wounds and sought to heal them. I explored. I played with ideas. I was never more content than when I was there surrounded by turquoise waters creating my stories. I'd write til afternoon. Some who knew me never understood why I spent the time alone, but I was never alone. I was surrounded by foreigners in a foreign place. How odd it was that I was the true foreigner and felt like I was home. I was the true expatriate then. The exile, self-exiled because I could see my real home more clearly from the great distance I'd put myself in -geologically, culturally, socially, intellectually. But I was close enough to things to splash my feet in the ocean, or draw my finger across some interesting pattern or object. I'd encounter malnourished kittens as they scrounged through trash heaps. Shutters would slowly close, or from three stories up I'd hear giggles. Looking up, I'd see a green colored sleeve disappear into a long narrow window. I'd go to ruins and sit on the grass before some long-ago-collapsed structure and sketch it on the inside cover of my notebook. I was there, and it felt so real, and time- Time, it seemed to stop there. I distanced myself from time too. Always I tried to distance myself from Him, from God. I thought I had, but God is infinite and the further you run away from everything in your life the closer you approach Him, or rather the closer He approaches you.