Testing Ground

Saturday morning thoughts on how

every passing second of this life might

be the fertile testing ground for some

thing else.

I can stand out at the front porch

of my ramshackle midtown home

with its multitudes of creaks and

splinters, look down at the

canyon park / tiny park across

Cuming street, see the cops pulled up

to a halfway house on the other

side of the park, enough distance

to make the cop car seem like one

of my infant son’s toy cars, and

I wonder at our testing ground, the

bureaucratic muck of bust and

jail and prison, the sheer over-all

waste of time of it.   

Time pushes all forward

with every paycheck gobbled up

fruitless and theoretically spent before

its even made, facts and

figures of the human tribulation over

the dynamics of a dimly conceived

universe, probes pushing forward past

planets and outer edges of untraveled

nothing-dark.  Before I know it I’ll be

coughing my last on some death bed

as the rest of humanity guesses

at the universal spin wheel.  

Why should I follow the rest over an

infinite guessed-at lip of a God-

dream whilst I still breath and fuck

and stammer and write and sing and

toil and work?  I still smell the cult

stench of Jonestown, yet still can

identify with the Boxer’s Rebellion,

mayhaps look at Waco TX

warily but not without some kind

of understanding and yet

I keep the daylight filtered through my

own two eyes, taste with my own tongue

and feel with my own skin - no need to

exit at the behest of some god

damn lunatic, all those empty  

vessels filled with shadows.

A mirror tells the truth but still I see

it with my own two eyes.  If God is

in there someplace his face is veiled

and voice is silenced.  To see or hear

it is strictly my own choice.  I’ll not

hear any other voice and consider it

           divine lest it be my own.  

- - - - - - - -

(May 24th, 2014)