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You can route audio like so many trains as they pass through the mic cable, to an old laptop with a semi-legally-obtained copy of Pro Tools, to a wav file, to an mp3 file, to an email sent to an old lover, who has married and has kids who play soccer at the park you used to cycle past on ambitious mornings.

If you're not paying attention, you might send a track to an output that does not exist, or, that leads nowhere. So the original signal is silent. But if you have already set up part of that track to go through say, a reverb effect, that reverb will continue getting a portion of the signal. so what comes through is a soft, beautified echo of something you can no longer hear.

'Satan and his legions' is a term I heard far too often as a child. Too delicate to watch a pg-13 but let the Sunday school teachers talk all they want about an invisible horde of demons, all of whom think of nothing but my destruction...

Perhaps they're the dark matter we hear so little repeated so often about. Only know it exists from the force it exerts on us. Makes up most of everything. The fundamental skeleton of the universe.

I can see the appeal of Lucifer's plan. If it was say, equivalent to the rest of nature's goings on, and Christ's agency akin to human self-consciousness and all its rich, interesting, but God-awful results.

So the return to childlike nature would be yes, a surrender to God, or an aligning of our will with his maybe, but also a reconciling with, or at least understanding of Satan who never wanted to part ways in the first place.

And that feels like a fitting yin yang thing. The perfection of a snake eating a mouse whole or something.

I love this

Sometimes when I start playing the piano, my daughter will drop what she's doing and start running in circles around the couch. Like this is her contribution to the performance. And when a song ends she takes a break just long enough to drink some milk, and then asks what's next on the set list.

Mom is the void,
Mostly ignored,
Unknowable life-imparting ways,
The baseball stadium of space between the golf ball-sized 'stuff'.
(Or is it merely mom getting restless, what we call stuff?)
Dad is the pattern, and also mom's child of course.
Look what I can do!
And void is form and form is void and all that

Sweeping

It's her melody,
This dried lakebed at twilight,
Red leaves on my porch

Lyrics to a song I may or may not write

I used to blow my nose with golden leaf 

While whining for something to eat

Now I scratch without that righteous pain

But with hope I'll find an honest vein

And follow that gold to its source 

Where I will want for nothing more

We displaced and desperate people of the high desert,
We sunburned and murderous pioneers,
We scrabbling, subduing, culture-confused saints,

Have learned to expect a harsh hand from the earth,
The sand-filled winds, Seven-month winters, constant drought warnings,

And we know there is virtue in weathering the dry cold, dry heat, dry springs,
Not a self-flagellation to assuage guilt (forwehavenonenorshouldwenorwillweever),
Just a beauty-in-adversity, refining fire, cold-hard-reality type of thing,

So that when a freak hurricane sends rain (real rain) inland from the west coast and we wake up to
Mist burning off in the rising sun, dampness and health that briefly revives the brown grass and
Creates the dew-covered, glistening effect we know only from vacations,

The intrusion of the outside world into our skin and nose and hair is a foreign feeling,
And tied up in some unformed idea of loss, or a sacrifice we didn't realize we keep choosing to make, or an ancestral home, or innocence bartered for independence, or a secret forest clearing we pictured as a child and that used to carry a... feeling... with it and why does it not anymore-

And the relief!  When the pores constrict again, mid-afternoon, and the skin is vulnerable only to the clean and negligible corrosion of wind and time

Mercy

Everything We Do

I transfer her,

From my large white bed to her small pink one,

And if I'm not careful when laying her back down,

She tenses up for just a moment,

Feeling like she's falling,

I hate that tensing,

So bend at the knees,

And keep her weight on me,

Until the mattress can seamlessly take over

Somehow just now, today, I have grown old,

Without the wisdom or security or really even the years that I think that usually accompany this,

My parents are better with their phones than I am,

My daughter smarter with her money,

My wife more creative and social,

I try to follow the Tai chi movements on a YouTube video, but lack the energy,

And desire,

To keep up

Closing the right eye, life is crisp and stark and marvelously detailed,

Closing the left, it is weathered and soft, with the harsher realities muted and manageable

Next Time Around

I plan to return
As a bare-breasted Ama,
Smiling in the spray

Bright Blessed Day, Dark Sacred Night

The day to obscure heaven, keep the attention and affections finite; The night for expansion, transparency, stars, sleep

A Grand Game of Telephone

My mother whispered her best guess,

Which I maybe could have caught,

If not for the tingle it sent down my side






**For future reference, this came from the idea that humanity is like a big game of telephone, where each consecutive assertion confuses the real message a little more. The real message perhaps being the immediate experience of the present moment (the tingle), although that is another assertion, I suppose? Babies then, relay the message more directly, before they learn to translate and reduce it to words. But in time, with all the reductions and assertions that they’re taught, as well as the iterations they come up with themselves, not to mention the impact of their specific genetics, a unique representation (or bastardization maybe, if you see this as a problem) takes shape which we might call a personality, or persona, or just person probably. A term i’m told means “that through which the sound goes.” Kinda like a telephone :) I have no conclusions here, and the more I write the more diluted the original feeling gets... let’s just say, I enjoy the smell of the dirt in Spring, but can also appreciate Vivaldi’s take on the season. Maybe there’s room for it all. And it’s just glancing back every so often to make sure Grandma can still see you. Check her face for approval, and just a tiny bit of fear, so you know what you’re doing is brave and special.

The Song of Angry Men

Michael Larsen hit me hard,

Though I didn't even know about it til two years after it happened,

Wasn't the fan I pretended to be, I guess,

Jesse's dad, Brother Wilcox, Brooke's dad, Elliot Smith,

Sad grist for songs and cigarettes,

Anthony Bourdain was a sharp blow,

In France when I heard,

And I've never seen the depths he has, but

I'd been on both sides of addiction and

Been father to a ten year old girl, and

Maybe started feeling that I can't know anything for sure, but

 I had found myself on a shore which suggested that

The game was worth the candle,

And now in a Paris hotel bed, left to wonder if

Even this is too much to count on

Chuck E Cheese

I wonder how it will be if the afterlife really is just like one big mind waking up from a dream. Some supremely complex dream where each of the infinite fractions of your conciousness had a turn as protagonist... maybe even rocks and comets get a say.... and to realize that each thing you hated, and each person you pretended didn't exist because their every word and action seemed an affront to creation, was actually you all along. Rapists and their victims reconciling what they did to themselves... Jews and Gentiles, lambs and lions and all that.  And I don't know if it will outweigh the nausea from all the misguided self-serving, but a salve, or the hope in pandora's box so to speak, might be realizing your loves - the ones you knew before the dream lost its sheen, its new-car-smell, its ability to surprise and strike awe, the ones that made you feel you'd been holding your breath for years until you held them close and inhaled at last, deep and quenching - are also inseparable from you, with all their impossible goodness.

Void is Form

It is two minutes past noon and I am still alone in the office.  One colleague has called out sick, another has called in late due to fevery children.  The third doesn't bother with excuses anymore, as he never appears until he's been to the gym and had lunch.  My boss's Google Calendar says she'll be at something called "Moving Forward" until 3:00.  I don't mean for this to sound as whiny as it's coming out (there's a little self-righteous resentment yes, but just a little).  It's more of a lonely thing.  Ella Fitzgerald can't be helping... I'd never really listened to 'They Can't Take That Away' before.  And only 27 hours ago I was standing over the Snake River near Shoshone Falls, in the parking lot of a Michael's craft store, watching base jumpers leap from the Perrine Bridge.  My daughter is at the perfect age for everything and she squealed as each chute opened.

Mermaids can't be caught
Or they become like girls or
Fish, though goddelijk

I didn't get my little boy but I got my kindred spirit