Atheist Tomb of a Truth-Seeking American: A Plea for Disarmament

Tomb of D.M. Bennett in Brooklyn by Cory Doctorow

"I have learned to modify my prejudices. I am ready to believe Hamlet was right when he assured his friend Horatio that there was in Heaven and Earth many things not dreamed of in his philosophy." D.M. Bennett, as orated in The Truth Seeker 

It is at times like these that we Americans look to our history. Who are we? Where do we come from? How did we get here? What could have led to this? What is happening? 

Those among us strong enough to ask such questions are motivated to seek truth. As the president weeps for the children of the nation, so we must all begin to weep with minds full of emotion, burning with an intelligent self-awareness towards post-political change. We don't need rhetoric. We need new laws on guns. We need free thought to embellish the minds of such substance as founded free press in America. Disarmament is the new abolition, and as long as guns are indiscriminately accessible to immature minds and wounded hearts, we are all slaves to this mortal era.  

__________

The last thing I remembered was the initial feeling of impalement. Careening off a flight of concrete steps, I flew from my bike onto a metal pole. My back cracked in shards. When I came to, the city was dark. A Rastafarian man burned down a hand-rolled cigarette in the shadows. I knew from his countenance, to walk outside would be a bad move. I did anyways.

The Customs Cabin by Ferdinand du Puigaudeau

The street lamps glowed over empty streets. The absence was chilling, yet I could feel a human presence both alarming and alluring. As I made my way down to the riverbanks, the icy shoreline stared at me with two riveting eyes. The male stance was formidable and intimidating. Fear struck. The air breathed of danger. I needed to know why.

Night on the Southern Shore by Nikolay Dubovsky

As I hurried further on down the shoreline, a group of men whispered in the dark. I quickly smelled the entrenched anger, the mortal struggle at hand. I fled. On my way back, I met a friend from before the accident. He recounted his story, how he had broken his back in an accident that mirrored my own. I didn't question the curious coincidence as he went on to explain the unthinkable, we were now living in a world so hostile to mankind that people were literally killing each other for the last crusts of bread, the last drops of water, the last feet to walk, the last fresh air to breathe, the last day to live.

__________

"towed current
            pulled slow,
            drifted away

hand,
            fingers following new lines
...

virgin thorn brush
            frame lilting strong above the careless face
of artistic madness
in the jokester’s foam and rust
...

the pulse breaking off the tops of widow’s peak waves,
            blushing high over the coastal horizon,

a piercing thought
that boiled in the mind’s own brain,
an intuitive question
            with an answer as certain as death in the next step"

excerpts from "empty Blown mind"

Achuar Victory! A Dream Come True Is An Awakening

"We have fought long and hard against Talisman. Now we've achieved this, but it doesn't end here. We have to remain awake." Achuar (FENAP) President Peas Peas Ayui

See the Amazon Watch report 

Proof: international networks of civil society and allied global citizenry make unprecedented change in the policies of big business and government. 

See my past posts on the Achuar struggle (Here & Here & Here), and we must remain aligned!

__________

An acquaintance, a young African-Canadian woman, confident and jovial, meets with me on literary terms, to edit a short story of mine. The story is in its very beginning stages of development, only a few phrases and scattered ideas. She is diligent, and always supportive. As I begin to tell her the story, I penetrate the image-letters and enter into the mystery of its narrative continuity, to explore experientially.

The concrete walls, unfinished, breathe with shadow. A well-known author sits in a dim corner, incommunicative. He is deep in listening, with headphones on to gather the soundscape of the strange, even horrifying darkness surrounding. Then, I notice his subject, a grumbling bunch of ruffians thirsting in the mud of Mexican pain. They secrete primal sounds from unlit depths below, before trailing off into the endless night. In that moment, the famed author saunters off with recording equipment in hand, leaving me to the bare depths, an empty memory.

I bleed on through the folds, with pain-stricken mind, searching through memory, confronted with a hollow mixture of painted nostalgias. A university campus, brimming with beer gush fads and costumed throwbacks to the glorious sexual revolution of their parents, now filling their pockets with the fool’s gold of American savagery. As I wander through the woods, the clouds gather above, warning of a rainstorm.

On the forest path, exiting from the campus, a friend and I are spotted by a group of peaceful youth, with meditative eyes and friendly sight. One remarks on my shirt, a gift from Israel. Soon, I find he is from Israel. He asks me, “Why is it that Americans never emerge from the forest?” I understand his referring to the colonial history. I empathize with his heart, worn from the break of political waves crashing in mid-sea. The Mediterranean harbors of our once shared ancestral home are now given speed to the sacrificial meaning of e-state.

We clamber on, my friend, an Aboriginal man, and I, as he critically rethinks the statement by the Israeli, “Haifa is a place not unlike Halifax? A seaport, where you fly from America without heed to the other?” We walk on into the city, through art galleries, attendants offer free espressos and truffles, through the museums of old travesty, and in an off-white room, sightless without a spot of focal interest, we separate.

__________

your eyes crack open
with subtle wanting
in the cold

drop

mourning

...

with the unforgiving pull,
a soft whirr from the sky's clear vacuum
exhaling
the rusty kisses of lips gone stale
with a life
lived too long

- excerpt from "Morning Dew"