Alabama

has become ALABOCKET.

A Mess

They travel from grayness to grayness, the trains. The concrete block under legs are cold, and the fogs chills my shoulders, but still I sit. Waiting for I don't know what, but wanting to see the trains, traveling from place to place. Stopping with me, going from me. Places that aren't here, that don't exist inside my fog. But the trains connect us. They tell me my little bubble in fog is connected to something bigger, my cold legs touch concrete that is part of a bigger world.
A few damp sheets of paper blow by me, falling over the lip of the cliff and spilling down onto the track, a meager waterfall of thought, words on a page. Plastered on the rail now, this trumpet of human wit or sorrow, of little value once it's been copied a thousand times and rinsed in the rain that falls on all of us.


Here I am, circling on a flying horse, alone.

Back to Lunch

Behind the wheel, James looked out on the world in contentment. His warm coat rustled against itself as he pulled his arms left to merge into the empty lane, moving past a semi and a sedan with a "school bus" sign crossing the roof horizontally. Smiling, he leaned forward slightly to see under the fog, the ice crisscrossing the road ahead. Should he turn the air hot or cold to defog the windshield? He couldn't remember. He tried hot, as hot as it could go. It seemed to work for half the glass, and that was good enough.
The chassis rattled over a dip in the pavement, and small chunks of frozen snow bounced from the hood across his vision. James was content, even with this crazy world. He pulled back into the right lane just in time to jam his foot onto the break when the pickup in front of him slowed abruptly. Crazy world full of crazy drivers. No one moved. Sometimes impatience and contentment can simultaneously exist.
He pushed his lips together and jerked the wheel to merge left again, turning his head to see the huge prison bars of a grill two feet from his face. Oncoming, oncoming. James looked at them, saw them, read the lettering between the silver shafts as they crawled closer at seventy miles an hour. James was still strangely content.
The bars pressed against the rear of the car and shifted it to the horizontal until they met the driver's door.
It exploded into his left arm and shoulder. Splitting metal ripped into his ribs, grating against the bone and whirling blood up into his eyes as his world was thrown upside down. A cloud of glass and a roar washed over him, and he was hanging from the seat, the car gently spinning. James heard screaming, and fighting lions, a crew fixing the highway, and an airliner exploding. Dew dropped like thunder on rainforest leaves. Whales breathed fire over a barren titanium moon. A bathtub drained in lazy spirals that played in and out, in and out, in and, out in, and, out. 

He thought of his grandmother, tea in hand, sitting comfortably in the wooden chair, a dogwood blossom tickling her right ear. She smiled and gave him a little wave, and he came to sit beside her. She handed him a glass, light condensation wetting his fingers as they wrapped around it. He put it to his lips, and it was good.

Most Firstly,

Dante's Inferno.

Gregor

His glasses showed tiny scratches in the window light. The room was crowded around him with plants, thick and thin, that grew up and down the walls, climbing and falling like road maps on the plaster. He often wondered where he would go if he followed them. His elbow rustled the paper underneath it on the desk. His chin itched on his hand, the short hair caught against his palm.
He watched the birds on his feeder, suet and sunflower, and the rabbits around their three holes on his backyard hill. A slight smile rested softly on his lips, a mellow sweetness, like good tobacco, still to be tasted there. His tongue snuck out and captured the last hint of it.
Clouds were rolling in over the further land beyond his own, the sun still close to him licking at the rain below their blanket. An epic battle. He straighted away from his rest on the desk, looking down and straightening his letter.

Gregor,
I know it's been a long time since you decided not to follow me any more, but you need to hear this at least - watch the phantom, she will show you what to do.

There was more, but Gregor didn't have time to read it. He only had seconds, he knew. A deep breath, and he turned from the letter and the strange war of light beyond the window to the shadowy entrance of the hall. Like all the house, the hall was a tunnel of old and new leaves, a green and brown patchwork of stems and vines that darkened and narrowed its breadth even as they brought the deep wild life that he loved. As he looked into its mouth, the shadows there spread into a deep blue-black, and the girl floated into the room. She was short and plain, her faded flower print dress covered at her shoulders by ebony hair that flowed forward from the depth of the hall. She stepped slowly over the roots and the old carpet. He couldn't draw his eyes away, and she smiled at him, her small face shining beautifully inside the dark frame of her unbraided bangs that sucked away the light around it and poured it into her fine features.
'Hello, Gregor,' her voice was young and sweet. He nodded stiffly, silent, and she laughed with teasing playfulness.
'Hello, ah, welcome,' he was finally able to press out. He pushed at his glasses with a nervous finger.
'Well thank you,' she accepted his words with her own nod, graceful and childishly mocking.

Folk

Little worlds,they are such
little worlds, but beautiful.
Little gold paint on the rim
chips slowly in the water, floats
away with a circular glide,
sparkles in the light. A candle
burns inside the frame, frozen
in a stillness of oil undried.
Little flies touch softly
on the still damp surface, leaving
footprints of their slender bristles.
The buzzing is a gentle drone,
like soft aloe leaves growing, pushing
against a window screen, or glowing
logs on a hearth, punctuated
by the softest pops in the heartwood.
Heartwood was once a shoot, a sprig
laughing its way to the surface
warmed by rain. A warren full
of new life, wrapped in scents of musk,
fur and new fir, a whole home
for the young ones learning to love light.
The smallest flakes of light drop
like woodchips chirping against wet pavement,
boiling water splashing just over the rim
hisses with the same sound, and a groan
from a grain silo is the same.

"If I could I would break into flower."

Psalm 120:7

I am a man of peace;
but when I speak, they are for war.

Psalm 114:4

the mountains skipped like rams,
the hills like lambs.

Music and Art

Good music has something in it that I can recognize from myself but haven’t been able to put into words before. – Jonas of Mew

All good art should have some sort of this quality, this essence of “a mystery solved,” some sort of answer to a riddle, some sort of assurance amid the uncertainty of the world.
This meshes with L’Engle’s idea of art as “cosmos in chaos.” Art acknowledges the mystery, acknowledges the chaos and the uncertainty, and then, as Jonas says, gives some sort of answer, or, when it can’t do that, makes some sort of sense of it. It says, “here’s the sense, here’s the reason, here’s the way to understand the mystery inside you, or the mystery that’s leaving you bewildered," or when it can't do that, “here you are, here is your mystery, here is your confusion and the confusion of your splinter of life, and here it is in the glorious cosmos, here’s where your piece fits, here’s where your mystery belongs." Yet, at the same time, it doesn’t say that, it doesn’t say that, and that’s why we can listen. That’s why we can have ears to hear.

Silence

Dancing through life, I’ve seen too many with their mouths wide open. Raucous, chaos in chaos, noise in noise, spreading the frenetic disease of restlessness. There is no privation of sounds, decrying, declaring, denouncing, so much suffering that is echoed but unheard. Testifiers without ears, voices launching preemptive strikes against an existential cloud of witnesses, battling the sparks and piercing shrieks that find their way in, finding their way out of, our lives. Attack before defense? A knife blade against the lines of hope and help, the cradle of sanity and the embrace of the home. Energy fired from a vacuum of energy, a jug at the speed of light, failing to fill with the coolness of liquid rain. "A glass can only spill what it contains," so what are these voices that lay their bold claims? Worried husks plucked before the fertile, dusky ground could reach up to fill them with the seed and sweet roundness of new growth.
How can water fill this empty bowl if it will not stop rolling? The hunger that all the animals could not quench, could not meet, could not allow to exist but could not answer in a hundred years of trying, it will persist through another hundred if the ears of man will not unstop and begin to hear.

“The righteous man hears the crying of the world through silence, and in it learned to listen to the suffering of others.”

All we need is that "thimble full of fire."

"He who answers before listening— that is his folly and his shame."