January Sixth

How lovely that you
have painted a mask for me
featuring all your favorite
monsters and boogymen,
the ones from the bedtime stories
you grew up on.
told by the frightened madmen of your youth,
to frighten you into submission,
the ones you are so certain
are not you, but the other….
me.
Your imagination is so exquisite
that my mask needs no cloth,
your old slide projector will do, so realistic,
that all the fearsome tales seem to
dance in full technicolor across my forehead.
The demonic red glare
reflecting from my eyeballs
cropped from ancient images
of heathen demons
and better dead than red,
with all that Christian blood
 dripping from their fangs,
the source of all your suffering for sure,
so perfectly projected upon my face
and in such incredible detail
that you can no longer distinguish
the deep fake from what’s real.
So then,
because all things need an opposite,
I must also paint a mask on you
with all the colors of my own fears
and all that terrifies me,
because as we both know,
 hate must be met with hate,
and vicious violence with vicious violence,
and a tooth for a tooth
for it is written
and has been posted on the internet,
so it must be true.
So now I see you
dressed in jack boots
with a swastika arm band
wearing a white hood
and waving a noose,.
so real I have totally forgotten
that you are you,
my brother and my sister and my friend
and I can no longer recognize you.
And now I find myself
standing before
the screen showing of my life,
in my dragon costume
with all my dragon scales
glistening in the eerie light,
and flames billowing
from my terrible gaping maw,
hoping to defeat the one
that I see coming at me
charging up the Capitol steps
on your white steed
with banners flying
and your holy blade of righteousness
waving high above your head
to save the day.
and it’s all caught on cell phone video!
So real! So real!
until the slide projector crashes to the floor
and bulb goes out
and there I am,
standing in front of you,
with your blade arching towards my throat,
no longer the beast,
no longer a dragon,
but an ordinary person,
yourself. myself, the one you love
wearing a silly mask,
only asking
if you would like to go outside
and play together in the street,
playing pretend,
until we each become
the thing we fear most.
4/2/2021

The Great Escape – Part Fourteen

The Great Escape – Part Fourteen

Of course, The Great Escape 13 isn’t entirely true. There’s some bullshit in it. There are places where time has skewed my memory. Gaps and holes that I filled in with imagination. A place or two where I tweeked it a bit to make a better story. But overall, that’s basically what happened…..as I percieve it now, through this particular point of view, this particular, fucked up mental mess called a mind, the present one that is doing the remembering that is, not the one I had yesterday.. You know, the instant something becomes the past, it becomes fiction, and all knowledge is of the past. Which begs the question….What is the truth?

Well, I answer for you, “It’s what really is, or what really happened in this case. It reality, right?” I love answering questions with questions,……It’s so politic. So I ask, “Who’s reality. What you believe to be reality or what I believe to be reality or what the lady who lives down the street believes to be reality?”

And then you ask, because this is a real questionfest, “Aren’t they all the same reality, Isn’t there only one?”

And I say, “Well, I’m not sure about that, because things might look different from over there, where you are, for instance, than they look from here, where I am. Completely different angle. To know for sure, you would have to see what we are calling reality from every possible angle there is plus a few more including from inside out, and even if we both saw it that way, we still might not agree because I’m seeing through a different mind set than you are. The closest we can get to the true reality is to assume that every point of view is correct, no matter how much they differ. If it exists, then it’s true. And since my imagination exists and your imagination exists, then what we imagine must be true too, even if it doesn’t jibe with our exterior realities. So everything must be the truth. Just because you don’t like brussels sprouts doesn’t mean I can’t like them.”

“Wait a minute,” I say for you, “Truth is not an opinion! What about bullshit? What about out and out deception and lies?”

“Well if they were said, they must truthfully be deceptions and lies. Truthful opinions too. Anyway, those are merely different classifications, different labels we give to truth to differentiate aspects of it from one another so so we can compare and judge and sort them. It can get really confusing.”

So, as you can see, were back to that apple in the Garden of Eden thing. The fruit of knowledge of good and evil. All those good truths we like and all those evil truths we despise and hate. The Garden of Eden was Pandora’s Box….all those little imps. Reality is not always pretty. It’s like liking candy and Limburger. Whichever we prefer is really the best, but it’s in your head, not out here in my reality. Some people like limberger better. Some people like candy. Maybe it only matters to those marketing analysts that work at Facebook. And to think, until the apple incident, the snake was just a snake, a tree was just a tree, and “….a rose is a rose is a rose”, to quote Gertrude Stein.

This doesn’t help, does it. It’s kind of sad that your truth might not be my truth and vise versa. That much of what we believe and say might be bullshit. Hurts, doesn’t it? But of course we know that people have different view points than ourselves. That’s part of the wonderous, beautful, diverse universe we live in, no reason to get pissed off.

It appears we can only know the truth in the light of the God within us. It’s everywhere, from everywhere at once and beyond differences. Don’t sweat it.

To all my friends up in the frozen north, Carnival Costelegre 2016 in Barra de Navidad starts today. All out, wild ass, fun time, if your up for it. Big doings in the town jardin tomorrow evening if you can get your butts down here. One big party this weekend. Chynna’s still looking for Rey Momo contestants. Weather’s warm and sunny. Sea and sand and all that too. Real as it gets.

To be continued………..