what poem?

i did it -- i finally posted something on another blog i thought i would try to start a while ago ... it's not what i thought it might be when i started but it's something ...
and it was easier to put something there having nothing really to do with me than to post here what is wanting to be loosed ...
maybe later.
If nothing else i did something today that i had not done before.

I am reading James Alison's "faith beyond resentment" -- excellent if difficult -- and this song comes to mind; rather than trying to be literate about what is waiting for me to catch up, this song does well enough for hope I think.

memory?

“Like those birds that lay their eggs only in other species’ nests, memory produces in a place that does not belong to it… Memory comes from somewhere else, it is outside of itself, it moves things about.”
Michel de Certeau The Practice of Everyday Life, pp. 86-87

And what of faith?
Faith in the truth of memory, faith in the goodness of man, faith in a loving and welcoming god -- where does faith come from?

moving along ... but to where?

so here i am with twenty years of formal education, not enough, ready to run as fast as i can (i think) from the 20-year trial lawyer i have become into something, almost anything else. I finally (maybe) ordered transcripts and i did (for sure) fill out my alternate teacher certification application (EC-4) and i paid my application fee ... but i still don't know.

What makes me think i can teach elementary school?
nothing --- it's more what i can't so ... math and science are the ones they want and since i flunked pre-algebra in HS and flunked pre-calculus in college and now they teach college calculus in HS i figured maybe i could pass whatever test they require for grade school math ... and in keeping with NCLB once you get certified in anything they don't care what's on your transcript. You just take and pass a test for another certification. So maybe eventually i could test into middle school to teach remedial math, and maybe some sort of english class where there are no diagrammed sentences ... i don't think i ever learned how to do that, and i don't see the point to it anyway ...
no one seems to think i'm capable of teaching HS ... M says (and she has good insight at times) i am not emotionally able to handle HS bc as she says they have to pass kids and they don't really expect kids to work or try or do anything; the purpose of HS is to graduate them to (remedial) college classes. M says i will be too easily frustrated and to hell with them... I think there is some truth to this --i am not and never want to be in management for much the same reasons -- it's not a prison so if you don't want to be there or take care of your business just leave. I may be unhappy in my job but i do it really well. If you're not doing the work you said you would do and that you asked for when you asked for the job you oughta be fired.
A judge friend who's known me for a while agrees HS is not for me, for many of the same reasons, but i don't understand what makes her think i can teach little kids ... to her it makes sense and is a wise choice but for me it's a fallback position.
So class starts June 3 and theoretically i guess i could be certified to teach by spring if I do clinical teaching for 12 weeks for free... but that's not when the school year starts. Or I could do class this summer and student teach one year starting the fall and get paid as a first year teacher and then after a year get certified.

But what if I hate it? What if I suck? What if I throw away a horrible nasty micromanaging job peopled with jerks and assholes who delight in being nasty and making life difficult ... but with a decent paycheck, to take a job paying half as much that has nicer people -- how could they be worse? -- but i hate it? And i'm really not sure i can teach ... M was bilingual at the end of 2d grade but couldn't read a word of english and i couldn't teach her. I couldn't teach her to ride a bike. Somehow we eventually got through tying shoelaces but there was a lot of daycare help with that. I think i could teach college or law school but there don't seem to be any jobs, except adjuncts, which pay nothing and lead nowhere and tend to have bad hours ...
but i did order transcripts (i think that happened), and i know i filled out the application and paid my bucks, so ... at least i did something, even if it's not the right thing, not well-reaoned ...

It sure would be nice to just know what i'm supposed to be doing, but no one's telling

dream

All in new jeans
dark stiff denim two men
one a son of the other
leaving to china to live in the jungle
on an island
just to be.

These I don't know but familiar.
I never met a man in new stiff jeans.
Some with tags still on
proclaiming how thick, how thin, how tall, how short.
Stickers unseen
like no body's business.

All here exude nervous nonchalance.

I am here to learn
how to
what is
prayer

One cursory look in my bag for drugs
fearing forfeiture of this place in tatters
with an armchair for the father,
who sits on the steps
the rest divided into plots,
string strung between dead sticks of trees.

Some growing, others empty
maybe planted but sterile
either way
nothing there

On the wall a painting
i know it well as though i painted
but i never saw it til now.
A cezanne, a monet, or maybe starry night
"Peter sold this house"
I know this picture well
the house as blue as starry night
but windowless admits none of this.

I know someone here but
I don't know who
only nervous scared to be found out
One to China, another for drugs
no one else speaks.
We, none, have mouths and they, no eyes

On the wall by stairs
where one father sits steps
the picture unframed.

I learned something but I lost it.

Painting writing
growing things are important
but i don't know if they're prayer.
No one told me anything about prayer
maybe it's that I never asked
but why i am here?

still
I play with red-striped soda straws, nervous.
They don't like me playing
I quit the sraws, they're gone.
The noise cuts deep and through, bloodless.

I want to ask
I want to know.
I never do.
Not yet.

I think we may meet again
maybe then I will be
able
to ask.
Maybe then.

spiritual amusements

Faith is academic once we're dead
enmeshed in the brain
loosed of earthly moorings
speaking in hallucinogenic tongues
liuke all good pentecostal evangelsits

down in the church basement
tuesday last
my asymmetry alone

is this a better place
to purge my sins, veil the toxins and
serve up pious seconds -- for clarity
not euphoria

After life
being to not
forking this way and that
to paradise, damnation,
the final liberation from this wide open place

A smaller case of larger reality
of the perpetually sober schizophrenics
in China digging in their heels.
At least they have a name for it

Singing in public no more,
not
in the shower
of a married man.

Melliora!

Even at home the voices
the people
the noises outside
There is no way to fall from
this jiggly life.
It's time to jump.

We have done this, met before,
no
matter the denials.

Preguntas?

Is it true
in most christian religions
to be ordained
you must prove god spoke to you?

no idea

Metric fantasies.
Punjabi dance.
One lone swan on the winter's river
followed by his hollow vee, nothing more.

Germs of craziness
inciting to revolutions
the disaggretative individualism
of modern theology,
passing therefor,
of me
i am we are
the center
but only until you are gone again
your perversity, questions, disallowed.

It's the gorgeous tiny chicken machine show
joost and hulu
facebook myspace
me me me me me me me
and the select few i allow as "friends"
and the hundred they know
and they know two hundred and they know two hundred and they know two huundred
and we know none of you
friendless hiding in the numbers.

Strangers with candy
brain aneurysms waiting to pop
like so many cerebral zits
whose pus the ignorance our survival thrives
We think.

a few questions

why must we play games, even when we don't know what takes us in are games and given a conscious choice would decline to play?
Who decided these games were so important to our ordered civilization that we had to engage or perish?
Why is it that if we can't or won't play we become further removed from ourselves and our brothers?
Who wrote the rules, where are they written and when will I learn them?
Maybe I will never learn the rules -- then what?

If I am gone will you know?
Who will look to see if I still am anywhere?
If I cannot be found how long can I be gone before anyone wonders, if they do?
What will they say when I'm gone and it's real, when we cannot talk or touch or ask anymore?

When I'm gone and here no more where will I be?
... will I be?
How will I recognize this self in another place if I don't know now -- whether through denial or otherwise, this self so well?
Does it matter that we know the selves that make us up?

If there are selves elsewhere not here will we know of them, will they know us?
Will we know ourselves better when we leave here?
How do you know if you're whole?
Does it matter if you get whole or not -- and why?
What does it matter to be splinters or whole, to know the difference ... it is just self centered ignorance, right?

Sacrifice is wrong ... is it idolatry? An insult to god? Ignorance ...
Suicide is wrong ... but exactly why ... really?
If there I meet 18 strangers will any of them be such as I have met before?

If I want to be right with god must I be right with others first? With whom must I be right to be right with god? and what if god says "fuck you?" It would't be the first time ... but if god never said that then who was it?
Once he was here I am sure but why did he leave? What did I do?
What did I say? I didn't mean it ... maybe I did but only when he'd already left me there alone

If Christianity says ... what DOES Christianity say? I don't even like the word "Christianity" -- here especially it can have so many negative connotations.

Must I go to church, a church, some church, any church ... to be right with god?
Must I go to church that says I cannot belong and cannot participate fully and cannot be part of the communion of the church because ... there are plenty of "becauses" which perhaps are beside the point. Or no?

May I go to a church that says I cannot belong and fully participate if i think they are wrong? Or is that an oxymoron waiting to happen -- is it even possible to do such a thing?

Most churches -- all? -- require confession of sin ... what is it really? I know my actions, or most of them, and of some I know more and of others little ... denial and self-inflicted wilful ignorance probably, but what makes an act or participation or presence into sin?

What do you know when you know nothing at all?
What do you do when you know nothing at all?

And where does faith come from?
Why do you have faith and I do not though once I did, at least I think I did.
Was it taken or did I set it aside?
Where did it go, and where is it now?
What did I ever do to have faith that now I am not and have not for so long?
I have been told i need only to want, to desire, to be open ...
as deeply as i want, so much as a desire and need ... there is nothing.

What to do?