Something pities you

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Shake your head. Shake it out. Shudder. The best way to unshutter. Open up why don’t you. Talking to yourself again. Out loud. On “paper”. Jesus Christ I have changed quickly. Same as it has ever been. I keep waking up while I’m already awake and realizing how many years I slept through fully conscious with eyes open. Dead-eyed asleep and ceaseless dreaming. What do I want out of life? What do I want out of a deer my brother killed. Everything I can get but I’m not ready for yet. I feel like the animals I’ve ended surely sit patiently waiting on the jury that judges me into whatever hereafter. I want them to look at the work, and feel maybe less hate and resentment than I would. We’re always counting on other people to be better than we are. Why does anyone ever ask why did everyone pile onto the short cut and traffic jam it into engine-idling oblivion. The long way is the short way again, because the numbers have shifted, and the only way to think nature isn’t on top is to bury your head in her. We will, all of us, die, and in doing the things we describe as life, learn to live again. You’ll shake your head. Shake out the you. The me. I. Whatever ridiculous code name you’ve been called your whole life. For me. I’m shaking out a Jeremy. I’m waking up all Jeremiah and feisty. A hammer in the hand of the carpenter was once a tree with roots cupped in the palm of the earth, and metal nestled deeper than that. If you want to know the creator, you have got to start thinking elemental.

You’ve got to start thinking. Now.

I have no clue about what the afterlife will look or feel like. But. I have every clue imaginable regarding how I entered, and my full understanding, of this one. And I can dream, without much difficulty, that being reborn into the next world will generally be similar to our entrance into this one. You had zero control. Absolutely no say in how you survived the first years of life. The most you knew to do was cry, and another being, better or worse, sought to silence you. Protected you. Ushered you every step to your current high-priced ticket seat. How do you find your way in the afterlife? The same way you made it to this one.

You scream, and cry.
Then something pities you, and keeps you alive.

The very same river

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Ask for a mansion framed by a yard spilled down to the river Jordan.
Too many massive rooms, halls, a huge restaurant kitchen, please.
In the summer though, the house gets fleas. Gnats in gray clouds
in the kitchen, flies itching to tackle and impregnate crumbs
dropped to the floor, rolled beneath the cabinet door,
spiders, friends stabbed at by a toe, moths orbiting the lights,
from windows open, out of necessity, at night.

Ask for rushing tan water to flow-roar, opened and closed,
consuming unseen boulders, still stagnate in still places,
the breeding grounds of mosquitoes.

Take a walk around the shore, take in heaven’s long rolling like a river winding,
root gripped path, legs slapped and arms reddened, a splash of red blood,
a heart, in the center. Dig gardens and sweat, plant seeds, weed.
One day pull up a snake writhing in leather-clad hands.
Witness pests roam wide open squash leaves and turn orange blossoms into gloop.
Holes burned through potatoes where slices were put in holes, grown,
and eaten by whomsoever gets to heaven with a shovel first.

Still, ask for a mansion. And remember,
do not take paradise for granted. Because it isn’t.

For those who do not plan to work
for their hereafter, the very same structure,
by the bank of the very same Jordan,
is a prison.

Some form. Or another.

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

I believe we are all some form of tree, reaching toward some form of sun,
digging as deep down as possible with some form of root system.
All that this man is is not on the surface, like a tree.
There is far more to us than can be seen, or achieved, or stood beneath.

We are all stacking cells like bricks, burrowing into our eternal selves
like we were digging wells, into the still flowing aquifers we all have
eddying in our core somewhere, eroding washed out circling lines
that record our time, and tell, at least, the length of our stories,
which no other life can cut into and realize until after we die,
expire, like the tree parted from roots, burned by some form of fire.
Leave some ash as dust upon the earth. Some rich white breath
to drift off and become clouds. The body eroded until no trace can be found,
except for some form of still buried root beneath a weeping stump.

I believe death will not be the end of us.
We are like some estranged form of tree.
We have not existed all on the surface.
There is much to Man that can not be seen, or destroyed,
or burned down by simple fire. Every ounce
of every being still exists after it has expired.

In some form.
Or another.