Working hard or hardly working

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

There is a difference between exercise and labor.

Both can help your health, could cause injury, or swell ego. Except, physically demanding chores are a little different. When accomplished correctly, they leave behind a pile of split firewood, or dripping clean dishes, or a new row rolled over in the garden.

In a gym, this experience is for sale. The impact grows firm in sore muscles, or rinsed with expensive sweat down the drain in the shower after. For your money, you get strong and healthy, but only around repetitive motions specific to mindless machines, a heavy iron bar and round silver dumb-bell ears.

Even simple tasks like cutting grass, however, on your feet pushing a smoke puffing mower, or filling holes in the road, or turning compost over, or digging gardens by hand, exercises your thinking-organ as well.

Eyes, ears, mind must go to task with body, so as to not waste effort. Cause injury to yourself or others. Damage the yard. Break a tool. A tsk tsk task. It is as mentally engaging to get good, essential chores accomplished as it is physical.

Compared to mind numbing counting and losing track of turns around the track, rote transitions through this machine or that, stretching out on the mat, cardio, bodybuilding, athletic training for bookkeepers, an army of well-tended iron on wire cords.
Such monotone, even-tempered, routinized methods of getting into or maintaining desired shapes. It all becomes another way to measure ourselves against others.

Splitting firewood, cutting and hauling yard trash, moving earth, putting down power tools and doing the work by hand, won’t win you any speed or strength or body building competition. But it will make you stronger. And the gym has been in business longer.

All-Questions

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

All the thoughts in my head are formatted
with question marks chasing after them.
I would know nothing if not for confusion..
Questions made me who I am. Like who am I?
What is I. Eyes can’t see. Ice on the grass.
For the first time since seven months ago.
Seems so long. So any questions answered since.
Makes my head spin. Questions turn the earth.
For many reasons. For at least four seasons.

Two Thirty on a Tuesday in December

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Five feet toe-tapping quarter notes beneath their seats. A kid in the crowd meows like a kitten and the audience howls. Some poor kid tried to clap between medleys. A teacher with a salt and pepper goatee and a baggy school hoodie on has four different smartphones in his palm. The lights are all up front. When anyone chirps into the microphone the whole system hums. Girlfriend leans on Boyfriend’s shoulder and the teacher sees and says nothing to her. Christmas music for high school students on a Tuesday afternoon in December. The Chorus dismembers and takes up instruments in their hands. They play Rudolph the Red Nosed Flat Note and We Wish You a Merry Solo. They sound perfect for what they are, as does the audience they play for. High School kids who bought two dollar tickets to get out of fourth period had no intention of paying attention to the show. Teachers with fourth period planning impressed into chaperones. The energy is palpable as kids cram together row by row, they know, there aren’t enough teachers to see all the hands. There isn’t enough light to see which mouth threw which knife. That’s what makes it a reward. And for the kids in the choir and band, they’re playing for the toughest audience of their careers: their adolescent peers. Every song speeds up from the start, from the nerves. Each shy note or apprehensive solo is heard. The kids in the crowd are distracted and loud but on the inside they could never do what they heckle. Imaginations set only to meddle. While those kids on the stage cling to metal, and do something with their breath akin to life after death, resuscitating inanimate objects into music.

The man with his back to the crowd shows them how every single day. The band director. The chorus teacher. Two English, two math, one science, all playing usher. It is for them, and they truly, shamelessly, despise us for it. Traps aren’t meant for the masses, but only the one. One animal in a trap could chew off a paw and get out. But three hundred kids, maybe twelve adults in the room, and the lights all turned down and the blinds all closed too, there’s no chewing off a limb. Two thirty on a Tuesday, last week of school, there’s no escape. It’s us or them.

Sticky Note Poetry

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

How is this man my
teacher, stretched out
and lost meaning-reacher,
whose mind fell out
through the bleachers
lost thought-blood
to the leechers.

I’ve reached the end
of my rhyme but I
still have time
lines left to right
and slowly down
icky sticky stuck on
itchy notary
sticky note poetry.
Wow.
I see how
he is my teacher.
Now.
Though I think
he’d prefer
to play preacher.

Where is the horn that was blowing?

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Who are you warning, this misty morning?
A day in rough labor attempting to birth its sun.
We asked the rooster. The hen said he abused her.
He’ll call us all to dinner a little sooner than he thought.

Tree frogs croak like night. Daylight whispers,
you should see the other guy. Slow start to say the least,
a strength where I was always weakest.
Last night we passed through tempests.

This morning is distilled by fog.
Where is the horn that was blowing,
where has the horse gone, the rider, the rooster crowing?
How were they louder before my eyes had opened.

Mute morning leaves eyes deaf to noisy warning.
Silent as the trees plunk leaves in twice fallen rain.
Tree frogs explain their stubborn rubber song.
And why it lingers so long. The chicken growls.

The hoot owls. And an ambulance sounds
in the distance and all the neighborhood dogs
start to howl. We are up, the sun is too.
Unfortunately. So are the clouds.

See It Sewn

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

A misty eyed mystified look across twenty four young faces. Masks make you realize how it all always was in the eyes. Skepticism. Judgment. A narrow fold of scrunched justices when brows get pulled down together. A good orator sits back in the seat where they stand. Let them stew in it a bit, before easing the queasy feeling of questioning what it was they just heard. A crooked smile is like a wide-brimmed hat, one should never leave the homeplace without it. 

The love a partner hands over after forty years of marriage is the same love McDonald’s believes people have for its sandwiches. There’s no formal distinction between these two uses of this one word. I love my mother. I love Saturdays. Equitability doesn’t just raise the bottom, it lowers the top. Levels the heap. Squashes the pile flat as the earth was before we rounded down its corners.

Assigning students to produce in a room designed for them to receive. Sit quietly. That thing in your pocket that is quickly becoming your voice, it’s contraband in this space. You will use it to speak through for the rest of your life. It connects you to anyone who loves you and would fight for you no matter the stakes. Make no mistakes, your phone will save your life perhaps even from those publicly sworn to serve it. But if you glance at it during class, to check the time, no time to ask, you’ll lose it. They’ll take it. And you refuse to, they’ll send both of you home till Tuesday. 

Then this kid thinks, well I can’t go to college. This school thing is not for me. I can’t go four more years, my voice held hostage while I’m demanded to speak. Kids forming their perceptions based on tired, saggy, complaintive old people going through the motions is a recipe for the slow motion disaster being served at all our tables right now. 

I get it. School is a two bird, one stone design. Built primarily with babysitting in mind. But it is also a teacher trap, a catchall for those called to the one field government never sacked the revolution on: educating future generations. It is amazing. How far we’ve come. How drop-dead smart we are. And yet we haven’t figured out how to make a door we can close behind ourselves and once we do, no one can ever come through ever again. We can’t figure it out, because the universe is created in such a way where it can not be done. If a nation is formed of revolution, then it will be plagued by revolution until its dying day. The line stops when we find there’s a real plot to dumb down our children. I will not see mine censored into societally induced stupidity. 

A good orator is not in it for the applause. Jesus knows who rocks the boats, he doesn’t fear water, his time is set in stone. Before the end, you just want to know, there’s a touch of what was in you still out in the world, and if you don’t see it, a good orator will shell out the right words, and see it sewn.

Notes of the Daydreamer

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Oh me, Oh my. No exclamation will meet the mark.
Give up a pen that shouts. Sparks fly and flint flakes
and fire sighs sight and reveals strong citations.

Textual evidence of a higher power
keep my eyes on my naval
and off thy sight.

Education. Psyche. Eros. High school.
Kids. Jokes. Festered into identities. Titties.
Boys obsessed with misremembered memories.

I am going to treat you like you are intelligent
until your behavior shows otherwise.
Offer language supports. This is asinine.

Sanctimonious. Cynical and negative.
Turning my camera off to take a drink.
Passing. Barely. This class. Life.

The ones where I’m the student.
And the ones I have to teach.

Fear’s Favorite Hiding Place

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

A book slams shut. The door is too abrupt. A window closes loudly. In the hallway, someone drops their stuff. They don’t teach it in gym, but there’s a way to jump within your skin. To be shaken and never shake. To crack up but never break. The human body has always been fear’s favorite hiding place. 

Two tall black boys race one another down the hall. Gender segregated groups take it easy outside the restroom. A teacher with his clean arms crossed tries not to do the same in his eyes. Three girls swoosh arm in arm heckling a single girl with her head down in front of them. It’s not cool for a teacher to say hey to you if you don’t say it to them first. All the cool teachers know this. But the nervous ones shout a student’s name like it’s the phrase on Wheel of Fortune. Then tell you take your hood down. Hide your phone now. Better not frown. Or that same teacher is going to make a show of asking how do you do.

The feeling of pulling up to work and seeing a cop car with its blue lights wheeling. An innocent traffic stop starts the mind off reeling. The look in the eyes of adolescents as you tell them to huddle on the floor in a corner while you turn the lights off and block the doorway windows. Don’t worry, just a drill. Said the carpenter to the board. Said the miner to the earth. Said the dentist to a rotten tooth. 

The bottom, the basement, the hidden dank disgusting earthworks foundation of the human gut can only be struck by the sonar sound of workers screwing flag pole mounts into concrete in a classroom down the hall. 

There is no eye in the room off of me. I hold them all. They help me see.

I believe they call that revelation.

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

The problem with Narcissus was he couldn’t lift up his stream and carry it around with him in his pocket like we can. Self-awareness is not the same as self-perception. Unfortunately. Philosophically, we’re four generations all living at the same time struggling with the same disadvantage: disadvantage. When it comes to witnessing one’s self, all of us come blind.

I had this idea recently, I think it’s related, that it is not a third eye, but the second mouth which lives in our minds, and all senses feed. I had this idea when I was thinking about the nature of an eyeball. A receptacle, a trash can filled with recycling. Receiving, not really creating. And that’s a poor analogy for consciousness. Considering how much reality imagination is responsible for making. A mouth breathes, in and out, and that you behind the you is not just pulling strings but also reaching out and tying them to things, maybe it should be called the third hand.
See. See how hard it is to see yourself clearly.

To talk about how it feels to feel and make up perfectly parallel analogies. We have no control. No comparison for an ideal life. The one human who did it right. Sure enough, many have tried. Problem is, they said they wouldn’t, but they really did just up and die. Our great philosophers filled our heads with what ifs and wait and sees, and almost none of them fought to hold on to life in the breakneck manner which was passed down to you and me. They left their model incomplete. They never warned us the third eye speaks. And that it isn’t an eye. It’s a disgusting sloppy pair of lips we shove stuff in to spit stuff out and swallow hard and peel back and shout.

It took cameras cheap enough to fit into a commoner’s pocket to show us who we are. And we’re hypnotized, by all the things the storytellers of our society never wrote down. We’re demanding of ourselves to be some new creature because we have never seen us before, even though the latter can true while the former remains demonstrably false. Nothing new in the last fifteen thousand years for Man. Learning something new about yourself isn’t really news.

I believe they call that revelation.

The Hive (part 2)

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

You’ll argue as long as you can. We’ll put it to bed. Maybe in a year you’ll say, I was thinking about that thing you said way back again, you’ll ask me what I meant. And I’ll be a year ahead, no longer questioning, practicing philosophy all of my own, which advises me heavily against teaching people who they are. No. I can work with why. How. I can work with not today, tomorrow maybe. But no. You confessed every reaction to a new situation or life change you’ve ever had before was no. Rather take it slow. Prefer to accommodate this stiff lactic acid choked emotion that hardens the stomach into cartilage and makes perfectly mobile situations sit stagnate and static and cold to the touch but hot like acid. I can’t help. To you, I can’t be shepherd or farmer or friend. To you, child of doubt, progeny of woe, I am no more than a sign post. I can point you to where I found God spying on me, I can tell you what it took to finally see what it is my eyes and ears and mind and fears feed. I found the fractal that gave me the shape of the birthmother of this place. I have seen what we were before. The ghost white pearl in a swirling cape of blackness, gravity radiating like energy, a pull that outreaches, a proactive desire, a cosmic pairing of opposites like the very first lovers weren’t necessarily more complex than dark and bright. But from their union all forms grew possible. I’m a piece of wood nailed to a stake that only says to you, ‘The Garden is This Way’.