The New Breed of Lunacy – Old Journals

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Put a goat on a tie out and the farmer will watch a dumb beast tread pointless circles.
Lock it in a dense, knit-wire fence, the brute paces the same ignorantly beaten path
until the grass is dead, and stupidity scars the lawn. Do not watch too long.

Feed. Water. Checking in between, fine. But be cautious of staring at goats.
You will have funny thoughts. Same as in the head of any other domesticated.
Certain questions are going to get asked.
Like, why a fence?

Let that goat out after saying goodbye to your garden, all the bark wrapped around every crab-apple and cherry, sure to freeze next winter. A free goat is happy crossing roads, stopping cars, grazing lazily into neighboring yards.

Why does she pace that way, back and forth, steady in circles. Is it lunacy?
Precisely. All creatures, humankind included, can run only so far so fast,
no fence or chain to hold us. Before we reach mountains. Oceans.
The very verge of space outside all knowing, new and wild,
where some leap and others linger awhile.
Those are our boundaries.

You would not think to expect it, but many thoughts
never get considered without having limitations.
Without seeing through iron and restrictions.
And the lunacy you perceive,
is the domestication of questions.

Why? Correct. The question is why.
Think you’re so clever. Say why?
All right. I think you should consider going inside. There is no such thing as a fulfilling answer out here. The world is full with conclusions. Just none of them leave you satisfied. Like living in the wild. Unencumbered guile. Where a step taken in any direction is its own answer. Hunt against hunger. Medicine against sickness. Company for comfort.

The questions are different when you are tied to a stake. Closed behind a gate.
Missing a world we can never escape. We will never cease being a part,
or feel it absent, or cut it off. If it was not happening to us all the time,
everywhere, to every species, it would be called impossible.

A creature confused about its own origination to the point of denial,
believing it came from nowhere. Born into violent,
intensely lucid, vibrant creation,
somehow without parents.

So, what is it about the other side of the fence, the inside, where my new, young Alpine paces like she is going crazy. How does she view herself? Her life?

She thinks she is God. Chosen. Over a goat’s world.
Filled up buckets with perfectly comprised, completely nutritional, pellet shaped,
sugar soaked feed. Blue water spilled over silver pales, poured dirt into mud
even in drought. How the grass and the weeds and young trees are dying out.
Yet goats live on. Still pass away, each one, but out of sight.
So, to an animal, it never dies. Believing it lives forever
even as it is pushed onto the knife. A kid no mother,
no father, no purpose is calling. No horns,
or forest to solidify her deep heritage
of instinctive thinking.

She is an animal with unending questions,
false notions, and confusions regarding life.

Trapped, where all the answers are foreign, in another animal’s world.
Contained, so completely, that this circle is her only path forward.

Modern Christianity – Old Journals

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Can the livestock lie down with the wolf?
A lamb of short cut wool. Nude colored
and halved black hoof tapping shoals noisily in the dark.
Stalked by the wolf black as night, red in tooth
a blood matted mouth, grinning. A greeting
only to the innocent glowing white lamb,
friend to friend.

How can it be? The lamb remained a lamb bald and weak,
small and sleek. Or has the world worked hard hungry hands
over the offering? The grass fed sacrifice, reshaped dense,
sharpened bones into slicked back horns,
tiny trembling feet raised cloven hammers,
pounding ground and snorting dust and air.
Our innocent lamb now works and bleats to inspire fear. Pure no longer.
Tough and mean, still convinced beneath a thick skull it appears to be meek.

And the wolf, a beast howling hunger up at a full round moon,
a predator pitifully calling on company gurgled out a vertical throat,
outpouring pain and a gut wrench of sorrow. A friend with a voice also,
conscious of harmony, listening with sympathy, at songs sung lonelily.
Sweet, uplifting tones when times are good, and behavior tame, otherwise,
there is an ape in place of our angel, whose fists lay down lessons of pain,
obedience, trembling submission only to wait a little while,
and then call student come crawl deep beneath covers and cuddle. Embraced.
In the same soft arms that were just hard, tense, hands formed of fists,
capable now of good thorough petting.

The mythological hunter, once roaming and stalking in tight-knit droves,
has been reshaped into a pet, brown eyes for Man. Batting and staring.
Hungry to please, begging for scraps, sharing the fleas.

And the lamb is grown into a ram, lunging before a hyper dog’s raised ears,
wildly smiling while the sheep rears. Both give and take. Equally tease.
Playing games and ignoring the other’s presence with ease.

But when those ancient voices speak up now in an animal’s mindset,
it has become the wolf who lies down to the lamb on its hind legs.