The Place Where a Rock is Commemorated-or any other missile.

Resentment should begin at home--
why should it atart at some faraway setting?
The sideward glance and the flare of green
are home truths rustling in the backyard
of your imagination--
So why place it there?

Or--

Why not center it here--
your neighbor and their muzzein
the call to prayer mingling with
the
church bell call, with its tasteful
jingle of "Amazing Grace"?

How do you face the world knowing
that two, or three, or a dozen faiths
contend, in this very nation--
and custom and Constitution claim
no preference for any?
Meaning no
preference for yours?
(If any.)
Do you pause there, entranced
by the variety of beliefs?
Do you dance on the head of a pin?
Or do you draw back, spent,
recognize the ultimate
reality is that your standard is--

but only one contending. But as for
these other contending voices--
their creed:

Resentment should begin at home,
aquaintance brings these sufferings,
and hearts are only good for strings,
that can be pulled towards anything.
And if that thing be bitterness,
and the others' gross exclusion,
let us come to this conclusion--and
spit a little hate in everything.

But were that sentiment too vicious,
this then, the kinder thing,
the truth that I would mean to say:

Bigotry is wasteful in every way,
and is not a rest for those who seek peace
but a stumbling block to perspective.

That's the missing link--

And as for practice, does hate want
a face to punch,
or a house to ransack?

Does hope want a
place to land?
Isn't the lack of a welcome
the grievous foe
of those who just want understanding--

Think about that, then, please,
We hate so often by degrees,
and singe mere humans with
bad intent. Our lives then seem
much better spent
accepting and not othering.

Inexorable as the tides, the tomb.

My patient lover waits.
I'll meet her at the city gates,
though the old folks say "Too soon."
But they don't know my heart
or how it strives to ruin
me with fear before I see her.

I will wear my best vest for the day
that I am thrown into Her arms.
Her charms have long beguiled me,
so I am sure to be prepared.
I've lingered in the town square,
for a glimpse of Her face.

My old friends will cling with
loving hands, but know I'll not be stalled,
and Mother has known about this day--
she might suspect that I've been called
by the way I am more thoughtful, now.
I know she even knows Her name.

I'm unafraid of anything--but my fear,
and conscious of nothing but my Love.
I long, I lust, my passion like fire,
like hate that has nowhere to go--like
a kind of madness about fate! But
I have to seek Her out to know.

And will she love me back? The whore?
The desperate ghost that haunts my dreams--
perhaps She isn't all she seems;
although Her arms surround me and Her voice
like a dove....She's been with many,
And they are gone. She slaughters memories.

How long would it last?
How long? Before She calls out to another?
But I'm a fool if I don't go. And maybe--
maybe I will be the one. The one so true,
even her lips will crave none but mine,
and her hands seek only my skin alone--

So to the gates I go! I'll miss
you all, but this is what I'd planned
long before I learned to be a man.
My destiny always was Her arms,
her fortune, always mine to see--
What other thing would you have me be?

There is nothing but her
for one like me.

Sliding

Tenuous is what I think I'd call
the grip any of us have
On reality; we reside in thrall
to sense-perceptions after all,
filtered through a primate brain
to which our symbolic fetish
is new as fire, sudden as rain,
and because of that, we easily
relish
the creation of taboos and
sacred things,
the hallowings of ground
and the rings
of a Venn diagram would not
easily show those borders of
sacred spaces and
the acceptable places for our
otherings.
No,
we are too enamoured as yet
with the get of our
thoughts,
made into existence with words.
And if we say our is
makes oughts--

Okay?

So it does, as we
are primitive architects
as yet, cave-dwelling, and
words confuse, creating forms
in spaces mental and emotional--
and so the devotional space of
one,
intrudes on the wounded place
of another,
but brother,
this isn't about your pain,
but a recognition--

(RE--cognition)

That we might make things right
with the words we have
and make our symbol new,
and what pain was ever borne of
hate, with love, could
be remade true.

And we accept that we don't own
all our pain, not
when it is shared,
and wounded hearts heal
when we understand
what separates the fallen
from the spared--

one thread cut off,
one yet woven
into the complexity of time and space,
and time does not erase the memory
of the missing,
but the reality of the living
is to accept the buffeting of fate:

we all are sliding to the tomb, but
we need not linger at its gate.
Let new life bloom and connections form,
lets let ourselves relate--

before it is too late.
Before it is too late.