“As human beings seeking to live meaningful lives, we hunger for some kind of structure, a set of practices that challenge us and help us to grow. Yet, if our rule is too rigorous, we can become suffocated by legalism.
“The paradox of the spiritual life is that it needs a healthy balance of structure and freedom to thrive. This is the paradox of the creative process as well.”
— Christine Valters Paintner, PhD The Artist’s Rule: Nurturing Your Creative Soul with Monastic Wisdom
It is not pretty
It is not comforting
Brace yourself…
for I rub our noses in it,
the hypocrisy
is too much for me
and horror, hate is
all I see this day
Go ahead…
after reading,
go to the parades,
the barbeques, the picnics…
go to family and friends
and fireworks and fun…
but go
with these words
stuck in your craw and
mashed down in your marrow,
and know that this is
the truth of where we are come,
where we have been led because
we will not lead and now we stand
on precipices and drunk upon our past
and deluded in our dreams of futures
that are just not real.
I am glad for our constitution
one of the major leaps
towards true liberty
in world history…
but omg just baby steps
and not a signal that we have
arrived and can stop walking…
we must see how insidious
we have been taught
to play the fiddle
to scenes of horror
that would warm
the cold dead bones
of Nero his ownself.
Extract yourselves
from the trappings
and tentacles that croon
to your swooning soul and seek
to pull you down into an addict’s
wet-dreamy tragic death
and make good your escape
while there is still a crack of time,
a sliver of hope milky moony white
and weakly glowing still
in this crashing night…
for it will break indeed
in tsunamis of terror
not brought here
from foreign lands
but homegrown in
these places we did not
attend to carefully
and mercifully
and compassionately…
and then…
there, tonight
upon your bed,
in trembling,
whisper a prayer
and ask that you be
just delivered of a sliver
of that silver privilege,
slippery that squirms away
and wriggles fierce to live like that
insatiable chest burster of Alien…
oh God
PLEASE DELIVER US TO TRUE LIBERTY
and do not rest until
all can breathe until
all can breathe
We are waltzing in this Danse Macabre,
spinning thru the fogs of night
while day is faltering in light
and our feet cannot stop or halt
but bloodytapping tripping faults
See the fog dense, packed with fear
see odium’s terrain drawn near
and each one drinking bloody cups
raised heedlessly and lifted up
against the screaming skies…
We are now there.
You must not
look away…
Dixie Land
is our Promised
Land…alas!
What is happening here at home?
In “America the Great”? We roam
the “Homeland” in this late
hour dolorous and dangerous
we have been washed away by hate.
What has happened to
“The American Soul!”
What the fuck is that, anyway?
Dancing maniac-ally
at the cliff’s precipitous edge
and the fall is long deadly
but we have no recourse.
We have no recourse
because the only cure
has at long last become a curse
disparaged in our danse macabre
and mocked by all our ringing words
writ long ago as cover for
the drinking cup, the bloody cup
we lifted up in “Freedom”‘s name
and filled with slaveblood’s cursed stain
and now here in this hour dark?
Reason bleeds to death before our eyes.
midst the fiddling of the powerful
and bodies littering the floors
of offices and restaurants
airports, clubs and nursery schools
and still we dance the Danse of Fools
How many families will be shattered
and offered up unholy terrors
on the altars of our dark god
foolishness? And how we lecture
constantly wrapped in our privilege
disguised as Amendment Number Two
(it’s number two alright)
and truth dies screaming in the night
morality and reason run
in terrified time and treason comes
to exterminate the drunken dancers
dead on feet dead to the horror
of the screaming suffering beings
that they dance upon and call it
streets of gold…welcome to hell.
Welcome to Hell.
Charissa's Grace Notes 
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