when you have a poor mattress

7/11/06

Dialogue between Mother Earth and Father Time

(father)

Dear mother, you are suffering—

Look at these wounds and scars.

What perfection you provide

the human desire chars.

You still survive, superior—

a strength they could define

in the persistence of the spring,

proof of your holy design.

Though my life is infinite

as the choices they can make

I cannot see why, for their abuse,

you continue to create.

(mother)

Because my friend, with your aid

they have, always, chance to change—

the position of the universe

is bound to rearrange.

Although it is not optimism

that brings the bud to bloom,

Our powers through elevated hands

can avoid some pending doom.

There is no measure better than

the cooperation of our effect.

Could you devise a method

more physically direct?

You are forgiving, but I

have witnessed evidence

that their hubris destroys even

potential innocence.

Mother look!  Look how they behave

as if each were disconnected;

their talents are abandoned

their empathy neglected!

There are those who recover truth

and maintain to it their duty,

those who still choose to perform

those actions of beauty.

And when their conceit reaches

too rude a proportion,

I’ve been known to compose my own

disaster to remind them of the distortion.

(Mother holds out her arms looking upon humanity and shakes her fists.  Humanity stumbles from the moving grounds of an earthquake.)

What would you convey, Father

that has not somehow been spoken?

That would open their eyes

and keep illusions broken?

I’d say, “Here is Heaven!

Be not blind!

Seek in every stone and soul

so you may find:

Truth exists as ancient

as it is anew

as your ever present Father

quietly moving with you.”

Some are humble to the

authority of elements;

Some still learn to practice

patterns in my defense.

But too many ignore, or worse

deny, patterns that support

the harmony that makes actual

that global comfort.

And we have given them leaders

whose form—whose passion wakes;

whose impression upon reason

is difficult to shake—

That gift of truth is clear enough

to last after their bodies’ end—

But the context is one in which

only a moment will depend!

When they leave their earthly vessel

their messages become routine;

they repeat and obey a habit

and don’t interpret what it means.

They deny me and defy me,

stain me with redundancy.

They hinder their own progress and

death is their consistency.

You are too like winter for me

to even suggest we try

to plan an intervention

of the ancient kind.

I would assist the making

of a form for all to hear

if you’d consent with hope

and without doubt or fear. 

Do you not agree that faith

bound not by limitation

is the best ingredient in

any godly creation?

(Father cannot deny the truth of mother’s reasoning and pauses to consider…)

Though I am decorated too with scars,

these wrinkles changing my face,

I will not deny my hope for them…

Yes!  Let’s infiltrate their space.

(Mother claps her hands together and turns to collect ingredients, but then thinks of something…)

And father, I must insist on

the sex (and I wish you’d agree)

that the voice of this messiah

instead of He, should be She.

(Father opens his mouth to say something, perhaps in disagreement, but then smiles and nods in agreement.  The story jumps into the future--the messiah is born and makes her way slowly to the level of mass-recognition.  She does not recruit followers, but has them nonetheless, as well as enemies who would have her destroyed simply because she threatens archaic beliefs.  Though she is able to create a new movement, a new shift in the global perspective, and has contributed much toward the path of enlightenment and social evolution, she is ultimately condemned by those who oppose her.  A plot to frame her is successful, and the very system she was working to help revise sentences her to death.  In her last speech, which is televised, she passionately utters these words.  Even the “unbelievers” can’t help but be moved by her words…)

Our ideals are, like innocence,

victims of corruption.  And then our

apathy selects modes

of self-destruction.

Possibility remains patiently

all around us.

It will reappear

until it has found us;

The callendar is organized

by the inertia of the seasons,

and yet we fail to see how

rebirth

begs for the influence of Reason.

We accept paradise lost—

a myth so far removed,

that life requires death

as the evidence to prove.

When ignorance, a global cloud

begins to release its rain,

We fear the water that might

alter our terrain.

In the shower is a mirror

to show the only source.

It was sheep that called

for the soul and the world

to suffer a divorce.

We place our faith in shapes

that imitate the error of our ways

since “It’s the afterlife where we’re rewarded

for the order of our days,

Let’s trust the book of man

and he will insure our finest dreams!”

Our servitude,

our gratitude

for a goal we will never see!

We should know better

that to buy into the sketch

of their milk and their honey;

“But the curdled and cemented fate

affects them, not you, not me.

Be not led by evil!”

And we know it by a name.

When progress is disasterous

we have something to blame.

Conceit is protected

under a quilted lie.

Years of glory hide the stories

that should have us asking WHY?

Is a crime any different

from a different hand that hit?

Are we so proud we can’t admit

that we the terror did commit?

We are napping contently

in the shade of chaos.

Hearing echoes of the voice of love

that made us.

But a louder noise conditioned us

so that any drop of truth

was a poisoned apple, possibility of no use.

The speed with which we fall—

the intention of direction,

we analyze just past the point

of rethinking our discretion.

We are all slaves who may choose

to Declare ourselves free.

But liberty’s illusions win popularity.

Symbols must die!

And with them theories that prevent unity.

We must confront our forefathers

that reserved opportunity.

Do not be fooled by new tools, new

chains of hypocrisy—

It is the same now

as the few then

that mock our democracy.

Too young to listen

too old to hear;

It is not foreign, It is here.

It is here we are able

by the strength of our will

to bring Eden back

or wait for the kill.

Past is present is future,

none filled with change.

It is the quantity of quality

that needs rearranged.

It is not the option

for the lesser of two evils.

We must rub out the lines

that segregate what is equal.

HERE IS HEAVEN!

BE NOT BLIND!

Look to the soul like every stone

and you will find

that this is the stuff of which

our dreams are made,

This is the nightmare

in which we’re awake!

The garden of plenty

where our children play;

the labyrinth for which

we know the escape

because we’ve built it—BUT listen,

(and here is the key)

It is not too late to embrace

the goals we need to see.

Every part requires just as much

fulfillment as the whole.

Any prophet who shared this fact

was reduced to a goal—

an unreachable status for us to achieve

after a death we were trained to be

scared to receive.

If death is a finale, why does

nature return?

Is the time that repeats

a chance for us to learn?

When will the stain

be dark enough for us to see

that there exists the power

to live as WE.

To abandon conventions

that take away from our rights

To remove the illusions

that occupy our sight,

To acknowledge and understand

and put into action

those movements pushing us toward

global satisfaction.

And if you still fail to see

what is happening

without you as well as within,

Then denial makes you the traitor,

another vessel of sin.

If it is fear that holds us,

and the loss of certainty,

then we are cowards who ignore

what it means to be free.