A Valentine Too Late

One has to have a sense of humor about love and marriage, but my problem has always been that I do the romantic charming things during the pursuit of love but discard them during the marriage. Wives don't think that's funny. Let's take Valentine's Day for instance. I never liked it. I didn't like it when I was alone on certain years because that sucks, and then I didn't like them during marriage because...well I thought it was pointless. I mean ...you're married. How romantic is that? One year my wife made a big deal about my thoughtlessness on Valentine's Day, so I decided to compose an original poem that would sweep her off her feet. It was written, I believe, two or three years prior to our eventual divorce. I'll leave it to you to decide if it postponed or hastened our eventual parting. Enjoy.

Rose are Red, Daisies are yellow

By now you think I'm a miserable fellow

Mayonnaise is white, cheese can be cheddar

For a husband, you're thinking

"I could have done better."

How many times have I said I'm forgetful?

And for that I must say, I am very regretful.

"For better or worse" our wedding vows said.

For it to be worser you'd have to be dead.

So I'm giving this poem to make up for my dumbness,

to apologize for my sensitivity numbness.

I'm sending my love in this Mardi Gras season

to show you I care...I'm really not teasin'

Happy Valentine's Day from your husband Rick

Stop telling our friends that I'm just a...rascal.

Although I don't say it or do it enough,

I love you Nanette...if that scares you...that's tough.

Surviving The Cosmic Screw

I dislike the practice of assigning human characteristics and sensibilities to the entity we call God. I believe organized religion in all it's myriad of forms has successfully corrupted the message and motives of the divine consciousness that conceived and created the universe and all it contains.

For my money, It (the Divine It) is unknowable to the degree that we desire to know It. I am particularly uncomfortable with the ideas of Heaven and Hell , both petty human notions that insinuate that God is a sadist and taskmaster that demands obedience from his sheep to avoid eternal suffering. That alone suggests that God has contempt for Its own creation. The concept of Free Will gets thrown in just to give religious interpreters an "out" to portray God as tolerant and fair while still being "Holy." It is a perversion of God through generations of sacred scripture rewrites, exclusions,reinterpretations and in some cases outright embellishment and pandering on the part of leaders and their clerics who see an opportunity to control and manipulate the masses. How else do you explain the European blue-eyed image of Jesus that adorns the halls of religious institutions today or the notion that Jesus and, by association, God Itself is a conservative Republican that endorses War and favors one political view over another. How can anyone take that seriously?

And yet they do.

To the degree that we are able, I believe that we owe it to ourselves to test the tenets of religion against our own experience. Nature is our teacher and this life we live, ultimately our testing ground. It provides a level playing field that does not favor one soul over another by magic or supernatural intervention. I do believe Prayer provides us with a link to our higher nature but I have come to believe that God does not intervene or step in to alter natural outcomes. I do agree with traditional thought as it pertains to the pursuit of spiritual purity because I do think that our ultimate destiny is to be reunited with God, who is by all accounts the standard for purity and enlightenment. But here is where I part with the teachings of my youth, and veer off the path to consider the concept of reincarnation. My own intuition tells me that it is a valid consideration. Nature does, after all, teach life, death and rebirth. Some may say that an argument like that is simplistic, and I would counter by saying that faith in God must be simplistic and it must reject complex, intellectual trappings.

Throughout my life I have been plagued by repetitious dreams that appear to me to be memories of past lives. One takes place in Egypt where I am being punished for some sort of offense, slapped repeatedly and berated by a man...the same man in every dream. Another involves the aftermath of a flood where I stand at the end of a pier and look down below to see the bodies of dead friends consumed by the rising waters. Still another involves an English manor and a wealthy household from at least two hundred years ago and I am a husband to a virtuous woman and the father of two young daughters. They are with me in the house, a house I know well, but their physical appearances tell me that they are sick, all with drawn, pale faces with dark shadows beneath their eyes. Sometimes I feel that the dream itself is a memory of a memory and that my wife and children have already died. These dreams, and others, have appeared over and over again in vivid, stark detail, never changing to any great degree. And they are not like normal dreams. It is as if they are trace memories of previous lives. Previous tests of my will and progress toward final purity. But how long can the process of purification take? Again, unknowable until you at last meet God.

I made up my mind some twenty years ago, when God did not answer my heartfelt prayers to heal my brother-in-law of cancer, that prayer for "special treatment", was an exercise in futility. It is the first and last time that I ever actually fell to my knees and begged God to grant a miracle. But the Age of Miracles is over, so say theologians who try to rationalize why God appears uninterested in parting the waters or raising the dead. My question is , was He ever?

His truth, His wisdom, His love is not and was not ever defined by special consideration of one over the other. That is a human quality and far less than divine. I believe that if there is a final reunion with God that all of us as children of the Creator will see that day, if not together then in our own due time.

The year 2009 has been the year of the Cosmic Screw for me. It is my name for the inexplicable convergence of what I perceive as undeserved piling on of bad luck and Instant Karma from above upon me. Its just the divine process in motion. I won't bother to whine about how I don't deserve it and I certainly won't pray for any special favors from the Creator of the Cosmos. That would be hypocritical of me. In the mean time, I'll rely on my talents and charm to get through the convergence. However, if you don't share my beliefs and want to help, feel free to pray to God for me, and I'll let you know how it works out. If I'm living in a cardboard box next year, I'd say you have some thinking to do.

A Tribute To A Father

I remember I was so angry that day when I found out that he had filled in the large hole that we had been digging for days for our new underground clubhouse. Our plan was to dig a huge hole and trench, then cover it over with plywood to fashion a kind of roof that would then be covered over with a thin layer of dirt thereby rendering the clubhouse below invisible and ultra secret. The "We" that I am referring to was David and Alan Miller and of course me. We should have known better than to dig on someone else's property. The three of us did a lot of things we shouldn't have done. There were several secret clubs that we formed, but we also kept girlie magazines hidden in the woods, cigarettes in a shoebox under the driveway culvert and at some point burned a giant black spot on David's bedroom wall with a chemistry set explosion. We were those kind of kids.

Later David's parents would suffer through countless hours of Beatles music blaring from David's record player as we pretended to be The Beatles practicing our music. I think we called ourselves "The HorseFlies". Eventually we "became" the Beatles and held real rehearsals on their carport and treated the entire neighborhood to our own brand of rock n roll. In those early years we turned the Miller's house and yard into army battle fields, BatCaves, secret agent headquarters and mad scientist laboratories. It went on and on. I knocked on that door off the carport leading into the kitchen every day during those certain summers with joyful anticipation of playing at the Miller's house until the sun went down. They eventually named me affectionately their "#3" son.

In my high school years, Wesley Miller was my enemy at school, and a second father after the bell rang and on those countless weekends. I was not a bad kid but my hair length was always an issue with the school administration and during those SHS years he was "The Man".

My parents had their own issues with my hair, but Mr. Miller had to be the bad guy at school.

He sympathized with all of us who longed for the dress code to be revised, but until it was, he put his personal feelings aside and went by the book. No amount of dippity do hair gel could fool him in to believing that you had actually gotten your hair cut over the weekend. He knew us all.

In 1991, My wife and I attended the Class of '71 reunion in Slidell. Wesley Miller was there as an invited teacher and we sat and talked for awhile and caught up a bit. He graciously sat with my wife and kept her company while I (sans wife) mingled with old classmates and enjoyed the hours with old friends who may or may not have wished that they too were free from the old ball and chain for a little while.

A few years ago I passed by the Miller house at 425 Michigan Avenue and happened to catch Wesley out front in the yard. He recognized me and motioned for me to pull over while he rushed back inside for a moment to retrieve something. He came back out holding an old catcher's mitt that belonged to me when I was just a kid , a forgotten remnant of my many days spent under his watchful eye on Michigan Avenue. He wanted me to have it after all those years.

I do not like to be reminded of death. I avoid funerals if I'm able. I prefer to delude myself into thinking that those that I love are not gone and that they continue to exist in those buildings and rooms and in those places that I no longer frequent. It is for my own protection. On some level they will., in fact, always exist for me and others, as a pleasant and joyous reminder of the good people that one can meet on this journey through life. This is not just for him but for his family and his life mate of so many years. They are wonderful people. From me, your unofficial number 3...rest in peace.

My Poetess, My Troubadour

I am just a troubadour

a simple man of songs

unsure of where I'm going to

Not sure where I belong

I look at you, your golden hair

I gaze upon your face.

Please take my hand, oh lady fair

and fill the empty space.

I am just a poetess

A lover of sweet words.

I speak of life, so lyrical

the secrets of my heart.

I seek a truth that few have seen

The journey is my own.

I go my way in solitude

I travel all alone.

When contemplating o'er my tapestries

the feelings just aren't there.

The loves I've written of are fantasies

illusive as the air.

You beckon me with words you weave

with dreams you lay to rhyme.

And oh to be a dream you have

your poet for all time.

And in the middle of my melodies

I sometimes lose the words.

With you beside me I find harmony

a song I've never heard.

If you could be my perfect love

and tell me of love's peace.

My days with you would be enough.

My longings then would cease.

I'm not the kind you've known before.

a lover like the wind,

My love grows stronger every day

a gift forever sent.

Living life apart in loneliness

would never be the same.

Come and wrap me in your tenderness

and whisper soft my name.

And if it should be we fall away

Our time is not too long.

I'll write of you in my poetry.

And you will be my song.

A Serpent's Tooth

original thought...the final word

eternal truth can ne'er be heard

the wisdom in the final draft

begs one to sleep, or one to laugh

we contemplate alternatives

and criticize the way He lives

He resurrects, reincarnates

what of poltergeists and floating pie plates

skeetshoot saucers from the clouds

ancient angels feed our doubts

dare we believe the options there

deities vanish in thin air

the Atom of His fingernail

Eve of destruction taints the tale

can Uncle Sam be Anti-Christ

and white wash the crimson sacrifice

the sons of God all stand accused

and Lucifer remains amused

immaculate confusion reigns

and Hades' population gains

if Paradise can e'er be found

the answer beckons underground

if blind faith be the price we pay

with fingers crossed we kneel and pray

The Dream Deluxe

Light And Shadow meld in a fleeting flickering moment

And hover on the wick of muted memory

A pirouette through time last performed

Temporal temple of desire and hope

Its quickened ghost crashing down in wicked ballet

Sparkling shards of sentiment buried in moist black earth

Love and laughter fire in eternal richocet

Her hand in mine, liquid eyes in reflected twilight

As an infinite echo of an everlasting kiss

From gin joints to starships

Where went the yellow brick road

I was there the day it died

The path to Oz and Tara

Its mushroom dust gave rest at last

One dream left barely escaping

Me and Dorian Gray

I am a practitioner of Romanticism and while I admit to it I still recognize its failings as a philosophy to live by. Romanticism butts heads with Realism more and more as one grows older.

I view the book "The Picture Of Dorian Gray" as fiction of course but I cannot ignore the similarities of the ideas expressed in the work and my own feelings about life. As a young man I barely recognized my actions as being in line with a particular predictable pattern but as an older adult now, its hard not to. Romantics have a freedom that allows them to ignore logic and reason and yes... even morality. The mind and body want what they want, with no apology. I embraced it in my twenties not really knowing that I was becoming a hedonist in the process. I looked at love as a casual affair, something I couldn't do as a teenager. I was devoted and true to one but at the cost of being the victim of love's fickleness myself. I dabbled in romantic betrayal and drug induced euphoria that allowed me to walk away from the unpleasantness of reality but certainly not without some regret. That is the curse of the romantic, that sense of longing about what could have been if only your heart was more grounded in reality. Eventually the romantic , in his waning years, wishes for someone...someone that would stay, and offer true comfort and love on a level that playwrights and poets would echo and hail through time. It is the paradox of profundity and superficiality that exists side by side in the romantic mind.

I do love me some women and I love it when they are beautiful. Honestly, sometimes it actually makes my heart beat faster (even now) when one merely passes me on the street. And I like all kinds, but I'm mostly attracted to women who project an air of purity and innocence. I've had the good fortune of being involved with such women but, like Dorian Gray, I allowed myself to be controlled by my own untapped decadence. That need to explore those feelings came out of my sheltered youth where religion was an invitation to conform and be clean and uncorrupted. To ignore the compulsion to explore those feelings would have been hypocritical on my part. What does it say about a person who is willing to corrupt innocence. It's despicable unless you look upon it as unintentional corruption. It is Experience being drawn back to what it once had in the way of purity. Dorian Gray and Oscar Wilde saw it as a perfect coupling of two souls...one old and one new. And that was me too, for a while. If there is a point to this thing we call Life, and I think there is, it is this. Life should be a process of purification but not at the expense of others. Pleasures of the flesh and other dark places in the human heart make that process a tricky proposition. At the end of his life Oscar Wilde tried to redeem himself by embracing religion practically on his deathbed, but I doubt that it really works that way. Romanticism is not necessarily a part of hedonism, but it was for Dorian Gray and a little for me too. I hope that before I die I can finally find that missing thing...that piece, that person, that true epiphany that maybe I saw once but didn't recognize it at the time for what it was.