The Blunt Trauma of Et Cetera

Ah but as a child you did love the purple of the bruise, correlated it to thunder clouds, and thunder clouds to anger, which was always the bruise’s source, amen amen amen. Pancake recipes differ subtly, if you get close enough, go deep enough, and the differences become prismatic slits through which the cosmos flow like syrup, get it? On the other hand, let’s not argue.

 

The vows include nonviolence, nonviolence is the vow that includes the others, and against this promise to God the ego yet rages.

 

Listening to Led Zeppelin, remembering how briefly Jimmy Page’s playing fascinated me but Robert Plant's singing felt excessive and forced. The blunt trauma of et cetera in certain contexts. We are colorful, we are collaborators.

 

Everything is slow and measured until the end when we are together a breathless hurry. You can appreciate how your ancestors – I’m talking fifteen, twenty thousand years ago – felt a need to create and be in relationship with many gods. What is lost, ever?

 

The coffin offered what assurance to devout Christians? You come close to the flowing river, you do not enter, you remember being baptized all those many years ago. In my mind I am always walking up Ridge Road, and maple leaves are falling all around me in the cold air, and it is Halloween and there is this clarity – hard to explain, even now – that there is nothing to fear, nor ever was, nor ever will be.

 

Lamenting the old days, a production no longer at odds with Love, given how much we’ve forgotten that it wouldn’t hurt to remember. We are so confused about Rumi, poor Rumi, it must really make him sad, he must complain a lot in the corner of the afterlife where angels make him count rain drops. Corrections, cancellations, comedy routines.

 

Sarah calls, asks if we want to go in on turkey poults, which we don’t though later the rejection is hard to square with our overall food ethic. Morning stillness the coffee only enhances. All the pretty horses, including one who is blind.

 

All the folds of us, all the flowers, all the openings to which our throats must adapt.