Saturday, December 19, 2009

Estrangement.

Cuts suddenly remembered; unexpectedly catching and pulling open during the routines of life.

Not a very sharp knife having sliced a finger lightly; not the skin, not the bone, not the muscle, not the flesh.

Instead, feelings repeatedly nicked over time, confused by the edge of the false comfort of family relations.

Wounds growing slowly, and the ache and stings of interacting; distance, space, and absence, the only cures.

In the fading, wiping of time, the blood is cleansed.

Regret; a forever, lingering taste.


Saturday, October 24, 2009

When they breath into chilling winds their last leaves of the season, skeletons of once full canaopies are revealed, welcoming the last day of October, the celebration of the dead.

All around, God’s confetti covers the ground, the Earth, the paths, walkways, streets, and the cross roads of life.

How jarring it is to realize that others are not entranced by the sounds, the colors, and the smells of Fall; that fibrous damp scent, of dried out rotting foliage; the sensation of cold air ripping across the cheek; the delight of more colors than any painter could possibly imagine – everywhere hanging, and falling like giant pieces of rain as wind rocks the droplets from the rain-bowed clouds hanging just above our heads.

All too soon there will only be the sleeping wood of sentinels, with scrappy bony fingers and tentacles scraping long gray icy, snowy skies. But for now, the colors of heaven abound. And everything ceases, as these sensations invigorate the spirits sensitive enough to bear them witness.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Mirrors:

Surfaces so smooth,
- almost all light bounces back -
showing who we appear to others as.

Faces so smooth,
- emotions bouncing back -
Showing who we appear to others as.

When smiles greet us, we can feel uplifted about ourselves.
When frowns welcome us, we can reflect about ourselves,
The faces are mirrors.

What can we see about ourselves in others’ ?

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Paparazzo

Confession of your number one Paparazzo:

In the pack of other men with cameras, following, filming, running and dashing to where they think you may be next, I stand without equal. I am not here to snap and sell a picture of you. In fact, my camera doesn’t even have film. I must admit, that I do not even know how to use this camera, nothing but the flash even works – I bought it at a discount off the internet.

Ultimately, I simply carry the camera so that I have an excuse to be where you are. You see, it just so happens that every time I figure out and go to where you are, these other men with cameras always seem to be there too. I don’t understand them, they don’t love you the way I do. They follow you to sell you - I just follow you so that I can see you. So I can be near you. So that that I can see you with my own eyes. In my heart of hearts I pray deeply and sincerely that God find it in his heart to allow you to talk to me one day. Touch me. Kiss me?

Of course, I go to every public performance that I possibly can, if only to hear your voice and see your skin with my own ears and eyes. To perhaps smell some part of your perfume, or to touch any place your body has been, the floor, the hand rail, a bench, the seat - Anything.

The flashing lights of paparazzi scare me as much as they must you. Really, I am always afraid that someone will figure me out. I haven’t quite figured out how act like I am a real photographer. Sometimes I even forget to activate the flash, and I just hold my camera as my heart jumps out of my chest and towards you. Their cameras are like piranha or barracuda ripping at your flash, it hurts me that you even think I am one of them.

Between their many flashes, I can see your every movement; the flashes are white like lightning-strobelights that slow your movements down into quickly fading eternities. I just wish we could have a few moments to speak, to talk, to touch.

I am not a paparazzo, just your greatest admirer.

Sunday, September 20, 2009

The True End of Summer;

Trees scream their whispers as canopies and branches sway in golden sunlit winds and everywhere the foliage is set in stark colorful relief against crispy and bright and blue skies, no hint of clouds.

Green leaves against blue; reddening leaves against blue; and soon to be yellow, orange, purple and brown leaves against blue. These contrasts tickle eyes with their colors, colors soon to be replaced by only the bare-thatched and empty braches of late autumn against a graying sky.

When twilight surges and the colors of sky and trees are replaced by black and white of starlit nighttimes, it is then that insect legs shout attention away from the trees – and the warmth of day is replaced by the slap of the chilly, starry, and tranquil night.

Still warm enough to feel the ebbing death of summer, and crisp enough to sense winter’s gestation. The sliding times between solstices are the equinox, vernal, and now, autumnal.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Handswashing

After meditating one day in frustration upon the oneness of all things, two hands washed themselves; the left and the right. Hands holding one another; Each one bathed the other. Apparently separate, each felt itself grasping and cleansing the other, as each touched the other, and each hand felt itself more profoundly than ever they had before. Each felt itself being felt as it felt the other feeling it. And all these sensations merged into one shared and un-separated experience; the illusion of separate hands was broken. In the middle of this a mind felt both the hands feeling each other and merged with them both…and all three were one and the same. Now all three were one. A mental snapping into place replaced the delusion of separation; Now the illusion of objects separate from the self all seem like this; And the other smiling face is smiling at another smiling face smiling back at it – the shared smiles are interconnected into one and the same experience; two linked facets of one interaction. Wisdom: To treat the other as the self is as one washing one’s own hands. Kindness toward another is an interaction of kindness, a system in which one is inseparably linked. To be generous to others is to involve oneself in an interaction of generosity. Compassion towards another is to place oneself into a relation of compassion – ultimately a compassion towards oneself. Contra positively, inflicting violence or harm is to place one’s self inescapably into an violent interaction, a system of harm or violence into which one is inseparably linked. Violence towards another is to violate the self, by placing one’s self into an interaction characterized by violence. In helping/harming another the self is helped/harmed by the participation in help/harm.

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Childhood Evening Rain, in Summer

Nothing but the wind and shining moonlight comforts the uncountable molecules of pooled-up water hanging together. Under their building weight they are no longer supported by the air, and so slip out of it, one by one, heading downward and out of the cool summer night sky.

The reaching force of gravity can touch them now, and so they fall towards the center of the earth, passing from heavenly black sky towards the darkened earthy netherworld.

Below, the canopy of a forest is ignorant of the wetness to come; its leaves bluster about in the still warm summer breezes; this late at night, the trees emit only all the shades of shadow. The dry crisp rustling leaves remain baked by some forgotten sun, but not dry for long. Right now they still whisper as they are rubbed against themselves by the movement of humid night-time air. Air so clean and fresh; but still so thick with the heavyness of a muggy day.

All at once, the drop is grown, its infancy gone too quickly to be remembered. It falls now and the experience is building, accelerating and overwhelming. Every other drop it knew is either left behind or whirling uncontrollably about it, tossed by wind and pulled by gravity. Sister drops are blown so far away that they will never meet again, not at least until they are crushed by ground and dissolved back into the oceans – their bodies and individualities all lost in dissolution and obliterated in form; recognizable by nothing.

Now and then, the lightening illuminates each and every one of them up, for but a second. And, although they no longer touch each other as they did once in the cloud, they remain frozen both in time and light, if only for one single instant. And for that moment only, it is as if they are together once again, this time in icy white and fleeting brilliance. All are touched by the same source of electric energy in a unified field of electric photons.

This downward journey is quick and fleeting; their birth and youth now gone, their mature life rushing to an end. Every raindrop, born to die. To fall from heaven to earth.

The sky touching the ground.






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Thursday, September 10, 2009

The Definition of Common Sense definition of common sense.

Common sense is not what the common person THINKS; rather, the term 'common sense' refers to a mode of perception in which the world is commonly perceived. Understand; the tools and instruments that have been developed by our species, so that the species may perceive with more power any real(material) given object of interest, tell us so. When we use instruments and tools that magnify our perception of the universe (cosmologic, quantum-mechanistic), we understand that our human senses are incompletely perceiving and mis-interpreting that which is perceived. Usually we call this science; however, HIGHLY LOGICAL THOUGHT can also be similar as that which I describe. And anyway, as any social statistician can tell you, common sense is about what the average person, who by the way is an idiot, will think-- given his or her lack of understanding of even the question being asked -- let alone the depth of the phenomenon to be considered or the kinds of answers that may or may not be possible. In any case, I can't know if this made sense. But sometimes taking things apart feels pretty; as in explaining common sense. To me, An explanation takes apart a cause and effect relationship.

-Salvatore Labaro

Monday, August 31, 2009

Your Frown

Your Frown shines out like the rays of sun off a dead fish,
baking its putrid pink flesh and green scales
waterlogged as it floats at the surface of the salty sea water.

A pungent stench strikes the nose like a nailish shot of water into the sinuses
after a flip under water.

The face contraction that is your frown is like a dead and baking fish’s pungent odor
forcing my own face to frown,
like a yawn forces my own face to yawn.

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Hope and Doubt

Different approaches to a particular situation, life in general, the near future, the possible, the probable. Hope and Doubt are inflections of an outcome that inevitably will reveal itself over time.

Hope and Doubt are two ways to view the world, a situation, a life, a moment, a dream, the future, a bet, a test, the possible, the unlikely, the miraculous, the probable, the would be, could be or should be. Two manners in which to extrapolate forward the you and the me, the us and the we.

Paradoxically, a hoped for or doubted possibility is substantially the same in either case; and only the spiritual tone, timber, flavor, shading, and register are different with respect to each inflected possibility

Two opposite charges on the same possible outcome, to Hope or to Doubt can shape an outcome before it happens. Hope and Doubt are like two different prayers about the same possibility, calling to our spirits, the Universe, God, and all Existence, accordingly.

Is not to hope that one will heal worlds apart from doubting that one will heal?

Is not to hope that one will overcome so diametrically opposed from doubting that one will?

Is not to hope to find love opposite to the doubting that love has touched one’s life?

Friday, August 28, 2009

Echo and Echoes

An echo can say a thousand words, Having no mouth, lungs, voice or will.

It has no choice, no volition , no freedom. It has no consciousness, being utterly unaware.

Having no thoughts, feelings or actions, no perceptions or sensations…

It has no past, present, nor future. No now and no then. No ever, no never, no could’ve or can.

Having no hope, no aspiration, no intention no motivation, it arises from nothing of substance, no past-life experience, nor memory.

An echo whispers faintly through the distance what has been said.

When non-vocal, it snappingly claps through the air as a wind shattered into sound.

It emerges from and fades back into nothing, the absence, the void of the silence.

Youngsters sometimes yell out – in order to hear echoes.

And children sometimes play with that voice of a seemingly similar self - the unseen child around some geographic corner. Would that nonbeing be of same age, height and profile?

Listening to children playing with echoes, the imagination longingly pines for a long lost child, a long lost cousin or sibling, or best friend. A missing twin brother or sister, mistakenly separated and taken mysteriously away.

Both would be yearning to talk, to converse face to face, and to do so together.

My mind feels these things when I recall a child playing with echoes.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Water

Gazing into the rippling surface of water, the mind is silenced, the self momentarily released: The uncountable crests the innumerable dips, the compounded chaos that can shine forth a million shards of sunlight, emerging and fading back into shadows - created as quickly as destroyed. The splendor of anything, a sunset, the moon—are ripped, bent, refracted into so many peices that the mind cannot remember or grasp the infinity of form, the uniformity of difference. Peering into this the mind is relaxed by the colors and textures of motion, by the movements of the water’s dynamic surface - a force of nature that rips thoughts away from minds and supplements in their place, meditations.

Fading Memorie

Like ocean waves, one fades as another overtakes it.
The first is wiped forever from the Earth.

Waves live in momentary glory; they are all to be consumed by the next
of their kind.

Small waves, Large Waves, Beautiful Waves, Weak Waves, Strong Waves,
Meek Waves, Fierce waves, Forceful waves --they each evaporate into
momentum dumped onto the sands and time.

When gone, no one remembers one of them that existed, and no one may;
for, there are too many for any one of them to be unique. They are
each too uniform in their difference, too similar in their chaotic
movement.

Waves are more numerous than the tiny grains of sand on a beach; yet,
however incredibly larger than the discreet granules, they are ever
more fleeting.

Beautiful while they exist, they retreat more quickly into obscurity;
dissovling back into the fabric of the ocean from whence the came;
losing all detail, all content, all individuality.

Waves are born. Waves journey, Waves die. It is the way; of ocean, of
memory, of life.

-Salvatore Labaro

The Queue

My piercing bladder informs me I have, at most, fifteen minutes. I am
in a line, I’ve been here for nearly an hour, making my way ever so
excruciatingly slowly to the counter. Everyone, the clerk, me, the
other patrons, we are all annoyed. Most of us try hard not to take it
out on one another. The middle aged white man in front of me, the one
who has been huffing and puffing for the last fifteen minutes, he is
not so kind. He has started to, what I call, “broadcast monologue.” My
mother used to do it when she cleaned up after my father and us around
the house. It is a kind of general rant directed at no one in
particular, but is conducted for everyone’s benefit indirectly. Very
passive aggressive. At first I thought that only the lady in front of
this man and myself behind were the only ones who could hear. But I
detect from the stiffening spines of those further ahead in line that
this is not the case. Others too are absorbing the spewed negativity.

Now he has started to look for support, he’s trying to build some kind
of a consensus. – Yes. It seems others are nodding as he monologues. I
feel sheepish when he turns to ask me some inane rhetorical question.
I wonder why my head is nodding as he arrogantly cajoles my assent.
What power has gripped my nerves and muscles and bones?

Why am I smiling at him?

We inch up in line, and I am informed by the bursting balloon in my
gut that I must soon find a bathroom, and quickly. Now the clerk can
hear the bitter man. He is offensive; she is offended. His degenerate
metamorphosis into an impatient eight year-old is completed.
It is so hot, and we are all soaked in our own perspiration.

It is exactly one minute until noon. As the man in front of me makes
it up to the window, the clock ticks. The clerk looks him up and down
as he is unloading negativity like a storm cloud discharging
electricity. She locks eyes with this man stands up and lifts her arm-
and all at once I can see and agree that he deserves to be smacked for
being both immature and obnoxious. Right at the moment that the swing
comes, a window is quickly, but elegantly, lowered over the counter
and snapped into place. A stock message saying something about county
offices closing each day for a one hour lunch break fades into the
background.

I cannot hear the angry man’s irate response – I am fleeing out of the
line and into the hallway desperately hoping I can remember where I
saw the rest-room and whispering silent prayers to God that it be
unoccupied.

-Salvatore Labaro