Sandspurs

Putting a plank of wood
Into the shed out back,
I noticed a whole garden 

Of sandspurs growing wild

And flourishing:

Those insidious, innocent (at first) little plants 

That sprout tiny green fluffballs

That suddenly turn into razor sharp

Orbs of pain this time of year.

I hate them.

Without thinking, I gave into my hatred

And, bare-handed, tried to rip them out

By the roots, 

Clutching the whole batch

In my left hand. 

In my annoyance with their existence,

I ripped them out,

And in return, 

They stabbed at my fingertips,

Jabbing my skin

With white hot pinches. 

Some of the points broke off, 

Splintering down under my skin.

I tossed them all into the yard waste bin, 

Satisfied that my anger had destroyed them, 

Had been appeased. 

But my self-righteous triumph

Felt thwarted 

By the throbbing in my fingertips. 

Two days later, 

And the splinters will not come out. 

My skin has covered them over

And eventually

A blister will form and harden around the splinter, 

And eventually I'll pull away the dead skin

And the splinter embedded in it

So I can heal. 

But perhaps if I hadn't wanted to pounce
On those thorny orbs so quickly,

Perhaps I might have saved myself 

A lot of pain

If I had just donned a pair of gloves. 

Possible Things Before Breakfast

The White Queen on the other side

Of Alice’s Looking Glass

Practiced believing impossible things - 

As many as six - 

Before breakfast. 

I see the merit in such and approach. 

It encourages imagination, 

An, ironically, possibility. 

But when I ponder it, 

There is also merit 

In believing as many as six

Possible things before breakfast.

When I think about the fact

That I wake up most mornings 

Immersed in a sea of certainties 

Flowing through my mind and all around me

So constantly 

That I hardly know they are there, 

It occurs to me that most other people wake up 

In seas of similar certitude

But of different certainties. 

The people I most disagree with, 

The people who think things I could never think,

Thoughts that are not only wrong

But translate into horrible actions

And terrible policies

Are just as certain as I am 

Of their rightness

Before they sit down to coffee and eggs and bacon. 

So perhaps 

It behoves me to think six possible things before breakfast. 

Is it possible that I’m wrong? 

Is it possible that my certainty is an idol 

I bow down to so I don’t have to think?

Is it possible I’m a hypocrite? 

Is it possible that when my certainties

Are brought out of my head 

Into the light 

They will make a scene and clash with each other? 

That I might have a fight on my hands 

Between rival ideas

That I thought got along fine

But actually want to tear each other’s throats out?

Do I hold others to a standard

I don’t expect of myself?

Is it possible that I’m 

Just going with my gut,

My knee jerk reaction, 

With what I want to be true,

When in reality, 

If pressed, 

I don’t actually know very much 

About the opinions I’m so sure of? 

Is it possible that the world 

Of ideas that I take for granted

Is just a construction,

Like the movie Matrix,

But created by my own mind:

Made up of biases 

And prejudices 

And online filter bubbles 

And money being made somewhere 

Out there in the digital either

From the fact that I keep on clicking 

On the things that already agree with me. 

Is it possible that I have reduced 

The world into simple binaries 

(Ones and zeroes in computer parlance)

Without nuance, 

Without color, 

All black and white, 

And myself always standing in the light 

Of righteousness? 

Is it possible I am missing the nuances, 

The inbetween-ness of things

The allows for complexity,

For paradox?

Is it possible that 

The worldview I find on my head each morning

Like an enormous hat 

I have somehow slept in

Is a protective helmet 

I have built around my mind 

To keep out the thoughts 

That might actually help me grow? 

But will I actually

Question myself? 

Will I attempt to step

Out of my comfortable, 

Limited perspective? 

Or is that impossible?

If so, perhaps I have thought six 

Impossible things before breakfast 

After all. 

Straw Men Are All Going to Die

 You prop up a straw man argument

when the real argument you are fighting against

is hard to defeat.

You replace their argument with your own version

a version that is a parody of the original argument

minus any wit

but bearing a strong scent of desperation, 

a ripe odor like rotting vegetation.

You smirked 

when they said

people will die

and answered, 

We are all going to die.

You knew that none of them were ignorant of death. 

But you pretended your opponents

were so stupid 

that they actually didn’t know 

humans are mortal. 

You propped up your first straw man, 

Who announced, 

People live forever! 

That’s a pretty easy argument

to knock down.

You doubled down when they objected, 

standing in the tombstones

issuing a sneered apology 

comparing their supposed ignorance of inevitable death

To belief in the Toothfairy. 

Your second straw man:

Your opposition believes the Toothfairy is real. 

A straw man blended with a non-sequiter. 

But you weren’t done 

Producing staw men. 

You then invited people 

To seek eternal life

By embracing your Lord and Savior,

Jesus Christ. 

I suspect you are embracing 

a straw man Jesus, 

a misrepresentation 

of the man recorded in the gospels.

I’ve seen a lot of versions of Jesus 

put forth by many different people, 

but nihilist Jesus is a new one. 

I don’t recall Jesus 

smirking at the lame and the leperous, 

the blind and the bleeding,

and saying, Tough luck.

Can’t help you.

We are all going to die.

To say everyone is going to die 

Is truth. 

But context matters. 

You were saying that because everyone is going to die,

we don’t need to care about them or heal them 

or care about their quality of life 

while they are here. 

We just need to let them die. 

Embracing eternal life,

we can ignore this one. 

With every person Jesus met,

he showed concern, 

not just for their souls, 

but for their very earthy bodies as well.

for their health,

for their well-being, 

physically and mentally. 

This set of blind eyes.

This rotting flesh. 

This bent back. 

This set of motionless legs. 

If you are concerned about the afterlife, 

you might want to review the parable

of the sheep and the goats.

You know the part. 

God separates the sheep from the goats

and tells the sheep they are inheriting 

The Kingdom of God 

Because they - among other things - 

Took care of Jesus 

When he was sick. 

And they don’t recall doing that, 

and Jesus tells them 

That whatever they do for the least of these - 

Like, for instance, caring for the sick - 

you do it for me. 

When you callously looked at that crowd 

And said We are all going to die

You said it to Jesus. 

Tough luck, Jesus, 

I’m not helping you when you are sick.

You are going to die. 

A straw man can be

Something you prop up

In place of your opponents’ real argument.

A straw man (or woman)

Can also be a front man 

Used to cover up

Dirty dealings.

A straw man (or woman) 

Can also be defined

As a person without substance 

Or integrity.

It seems that in making

Straw men so often,

You have become one yourself.

Or maybe you were made of straw

To begin with

And straw simply creates more straw. 

You sent your straw man argument 

and your straw man Jesus 

out to dance in front of a real argument. 

the real argument is this:

we are supposed to care for

and take care of each other. 

We aren’t supposed to treat each other

as being as disposable 

as straw.

Line and Circle - A Poem

 

Free Advice

 Avoid people who whip up your anger

At other people. 

They are controlling you.

Don't listen to people 

Who stoke up your fears, 

Especially your fears of other people, 

They are manipulating you.

Move away from people 

Who tell you only they 

Have got the truth

And that all those other people 

Are liars.

They are lying. 

Change channels on 

Voices that agree with everything

You already think

And tell you exactly

What you want to hear. 

They are playing you.

Plug your ears and go take a walk

When people get hyperbolic about

Your perceived enemies. 

They are Nazi-Communist-cannibal-pedophilic-lying-theiving-human-excrement.

They are projecting.

Take a deep breath and go talk to someone different

From your normal crowd. 

When they tell you to Other 

Other people, 

To label them, to write them off, to discard them,

To consider them un-people, 

Write off what they are saying.

They are trying to make you less than human.

Run away from people

Who mainly value freedom

When it's the freedom

To badmouth others and mistreat them. 

They love freedom if it means taking other people's freedom 

To live in peace

Away from them.

Don't be a marrionette, 

Jerked around by the strings of bias,

And hatred,

And fear.

When all you hear from a voice

Is what it is against,

Ask it what it's for. 

Ask it:

When you take away fear,

Hate, resentment,

Enemy-creation, and negativity,

What is left? 

What is the good.

And if they tell you those things are good, 

Get as far away as you can. 

They may be telling you their truth.

But that is not the same as 

The 

Truth. 

But here's the hard part. 

Try not to hate them either. 

Don't dehumanize even the dehumanizers. 

Unless you want to become the thing you hate.

Minor Villains and Hope

 The major villains get all the attention:

The Eye of Sauron,

Emperor Palpatine,

Voldemort,

Characters so irredeemably evil

They have little to teach us in their remote power

Because we feel we'll never be like them.

But consider the lesser villains:

Denethor,

Saruman and Dooku 

(Both played by Christopher Lee)

And Lando Calrissian in betrayal mode in Empire

And all the toadies like Wormtail and Umbridge 

Who throw in their lot with the Death Eaters. 

What do they all have in common? 

They have lost hope in goodness, 

In right prevailing.

They think their only hope, 

Such as it is, 

Is in joining with the enemy, 

Being realistic,

Throwing their lot in with the winning side.

But the Frodos, the Gandalfs, the Lukes, the Obi Wans,

The Harry Potters,

Of our tales 

Never lose hope. 

They don't cling to optimism.

They know they may lose, 

That evil may triumph in the end. 

But they never lose hope

Because though you cannot control ends,

Your own ability to aspire to right action

Means hope is in the action

Not in your mind.

To behave as though the right will win out in the end,

Even when you are certain it will fail,

That is hope. 

To be hopeless 

Becomes a form of villainy, 

Whether you join the bad guys or not. 

At the very least, 

Hopelessness

Stops right action at its source,

Stops your light from shining in the darkness,

Stops your voice from sounding clear in the cacophony.

But to act on hope,

To act as if your actions matter,

To act as if our voices will be heard,

To shine your light and trust that it will

Not only pierce the darkness 

But inspire other lights,

Is to have lived well 

No matter how things turn out.

Hopeless people join in 

And build Orthanc 

And Death Stars

And try to preserve their own little patch of freedom 

At the expense of others. 

Hope scrambles across the shattered landscape near 

Mount Doom

Or flies a desperate trip down 

A Death Star trench

Or simply walks across a bridge 

They said not to cross. 

For of course, these stories 

Are not just found in fictional epics.

To live in hope isn't to think 

Things will turn out right,

But to believe that standing for 

The Good

Is always worth it in the end.