Sunday, July 29, 2018

WALKING THROUGH THE WALL OF NOISE




MICHAEL CAYLO-BARADI Reviews



Human Cathedrals by John Sweet
(Ravenna Press, Washington, 2002)




Crucifixions Without Crosses, Resurrections
Under the steeples of John Sweet’s Human Cathedrals



Human Cathedrals assumes a certain firmness of tone, one that can be mistaken as mournful deliberation that precedes rebellion, or rebellious action. There are many passages that can illustrate this argument; but one particular passage stands out, because of the intertwined vein of courage and casualness that flows beneath its rhythm: “[o]f all the/words i own/the one i refuse/to say is/god” (58). The strongest phrases in this stanza, at least for me, are ‘i own’ and ‘i refuse’; the phrases are declarations of ownership, and a categorical declaration of something toxic in religion. The subject in question is contained in three-letter word: god. It’s crucial to underline the number of letters in the term ‘god,’ because three in Christianity stands for Holy Trinity, the sacred trio of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, summed into one Godhead.

Now quite coincidentally -- on the book’s cover -- in the black and white photograph of an old art deco building in Seattle is a suggestion of this trio; it’s a carved image in the building’s façade, of what appears like three stems: in the middle is a taller stem and to its left and right are two identical stems. On the other hand, while this image of three-some is, unavoidably, loaded with religious connotations, its presence above the title creates an ironic and un-iconic relationship with the title, because the idea of ‘human cathedrals’ presents a subversive platform; cathedrals ought to be juxtaposed on equal hierarchy with holy elements, not the one element that is beneath the sacred: the human.

Thusly, this image of three-some in the cover and the tension it creates with the title presents a gesture that frames the collection’s imagination: that the spectre of organized religion hangs over this collection like halo, not halo of sainthood, but rather that of moral introspection. In this regard, the poems in this collection become a sort of journey into the circulatory system of emotive introspection and examination, a system that doesn’t necessarily constitute or structure unified cathedrals of a specific community but rather distances itself -- as opposed to creating barriers of resistance -- from the notion of cathedrals, of structured and organized belief systems.

In many ways though, the poet’s sense of distantiation from these belief systems -- quite confidently suggested in the refusal to say the word ‘god’ -- can be viewed as the kind of distantiation hoped, exercised, or even forced among members in a family caught in a state of falling apart out of each other. Injecting the idea of family in this discussion is not incidental nor modestly relevant but rather critical, because when one discusses moral intimacies that implicate religion and religious beliefs, one steps into realms wherein the familiar becomes familial. In organized religion, belief functions as blood-line among believers; belief then, becomes critical indicator of kinship.

Now representations of distantiation, in the context of family, are often easy to recognize in amplified and theatrical simplifications: movement from one geographic location to another, absence in usual social gatherings, refusal to accept certain phone calls, refusal to assume connection with certain organizations, or, of course, explicit confession and iteration of commitment or non-commitment on something. On the other hand, when one asks to what extent these representations measure depth of separation, one starts to talk about degrees of separation, because of complexity in the process of separation. Members from any form of family-unit severing membership from that family are often aware of this complexity, because memories about being part of that unit cannot easily be severed.

The voice in this collection comes from that sort of family member, one who has tried to sever ties from a family called Christianity. This collection’s first poem convincingly takes us into that mind-space in “waiting for the day to begin”; and there are, at least, two families suggested that are intertwined here, that of the author’s and Christianity itself:


this is three degrees below
zero
and waiting for the
day to begin

am waiting for the baby
to wake up

for objects to solidify
cast shadows and i am
waiting for christ’s name to pour
like black blood from the
mouths of priests (2)


Something about this passage is almost like a chant for Christmas celebration without lights, or perhaps one transported along the River Styx. Christmas, as we know, celebrates the birth of the Christian messiah. In this birth a Savior has arrived, whose too-familiar story resists biography and history, but rather prefers to define doctrine, one that frames and colonizes world-views.

Now the gothic beauty painted in this passage rests not so much on the stand-in for baby Jesus, but rather on the baby’s duality, both as baby Jesus and the author’s son. But baby Jesus doesn’t wake up here. There is a wait, a long wait, a very cold one that takes us into the number three again, the trinity: “[…]three degrees below / zero”; this temperature somehow suggests the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are submerged below zero: frozen, powerless. No promises of messiahs here; baby Jesus appears dead. But what seals or unifies the darkness in this passage is the voice’s aspiration: “I am / waiting for christ’s name to pour / like black blood from the / mouths of priests.” The scene summoned is now the Holy Communion, the heart of Christian-church services, wherein the priest delivers the body and blood of Christ to the congregation, to God’s people, symbolically, through bread and wine, the ritual of transubstantiation. Furthermore, the idea of Holy Communion is not unique to Christianity; it has a secular dimension. Symbolism has, indeed, preserved the idea and drama behind the secular origins of the Holy Communion, sanitizing the bloodiness and violence involved in the culinary ritual: the taking in of body and blood of a human subject: cannibalism. Thus, the Holy Communion as simulacra of civilized and highly-dramatized cannibalism is holy because the body involved is not that of an ordinary human subject but that of God in human-form: Jesus; his body is the cleansing agent for the bodies and souls who take him. But then when one associates or equates the name of Christ with ‘black blood’, one stops thinking about blessings, but rather contamination, of something viral about the sacred. The equation of Christ and ‘black blood’ flowing out of the ‘mouths of priests’ further emphasizes the vampiric element and nature of the Holy Communion, not from the context of congregation but among priests themselves. Instead of being able to drink the blood of Christ first, before sharing that blood to their congregation, the priests reject Christ’s blood, and vomit it out. The vomited blood is black. The voice in the poem is waiting for this impurity, somehow expecting its flow as form of celebration; it’s not a nice vision of Christianity, because it renders Christ’s blood as toxic, and that the men who preach his gospel somehow have had enough of him, and cannot ingest and digest him anymore in their souls.

John Sweet walks on dark terrains, in this collection, without blinking. Released in 2002, within a year after September 11, 2001, Human Cathedrals can stand as epitaph for things in the human condition, too many to enumerate.

Thursday, July 26, 2018

LANGUAGE



and there are
these mornings where
language is an awkward
stone lodged in
my throat

where the sun is
beautiful liquid down these
frightened streets but
my hands have been cut off
at the wrists

my head fills with static
and the baby won’t stop screaming
and gorky is found standing
three feet above the
earth

or not standing but
spinning

swaying to the
harsh music of crows as
van gogh walks into the middle
of his last field

aims his gun at the sky
and squeezes the trigger

blows this wasted day and
all of the ones that
will follow into
dust





Monday, July 23, 2018

YOU SNOOZE, YOU LOSE. BUY BUY BUY BUY BUY!!!!!!!!!!!


My copy says "Limited run of 25 numbered copies", so why are you sitting around? Get a move on! Excellent new collection by JJ Campbell w/ a most-superb cover by Janne Karlsson (which my photo doesn't do justice to). Go to http://www.analogsubmission.com. NOW!







GOD AND THE DEVIL ARE BOTH THE SAME


Saturday, July 14, 2018

CORRUPTION



a big sound rising up

out of the emptiness



a hand, severed, found in a ditch

alongside the roadway



alongside the rutted dirt road

that passes through the village,



and then a womans body,

and then another



five altogether, lets say,

or ten, or fifty,

and then we grow tired of digging

in the sandy soil



we hear stories of our daughters

on their hands and knees

in the offices of politicians



we learn about their deaths

in the usual way




DEMOCRACY, MEASURED IN CORPSES


Wednesday, July 11, 2018

BUILDING HUMAN CATHEDRALS




summer gone without warning



the burning house where you left it

twenty years ago and

your father still trapped inside



the past can be rewritten

but not changed

and it makes me tired



i am thinking of the suicide queen

and the stories of her boyfriends



how they sold her for cash

or traded her



for tires

is what she told me



for a new tape deck



and before that

it was her stepfather

and i am sorry

yes

but i am not anyone's savior



i am not a confessor

but still these stories pool at my feet



still the drowning boy is found

three days too late

and his parents blame whoever they can

and all the statues of the virgin mary

that line this dead-end street

refuse to weep



the pavement shines in the bitter rain

and the flags fade to

silent admissions of surrender



we have been speaking of war for

the past two months

without naming the enemy



we have granted pardons to

the killers of young women



have forgiven them their violence

and we are in love with our own voices



the sounds of dangerous words

as they spill

from the lips of politicians



the screams of the bodies that fall

from the 98th floor



and i have been in this room

for too long



the mirrors are heavy with dust

the windows warped

the clocks all run down and

it's here where i finally realize that

i will always be numbered

among the guilty



it is a small thing in the face

of so much freedom




WHY WOULD WE NOT SET FIRE TO THE MANSIONS OF TYRANTS




New slap diddly doo dah work at Misfit:




Image result for time lapse landscape gif






Monday, July 09, 2018

WITH YOUR BRAINS DRIPPING INTO YOUR SHOES



Some psychedelic spider web photography from Dawn...…




RUN AHEAD AND BLINDLY SHOOT




age of crows or of

someone else’s bitter god



a joke made at the expense of

this dying man while

the soldiers rape his wife



a church on fire and

filled with children



will you change the channel?



will you plunge your knife

into the false king’s throat?



in an ocean of blood,

there is no way for

any of us to stay clean


Sunday, July 08, 2018

FINAL DAYS OF JUNKIE KINGDOM


THE WHOLESALE BUTCHERY OF DEMAGOGUES




Maybe i'm too subtle?   I write these poems, and then the comments I get sometimes make me scratch my head.  At least one of us in this equation strikes me as a simpleton.....




FALSE KINGS, CRUCIFIED



in this seething cauldron of days
i will rise like ashes to the sun

in the age of murdered children
i am grateful for vengeance

am a believer in the
wholesale butchery of
demagogues and rapist-priests

there is no point wasting
compassion on cancer 



*********


With respect, john sweet, this sounds a bit too much like a charnel house to this reader.
Then, of course, isn't vengeance the prerogative of the deity?
Finally, I don't think that cancer has any moral sense, in which case compassion and any other human emotion would indeed be wasted on it. It does, however seem to respond to research-based mitigation.
Regards,




Image result for WILDFIRE