Ajax Kallistrate

You looked up at me like you
were going to tell me a secret.

We see with our eyes,
you think.

We see with anticipation, expectation,
assumption, context, history,
propaganda, illusion,
desire, fear,
and
so
are
we too, blind.

Ghosts.

We live life on rails, behind bars,
our noses pressed up against
the limitations of drywall.

We peer, squint, blink,
rub, splash, call out
to one another,
request
a
second
opinion, demand
confirmation. Is this it?

Do we know?

Ten percent is too generous
to grant conceited
animals.
One,
maybe,
and then
only for the
materiality of
round numbers.

The rest?

The difference is a lifetime.

Divine creation or evolution,
the question is moot in
the minds of animals
who function on
a linear plane.

A decade,
we can remember.

A hundred years?
A hundred thousand?
A hundred million?

We've long since stopped functioning.
We think we see and we're wrong.
Dead wrong.

Holmes was right, Watson.
It doesn't matter.

We were born into Plato's cave.
We will die in Plato's cave.

The puppet masters own your entrails,
and mine too.

Demons,
gypsies,
wizards,
extraterrestrial space aliens,
Babylonians,
the Pharisees,
Eastern European degenerates,
Talmudists,
Ashkenazi Jews,
Zionists.

Does it matter?

Judaized, negrotized, this land
is their land now. Only the
blind see red stripes
and believe
in liberty.

And what do the rest of us see?

With our glass eyes, our natural armor,
our own anticipation, expectations,
assumptions, we cast a
jaundiced gaze over
this blasted
civilization
and
the only
thing we lack is
the stubborn confusion
I spent a lifetime trying
to straighten out.

Otherwise, the decay is just as putrid.

We discover and abandon hope,
backtrack from false paths,
and keep our eyeballs
fixed on the wheel
that reaps and sows.

We are no smarter.
We bear no fewer burdens.
We shall sink beneath the horizon
all the same.

So when you looked up at me,
I canted my head, as I saw
and thought, you have
a secret to tell me.

I'll keep that, for now, and believe so.

February 23, 2025

There's a place where the rain falls
straight down when the wind is
still, where everlastings nod
in time, keeping pace,
and cats watch
from their
wisest
course,
warm and dry
upon a window shelf.

There's a place where ice breaks
over shallow stream, liquid
crystal, rising and falling
over smooth stones,
and crayfish and
tadpoles,
pond
skaters
and dragonfly larvae await
the chuckle of laughter,
the surge of breath,
the brilliance
of
sunlight
reflected on water.

There's a place where an engine cools,
pinging under the mighty heat lamp
of August, crabgrass triumphs
over gravel, peel painted
board creaks
under-
foot, and
the welcoming
hinge of a screen
door lifts two hearts at once.

There's a place where a cool breeze
drifts through an open window,
too cool for a shawl, and yet
the sound of falling rain
on wet leaves heals
some forgotten
wound,
and
the dog
is at the back
door, shaking loose
the past, the way a dog does,
and an hour from now the sun
will have warmed all the earth
into steam and the leaves
in the garden will glow
translucent
emerald,
and
every step
will sink into loamy peat.

There's a place where the wind whistles
over rock and heat lightning flashes
its silent signal across a mono-
chrome landscape of tree-
tops and shadows,
and the
cats
are
asleep
at the foot
of the bed, and
in the place where
time would be there's
the sound of running water,
the laughter in the thicket,
bare feet, and the love of
all beautiful things.

February 21, 2025

A just life isn't judged by results, but by the commitment to live a just life.

February 10, 2025

We stand in that square of sunlight
and question our allegiance
to what is good and right.

"That sun sure feels good, doesn't it?"

Doesn't it? It does, doesn't it. It does.

That hesitant glimpse through a door
we've been raised to believe
is an impenetrable wall.

Doesn't it? It does.

Raised to suspicion of all that feels
good without pain and suffering
and sacrifice.

Doesn't it? It does.

We question without waiting
for an answer we're afraid to hear.

You're a fool!
You were lied to,
deceived by the same liars
who deceived your revered ancestors!
An entire lineage of fools!
Fools deceived by liars
who've laughed at
you throughout
all of history,
laughed
at
fools so
easily deceived
into questioning all
that is good and right,
into questioning the very
warmth of a patch of sunlight!

We stop for only a moment,
to contemplate, to consider in
silence, in the bare shelter 
of a patch of sunlight
in -2° on a bright
morning in
January.

"It does," we say.

Our only concession to truth.

And then we bow our heads.
We pick up our burdens.
And we walk.
Blindly.
Into darkness.

January 30, 2025

That spinning wheel on the last day
of January draws to it foxfire and
embers, the trails of stars,
the hungry desires
of the last of
our blood,
the
last few
who hear
the muted rage
of ancestors smothered
under the crushing weight
of the parasitic machine.

The wheel spins on without us,
as natural as the tides, as
natural as the shifting
balance of air
currents
and tectonic
plates, as natural
as the expanding universe.

Nature, God, the old gods, ideas,
energy, first causes,

an endgame
we
cannot see.

The wheel
will draw us with it.

If we let go, if we listen.

The machine cannot stop it.
The machine cannot stop it.

They are death dealers, they are inertia. 

The wheel is the creator.
The wheel is life, perpetual life.

The wheel spins on, taking winter
with it, taking us with it.

If we open our eyes,
if we look beyond,
if we lift our heads,
if we lift our voices.

The wheel spins on, within us.

January 31, 2025

Q: What is an actor?
A: A liar paid by a Jew to deceive you.

Q: What is a politician?
A: An actor.

February 10, 2025

Faith conquers fear
in gentle November.

December 7, 2024

Who is the bell ringer?
Substance, insubstantial. Chime.
Good nature, calling to good nature.
Bells, snowfall. A bridge.
The spirit of our people. A song
too long silenced. We listen again
to the chime, to the bell ringer.
We walk the path. We are storytellers.
We lift our heads, we lift our voices.
We sing, we sing.

December 7, 2024