Greed-prayers ask for moola
Love-prayer for companion
A sweet Hawaiian does her hula
Underneath the banyan.
Clue-prayer asks for guidance
Woe-prayers ask for strength
A gang of demons wield their tridents
Down the border’s length.
Prithee writhe no further
Beg ya, have some trust
A cockney thwarting murther
Knows that deeds leave dreams in dust.
two simple prayers often flit through many of our brains: God i hope so and God i hope not.
Saint Francis is said to have said something like God grant me the serenity to accept the things i cannot change, the courage to change to things i can, and the wisdom to know the difference. he is also said to have said do not burn me, Brother Fire.
i pray that there is such a thing as a soul, and that therefore evil and absurdity will be ultimately thwarted. my prayer seems in its peculiar way to cover all the bases. and it is also a prayer for you, whoever you are. may God grant you serenity.
NOTE: A version of this poem appeared in Facebook, earlier in December, 2021. The poem was altered, partly to better suit the illustration.)
[pause]
—let’s have some wine. I have some left over from a Wedding.
[wine and two wineglasses materialize]
—to Enthusiasm.
–amen!
[they drink]
A long time ago I read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet, which included a prayer of sorts, ending with
…the lightning with all its rapid wrath,
And the winds with the swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the earth with its starkness:
All these I place,
By God’s almighty help and grace,
Between myself and the powers of darkness.
Today’s Inktober prompt is Armor. And what better Armor that the elements themselves? So I drew, not the elements, but crystal-like metaphors for them, to surround my person in need. I then looked up L’Engle to get the quotation right, and was flabbergasted to find that she had derived her invocation from something now referred to as…Saint Patrick’s Breastplate!
Instead of L’Engle, then, I included phrases from the original, in the original language. Up top it says “attomriug indiu,” which means “I bind to myself today.” “fudomna mara” is “the depth of the sea,” and so forth. I faked some uncial calligraphy for the phrases, intending to lend a mystic-incantation aura to the image.
There’s a sort of warning in the background of this image, a sampleresque homily which has been, to my knowledge, as yet unwritten. It says “Ambiguity S O C K S.” it is sort of self-demonstrating.
I got ambitious, and my have overreached my ability –I KNOW the viewer needs all the help she or he can get, yet there’s a lot of chaos here. The double acrostic poem, “Kitchens Sync,” gives another clue as to why. A lot is thrown in.
kitchens sync
kundalini yoga sends
intimation to yr friends
take a ride on grammerly
challenge all yr fammerly
help a sea or gutter urchin
end a quest 4 what yr surchin
need of job r wife r clinic
seeds yr future megacynic
When Kitchens Sync, i.e. become synchronous or achieve synchronicity, the phrase “everything but the kitchen sink” expands to become “everything INCLUDING the sinks of more than one kitchen.” I hope and trust that some enjoyment of this poem/image may be derived by looking for patterns. One example that may be missed if I don’t mention it is that the poem has one instance of the shorthand word “yr” (for “your”) in every other line of the poem. That wasn’t done gratuitously. It’s intended to reinforce the connection between the reader and the poem’s arc. Whether it works or not is a matter of opinion–YOUR opinion.
The center figure seemed to me to look a bit like the late Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson once ran for public office, and used a symbol of his own design for the political party he was trying to get off the ground, of a two-thumbed hand gripping a peyote button. My guy doesn’t have two thumbs on his hand, but including the thumb there are six fingers. I think I owe the whimsy of that to Marc Chagall, who once gave one of his figures a seven-fingered hand. After I post this page I’ll see if Chagall had any other reason for doing that other than the sheer anarchic joy of it. If not, that was plenty–doing a little time in the Anarchic Circle is good for an artist’s refreshment. 🙂
Today I went to help my brother Brian with yardwork and carport/shed hauling. I yelled at him when he pitched in to the point of reaching as high as he could to clip some branches on the small tree. I lectured him about trying to be a player/coach when at this time he needed to be just a coach. “When you coach a softball team, you can’t go out in the field with the guys,” I said. (Brian had been a Little League coach–a good one–some years back.)
Later I apologized for yelling at him. He said it was OK and I was right and he needed to keep in check.
The thing is, Brian is going to the hospital for cancer surgery next Tuesday. He has an IV port in his chest that has been there since his chemotherapy a couple of months ago. Most of the available veins–aren’t.
Brian has been to Hell on his own dime via street life, incarceration, and hard drug use. This century he has trekked back out of Hell heroically, and gives a lot of credit to the faith-based service organizations Streets of Joy and Victory Outreach. He has even (miraculously!) stopped smoking, giving up a habit he’d had since his teens.
But now, the malignant mass having had its growth stunned and stunted as much as possible via chemo and radiation, the docs are going in to remove the mass, and part of Brian’s body with it. And he is far more calm and collected about it than I am.
It is rectal cancer, the same thing that claimed our grandfather back in 1987. Brian knows exactly what he’s in for, because he was Papa’s caregiver in the last four months of Papa’s life.
It is possible that Brian’s long stint of living on the edge has helped prepare him for this next challenge. It’s also possible that he’s just putting on a brave front, but I doubt it. I think I would know. I’ve known him all his life.
And I love him. He is a great brother. He would do anything for family, including me. He is especially generous to the homeless. All are his brothers and sisters.
But this brother is having a hard time with this harsh reality, and has turned to creative expression as a means of coping. You’ll see some of the chaos of panic in the card below . . .
Part 2 will include transcription and annotation. Meanwhile, Brian has given me permission to ask all who read this to pray for him. He believes in the power of prayer, and I believe in the power of Brian plus prayer. Friends, please pray for my beloved brother Brian.
One with Clay, Image and Text 