and smite the world

with a poem

messages from the deeps

by Joel A. Wendt

What is a poem, but a magic incantation the poet uses to evoke a gateway

into the heart of the spirit world - the place where

resides the yet uncreated and unformed

these poems must be read aloud

or fairies will haunt you in the dark of night

for the sin of having no imagination or passion at all

5/9/2013
May Flowers, from April Showers

the day is Grey, and dark

clouds mask the sky

I watch Hannibal on TV

obscene corpses presented as art

drama appealing to the dark side of human beings

where are the screams of the politically correct?

where is the conscience of the network that uses

such beastly titillation in order to sell advertising ...

ten million Caligula’s Haunt our passages through this Age

sung to music by ten million Nero’s fiddling 

the worst dreamers of Rome reborn

dance among us now

exposing themselves

like the flasher opening his raincoat

surprising us and taking delight in our

shocked faces

we, the strange mirror to their devices,

what do we reflect to their observation of us?

Should we kill them, knowing they play

us like a deranged new orchestra of mad serial voyeurs -

we the mouse - they the super intelligent cat

licking its paws, and staring into space

having forgotten the prior moment,

and waiting only for the next

ball of yarn - ball of human desire

waiting only to push our souls down into the

nasty smelling pail of kitty litter we call a brain ...

are Cats and Dogs actually domesticated,

or is it just human beings that have been trained

and had their animal nature seemingly castrated

We like to believe we are light only,

having so many clever ways of denying our

own dark hungers and actions ...

Do Saints and Guru’s really gain the highest,

or do they only stand on our drowning shoulders

like the sailors standing on each other trying

to reach the air above and live, while floundering in the sea

of civilization’s raging storms,

We forget that the beautiful tree in our yard

can only live because its roots go into the deepest

darkest places of the Earth, there to find food and water

for its buds and leaves and flowers ...

A gorgeous forest is also an underworld of tangled roots

and hard stones, and caves wherein the rodents thrive

with the worms - that strange creature with a face at

both ends, and which when cut to pieces just grows another ...

birds eat worms, and then fly in sunlit spaces ...

would you eat your own self-worms in order to fly?

5/10/2013

the haunting

I am haunted by the truth ...

For years I sought this seeming ghost

of how to describe reality as both

spirit and matter ...

I read books, studied teachers,

prayed, meditated,

did exercises

I found my way to the

School of Life’s Mysteries, which surrounded

my individual biography, and

gave myself to what it taught ...

surrendered to the secrets 

hidden in my own tale ...

following their lead

mostly

I still dreamed dreams,

of which some turned out

to be maps to the future,

not just fantasies

At the same time I am haunted by myself

who am I

what am I

why am I

how am I

when am I

where am I

am I?

the worms of dark feeling

devour the traces of my best self

and turn me into food for my “darker other”

Lucifer’s Pride haunts me too

Shouldn’t I save the world,

take home every homeless person

only eat what starving others eat?

Why should my life be good

and full of laughter and love

when so many other-Thous

everywhere suffer?

The Father of Lies too

rides my soul, ...

can I distinguish his tangled roots from my own

Do I know the TRUTH!!!!

What is that?

Ancient Wisdom says:

we are the small world, which is

a duplicate analog of the great world

in us resides a version of the Good,

of Christ and the Holy Mother ...

my soul is a musical instrument which

I can learn to play, by deciding where to lean my

attention, and what to create with my intention

do I study worms and roots, light and darkness

seek fame, seek love, seek revenge

or ... do I

hide in forgetting, in insanity, in death 

or in sleep ...

each night I do this, do I not ... sleep, die a bit,

forget and wander in the halls of madness where

impossible dreams seem all too real

then there is the stuff of my mind

ideas, concepts, generalized concepts and

mental pictures - all borne and driven on seas of

invisible feelings with the storms of fear and anger

and rage and terror ... sadness sorrow and hate ...

unless I dance and sing on my happy feet,

and smile and hug and play with puppies and

kittens, or get drunk with old friends, have an affair

with someone where I work ... plot to blow up anything

within reach of my raw passions against ...

to be human, is, as Walt Whitman said:

“I am multitudes”.

and to be haunted by all my possibilities

meanwhile living in the deranged house of

cards that is my biography,

my persona tale,

little of which I

control, some of which (or more) I would

change, unmake, do over ...

there are so many kinds of thoughts

so many shades of feeling

so many worms and roots

so many angels and demons

so many gods and causes and ...

sunny days, where nothing happens

and I can have a smoke or a drink and just

watch the clouds paint the sky ...

just as my dreams, desires, wants and needs

paint the life of my mind ...

He touches me you know, Christ touched me.

more than once ...

He sang of love and forgiveness and

healed me in those wounds I most needed healing

more important ... He sang that I was just fine as

I was ... there was no need to be better

or more

or slimmer

or faster

or smarter

or any kind of other -

I was loved just as I was.  

and, truth to tell,

and be haunted with:

so are We all.

5/11 and 12/2013
the World

a place, a time, an Age

ancient, modern, futuristic

wanton, obscene, deadly

bright, holy, innocent

I wander there,

free perhaps ...

tired, rested, joyful

embarrassed, friendly

scared, ceremonial

playful, sad

angry, burning

ashamed, cold

near 7 billion souls

are with me,

wandering and wondering

clashing, fighting

hating, loving

wounding, healing

touching

and then there are the quiet ones,

the ones who don’t need to shout

and get everyone else’s attention ...

the ones who are content just being themselves ...

that’s a hard enough task, being just the human being

we want and need to be.

we inhabit the World

we billions ...

but just what is it we inhabit?

what is this World?

Does it have a story?

Our time - via the “scientist”

sings songs of big bangs and long

hidden sea swells of evolution

upon evolution, upon evolution

until the human being appears,

on this grave stage: the World

so there are two now

us billions and the stage - the World

we seem to be its progeny - this World

of big bangs and evolutionary trees

made us out of itself ... or so the tale is told ...

but when ever did the stage make the actor?

do the floorboards transmute themselves into

feet and legs and hair and teeth, and

ultimately speech and song?

by the myths of science, a long long tale

to be sure,

the stuff appears out of nothing, and

having more time than god (who it is

declared by some to only have taken seven days),

the stuff from nothing makes a human being ...

a miracle of accidents and random chaos

a mad tale we tell children, who lacking

yet reason have no basis on which to disagree ...

when these children play with sand on the beach

we might suggest how they too can create castles in

the air - visions of billions of years where everything

is made of pieces of sand, thrown up into the air

where wind and tide take all these little pieces

and rearrange them into countless forms

stars and suns and planets and plants

and animals and us billions on a stage ...

great power and wisdom must this miracle

of accidents and random chaos have,

for its mad tale lets us breathe and

bleed and talk and walk and fuck

and get drunk and cry and be sad

and run and wear silly hats

when I was young, I was told this tale

in books and bits and pieces of language

although the tale in Church was not

the same tale is in school

until one day I discovered thoughts!

invisible to others, mine only to have;

but thoughts nonetheless ...

whence came these miracles of meaning

in which I swam .... the tale of the myth-making

scientist was that I had a brain - some material stuff

that lent me thoughts, and perhaps even lent me the

thought (not true it seemed for some) that I even existed

so now the tale got stranger .... a miracle of accidents

and random  chaos made a stage on which us

billions danced and with grave madness and certainty

the priests of science declared:
I was not!  I was not!  I was not!

I do believe I prefer my silly hats, and

would rather have tea with a mad hatter

then believe the miracle of accidents ...

why ever would I think us billions had

no point, and were but a virus and a disease

on the poor earth-world, hell bent to destroy it?

that strange thought others sell me

is their vanity - their belief they know better than me ...

I’d rather remain a child in love with play,

than follow the mad scientist off the cliff

in the cart of the miracle of accidents

who is he to tell me what to think ...

How shameful to insist he knows better

of a past no scientist has even seen

but only dreamed, taking his theories

for great truths, ...

all the same too, the priests of books,

called religion, who also tell me what to think and believe ...

how crass of them, how arrogant ...

is there a truth which is sounder and better

than the miracle of accidents and the old teachings

in dusty books shoved in my face in Sunday school?

who do I ask?

not these men, these priests of science or these

priests of religion - they hardly seem reliable ...

perhaps methinks, I should ask the World from

whence it came ... will not the world itself know its

home, is place of birth, its future ...

the World lets me dance on its surfaces,

hide in its caves,

play on its sea shores

walk in its rain,

and parts the clouds for me at night so

I can see the stars ...

a good companion this World ...

it gives me fruit and grains and meat

and eggs and fur to wear if I am cold ...

its lightening gives fire, and while I

pursue its secrets there is one thought I

have which rebels against the priests of

both science and the books of so-called gods ...

it is the thought I first felt in early childhood

that the World was alive and magical

and that She/He/It knew me as I knew it

we were kindred this World and I

both of us billions and the World

had self-consciousness and Being

I was its Child!  Its beloved Child!

Now there is a tale well told - some think

it is too primitive, given how many aboriginals

tell the same story, where trees can talk, and

rocks can sing and stars play on seas of light

I like that story ... I want to be part of that story

I want to be the Child of Father Sky and Mother Earth ...

so boo I say to the miracle of accidents and the myths of dusty old books

go away and leave us billions alone - stop confusing us with

the madness of priests of either science or religion - we billions need

none of that in order to touch and love and dance and sing

and play on the stage of the World that loved me into Being

and gave me thought so that I could know and sing myself the World’s

Great Song.

we are all brothers and sisters, cousins and kin ...

animal, plant, stone and star -

and World

and we billions -

all related and loved

and in love, should we so choose.

5/12/2013
letter to President Obama #1

Are you my President?

I don’t believe so.

I don’t believe you are even your President.

I don’t believe you are who you want to be

as President.

Maybe you are Michelle’s President,

but mostly I think you are the President your

advisors want you  to be,  safe, cautious,

intellectual, disconnected, cold, aloof,

outside looking in.

You got to the door of the candy store

but have just stayed at the window

watching

America needs a President who takes risks,

and who cares passionately about something ...

almost anything ...

we can forgive mistakes of passion,

but not fear driven errors of

too much carefulness ..

Benghazi came from that,

from the errors of caution

whenever politicians act with “restraint”,

not risking their “elections”

our public life dies the death of too little too late

they call you a “lame duck”, yet ...

if you paid attention, this is the very

best time to take risks, for your election

in the future is not in play

your party might complain, they want

to own you, and save their own elections

from the vagaries of voters

but you don’t work for them,

your work for us,

for “we the people”

and we need risk taking statesmen

not politicians

not liars and cheats, and

those who put things off until

its to late ...

there is a reason we hate you,

you know ...

and you only have yourself to blame ...

you are dis-likable, and in wanting to be liked

you also kill what we need from you

we don’t need to like you,

once elected and granted so much power

we need you to act

.. . to act you fool

to act!

we need you to be willing to die,

to risk what you ask all our

children to risk,

when you send them off to war ...

we need you to displease the powerful

to upset the wealthy

to make the other weak and lame

politicians crazy

to make the press wake up

to make us all wake up

you belong to the world,

not to Wall Street

or the Democrat Party

You belong to us ...

not even to yourself ...

and, if you are not ours,

then you are nothing

but a vanity waiting for

the fools that write history

to tell pretty stories about you

that will not include how

“we the people” suffered

and starved

and died

the slow death of a thousand cuts

because you lacked the guts to

do the obvious

leave Washington

leave the moral swampland

that festers there and only

grows ugly  

and deadly mushrooms 

in waters full of decay

polluted by too much money

and lacking any ideas at all of value

Washington is stupid, its inhabitants

a joke for late night comedians ...

you play games and do nothing there,

while we suffer and you have lives the

rest of us need ...

politicians are useless parasites on

the body politic ...

leave Washington

come to us,

ask us for advice,

not your political friends

who serve everyone’s needs but ours ...

take off the suit, and the tie

and the glib bullshit face,

be part of our pain, and let me give you just a couple

actual ideas ... there can be thousands if you

start to pay attention to your poets and

your singers and your playwrights 

and your comedians.

roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty,

work in a fast food restaurant for a day,

in a hospice for another day

and in a cubicle in front of a computer

for third ...

know our lives intimately

as an experience, not as a vanity

of imagined liberal fantasy ...

hang out with a gun toting red neck

family, whose yard is full

of old tires and trucks

and useless things

that broke before

their time

sure, use the secret service

to keep you safe, we

don’t want you to die,

we’ve been there before, and done that before ...

but there is no truth in the swampland,

only in the heartland

where real people live and suffer

and age and die ...

Washington is an illusion ...

there is nothing real there at all

nothing ...

to be an actual man of the people,

actually be of the people every day ...

you won’t find the people in the halls

of congress ... just parasites and fools

who believe that by going to Washington

by going to a place of seeming power

they can fix things ...

You know who actually fixes things ...

“We the people” do.

All the idiots that live in the swampland do

is make problems for the rest of us,

while serving the rich and the powerful

and lying to the public

Are you with them,

or us?

If you join with us you’ll have

more real power than any politician in

years, for “we the people” are the engine

which makes America go,

we are America’s muscles and bones 

and brains and heart and spirit and soul

and hope and truth ...

Washington is just a cancer that needs to be excised

from the body politic ...

We are life,

there ... in the swampland ... is only death ...

Choose!

5/15-16-17/2013
the Mystery of Lust

In the dark of deep night

I want to have her

to own her body

to possess it

I want to become engorged

and penetrate every orifice,

and I want, I used to suspect, to sin

I need to dominate

to control

to satisfy any sexual hunger

I don’t always want to romance

or to be gentle

or tender

or slow

or careful

what is most worst

is this Hunger

this Lust

this near unfathomable need

includes wanting her to give in to me

completely of her own free will

I need her surrender

her submission

her yin to my yang

I need her to want to be dominated

and hungered for

in all the raw ways possible

everything I can ask

she must choose to give

yet, this is not about debasement

how can Lust debase what is freely given?

nor is it about power

I want no power over her at all

for I too want to surrender

to give into the Lust

to embrace the untempered Hunger

yet not be there, in that dark seeming place

of raw Lust

- alone

I want, need, her company

in the dark deeps of the night

when the Hunger is aroused

Not only that I want her to urge

me on

take me she must say

have me she must say

possess me

own me

she is to open to me

to spread her arms and her legs

and lay back

and tell me to penetrate her

devour her

my hungry mouth

everywhere

or she turns herself over

and demands

I go into her

from behind

the Lust

must burn through both of us

taking away all inhibitions

all resistance

for in this burning the Lust is pure some way ...

how can that be?

a primal power of the creation is appearing

a need for uniting that overcomes all reluctance

where the resisting mind fades away

and the body itself surrenders

to all sensation both inner and outer

to all urgent demand

to plant the seed

within her

to plow her

and plunder her

and shower her

nor is this a gesture of animalness

this is the urge for pure generation

for combining egg and seed

electric and magnetic and atomic

is this desire, this Lust, this Hunger

this is not sin in fact

but something holy

something divine

we are making something together ...

we are making a new body

a new avatar

for a new person

to inhabit

for the fire of the Lust comes

also from outside us

from the spirit of the child who needs and wants

a physical body in which to be born

there are three of us here now 

we two, male and female

past and present

making a beginning place

a first iteration of a house

meant to become a temple

for the mystery of the future-other

the one who can’t come from their star

and descend into

incarnation

until we surrender to its Lust

for earthly life

that flows over and around us

penetrating us

this Other-Hunger wants to

have us

to own us

to possess us

and needs us to submit to

he/she/it

the gate into physical life

is through Lust,

through the overriding

all consuming

Hunger of the spirit to

be in flesh

Even the Gods knew this, for the poet sang:

And the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us

Is not each child to be born

its own spirit/word?

no wonder St. Paul

feared the power of the Hunger

the freedom of the physical earthly body

to surrender to the non-earthly spirit

to submit to the needs of the body

seemed to him to give up his power and freedom,

not realizing that nothing that exists

is outside of Gods’ Love, in all their holy glory

so then did the Church too

born in Paul’s confusion

Lust was a power

they sought to control but could not

so they stole it for a time,

from nuns  and monks

and made little fake temples they

called monasteries and nunneries,

but which were not true temples

for their purpose was to possess

the Lust,

to transmute and transform it and

to own its generative and creative powers thus changed

for the Church itself

without the captured primal passions of the Religious,

the Church had no moral heart

the primal Hunger of life to begat life

was given no room for its natural expression,

and in the end this coerced celibacy

could not defeat the holy and sacred

nature of Lust for Life,

yet by the Church’s capture was so deformed and transmuted

it became in some a true source of evil

masked as love

the Church also sought to confine

procreation to the marriage bed

but Lust was not to be bound

or controlled there either

when the spirit needed to incarnate in matter

it came, regardless of authorities

lost in fear or the need to dominate

which is why men and women came sometimes to fear it

to fear to surrender to it,

and began to name something holy

and so powerful a sin

but the old goddess religions knew this power,

knew the significance of generation

celebrated it,

and embraced it

we moderns think to call the priestesses

and priests of the holy arts of Lust

temple prostitutes

and from our warped time and point of view

made of Lust and raw desire

something wrong

when the patriarchs took social control

thousands of years ago, and manufactured

the monotheistic religions dominated by

male gods

then did maleness through fear of the generative spirit,

fear of Lust,

and its threefold partnership:

male, female and incarnating child

introduced then all the horrible distortions

of holy human sexuality 

that we call porn

or abortions

or contraception

or genital mutilation

Oh, the Churches tried,

the religions tried

the male dominated priesthoods tried

but the primal powers of creation

were not theirs to possess

Lust belongs to itself,

and we can only surrender to it

and submit in wonder

and in awe

when in freedom the male and the female

through arts of mutual provocation and intoxication

let in the Hunger

of the incarnating spirit

seeking a body in which to enter into earthly existence

so it can rush earthward headlong from its star

toward the stage of life

this world, and the needed company of

we billions

so as to dance and sing

and play

while He reminds us gently of this truth of innocence ...

lest ye become again as little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven

for Lust is adult play of the highest sort

a surrender to the world of sensation

which is also part of the Creation

We were not made to suffer

to resist the impulses for pleasure and joy

why else do we sing and dance in the temples

and shout and praise

the body is a temple,

lent to us by acts of Lust,

we are all from a father and a mother

we are all from our own star

seemingly hellbent to enter into the earth existence

to enter into the deeps of the body

but being not yet perfect

we descend partial and often lame

of soul

the Hunger of the spirit

for incarnation in the avatar

temple of the physical body

includes the need to learn

to master self

to become something more

so we want to temper Lust and

hope that at its root it is Love,

which as a truth is surely divinely real

for the divine does not create in error ...

ever

even we humans do not error in the sense of sin,

we only make the mistakes of the unlearned,

the not yet wise ...

so the Lust and the Hunger

the joining of male and female

and child to be

in the generative act of procreation

is such a primal power that it cannot

and will not be confined by human

religious hectoring, which is too much Beam

and almost no Mote at all

the Divine Mystery knows not rules

so why would it decree we adhere

to laws and commandments

an act the patriarchs of the monotheistic

religions decreed a sin in their twisted lust

for power and domination

over women

jealous of women’s power

to carry the child’s growing temple in their womb

and to be naturally a principle source of love

for this incarnating spirit-child during its whole life

these old men lorded their self-loved pain

over women, repressed them, for millennia

but the spirit cannot be repressed

cannot be stilled, 

so today, in our Age

Lust bursts forth its chains and

women will not accept control of their

bodies, their temples

for their instinct is sure that something holy

is at risk,

and the twisted lusts of men for domination

must be fought ...

or all of us, male and female and child

will be ruined,

and hate of the temple of the body

will be thus fostered,

and hate of the independence of the spirit

will be thus fostered ...

and the modern World of we-billions

drowns in the raging seas of Karma

such that

a civilization must Fall to make room

for the next one

the Goddess religions honored the Father God,

but the godless monotheistic religions dishonored

the Mother God,

thus founding Western Civilization on a great Lie,

one so great that the Lord of the Dance Himself

had to come and die on a Cross

to lead us all toward Redemption

the Redemption of Eros,

the true name

of Lust and the Hunger for unity

of the primal power of generation 

to overcome separation

and help us seek a World made whole

and Holy once more 

yet, why then abortion and porn

and genital dis-figuration and rape

and all the other crimes against women?

Because the ever and again incarnating spirit

voyaging  the ages and times from past to present

and into future - this reincarnating spirit, going from

one physical body avatar to another ...

learns only through strife and struggle

so that in our Age, we are faced

in the most direst of ways with

deep questions of moral confusion ...

the Lust and the Hunger, once managed

through social do’s and don’ts are now

ours alone to discipline ... and we will

only learn their mastery by trial and error

and through the alchemy of ups and downs

and choices ...

we are to be personally responsible for

what Eros, what Lust and the Hunger -

what the generative power of the creation -

does in our lives ...

these are our choices, and no religion

or any science can deny our freedom to determine

and rule them by ourselves ...

the gravitas of life is ours now to know ...

a great gift, in a mystery dance often

only captured in verse and song:

an “Amazing Grace” for all.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,

That saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost but now am found,

Was blind, but now I see.