If God created you,you must be extraordinary. If God made you, you mustbe beautiful, full of delight. Look at yourself? Are you thosethings? Either we have created God orGod has created us. In India I have been toldthat there are over 3,000gods. The irony of it! Thought worshiping thought.Oneself worshipped and called God. Notice it, […]
George Cassidy Payne
Lavinia
Ideas are fleeting likeair molecules, or flicksof a woman’s eyelashesafter the first appliance of eyeshadow. Or maybe they are morelike basket weaved hats that no one wears anymore,not unless they want to beseen or reenacting, as if there is a difference.
To Die Like Marat
The death of Marat wasbad, but at least he lookedgood. I don’t want to go out a slob,nothing against slobs. I want to die handsome, likeMarat, or at least the way Jacques-Louis David saw him with a letter in his hand and the sunlight casting a golden shadow on his shoulders, forehead, and left forearm.Stabbed […]
At the Edge of the Sea (for Rachel Carson)
Death is the one event that everyone knowsnever happens the way it is supposed to. Death is a secret realm. It has an entrance with fountains scented with lavender masking the stench of blood. On the loudspeakers, the rhythms of eternity.On the front door, a quote by Rachel Carson: each grain on a beach is the result […]
The Firebrands
What is the real reason Jupiterdid not let humans have fire? When the brutal winters camehe saw that they were unhappy. Was it to make them suffer, out of joyor boredom, in the rotting, barkless cold?Was it to merely expose their interiorsas hollow space for veiled, powdery, pinkish-salmon, gill-like phobias? Was it just a dark game between them – […]
Looking for a Place to Go
The last time I checked the Buddha never went toa Zen center to meditate. Jesus never talked to his fatherin a church or ate the bread ofhis own limbs at the altar. Moses never needed permissionfrom a rabbi to climb mountains,talk to burning bushes, or read tablets to the masses down below, those whoare always looking […]
The Art of Being
We do not paint. We are the pigments,resins, solvents and additives the soft animal bristle andhand-assembled metal bands. We do not write. We are the molecules linked together in crystalline structures, soaked into paper, allowingour thoughts to bleed at the edges. We do not make music. We are strings vibrating,communicating rhythmic visions hanging in air, that feeling of wanting […]
If the World Falls Down
What happens if the world falls down? If Atlas is no longer around to hold it,is anything or anyone strong enough? When Atlas gave up his burden we allpicked it up like a cannonball until ourshoulders began to hurt, and our back gave out, and we began to ask: What if I should drop it? Each […]
I Searched Back
Becoming many-celledfrom whitish to pale tan, consuming the soft crystalof my confiscated skin,the alien searched me. Like a probe sent into the outerhemispheres of my consciousness. I searched back. I wondered intoits yucca-sized eyes, and the room became calm, a cream-colored scent of smokerising as the holy spirit does for Baptistson Sunday mornings when they really need […]
Before Words
By the time it is written down it hasalready passed. Even the animals,the brute beasts of the fields, dumband blind to the ways of poetry in books, feel it in the soul of their hoovesand the simple sensations of their tonguestouching the grass, or a pig rolling in the mud, as birds sing for no reason […]