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January 31, 2010
To love myself, I must love the different and unknown.
We are close as strangers; I don’t know you when you laugh, or droop, or weep, or sing, or sin, or how you keep when I am gone, or where you go when I return. What stone tower, smooth and white and unadorned is this that I walk through alone?
The back of your hands,
The steel of your eyes,
The space between your breaths while you leave and then come back yourself again, but changed,
The places where you wait when I leave off and then loop back around to meet again but changed,
The fractal edges of my heart, rendered but unseen
The journeys that I make and then each one forget
The paths each pulse and impulse leave in myelin and lumen
The freight a cargo red, electric, transitional, mnemonic.
Out of these grows something sweet
Dark within, like a calf’s eye.
Seas, and skies of shining stars
Deepness grows in seeing deeper in.
Neither fathomed nor contained
Unknown, misunderstood, mislabeled, unimagined and unseen.
Each part a different part of me
Unknown, misunderstood, mislabeled, ill-used and untended,
Silence in the furthest reaches, not silent, neither unknown, nor dark at all –
Alive and feeding life with raging fire
Song that echoes in a soundless void.
In this between, where we all travel slow,
Remember all forgotten things that I still know;
Song and word and pain and tears
Dance and silence, shame and fears,
The ending of another day, another life, another friend.
The beginning of another day, another life, another friend.
Turn over the seas, turn under the skies of shining stars
I do not know you, understand you, or imagine you.
Filed under: biography, pilcrow, poetry, writing |
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January 27, 2010
“Some water would be very pleasant,” she said, and then sang, as they lifted her out of the ground, “God is good; do not fear death! God is good!”
Did angels visit her before she was rescued by angels?
Could I sing “God is good” after eight days pinned on my own mutilated hand under eight stories of pancaked concrete?
After being pinned eight hours to a tree, I think that I might ask my captors for forgiveness, to let me go, rather than ask my Father to forgive them. I think that I would “curse God and die.”
Every day I feel like I don’t know what I’m doing, or why.
I have no perspective on my suffering; every day, the perspective I gain on my suffering shames me.
Would she exchange my life for hers?
I pick around the itching scabs.
“We’re young men, we don’t want to die, we’re young men –
“Oh, God!” a roaring and then static, silence. More concrete pancakes, and I say “they all had the good fortune to be crushed mid-air”.
The leveled ground is a terrible blessing. I remember my disasters and compare; no daughters lost for days then found among a hundred corpses in a street outside a morgue, no hopes lost in ropes of twisted steel and wire, no wound in the earth where all I ever loved melted and exploded in a molten fire. I have: broken eggs, spankings, rejection; surely many have endured these simple pains, these heartaches, and then known many more. No men tear me from my home at night, no men throw me on the ground, no men savage my innocence with grinding, pulsing, bleeding hate. I have never been disfigured by burning tar, or even tarred. I am well-liked, respected, frequently deferred to, encouraged to raise my voice and share. I am embraced and loved for who I am and what I feel now, even if once, many years ago, I believed that I was not. I know that I am loved. I know that mountains move because I ask.
I remember being rejected, yes, but all that I have known for years now is nurturing love. Turn me towards that source of light, my hands unpinned and free. The light is very pleasant. God is good, do not fear death, nor man, nor speech, nor open heart, do not fear love nor learning how to love.
“Do not fear death,” somehow she sings; “God is good!”
Filed under: biography, pilcrow, poetry |
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November 12, 2009
"The right reading for this is the one I'm giving it."
Orson Welles
Draw God’s navel, body hair
See? all your parts were always there.
(He was a man like you, you know
Placenta to an embryo.)
Obscured by white clouds, cherubim
Are all of that which make You Him.
Draw in and then blow out your breath;
Uncover resurrection, death.
Your mortal body He forgives;
God once was dead,
And now He lives.
Filed under: pilcrow, poetry |
Comments (8)
August 10, 2009
Manage expectations
Modify desires
Moribund religion
Smoke to veil the fires
“I think this is probably the hardest thing to deal with,” he said,
and then, “whatever you choose, just make sure you are true to yourself –“
“that’s all that matters.”
Holding hands affirmed a life
Time wondering,
Watching, waiting, wanting,
Trued all the jarring angles
Even though my arms are long, and his are short,
All wariness, bitterness, dispelled.
My native wit, unpolished charm,
Bumbling stumbling burbling rolling out
We chip away at
Matters mean and great
Detached and riveted
Fixed and swinging.
Tell me, God,
Tell me how to love you both at once –
If I, your son, am known and loved, remembered, named and counted,
Spared within Your sight from all Your other sons,
Not globular but granular,
Not massed or indistinct,
Then I demand You hear this prayer.
If You are perfect You should reconcile now, not later – not after death, but now!
Me unprepared, vainglorious, intransigent, unfaithful, sightless, hopeless, angry and afraid
You came before by grace – to many – just as such
I would smother in the stinking belly of a whale,
I would pass through charring flame
(My dad once claimed he threw me to the wolves)
Let me wither from Your sight and shrink and fade and burn and die
I will not curse You or my birth or writhe indignant;
If truth is reason, give me reasons why.
If Your anointed say again “we just don’t know,”
Will I flee to, or from? This sharp comfort,
“we just don’t know,”
In the age of miracles, of fullness, attended by the living oracles
“we just don’t know”?
Who isn’t praying hard enough?
Who isn’t living up? Who here is unprepared?
What should we do but watch, want, wander,
Wither on the vine
Lose our way, and losing it
Make new friends, lovers, journeys,
Take faltering steps down faith’s last unlit stairway?
“we just don’t know,”
We just don’t what’s true.
Filed under: biography, love, pilcrow, poetry |
Comments (3)
July 16, 2009
WORDLE takes the words from a blog post or site and composes an image by prevalence, more frequently used words appearing larger than others. Not hard to to see which word figures most prominently in “Burn the Book” :-D
Filed under: blog history, meta, pilcrow |
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June 16, 2009
[audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/Easter_Song.mp3]
Where’d your gardener go?
Has he left you lone?
Clouds began to show,
He packed up for home
Snowflakes fall
Snowflakes fall
Raise your tender shoots,
Now the winter’s gone
Beat back to your roots,
Your first bloom withdrawn
Rise once more!
Rise once more!
Slow at first to
Show your green and
Glow, your roots must
Grow deeper still
Till you press yourself against the rock;
Your thousand fibrous fingers lock
A shoring up of stem and stock;
Sure mooring in the tempest’s knock
Eyes of high passersby
Wouldn’t notice you;
Signs of glories now nigh
Only faint and few
Till the dayspring streams,
And the gardener’s dreams
Break as morning gleams
Rise once more!
Rise once more!
Filed under: Squid, Uncategorized, music, poetry |
Comments (1)
June 11, 2009
A random ditty I made while setting up some recording equipment.
[audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/Metal_Wave.mp3]
Filed under: Squid, Uncategorized, music |
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May 30, 2009
These are only demo-quality stripped down arrangements, recorded on a hand-recorder, but I figured it would do to post at least something since I’ve been promising an album for a while. Not all lyrics and titles are final, not all songs will wind up acoustic. I’m working on recording the real deal, to be released when it’s done.
1. Chozo [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/01_Chozo.mp3]
2. For the Birds [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/02_For_the_Birds.mp3]
3. Shadowland [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/03_Shadowland.mp3]
4. Adrift [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/04_Adrift.mp3]
5. Breakfast with Godzilla [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/05_Breakfast_With_Godzilla.mp3]
6. Wake [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/06_Wake.mp3]
7. All Clear [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/07_All_Clear.mp3]
8. Nostalgia Dogs [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/08_Nostalgia_Dogs.mp3]
9. Easter Song [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/09_Easter_Song.mp3]
10. The Fight [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/10_The_Fight.mp3]
11. Midnight Snack [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/11_Midnight_Snack.mp3]
12. Veggie Soup [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/12_Veggie_Soup.mp3]
13. Go On, Be Still [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/13_Go_On_Be_Still.mp3]
All recordings, music, and lyrics copyright Anthony Hall, 2009, except lyrics on 3 copyright Anneke Majors, 2008
Filed under: Squid, music |
Comments (2)
May 6, 2009
Burn The Book
I.
In a box, among the papers I have collected and forgotten,
Bound in a white jacket, with a cut and glued spine,
Are the pages that shamed my youth.
The text says:
We are not in our control and never will be;
God hears our cries but will not apprehend or change our hearts;
There’s nothing else that we can do but
Surrender and
attend, attend,
attend.
II.
Attend,
attend,
attend.
Never talk across.
(If you are here at all
You don’t know better what he needs than he)
Sweet understanding, patience,
No one raise a challenge.
For one hour each week,
(or if Dan talks so long again, two)
Sweet understanding, men who know!
For two hours (sure!)
Each week,
Attend, attend, attend,
And never grow.
III.
Disintegrating,
The treasurer confesses that he took the till,
Paid for a prostitute down in Provo.
Disintegrating
– what should be done?
Never talk across.
The thief’s consoled.
I never put a dollar in that hat.
IV.
What “you are, you will always be,”
and “Always would be.”
And what’s the difference then?
The number of the sober elect is four,
Four percent,
The same number, I later learned, as those who never
attend, attend, attend –
at all.
We are ninety-six percent condemned.
V.
Oh, but I believe in miracles.
That God’s almighty hand being flesh
Commands all flesh –
All nerves, receptors, channels, pathways, veins,
All cells, all chambers, neurons, muscle smooth, muscle skeletal and
Muscle of the heart –
Reaching in between a beat
He tunes in fine degrees
Re-turning will with will.
In fine degrees, by our release and say,
When we cry out,
“Oh, my God –
Please hear me. Please hear me, oh my God.”
VI.
At ninety-six
We will be someone we don’t know now,
We will meet ourselves, a stranger on the road.
This is surrender;
What we would always be, we will not always be.
VII.
“Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?”
We do a lot of thinking,
A lot of talking too.
Talk only to each other, men circling up, facing backs to
Wives and mothers, friends and brothers, fathers
Putting them all off outside.
All through the week we think about and
Do the things we talk and think about so much.
And then come back again to think and talk and
Never talk across.
We kill ourselves a hundred times each day
In talking, thinking,
Straining to believe at gnats.
Circling up, again, the end,
Attend, attend, attend.
IIX.
Convention time again.
Attend, attend, attend.
This year’s workshops are so good we barely grow at all.
We sit, stand, eat
With men without the answers;
Men just like us who understand.
In three short days we’re guaranteed
To learn and change nothing,
All the time with other men (and some women, too!)
Who, just like us,
Know all the answers, and never have the answers.
We always get to ask a lot of questions, though.
We always wish this week would never end
– Because,
Once all our thinking, talking, knowing’s done, we’re still not done:
Our final step, XIII
Is never easier
Than when we’re in a thousand men
Thinking, talking, and doing all the things
We never don’t not want to do.
IX.
“Judge not, that ye be not judged.”
And then he said:
“For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged.”
If we judge you then to be crass, and false,
Protecting your own anger, rage and spite, and hate,
And harboring a grudge,
We do not falsely judge.
Then, only truth will be our judge.
Though we have spoke before in wrath,
For we are broken, man,
The sin is ours, and though we all will sin again,
We will not cloak our sin as you have always done.
X.
We all will sin again,
And so will you,
But will our sin always be the same?
Paul never said he would always be Saul.
Conversion, change, God’s transmutation,
Made Saul’s lead will to gold.
It was on the road to Damascus.
He saw an angel, and Christ sitting on the right hand of God.
At that very moment, abruptly as a blacksmith’s hammer.
Those were the days of miracles,
And so are these.
XI.
I had not been for years.
I left their circle.
I felt ashamed and wondered why
If it was right to attend, attend, attend,
Each time I’d gone I’d died inside?
Attend,
attend, attend,
We’d all attended, everyone I knew
(every one, it’s true)
Each group the same, each Tuesday, Wednesday, Sunday,
And as I sat at home, watching Lost,
(knowing now that was absolutely the best thing I could have done with my time,)
The voice would climb up deep and red from hell:
“If you don’t go tonight,”
and
“Then what you always were,”
and
“You will always be.”
XII.
But oh, I believed in miracles,
And God sent angels in my way,
Just like he did for Alma, just like he did for Paul;
These angels, I could shake their hands is all.
XIII.
The final step, my step thirteen,
Is finally to walk away
And work, and work, and work.
Work on ourselves.
Work on our voices, work at loving others. Work on our prayers, and knowing
God
Who is everywhere, and that all things are a path that can lead us back to Him,
Because that alone can be our happy destiny.
Work, on forgiving ourselves, forgiving our fathers we remember by the lash.
That thick white book with the cut glued spine,
Don’t work the steps that never work.
If our hearts are good, we have worked those steps already;
If we have not,
Attend to all the small things.
Attend church, attend our wives and mothers, friends and brothers, fathers.
Surrender and
attend, attend, attend to Christ,
Who won your broken being with his blood.
Filed under: biography, pilcrow, poetry |
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January 28, 2009
Click, Clack, Letters and numbers press the soft pads of fingers
Curiosity stirs. A knickknack. A vase. Dirt? No.
Clear vial, nearly transparent.
Orangish hue. Lid is indeed removable. Pestle like. Inside a thick sand, with sea shells? No.
Closer inspection.
Hmm, perhaps the remains of wood changed state? No.
Attempts to secure the pestle in it’s place, sealing contents.
Tough, gritty, hhh twisting helps.
Now back on the shelf where it overlooks the conversion of pressure into words on the screen.
Hmm, curiostiy. A silver coin. Crematoruim 387.
Small vial again in hand. Open. Observed. Truly?
Ashes. A respect then follows.
Polished with shirt. Respect.
Slid carefully on shelf when…..
Oops.
Stomach now on floor. Mine and Ashes.
Heart in throat. Mine and Ashes.
Quick clean up before anyone sees.
Finished.
The clouds darken the night sky looming heavily over my conscience.
Rest well this evening, oh departed.
Filed under: Hansel, writing |
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