What Happened?

I pulled out some pictures from my trip to Peru eight years ago, and while Craig looks much the same, I scarcely recognize the slimmer and more vibrant version of me in the photos. I am now, perhaps, 20 pounds heavier than I was then, and my face has settled into a softer and weaker rendering of masculinity. The hard lines of my jaw have all but disappeared these days, and the eyes in the mirror no longer communicate the unfettered joy and danger that, for good or ill, defined that young man in Peru, or hell, the young man who left and came home.

So what happened?

I blew my knee out a couple times and fell off the workout wagon, I guess, and stopped treating my body like a temple; and I had to quit school before the boys were born. The absence of concentrated and violent intellectual challenge has had much the same effect as the absence of concentrated and violent physical activity: the product of both being an overwhelming and near-fatal ennui.

I guess I fell out of love with myself, or stopped trusting my own instincts. I don't know, it's not as though my instincts have ever brought me any kind of tangible benefit or long-lasting contentment. I remember, though, waking from my midafternoon nap in the Ishinca River valley and being so slain by the mountains and the river, and by the benediction of a walk with my Friend, that despite my fatigue and rotten altitude sickness, I hiked and sang up the side of the mountain (I did stop singing at about 12,000 feet when I had to throw up about every 20 yards). From the outside, it sounds like mawkishness, a silly response to situational inspiration, but I know better. It didn't just happen on the side of the mountain, or on holidays or special occasions. I routinely allowed myself to be moved, to not take things in stride. I don't know what happened, or what changed, or what now seals me off from that dynamic experience of the world, but I need to find it again, desperately. I know I must in many ways be serious and solid these days, and I am, but if I don't find some way to reconnect to that vitality, I am pretty sure it's absence will eventually kill me.

much peace,
tjb

I Am Not Clever

...but this song is a little, or what I have of it thus far.

Spaceman

Out into the ether, where the stars collide
and flash their long-dead smiles through the cavernous night
Good old spaceman won't put his helmet on again
He's out in the cold and the ghostlight wearing nothing but his skin

And beneath the sweet physicality, there's closed doors in our minds
We're miles apart in your tiny bed, and I'm leaving you behind

I'll choose the vacuum, where there's nothing I'm required to feel
Yeah nothing but want and wanderlust and a nagging urge to breathe
Into the outside through a blue-white picture frame
I can't see your face from outer space, I can't remember my own name

And to shed the false solidarity and barely murmured lies
There's a skylight above us, and I'm leaving you behind...

(Copyright 2006, Thomas J Burbach)

much peace

Untitled in Progress

Maybe you'll finally make that mythic run south or
prove your repentance with a gun in your mouth
but you always lose your nerve
in the shadows' evening length
caught in your private hell between weakness and strength............
(Copyright 9/2009, Thomas J Burbach)

much peace

Of Mortal Gods

There is joy in a well-thrown football, in the lovely lethal hiss of air around the composite leather, in velocity born in the balls of one's feet, and in the violent and terrible force transferred smoothly from hips to throwing shoulder. It's the same joy, love, to be honest, that occurs in the humbling attack of a summit by bicycle, in the grim and glorious struggle against oxygen debt, and, in truth, in the absolute desperate necessity of a well-turned phrase or verse hunted and found in in the despairing wilderness past midnight: the surrender of one's body and intellect to service of the cause at hand. I have no illusions about my own talents, physical, intellectual or otherwise; I am die-hard mediocre, at best. I am privy (in a small mean way), however, to the paradoxical juxtaposition of self-surrender and utter self-possession that I believe is the hallmark of all great creations, be they those of Whitman or McGrath, or those of Ali or Montana. There's a rising up and a thinning of the skin, a fragility and a belligerence, a passion and dispassion, between the points of which the constant artist must steer. In those moments, when the artist permits himself to be as weak and as strong as necessary, he imposes his will upon his environment, and in turn cedes internal territory that is neither returned nor forgotten.



Max and Will (my three-year-old sons) have begun to be fast. They used to run and I could catch up to them in a couple of long strides. Not so much anymore. Now they run, and I have to turn on the wheels a bit. They also are evolving from little stick figures into sinewy, athletic little boys. They have developed little lat spreads, and miniature muscles play around their shoulders and arms. As I begin my slow (very, very slow) decline into physical irrelevance, I am comforted to see my boys begin to recognize the strength and speed written into their DNA, and in the obvious and unconscious satisfaction they take in the purposeful use of their bodies and minds. We threw the football around in their yard today, and I recognized the fey light that shone in the blue-grey eyes they inherited from me, and their revelations of speed and feats of strength. Don't misunderstand, the same joy is apparent in their steady mastery of language, space and math (and just as encouraged) but nowhere are the little wild things as purely abandoned to happiness as in running, jumping, throwing and wrestling. It's a bit sorrowful to know that when they achieve mastery of their bodies and their sweet, elastic minds, I will be inexorably declining. I am a god to them now: large strong and knowledgeable beyond reckoning. Little do they know the want and worry I feel for them, or how much their god's happiness is bound to theirs. Perhaps all gods feel this way; beside themselves with love and care for their creations. I feel curious panic in my gut when I think of the inevitable time when their god becomes mortal to them, when they recognize me as just as mean and insignificant as the world for which I am trying to equip them. They will ultimately outgrow their need of me, but I shall never fall out of love with their sharp eyes and their red-blond curls, or with their belly laughs and singing.

I have proclaimed my aversion to any and all religion, but today I sympathize with the gods of Abraham and Muhammad, with Osiris and Isis and Zeus and Apollo, and Wodin and Loki and even evil old Cronos. I sympathize with all bereft deities who demand temples and alters, tithes and worship, and even sacrifice and blood from their creations. I understand the terrible love and the beautiful, inevitable despair; but it's our blood, our lives that must be freely sacrificed. Jesus came closest, perhaps, but even he got it wrong. I can't say "take my body so that you may be free, but you have to do as I say and build the right temples and say the right words to receive it." I must instead say, "Here is my sacrifice. Do with it what you will. The gift is yours because I love you, and nothing you say or do can negate it." The burden of faith is therefore mine, as it should be for all gods. So should Max and Will read any of my hopeless ramblings someday, long after they have recognized their flawed humbug of a father, I want them to know that this intention and service, at least is pure; and that I love them as dearly as any mortal god can love his children.

much peace,
tjb

Another Song

Similar Ways

A nameless cold stalks these small-city streets
in the aftermath of snow and of sleet
It's been years since I dreamt out loud
Thus dies the child/So falls the proud

The whole city estranged since you I
since river birds wheeled through an untroubled sky
And sharp-handed men, they cut ugly and deep
and the summer-brown sorrow pulls me from my sleep

I walk down by the big Missouri
where the wind sings through these old oaks
past the dying buildings and the coffee shops
East of all the pavement and the smoke

In search of some soul at the old reservoir
and the prairie blows in through the wide open car
In bits and pieces, the day becomes clear
In shards of sunlight and the absence of all fear

And out past the cardboard graveyards
I leave this shell of glass and steel
and melt along with the last of the winter snow
lying naked in the creekbeds and the fields

In cowshit and straw by the side of the tracks
I've waited my whole life for trains to come past
Perhaps we've been broken in similar ways
But can't we just call that love and I'll have you
here with me today

And far past the sand and sagebrush
through mountains choked with springtime snow
we come at last to the arms of the ocean
a salty kiss so deep and cold...

(Copyright Thomas J Burbach 2006)

much peace,

More of the Same

She claims to recall in the August blues/
in the painful sweep of a windswept sky/
a young man stuck in an old man's shoes
and summer rushing by

In the wide expanse behind, there's three years dead and gone
but I can see salvation in the twisting hills of pine...
The car door slams in the rising wind/
In your skin is born the light/
of a thousand prairie suns as I go
down into this night

I recall your innocence/
your blond hair scattered across the grass/
the sweet release of your last defense
and the sorrow slow to pass

She called me beautiful...said everything's all right
but all I ever was was blinded in the antiseptic light
Over the lake, under the sky
with nothing in between...
our bodies and the rain and stars
the elegant machine

...and a young girl stands in her summer shoes
at the water's edge on the edge of night
and a young man loses these old man blues....

(Copyright 2009, Thomas J Burbach)

much peace

Christ's Church on Earth

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090520/ap_on_re_eu/eu_ireland_catholic_abuse

Please note that much of the evidence in the report cited above came from Vatican records. Again, these weren't files hidden away in individual church or school basements, but records kept at corporate headquarters, records of crime and abuse filed, stored and hidden by the fearless and noble leaders of God's kingdom on earth. The richest and most powerful were more than happy to sacrifice the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children to protect their own lily white Roman robes. They are all of them honorable men, no?

much peace,