Dear Mr. Hemingway

Dear,
Mr. Hemingway

I would have been more like F. Scott Fitzgerald, so I know the two of us would have butted heads.

However, underneath that bravado was a sensitive soul, who was chief among my friends in letters.

You reamed masculinity. You hunted Rhinoceri, you hunted Lions, Tigers, Bears. I'm sure you shot a few Ostriches in your day. I'm completely different than you, except in my hatred of war and injustice. I know working in the Red Cross brought your insights into the Spanish Civil War. And Pilar is a masterpiece of a character; you are the only storyteller I've read who knew to do flashbacks in the form of oral stories. I hadn't borrowed that from you--- Organically, I figured it out for myself. But yours are just as organic.

Had the two of us ever met, you'd probably say of me "He's a polymath." Meaning I'd be able to write in several different genres. Though, I wrote them well, you were the master of the novel. Though, I hadn't read a good short story from you yet.

The Old Man and the Sea is my treasure. It inspired my own "The Riddle in the Sea". Just in its titular appeal, however it was the story Steinbeck's Pearl was aiming to be. The Pearl is boring. The Old Man in the Sea kept me up reading all night.

We'd not get along, in that jesting manner. In my youthful days we'd have probably tangled once or twice. You'd win, of course. I was a lousy fighter, but don't tell me that when I was a young buck. I was a good wrestler, pound for pound. That was about it. I actually subdued an opponent once who was trying to kill me--- a legit madman.

However, I respect you as a man and as a sincere friend. I am not a drinker, a smoker, a fighter. And when I say we would not get along, I mean it only in the sense that we're cut from different chords. Not maliciously. For I'd be honored to have gotten beat by Mr. Hemingway in a brawl. 

Sure enough, though, when all is said and done, you were a good man. A knowledgeable man. A respectable journalist. A novelist and a scholar.

I could never craft a story as well as you. My best stories aren't able to match yours. I do not conjure your ghost, so rest in peace Mr. Hemingway. Only, that I hope it wouldn't offend you that I say we wouldn't get along. It wouldn't be violent, nor bitter. It'd just be like two birds, a blackbird and a robin.

I the blackbird, the Poet crying of injustices in the land. You the Red Breasted Robin, walking like a man, and the sign of a budding spring.

Dear Miss Austen

Dear,
Jane

I would be yours, Miss Austen, in a heartbeat. I would sweep you off your feet. However, I was born two centuries late.

What happened to you was not fair. It is everything wrong with consenting before marriage. I am not ignorant as to why you were in your situation. The weighing guilt on your conscience must have been much.
 
However, I do not blame you. He came into your life, made you fall in love--- and as the Song of Songs says, that love compels, when awakened, that the grass be your bed, and the oaks your roof. To run off to some place private, and to fill up on loves
 
Why that man got to marry, and you didn't--- I am sorry. If I could be Colonel Brandon, awaiting on you, I would be your suitor in a heartbeat. I understand you danced, and I understand the scandalous things you did.

You were in love. Yet, who you fell in love with, that Wickham, you were Lydia. Though you didn't run off, and start a life with your suitor--- to you it would have been better because then you'd have the dignity of being married to the man you loved.

I'm not ignorant. I too have similar guilt; and I bear my shame in this day and age, like yours. Where such a thing was frowned upon, and it was a constant barrage of shame.

In today's age, you would get along just fine. Nobody would fault you for your sin. I cannot say I prefer it that way, only that if you lived in my day, we'd be charitable, and I would find you.
 
In your day, the scandal produced a woman who was in love, and broken for she was not requited in that love. What you gave of your love, I understand though never having been in love myself.

It's not quite true, I was in love with an idea. I fell in love with Peace. I had called it "Love", when in fact it was peace. And that woman I had created, the one who changed my life for the better, was of course Jorgia. The phantom of my daydreams, but very real. And making love to her was never something for which I felt guilty.

I understood from that moment, the brilliance of love. The closure of having made love to someone who will always be there.

There is something beautiful in knowing it is right. And I'm sure you felt that. But, he left you.

The true love story of Jane Austen is a common one; there comes a man with ill intents who sweeps the woman off her feet. And sweeping her, he takes from her the thing he loves most. And then he goes forward.

However, you never gave up on love. You never got bitter or jaded. You, like I, waited and waited, writing our stories. And those gave us the closure.
 
And Jane, you made your five hundred pounds from your Novels. A sum which you used well. But you died so young, for this world was unworthy of you. It had taken from you everything, for a moment's passion.

Dear Mr. Tolstoy

Dear,
Mr. Tolstoy

I don't think any author shaped me more, outside of the Bible, than you.

I had taken from your work, that the movements of history are inevitable, and that great men are not made, but rather are the mouthpiece of an entire civilization.

Conversely, as Napoleon snuffed his tobacco, I realized I did not want to be him. I did not want to be the mouthpiece of a movement. Rather, I wanted to be the mouthpiece for my own, individual values. Those I have been taught by the Church and Jesus Christ.

I must say, your moment of clarity with regard to finding God, portrayed in Levin in Anna Karenina, is the same I had. The fact that life is meaningless without God, but I could never accept this life were meaningless. Not with all its beauty, and the power of love.

Anna was a flawless character. I find her realistic, and much like a woman who would do those things. I once told my aunt, after getting the book, that Anna was the good guy. I don't think you wrote good or bad guys, but rather just wrote true to life.

The way you get inside of a character's mind---often understanding there isn't much mind to get into with some of them---it is fascinating to me, how you have that insight.
 
When I read Jules Verne, whom perhaps you have read at some point, I don't know... I see the antithetical to our way of thinking. Though your way is not my way. It is just a large, sweeping breath over all things under the heavens. We must explore it in our thought life, whatever is in our power to understand.

Yet, Jules Verne's characters were so in the moment. There was no internal thought life, no real thought at all, yet in them was the knowledge of a certain man's way. Of experiencing, as recently a man told me to read Ned Land and the Dugongs again. So I did. He said it was realistic. And sure enough, Ned Land was realistic.

Yet in that moment, I understood you understood the person who thinks like Jules Verne. In your characters, you express their thoughts--- Somehow you understand them. To a person like me, I might look upon them and think, "Where are their thoughts?" Yet, their thoughts are in their experiences. Wholly in the moment. Drenched in that challenge with the dugong.

It is not a blessing of mine anymore to be so filled with life. For, I am awakened to my genius. A fertile imagination I had at one point, where all I could do is imagine stories and epic confrontations of war. Now, my mind is fertile and filled with the literature of the past. The characters and great understandings of other human beings.

It is not that people cannot think-- It is, as you lay out, they choose not to think. They involve themselves in the moment, like Ned Land, and are so free of thought, yet governed by their whims and emotions. And you understand that, while I have a difficult time understanding it. And perhaps so do you, yet you have found, what is perhaps, a Rosetta Stone for unlocking other minds.

Dear Ray Bradbury

Dear,
Ray

I just read what is, probably, one of my strangest stories. It is the one titled "Utopia".  You had once said not to mess with a younger author's work. Or in your words, "It is a sin to alter a young author's work."

May this gem be the work you talk about, as it is rife with preaching, rife with my cultish religion I had in the past. Rife with all sorts of cringe worthy dialogue. At parts it bored me. Yet, it expressed everything I wanted to say at the time.

How much further we go in society, where Christians are maligned and people are made into laughing stocks. I thought you would find it cute that Baryon found God by discovering Infinity. How modern minds, like Richard Dawkins, would be upset by it, for to him science could only prove God doesn't exist. Yet, to Baryon, the Queen telling him to prove God doesn't exist by proving infinity doesn't either, I found clever.

Yet, I read it with Mr. Dawkins in view. And I might have had his mind reading it, and felt myself flushing at some of the more preachy parts. Yet, as I read it as if I were him, I found the work faithful. It explained all the moral problems of my religion, as it ought to have. It showed why men would fight, and what the religion was that God had Israel wipe out.

You say not to try to change the world with a piece of literature. I do not change it, nor do I try.

Contained in my work is uncensored truths. I use the forbidden words to arouse a dialogue about speech. And I myself was a proponent of censorship once. For that I am deeply ashamed. I tell you that, personally, because I know you would forgive me. And I tell you that because my great work, Utopia, is a salvo across the bow of tyrants like he I spoke to. It is the world they march toward.

I think you would love my work. It is rife with metaphors, unconscious and well worth the horror story. As Utopia is a horror story. It is a horror story of one of these blasted billionaires gaining power, and exercising their brand of religion on the rest of us. We don't want it.
 
I do not know what to do with the preaching, but since it is so old, and I wrote it while young, I will not alter it. As perhaps though I broke some of the rules, it was more fertile than my period of stupidity. I would recant those words---which perhaps I spoke in a dream, I don't know. I begin to think I had spoken them in a dream.

I do not conjure your spirit, Ray. Rest in peace. But I speak to your letters, the man I know through your many interviews and many books. I say this, having a compendium of knowledge of the literatures, those I found acceptable. What I am afraid of is a man trying to make Utopia. Even in my Utopian novels, there was a distinct realization that we ought not strive to perfect man's government, for in their perfection--- well, it is just true that men are never going to be perfect.

And there in lies the problem, of course. We forget the agrarian truths--- the Grass Roots of Knowledge---and we replace them with something mechanical. Utopia is that. It is the replacing of the Grass Roots with a cult.

In that same book I counterbalance two societies, one being a disaster and the other an ideal. Yet the preaching of the work Utopia--- You had said, "It is a sin to alter a young author's work." Frankly, your approval on that project is important to me. I am not being a spiritist--- you cannot counsel me one way or another from the grave. But, it is my best, being perhaps my weakest output as a writer. Because it is written with a cognizance of trying to fix something; to save the world. But in that work, I taught myself so to speak. Where the story is strong, and the preaching weak;  but perhaps that weakness is the strongest part of the book.

Dear Author

Dear,
C. S. Lewis

I know you are resting. Rest easy, I do not make conference with the dead. But I shall speak to you, the you I know in your books, and I shall say a few words.

First off, that I do not believe the world is flat. And secondly, that I do not worship Christ because he can make the world a better place.

The world is a faltering star, slowly waning into a state of evil. A state of wickedness. At my age, men wear masks because they are wicked. I wear a mask because I have spoken wrong, on many occasions.

The faith is waning in these years, and the more I read, the more I realize Christ is true.

It's not because Confucius or Aristotle haven't made cogent moral philosophies, but that what they had gotten right, it was taught and demonstrated by Christ. Mozi and Lao Tsu are complimentary to Christ, proving quite objectively that his morals are discoverable. As solid as the Tele Dan Stele or Great Isaiah Scroll, these moral evidences are precious to me, that I had chosen the right religion.

But, understand that Christ would make a better world. And as my world is waning into its age of "Science", Science which steals every man's liberty, I find the principles of faith, that there is a God, would free me from my duties of wearing masks, and would stop me from being censored and having my words erased from the common public forums.

Is there a group of Witches who writhe and control the earth? I do not know. You write about them in your Space Trilogy. And though it is my least favorite of your books, the faith you have to believe despite everything is paramount.

I would believe no matter what. Because as we both know, whether the earth is round or flat, or spins on Satan's finger, there is a God. And Jesus' words prove Him to be that God.

I have to admit, I fear being alone. Much of what I wrote was to make less doubtful the tenets of my religion. To make clear that there was a flood---

How I do not know. I liken it to some spiritual event. Where literal water fell from the sky, and flooded the whole earth. Maybe several billion years ago. Maybe man had been upon this earth for eons, and maybe there is a cycle of birth and death, where man's civilizations perish in fire.

When you wrote, Mr. Lewis, it was paramount that people believed, just like it is today. But, today we traipse close to war. In your time we did as well, but now, my happy existence is threatened by the belligerence of nations.

I am powerless to stop it. I am not its catalyst. Rather, its cataloger. And as faith disappears the world becomes like Philip K. Dick's story I just read. A world where men are unable to ideate and project into the future. They are unable to think critically, and only details are given to those who strive in the higher castes.
 
And because of this censorship, because of this ignorance, some man finds the Robot, and he gives it life. He is taught that it was a moralist who destroyed happy living, but it was---as of modernity---the robotic hive clusters of men radicalized by propaganda.

Freedom I espouse. Let man put any word to ink. That is speech. But men play the dreams of Morpheus---They watch so much Television that their dreams turn to Black and White, as my Grandfather's were. And they play those dreams and corrupt themselves.

Yet, it is censorship that is destroying us.



Dear,
Billy Joe

I have to say a few words to you. You're my favorite modern artist. In that you are not a modern artist, but sing of the ancient subjects of war, political theory and romance.

Myself, I am obsessed with words. Words of all kinds. Censorship is my enemy. All forms of it.

I love ideas. I love notions. I love all forms of poetry---even the ones I disagree with.
 
Make a well orated lambast of my religion, and I will applaud. Which you do well, and I see those same faults in my churches.

I love words, a truly spoken word. But only when such word is true. However, much falsehood needs to be tolerated, so men can attain to the bigger truths.

Learning is a journey, from whence we come from some ideological framework, and we multiply ideas until the mere breadth of ideation becomes fascinating. The communication of difficult concepts, the predictions people make, and how they can be more accurate than any prognosticator's.

We are not fortune tellers, we writers, poets, bards. Yet, we often understand the truths the world would like to forget. Those it would like to hide. How many foolish things had we said, before we got to a point where truth was recognized?

Freedom of speech is America's most sacred value. More sacred than religion. For, religion in the Middle Ages suppressed the truth, just as much as any Fascist or Communist regime. And there is a reason to be afraid of a government regulated by the church.
 
Though I would never be a Mormon, they too must exist, as with all Arians. As forbidding them only makes it less possible for another man to express truth. For, if we regulate our ideas, men who have truth cannot speak, for the government will be a obelisk which defines everything for the masses. And therefore, it being a black, calculating machine bent on power, it will never let truth be spoken again.

I despise many things---but with speech and not violence I combat it. My words are the exorcising of my demons. Those strong inclinations I have for war and justice. The same ones that make you adealistic. I understand you... For I am you. I see injustice in everything, and every establishment.

Unlike you, I understand it is a necessary evil the world must tolerate--- Yet when those princely powers rise up, and strip from the people their voice, then truth ceases. Truth must be allowed to exist--- then so must falsehood, for pursuit of the truth means much falsehoods must be entertained. For no man is perfect in his knowledge and intellect, and by a congruence of many voices, truth is pursued.
 
Speech is America's most sacred virtue. The seconds only Privacy and Jurisprudence. For racial equality, religion, the press and all other sacred rights are borne from this one. And speech is also the vehicle by which we correct what is wrong with everything else. And I commend you on your use of it, though a few F words are sprinkled in. I myself have dabbled with it.



Dear,
Ray

I just read what is, probably, one of my strangest stories. It is the one titled "Utopia".  You had once said not to mess with a younger author's work. Or in your words, "It is a sin to alter a young author's work."

May this gem be the work you talk about, as it is rife with preaching, rife with my cultish religion I had in the past. Rife with all sorts of cringe worthy dialogue. At parts it bored me. Yet, it expressed everything I wanted to say at the time.

How much further we go in society, where Christians are maligned and people are made into laughing stocks. I thought you would find it cute that Baryon found God by discovering Infinity. How modern minds, like Richard Dawkins, would be upset by it, for to him science could only prove God doesn't exist. Yet, to Baryon, the Queen telling him to prove God doesn't exist by proving infinity doesn't either, I found clever.

Yet, I read it with Mr. Dawkins in view. And I might have had his mind reading it, and felt myself flushing at some of the more preachy parts. Yet, as I read it as if I were him, I found the work faithful. It explained all the moral problems of my religion, as it ought to have. It showed why men would fight, and what the religion was that God had Israel wipe out.

You say not to try to change the world with a piece of literature. I do not change it, nor do I try.

Contained in my work is uncensored truths. I use the forbidden words to arouse a dialogue about speech. And I myself was a proponent of censorship once. For that I am deeply ashamed. I tell you that, personally, because I know you would forgive me. And I tell you that because my great work, Utopia, is a salvo across the bow of tyrants like he I spoke to. It is the world they march toward.

I think you would love my work. It is rife with metaphors, unconscious and well worth the horror story. As Utopia is a horror story. It is a horror story of one of these blasted billionaires gaining power, and exercising their brand of religion on the rest of us. We don't want it.
 
I do not know what to do with the preaching, but since it is so old, and I wrote it while young, I will not alter it. As perhaps though I broke some of the rules, it was more fertile than my period of stupidity. I would recant those words---which perhaps I spoke in a dream, I don't know. I begin to think I had spoken them in a dream.

I do not conjure your spirit, Ray. Rest in peace. But I speak to your letters, the man I know through your many interviews and many books. I say this, having a compendium of knowledge of the literatures, those I found acceptable. What I am afraid of is a man trying to make Utopia. Even in my Utopian novels, there was a distinct realization that we ought not strive to perfect man's government, for in their perfection--- well, it is just true that men are never going to be perfect.

And there in lies the problem, of course. We forget the agrarian truths--- the Grass Roots of Knowledge---and we replace them with something mechanical. Utopia is that. It is the replacing of the Grass Roots with a cult.

In that same book I counterbalance two societies, one being a disaster and the other an ideal. Yet the preaching of the work Utopia--- You had said, "It is a sin to alter a young author's work." Frankly, your approval on that project is important to me. I am not being a spiritist--- you cannot counsel me one way or another from the grave. But, it is my best, being perhaps my weakest output as a writer. Because it is written with a cognizance of trying to fix something; to save the world. But in that work, I taught myself so to speak. Where the story is strong, and the preaching weak;  but perhaps that weakness is the strongest part of the book.



Dear,
Mr. Tolstoy

I don't think any author shaped me more, outside of the Bible, than you.

I had taken from your work, that the movements of history are inevitable, and that great men are not made, but rather are the mouthpiece of an entire civilization.

Conversely, as Napoleon snuffed his tobacco, I realized I did not want to be him. I did not want to be the mouthpiece of a movement. Rather, I wanted to be the mouthpiece for my own, individual values. Those I have been taught by the Church and Jesus Christ.

I must say, your moment of clarity with regard to finding God, portrayed in Levin in Anna Karenina, is the same I had. The fact that life is meaningless without God, but I could never accept this life were meaningless. Not with all its beauty, and the power of love.

Anna was a flawless character. I find her realistic, and much like a woman who would do those things. I once told my aunt, after getting the book, that Anna was the good guy. I don't think you wrote good or bad guys, but rather just wrote true to life.

The way you get inside of a character's mind---often understanding there isn't much mind to get into with some of them---it is fascinating to me, how you have that insight.
 
When I read Jules Verne, whom perhaps you have read at some point, I don't know... I see the antithetical to our way of thinking. Though your way is not my way. It is just a large, sweeping breath over all things under the heavens. We must explore it in our thought life, whatever is in our power to understand.

Yet, Jules Verne's characters were so in the moment. There was no internal thought life, no real thought at all, yet in them was the knowledge of a certain man's way. Of experiencing, as recently a man told me to read Ned Land and the Dugongs again. So I did. He said it was realistic. And sure enough, Ned Land was realistic.

Yet in that moment, I understood you understood the person who thinks like Jules Verne. In your characters, you express their thoughts--- Somehow you understand them. To a person like me, I might look upon them and think, "Where are their thoughts?" Yet, their thoughts are in their experiences. Wholly in the moment. Drenched in that challenge with the dugong.

It is not a blessing of mine anymore to be so filled with life. For, I am awakened to my genius. A fertile imagination I had at one point, where all I could do is imagine stories and epic confrontations of war. Now, my mind is fertile and filled with the literature of the past. The characters and great understandings of other human beings.

It is not that people cannot think-- It is, as you lay out, they choose not to think. They involve themselves in the moment, like Ned Land, and are so free of thought, yet governed by their whims and emotions. And you understand that, while I have a difficult time understanding it. And perhaps so do you, yet you have found, what is perhaps, a Rosetta Stone for unlocking other minds.




Dear,
Jane

I would be yours, Miss Austen, in a heartbeat. I would sweep you off your feet. However, I was born two centuries late.

What happened to you was not fair. It is everything wrong with consenting before marriage. I am not ignorant as to why you were in your situation. The weighing guilt on your conscience must have been much.
 
However, I do not blame you. He came into your life, made you fall in love--- and as the Song of Songs says, that love compels, when awakened, that the grass be your bed, and the oaks your roof. To run off to some place private, and to fill up on loves
 
Why that man got to marry, and you didn't--- I am sorry. If I could be Colonel Brandon, awaiting on you, I would be your suitor in a heartbeat. I understand you danced, and I understand the scandalous things you did.

You were in love. Yet, who you fell in love with, that Wickham, you were Lydia. Though you didn't run off, and start a life with your suitor--- to you it would have been better because then you'd have the dignity of being married to the man you loved.

I'm not ignorant. I too have similar guilt; and I bear my shame in this day and age, like yours. Where such a thing was frowned upon, and it was a constant barrage of shame.

In today's age, you would get along just fine. Nobody would fault you for your sin. I cannot say I prefer it that way, only that if you lived in my day, we'd be charitable, and I would find you.
 
In your day, the scandal produced a woman who was in love, and broken for she was not requited in that love. What you gave of your love, I understand though never having been in love myself.

It's not quite true, I was in love with an idea. I fell in love with Peace. I had called it "Love", when in fact it was peace. And that woman I had created, the one who changed my life for the better, was of course Jorgia. The phantom of my daydreams, but very real. And making love to her was never something for which I felt guilty.

I understood from that moment, the brilliance of love. The closure of having made love to someone who will always be there.

There is something beautiful in knowing it is right. And I'm sure you felt that. But, he left you.

The true love story of Jane Austen is a common one; there comes a man with ill intents who sweeps the woman off her feet. And sweeping her, he takes from her the thing he loves most. And then he goes forward.

However, you never gave up on love. You never got bitter or jaded. You, like I, waited and waited, writing our stories. And those gave us the closure.
 
And Jane, you made your five hundred pounds from your Novels. A sum which you used well. But you died so young, for this world was unworthy of you. It had taken from you everything, for a moment's passion.



Dear,
Mr. Hemingway

I would have been more like F. Scott Fitzgerald, so I know the two of us would have butted heads.

However, underneath that bravado was a sensitive soul, who was chief among my friends in letters.

You reamed masculinity. You hunted Rhinoceri, you hunted Lions, Tigers, Bears. I'm sure you shot a few Ostriches in your day. I'm completely different than you, except in my hatred of war and injustice. I know working in the Red Cross brought your insights into the Spanish Civil War. And Pilar is a masterpiece of a character; you are the only storyteller I've read who knew to do flashbacks in the form of oral stories. I hadn't borrowed that from you--- Organically, I figured it out for myself. But yours are just as organic.

Had the two of us ever met, you'd probably say of me "He's a polymath." Meaning I'd be able to write in several different genres. Though, I wrote them well, you were the master of the novel. Though, I hadn't read a good short story from you yet.

The Old Man and the Sea is my treasure. It inspired my own "The Riddle in the Sea". Just in its titular appeal, however it was the story Steinbeck's Pearl was aiming to be. The Pearl is boring. The Old Man in the Sea kept me up reading all night.

We'd not get along, in that jesting manner. In my youthful days we'd have probably tangled once or twice. You'd win, of course. I was a lousy fighter, but don't tell me that when I was a young buck. I was a good wrestler, pound for pound. That was about it. I actually subdued an opponent once who was trying to kill me--- a legit madman.

However, I respect you as a man and as a sincere friend. I am not a drinker, a smoker, a fighter. And when I say we would not get along, I mean it only in the sense that we're cut from different chords. Not maliciously. For I'd be honored to have gotten beat by Mr. Hemingway in a brawl. 

Sure enough, though, when all is said and done, you were a good man. A knowledgeable man. A respectable journalist. A novelist and a scholar.

I could never craft a story as well as you. My best stories aren't able to match yours. I do not conjure your ghost, so rest in peace Mr. Hemingway. Only, that I hope it wouldn't offend you that I say we wouldn't get along. It wouldn't be violent, nor bitter. It'd just be like two birds, a blackbird and a robin.

I the blackbird, the Poet crying of injustices in the land. You the Red Breasted Robin, walking like a man, and the sign of a budding spring.




Dear,
Thomas Chatterton

I had just recently become acquainted with you, from reading my Southey work. He had patronized you as a saint. Though, your life didn't seem so saintly, Southey obviously felt you were worthy to gain admittance to the Celestial City in his Vision of Judgment.

Often we authors contrive schemes, to get us published. To make ourselves rich. You had died young, as a teenager, by committing suicide. I can understand the sentiment of wanting to end your own life, when hunger and want are daily a part of it. Need you have waited the month or two to be discovered? I'd say most likely not.

Had you just gained possession of your work, instead of write in a damn pseudonym, you may have obtained all that you want. Or, like is the case with me, you could have been trying to move into a sphere of class which couldn't want you. I am aware that by name America is free, but it is riddled with the same class struggles you yourself felt.
 
Was it that your work was just discovered? Or was it that they knew you were dead, and now could bestow honor upon you without giving you the riches you deserved? Had you not assumed a pseudonym, perhaps none of your work would survive today. As it is, I can read your entire work, and it is collected, and easier to obtain than Robert Southey's.

I don't understand you--- not now when I am wise. Why didn't you just put your real name on your writing? And then you could have prospered immediately, rather than sacrifice them to the alter of a pseudonym? Did you have some grand scheme of design, where they would discover your name, and know you had written masterpieces? Well, they did, and you hadn't earned from them.
 
Yet, it is not your fault. I would never blame you. For, I too am suffering under a different, but equally vexing problem. In my age, Mr. Chatterton, nobody reads poetry anymore. So, even if the greatest poet wrote, or the greatest in two generations, none would know of it. But I will not commit suicide. Because I am stubborn, and I will eat, drink, and be vexed so that my old age proves I was a wise man. For there is yet much to discover in this world, and I am not privy to leaving it until I had exhausted all of its vanity, and satisfied myself that Solomon was right.

However, I do not want the world. Only to understand it. To live among it. To know its great belle lettres, to familiarize myself with all of its hidden compartments. To know every culture, and their peoples. Only so I can save some of them, and therefore have the company I so lack at this current moment.

Truthfully, I want to die, but am not one who wishes to take on the Tradition of Crea, as Montaigne puts it. I don't like suicide. Life is too precious to waste, even though I am poor. And likely I am happier poor, so that way I can say, "LORD, I am among the poor." And receive my blessing. Yet, let me never be so poor that I steal. Nor so rich that I forget the LORD.

Truthfully, your story was one of few poets who I read. As your tragic life is more poetic than Mr. Rowley's forgeries. Why did you have to do that?

Yet, to earn a wage from my poetry, I would not despair. To have a small flock of people by which I could shepherd through these illiberal times, I would not despair. To have my bookshelf, and the occasional portion of flesh, I am satisfied. Really I am because I am not poor. And my office is like a monk's, compiling through wisdom to draw out Christ. As the monks would be in the same office I myself am in. And I am in a little monastery, isolated from everyone. Surrounded by a few family members. I am not unhappy.

Would my society come and burn my books? Likely not, so I am satisfied with them, and the compendium of knowledge on this internet. Do I want success? Only for many people to read my work. I do enjoy solitude. But I enjoy a woman's company, too. Which I have yet to obtain. I could be satisfied writing my works and enjoying the company of a woman. Nor am I mad like I once was, as that demon had been exorcised from me.

I am like a sage monk, living in his reclusiveness, compiling odes. Yet, let me be famous only for the sake of having not wasted my time writing things nobody would read or enjoy. To have a steady salary from my writing, I would enjoy it. To eat from this labor. Yet now I am satisfied, for this one moment. Yet, why did you have to use a pseudonym?

Perhaps it is like me, where my class prevents me from being disposed to write high poetry. Perhaps the publishers are waiting for me to commit suicide, so they can pounce on my craft and pick at it like vultures. That way my rotten name isn't among it. They are like that, you know? I don't think you died in vain, as you would have waited many years before you were famous. They knew you had died, and wanted to create a narrative with your life.

Mine won't be that way. I shall live stubbornly, and they shall suffer. I will make them suffer. For they aren't prying this from me. And when I die, they will be forgotten. 




Dear, 
Coca Cola

I love Coke. I always will. I can't drink it right now for health issues, not political. But, I'll always be loyal to your brand; unless you change the formula! Don't do that. 

It's your freedom to say what you want. It's my freedom to disagree with you. I in no way condone homosexuality or race hustling. I say Homosexuality is a sin. And it's an abomination. But, if I boycotted everyone for a political difference,---well, that's just not right and I'd be boycotting just about everyone. 

And I do love Coke. So, there's no reason I can't enjoy your product and still retain my values as a Conservative. I haven't stopped watching the MLB either; I'm a Phillie Die Hard to the day I die. Fourth Generation Fan, whose Grandfather was a Philly Pro on the Tamaqua Bulldogs. So, I'm Philly for life.
 
This will pass. People will get tired of being so zealous, and come back to their senses. I'm afraid boycotts aren't going to do anything but make this culture war more militant. Let's all, Conservative and Liberal, just allow people to believe what they want. It doesn't have to be this way. 

Should you say to me, "You cannot publish, nor earn your bread from your writing", unfortunately this is the power of money, and the engine of Capitalism. And it needs to be broken. On that, I am against you.

Because your voice is stronger for your dollars, and mine is silenced, on that note I am against you. But I will not Boycott you. For, you have freedom and so do I. What point is it for me to infringe upon you your voice? Should you infringe upon mine, and boycott mine--- Well, then you are making yourself an enemy when I have been your most loyal fan.

Can I, and you, both sell our products, our brands, our ideologies? Without infringing upon one another, or stepping on one another's toes? Can I earn my bread, and you yours, without one of us trying to silence the other?
 
Not that boycotts are bad. Should you sell the parts of infants, and brew them into your potions, then I suppose I would have reason to boycott you. But, the only thing you do is exercise your free speech. And I exercise mine.
 
It is annoying to me to be told to "Be less white." What does that even mean? But, I've heard people call blacks "Niggers", and I had not cast them from my life. Nor have I boycotted them. 

We all possess our demons. We all have bad ideas. And, to get past this destructive time in our history, it would require it that I don't boycott you. And you don't boycott me.
 
That conservatives still drink Coke. And liberals, if they enjoy my product---and they will---enjoy it. As, there were plenty of times that movies I loved said things which were uncouth. When Star Wars made Darth Vader Jesus, or South Park portrayed God as a Purple Beast.

This is no different. Family Guy I hate. If given the power, I would censor them. The same as liberals would censor me. But, we ought to both understand that it is our freedom, to mutually hate one another's creativity.
 
Yet I do counsel you, that you have it in your power to silence me. And should you silence me---you and Google, and Facebook, and all the other businesses---that is Corporations taking control of the Government. And that is the very Definition of Fascism.

And if the Right can be guilty of it, so can the Left. And with that I leave you to consider.



Dear,
2Pac

I don't commune with the dead. Not as a medium. I don't conjure you for a concert. Let me just speak to your legacy.

2pacolypse, it might just happen. People of color fighting in the streets. Urban warfare. Molotov Cocktails.

I am white. But I suffer against the same institutions you do. And I am not published. Your voice is heard. Everyone recognizes you. You were rich. And I am poor, on welfare, unable to earn a living off of my work. 

In the Slavic Nations it was communism which they reared upon their haunches, and fought for. You don't realize it, but your work is of the same vein as the Communist, frustrated with society. My Marxian background, loving Marx from a young man---now I despise him---makes me want to fight for my prosperity. Makes me want to riot.

Yet, you are published. And I am not. You had the surplus of a king, as the King of Rap. I---at this moment---am poor. Is it race that holds me back? I am of the Race called Superior, born with blonde hair, a German. I wish I were Jewish, and perhaps I am. But it is not my race that holds me back. I could easily pass as that Holy Race which is called "Privileged" by blacks.

Lincoln did not free the slaves for politics' sake. He simply could have never written the Emancipation Proclamation, and allowed slavery to continue. That would have certainly fixed the problem. As the south wished to break apart from the North because of slavery. Lincoln was also an avid abolitionist. 

No, you are just a relic of hate, in an industry which pimps blacks and turns them into savages. No longer are you Kings and Princes like the Duke, Nat King Cole and Louis Armstrong. You're the Pigmy in the zoo. You were not a prophet. And sure enough, you'll have your 2pacolypse. I may be killed by some wandering zealot, radicalized by your music.

The ghettos are bad. But how much of your music is the very vein which emboldens them? How many kids are killed while your music blares? Where is the peace, when in the 1920s, men could safely sleep out in Harlem's fire chutes.

No, I am on welfare. I cannot get a job, or else my sustenance is taken from me. I may lose my necessary health insurance. As that's the real leverage over me. The policies that hold you back are the same ones holding me back. 

If you wanted to fix the world, if you wanted to make your streets safer, if you wanted peace... you failed. But, you continually rap of Race War like a two bit Nazi Krout. And remember, you had the whole world at your fingertips. You were a rich man. But you couldn't let it go. It tied to you, and the anger of your riches, the fact that you proved yourself wrong... and it screams in your lyrics, the cognitive dissonance that America is prosperous and wealthy, and you had your bit. And you got killed by a drug feud. Either that, or you faked your death, and escaped.



Dear,
Mr. Twain

I must say I like you better as a humorist. The last fifty pages of Huckleberry Finn is hysterical. The fact that it is the point where the Angry White Man of the time finds out he loves Mr. Jim.

I'm currently reading A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. It's more to my liking. And The Prince and the Pauper. More to my liking, as Huckleberry Finn was sort of dark, and trust me I followed your advice to not make the river a metaphor. Maybe I'm just stupid, and you really wanted to. But if I didn't catch your sardonic humor, maybe I should be shot for not seeing a metaphor.

To explain my current time, I see everyone is afraid. And nobody is willing to laugh. The Humor of Huckleberry Finn was the point of the novel... we all need to lighten up. We all need to laugh a little. Because that laughter makes us all on an equal footing.

The racist part of our society, the one implanted in me by the racism of the left---for they make me angry because I was not racist before they started threatening my happy society---I must say I am racist a little. But I wasn't. Not until Cancel Culture became synonymous with Blackness. When they removed "Nigger" from your work, that is when I became racist.

I am racist when I look at our current forms of literature, describing colonialism as a boogieman, and cannibalistic squalor is regarded as superior to law and order. I am no better than the people in Black Lives Matter. I get swept up in stupid movements. I wanted Derick Chauvin to go to jail---but, they sentenced him three times for murder. For one crime, they sentenced the man like he had committed three murders. And I thought to myself, "This is the thing that enslaves. Why Black Lives have to Matter, because of these kinds of excessive sentences."

Truthfully, I will write battle for battle the Civil War to erase this vein of racism in me. This new vein that hadn't existed until "Blackness" became synonymous with wrecking the society I loved. I wish, to my very core, that blacks could have been freed with Jim, but their slaveholders have developed weapons such as this fanaticism to keep them in chains. So much so that they will commit suicide.

I read Fredrick Douglass---it is weird, but he made me a little racist. He made me recognize the bonds of illiteracy. He made me recognize the bonds of savagery. I am not racist toward Fredrick Douglass, but I am racist when I saw a wrestling match between two boys. And I saw in the one boy, who was black, the movements of his slavery. To that I say that there is something which holds the black culture back. Because I watched a state champion who was also black wrestle like he were David. And the bonds of oppression were not on him.

What makes me racist is seeing this weakness of character being flouted as if it were superior to the society I love. Yet, I am impoverished by it too.

Truly, I know something needs to be fought for. But a man like Thomas Sowell I am not racist toward. You would not know him, but he is a man---possibly one of the most intelligent on the planet---who speaks to the true slavery. Developed in the mindset. Now I get close to Nietzsche, but may I draw forth one wisdome from him. We must shed ourselves of the Slave Morality. The one that has us rioting in the streets, and believing our prosperity lies in the hands of some force, economic or racial. That one bit I agree with him.

Yet, the Slave Morality which Nietzsche preaches, the one of the Jews, is freedom. It is trust, and equity---the very thing my Brothers and Sisters of that Beautiful Race fight for. For if I am racist, it is against the sluggishness and timidity which plagues my brothers and sisters. But they will get no gain of it, by trying to steal it from me. For I am impoverished of it, too. And perhaps that is what makes me racist, is that I have very little of what they want, yet these wonderful creations of God wish to steal from me what I already lack and am impoverished of.



Dear,
Herr Nietzsche 

My favorite story of you, is the one where you went insane. A man was beating on the stallion, and though the stallion was larger, stronger, faster, superior in every way, the man subdued it. And you cried out, "I understand you!" I don't believe you said this on your own accord, but saw the way religion took strong human beings, and subdued it like that horse.

Yet, imagine humanity without the horse. The most beautiful thing in creation is man's relationship with the beasts. Beasts thirty times our size, man has tamed and befriended, has ridden, has taken to war, has held in his hands. From vipers to lions, man has befriended all the beasts of the field. Could there, Nietzsche, be this cooperation between man and beast if the animals did not subdue? Could there be the beauty of the friendship, between a man and his horse, or a man and his dog?

Such it is, that even the animals obey a morality which you do not understand. The morality of camaraderie, kindness, love and affection. The morality of trust, and cooperation. Where the horse has helped man grow his crops for thousands of years, and helped us supply ourselves with food. They have given us their meat, they have given us their time and energy. Such it is, that sacrifice has created a natural bond between man and animal. One which you would destroy. For if the horse had broken his restraints, and if the horse had never been tamed, it would starve in the wild like you did. Or, it would simply be without the ability to ride. There would never be friendship nor loyalty between it and its owner.

No, you went insane, knowing religion had taken an animal, powerful and strong, and had subdued it. Rightly it ought to be subdued, for the horse is better use to itself and mankind if it is bridled by religion. If it does not buck the stranger off its back. For, by this cooperation, religion has tended to unify human beings, and allow us to forge relationships and common bonds. Religion must subdue the animal within us, if we are to ever form kind bonds, and trust and the superior elements of true happiness---which is love.

If we were an untamable stallion, being broken by religion and made weak by it---how would the horse ever improve its strength, except by the tow of a plough? It would never grow stronger. It would forever be weaker, fed on wild grasses instead of cultured grains. It would have no shelter---no barn to comfort and warm it. It would, rather, be in the fields roaming, in danger on every corner from hunters, wolves, lions and jackals.

Do you really wish this state on mankind? One where we throw off our bonds and keep ourselves tethered to a wild ferocity? Where now the horse is outmoded, and only the rich own them. They are obsolete, taken over by a machine and not a man. Your ultimate goal is to replace men with machines---cold, steel, hardened machines. For what flesh would the horse have, the most beautiful of God's creation, if all men needed were automobiles? We are quickly destroying the wildlife, and horses too would go extinct one day. Yet, you feel a kinship with the horse, being broken by the restraints its handler has given it. Should men had never progressed, it would still be common for a man to own a horse. Instead, we have machines.

Truly, your progression of man to machine is inevitable. For it is profitable for men to shed themselves of their flesh, and take on an iron bone. And like the horse, we shall die. We shan't be strong, but delivered to the wheel of fortune.

You died in an insane asylum. For this horse broke you. Yet its restraints are the thing that made it useful to us. And for progress to continue, it shall require that man go extinct, and never share love or witness beauty. To never understand those things, nor joy nor trust nor faith.

I speak to you, one who is dead. I do not call forth your specter, for you are dead. Yet, do understand that I love the horse more than you. I would see it nibble at the farmer's apple, take grains from his children's hand, and be embraced as an old friend toward the twilight of its life, than for it to be replaced by an automobile.



Dear,
Plato

I come to your concept, of the universality of Word. On it, the Apostle John staked Christ, that Christ is the Word Made Flesh.

I get scoffed at when I say this because atheists cannot perceive a world existing outside of our own realm of existence. Yet, as one of them noticed and I had seen it mentioned, the Aborigines would travel their distant paths, often never having travelled them. Yet, they could navigate them like an Ant does with scent, being blind; because of the Word, or nature within their mythology of Path Songs, they could safely and accurately travel to any part of the continent.

In this, is the power of Word that a man like Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, Gandhi, Siddhartha, Confucius or St. Augustine of Hippo and the Tribal Shaman on the Ivory Coast can communicate ideas. Not mere concrete things, as if language were reduced to a set of logical positives, where it must be materially understood before morally. As this kind of thinking builds atomic bombs, but it doesn't tell us we ought not use them. It doesn't give weight to death, or life, or birth, or love, or joy.

Yet, just as much as Euler's Identity, e^iπ = -1, which if viewed on a half sphere would be best visualized as negative mass expanding and shaping itself into the bottom half of the sphere, only nonexistent, reminiscent of negative space equal to the mass of the half sphere's positive space, making negative that nonexistent half equal in the limit by which the finite expansion of the infinites of calculus stop---just as much as that can be communicated, visualized or understood, so can concepts. Not everyone can understand the concepts. Not everyone is adept at understanding concepts which only a genius can represent or understand. Thus, with this limitation in the human imagination, what can stop us from believing in God?

There are people who cannot understand Euler's Identity. It is impossible to them, as a Horse's ability to understand calculus. As a horse can understand addition, and this beautiful truth shows the universality of the concepts, that even we two species can understand the basic logic of addition. Yet, the horse will not understand calculus, and some human beings cannot understand it. Does it mean the calculus or equation does not exist? Simply answering that question requires there to be a God. A creator. An architect. Because sufficient to itself, the concept exists regardless of whether we observe it. Meaning it is not our own minds which sustain it. So, it falls into the reality that other minds exist, which are superior even to our own.

However, what the Horse understands that many wise men do not, is the sanctity of its rider. It, being superior to the rider, will not trample her under foot. Because it abides by a system of morals present to it, that many of our most intelligent men and women cannot see. A principle of kindness, gentleness, love and trust. The man of superior discipline observes both things equally are true. Equally are self evident. Yet, who makes them so? Who makes Truth which is self evident?

For, by the laws of Euler's Identity, it can easily be said the cause is accidental. Yet, for the horse and Christian, meekness is observed as a truth, which is self evident. Yet, how many human beings cannot observe the truth? How many are blind to it? This law, which exists and governs us, does not allow us to act unbecomingly. And if we do, it brings upon us doom, hardship, suffering---yet, if all were that simple, why wouldn't all bad men suffer? There are men who kill, rape, rob and pillage like Genghis Kahn, who have the pleasure of a different woman's flower every night, drinks mead to his heart's content, expands his empire, kills many men, makes slaves and concubines. And such a man is happy. Yet, such a man is almost universally understood as wrong. For how many happy men did he slay? How many beloved wives did he sully? And if none, how come he didn't take other men's wives? He likely did, but this kind of man is universally bad. One who kills, robs, rapes, pillages---yet, in consequence, if a government causes suffering, it gives those subservient to the government the Just Cause to overthrow their oppressor. Therefore, for a time, all of the crimes of humanity are abolished, and war reaps its reward.

Yet, these truths are self evident, that when the victor is crowned, it can be either to suffering or pleasure for the people who are under such government. And humans know without a doubt that pleasure is superior to pain. Thus, the morality which best suits pleasure is to be determined, and often it's found in the likes of Confucius or Mozi or Lao Tsu, who one discovers filial respect, another discovers love for one's neighbors, and another discovers the world of ideas lies beyond human comprehension or ability. And it is soon found that what these scholars got right---like you had gotten right---were only the proofs of God's infallible word. That if the morality of the Bible were followed---including the aspects on war, which are observed unconsciously by all, yet we'd like to suppress them---it would lead to the ultimate pleasure for those of us living on the Earth.

And by that same tread of logic, it shows morality is able to be observed, yet what we observe of it only bears witness to what the Bible had already witnessed to. And what's even more true, is that only a man spiritually enabled to follow such laws can, or will.

Dear,
Søren

Your philosophy is like a bridge between Nihilism and Transcendentalism. For there are two great forces working in the world today, that of nihilism and transcendentalism. And by your reckoning, life is about making a choice between the two.

The Bible, being the object of faith, is not as important as the faith itself---or the relationship with our Creator. While I accept as true every word the Good Book proclaims, I'm skeptical of convincing atheists of it. Because what's important is their belief in one miracle, and one miracle alone. And that is Christ Jesus' burial and resurrection. If one is confident of that, one will be saved.

Whether Noah built an ark or Eve was literally formed by the rib of Adam---I believe it wholly, but I also have knowledge only very few do---it's inconsequential to the greater miracle of Christ's burial, death and resurrection. The Virgin Birth must be believed too, and that Christ was God Made into Human Flesh. These three revelations are the three miracles by which all Christians must believe to be saved. Greater knowledge comes when you accept the others, greater faith, greater relationship with God.
 
But, I do not pretend to convince an Atheist that the world were flat, why would I pretense to convince him that evolution were not true? Especially since it is irrevocably observed, and as cannon to science as any other truth? We ought not argue about it. Rather, the Bible should be accepted on the merit of faith that the Bible is true. Because its morality is true. Greater than whether Noah existed---which he most certainly did---is the knowledge that he was not Gilgamesh, a warrior, firebrand, nor did he fight heathens off his ship. He was a farmer, the only man of faith in the world, humble, and possibly preaching to all that the flood would come, yet none would listen to him. Happy he would have been to have anyone on his ship, but God shut the ears of the world around him, and thought only to save his three sons and daughter in laws. And that's the importance of the story, which even Christians forget. We, often, want to shut the door to the world, and pretend like we are greater in our efforts. That we ought to be like Gilgamesh, fighting with the sword and punishing the Heathen. Yet Christ says, "He who slays with the sword must be slain by the sword." In no uncertain terms, Christ says, "Judge not lest you be judged." Rather, if we are like Noah, we are beckoning an unbelieving world to come join us in the ark, but none will take the call, or they think we're lunatics until the torrential rains come.

I understand that a lot of Christians will be angry at me, but faith is understanding the story. It's not literally believing the story---though, that can just as easily be a condition for true faith. As the miracle we ought to believe, wholly, is that Christ died for our sins, and resurrected. We need not believe in demons, ghosts, fairies, aliens, angels, djinni or otherwise anything, though some of it may be true. We need to have faith in Christ and Christ alone, that He, in bodily flesh, suffered and died and is the LORD. That God Himself died for our sins.

I'm not even sure one ought to believe in hell, but one must surely believe in heaven. As, true belief in Christ will cause one to obey the moral teachings of scripture, to understand that they are true. Such things as Noah's example with the ark. Greater spiritual awareness will cause one to understand the rest is true, but that granule of a miracle is all a Christian needs to convince anyone of. Telling people the world were flat, evolution isn't true, and that the Earth is only six thousand years old is harder than passing a camel through the eye of a needle. And I don't mean the walls of Jerusalem, as Christians in their lack of faith believe that is what Jesus was referring to. It can be done, with God's help. But by our own power, we ought to preserve the unbeliever's soul with one teaching, and that is Christ preeminent. If you can believe in that one small miracle, the life and teachings, and death and resurrection of Christ, then you can be saved. I've seen men like Tolstoy believe that, and even doubt the miraculous healings of Christ, but I'm confident he was saved. As salvation is a willingness to do what is right under all circumstances, through riches or poverty, through persecution or praise. And it is spiritually enabled in the Christian's heart to follow based proportionally to their commitment to the truths in the Bible.

For some men, this is a stumbling block and I adjure them to continue in their faith. But, I worry about them stumbling over their faith when some great catastrophe happens in the name of science, where some form otherworldly is discovered. As I understand they are demonic---but in order to ensure we never face those questions in our lifetime, it is best we evangelize with Christ Preeminent, come in the Flesh. Jesus Christ is Come in the Flesh, and we need to preach that truth before any other can be accepted. And that truth means changing our behavior to fit the model Christ set for us, and not abandoning it. As one can believe all the Bible Stories they want, if they don't believe in grace it's all for naught. And believing in grace means the accompanying of action. Not simply setting our light under a basket.



Dear,
Paul

It will be said of me that I preached Works Righteousness by Christian Pharisees. You know I did not. I preached only Christ can save. Only belief in Christ, his Bodily Resurrection, His blood, could save. No man doing good, who is a Jew or Muslim, can be saved. Because by what authority does he do good? By whose power are we enabled to do justice, and enforce peace?

Surely, Grace is misunderstood. It's always said that you preached works righteousness was a sin, when you in fact preached the opposite. You preached that the Old Covenant was dismantled. Probably where that word gets its origin, the mantle of the Old Covenant is abolished, and a New Law, prophesied in Jeremiah, is preeminent.

It is my deep study of logic that, "Faith without works is dead", means if there is faith, then there are also works. You say, if there are works, there must be faith. Meaning, in logic, Faith and Works are a biconditional. They are equally weighted, where the believer cannot have one or the other, but must have both.

Did not the Pharisees, Paul, believe in the Sabbath? Quite piously they read Malachi, and made lots of lofty rules for the Sabbath. Which, none of those were what the Sabbath intended. As the sin of breaking the Sabbath isn't working on Sunday, but making your neighbor work on Sunday. That is what the Bible means by not turning your foot to your own pleasure. The Sabbath is also about not being burdened with your sins, but allowing Christ to bear your sins for you. So you can be light and confident in the LORD's blessing. And in turn, correct the scoffer when he admonishes you for your faith.

Where we got the silly notion that works were secondary to faith wasn't you, brother. It wasn't C. S. Lewis. It wasn't G. K. Chesterton. It wasn't even Martin Luther. No theologian throughout history, or even still in the ministry today who is saved, preaches that works are secondary to faith. In pretense they'll repeat their formulae, but they do not truly believe it.

But, Atheists believe that Christians are taught to sin. That sin is lawful, that goodness is evil---the law which Christ teaches is on everyone's heart. And they, in their zeal to be good, try to do what's lawful. But, they are not empowered to do it. Before I was saved, it took all my effort to nearly cause a fatal accident on the road just to pick up a solitary piece of garbage. After I was saved, by merely preaching the Word of God amputees were healed and the Blind could see. And I did nothing to heal them. It's not like the Christians who yell at the man with his knees tucked under him, and then whipping the crowd into a fervor so they don't notice him untucking his legs. That's the kind of thing that seems to me that Christians don't believe in Grace. Rather, who is it that works miracles? We, or God?

All things are possible through Christ. The trees, I've observed on several occasions like to move when there is little wind, so it's not a far reach for me to believe that they can get up and walk, if Christ deems it so, so let it be. But shouting at a tree makes you look like a fool. If the tree moves, it moves by God's authority, in order to accomplish the work of God. Not by our own command or word. Same thing when I witnessed men being healed---truly healed---it was not by some intention of mine. It was done apart from me, which is why Christ says to those who say, "Have we not healed in your name," the correct answer is, "Have you not healed men in my presence? I thought you had loved me." To which if Paul has ten thousand shekels, and he gives one thousand of them, it is the blessing of God which gave him the ten thousand shekels. Not by Paul's hand, as I have work but not pay, yet it is sufficient a work that we ought to give that which God enables us to give.

That is my understanding of grace. My understanding of works is that any Christian who is true will perform them, even raising the dead or walking on water. I don't believe we do it by command, like some witch or sorcerer. As that's what they do, is manipulate the forces of the wind by will. We do not will anything, except what is good.

Understand, Paul, I have thought deeply about this. And I know you taught what was good. Befitting for a man was his kindness, and love and his generosity. It is God who enables the work, but without the work, there can be no salvation. Which is why Faith is Biconditional. We ought to act like we truly believed in God, as far as He has enabled us. Which, to the extent we are enabled, that is the extent of our faith. But by what we do, that is a measurement of our faith, too. And what we can afford. Which is why the widow putting in her two cents is greater than thou, Paul, giving thy one thousand shekels out of ten. For thou have more than the widow did, when thou had ten thousand shekels. Yet, if poverty is our destiny, we shall be poor for Christ Jesus' sake. If riches, it is for Christ Jesus' sake. For you had been in prison my brother, and I have not. Except for where I sinned, I had never suffered for the Gospel like you have. Yet, I have suffered greatly, according to what my faith has allowed.



Dear,
Wisecrack

I come to you today, as authors in the twenty-first century. The video essay slowly replaces my work. I saw your video on the information age, how intellectuals are getting dumber. A textbook I read on the Psychology of Persuasive Speech---back in 1980---understood the phenomena. When someone hits a popular conscience, has a marketable idea, or generally interests people with it, it becomes like a demonic possession, infiltrating everything they do.

It's like a miner finding an endless stream of fool's gold, and because there is an equally greater fool willing to purchase it from him, he mines the rock without first checking the mountain if there were anything real within it. Any corundum, diamond, gold, silver or amethyst would even be good. Instead they mine the fool's gold, and like a Jackson Polluck Painting, because it validates their acquiescence to power, they pay top dollar for it.

Let me tell you a secret. Jackson Polluck hangs in billionaire's homes because it demonstrates a principle of success and marketing. That no matter how aesthetically worthless something is, it can still be valuable with the right marketing. With that, artwork rivalling Leonardo---even excelling his ability---doesn't get sold or patronized.

Information is no worse or better. It's not the quality, but rather the notoriety. Yet, if that information is actually true, it tends to offend the audience. Therefore, you rarely get truth spoken in public settings. The best sermon I heard was about a man making an analogy between David and Goliath, with Christians and Homosexuality. And sure enough, he is no longer on the air. Not because he offended, and therefore was censured. But, because the audiences were offended, and therefore he was defunded.

Understand the truth is offensive. The truth is bare. It's gritty. Great poetry speaks truth---and the job of a reader is to understand it. Yet, if the greatest poet to live in 300 years were writing this essay, notice that that same poet doesn't make much above forty dollars from his work.

Markets dictate value. They dictate the quality of ideas. They dictate the substance of ideas. I once got into an argument---as per I saw this in a dream---between myself and Athena. Athena had said, "You cannot allow markets to dictate the quality of information." And I, in my Glenn Beck phase---my phase of loving Free Markets---said, "But why not? Of course people will choose the best information." And he, Athena, said to me, "I will allow it." To which, in the vision, I went home. 

Now, I see the truth. Men hate the truth. And a man---not a god---like Athena was right, though beholden unto him, he had taken exception to my work. And he did not like it. So, he cursed it, and fought against it, and set the world on fire.

For the problem today is wisdom sets the world ablaze. Everyone is beholden to their own truths, rather than the actual truth. Truth becomes a mirror rather than an instrument by which to observe the natural world. And because of this, men and women are oppressed by ideas which are unnatural and unyielding to others.

Poetry can save the world. Only because it would teach people to listen. God will save a soul, but poetry will save the world. Because if men listened, rather than spoke---if men and women took the time to observe nature, form and entity they would understand that there are only two sexes, two genders, and the exception to this a rare phenomena which would be dealt with according to that specific case. They'd understand Homosexuality is a sin because it is dirty and foul and dehumanizing---and it correlates with social decadence and decline, both being caused by the same problem, which is pleasure being made into a god.

And with that being said, if there is no wisdom, there is no objective truth, there is no observable, intrinsic good, then there remains nothing on which to create happiness, or trust or solidarity. It, like G. K. Chesterton said, would last but a generation, yet what a hellish generation it would be.



Dear,
Jordan Peterson

I make it my aim to understand. I am sapiosexual. I love intelligence, mastering other's ideas.

One of the things that I found in my life was William Wordsworth. Who, after reading one of his poems for two hours, I fully understood it. In that moment, the postmodern lie was debunked. It clearly meant what I thought it meant, even down to the subconscious cues and intricacies. I could navigate speech and understand the thoughts behind that speech. I became, what the Bible calls, a "Prophet" or what that word translates from in Hebrew, an "Interpreter."

Understanding ideas---from Nazism to the Enlightenment Philosophies---is my highest aspiration. Understanding why a Femfascist or Nazi might believe in what they do, even to understand it from the most critical level, that an entire philosophy has been abandoned---in both cases---and the result must be a realignment of our values toward the Creator. Toward the natural order. Toward the Formal Element, which right now is unpopular, but later on in life will be a wellspring of chemicals and endorphins more potent than love. To understand, say, Niagara falls is to be welled up with that chemical which is akin to looking at the stars or studying Euclid's elements. The Chemicals which are there because a certain Form or Spirit awakens them within us. Same thing happens in love.

Yet, when we deny those irrational factors---the things which keep us bound to rationality---we tend to find our pleasure in other ideas. Destruction, deconstruction, denying anyone had anything of worth to say. Fundamentally espousing one's own doctrine without first understanding what someone else had said.

This selfishness, the homoerotic nature of the Western World, the inversion of love objects toward one's own identity and race and orientation, is the downfall of Western Society. Freud had noted it, and that psychology is teaching us to love ourselves preeminent above all things, it can be said that selfishness has destroyed the culture. Homosexuality, Transgenderism, Divorce, Serial Monogamy, Greed, Materialism, Hedonism, Tribalism, this is all caused by what Freud noted was the Homoerotic. The turning of our sexual desire inward, instead of outward. To where we destroy because we cannot ever understand, and therefore, never truly love.

Love is the highest ideal, and in love there is the beauty of those chemicals we obtain through wisdom. Through studying the natural course of the world. Through objectively appreciating the sublime feelings connected to truth---which, since the stars have metaphorically fallen, we can have no connection to. We cannot look into the heavens, and draw the cogent endorphins which the stars once created in their observer. We cannot know the forms of love, or even remember the liquor that was America. For those of us who remember it, we call it "Freedom" we call it "Democracy." For myself, I call it Peace.

And peace is only to be rooted in the truth. Where once again Western Powers are disenfranchised with Democracy and Republican Governments, and are enchanted by the cult of dictatorships, of rational materialism---much were the Nazis when they became disenfranchised with Christianity, and sought to establish the social order of Thor, or the Communists when they became frustrated with Confucianism and sought to bring in the social order of the Baalim Chairman Mao. And by replacing Christ with something else---in America, he was replaced with sex and money---there can be nothing except the interest in one's self.

The discipline of reading someone else's words, and understanding them, becomes mooted while it is replaced by the feeling those words implement in our lives. Never truly understanding the words, we are instead thrilled by the feeling of the words. It'd be like the enthrallment of Niagara Falls, without there actually being a waterfall. Which imagination can impart this gift, yet without having witnessed what is true, there can be no understanding of it nor the connection it makes with the Chemical.

Spirit is not merely chemical. It, if it's to be analyzed correctly, is the recognition of whether the chemical is true. For, there are many chemicals, and some masochists feel love by inflicting hurt onto others, yet it does not fit the form of what love is. Neither does our selfishness this generation, where the core problem with Postmodernism, Cultural Marxism, Nuevo-Liberalism, Materialism, is that the pursuits of these sciences are not to gain knowledge of others, but rather to know the self. And already we know much about ourselves, when the more we try to know what lies within our hearts, the more we cannot understand what is in others'.



Dear,
Critical Race Theorists

I understand your notion on equity. I truly do. As it is a thing lacking in our culture, for all people. I understand the slogan "Black Lives Matter."

This just gets into the fact that I am just like you. I suffer from a debilitating disease, that if I don't get my medicine, I'm likely to suffer immensely. I would like a softer transition from employment to getting off my benefits, as if I try and fail to work, I might lose these life sustaining medications. With that, I understand the reason Black People are held down, which is the Welfare System not allowing a greater cushion to wean off of the system.
 
Nobody wants to be on welfare. If I had my pick between working or sitting at home, I'd work. But, I've tried working several half dozen times, and my illness creeps in, and prevents me from attaining any goals. So, as it would turn out, if I took the risk of working, I might lose everything keeping me tethered to reality, as my illness is something like Schizophrenia. 
 
With this is a very real program you could implement to help people get off of welfare, and succeed in the world. 

Another thing which holds people back is the apparent criminal records they hold, for eternity. A program to seal all criminal records---as many times as needed---would be necessary. This way employers cannot discriminate based on criminal history. Yes, it might be common wisdom that most people who have committed a crime are more likely to commit one, but there are people, like myself, who have completely overcome that part of their life.

I have to say the truth, that if I could work, I would. And what prevents me is that if I fail, my medically necessary medicine will be taken from me. And that frightens me more than anything, as me without it is a shell of fear and panic. And I think if you truly wanted to level the playing field, if you truly believed in equity, you would strengthen the grace period between work and benefits.

As, anyone who has succeeded, will in fact stop receiving benefits. Nobody wants to take benefits, and I'm a strong believer in the honor system. I believe most men have honor, and wouldn't squelch the welfare system if they had other options. If they had work, it would be more likely that they would let go of the benefits. Unless culturally, it became normalized to hold onto benefits, even when gaining success as an employee.

And this last example shows the pitfalls of your organization. People of different colors have all the benefits they need. And, as a last resort, your theories are making permanent a crutch which should have been set aside once the leg healed. And for that, there is no honor in what you do.



Dear,
Dr. Laureate Southey

I must say I came to you work with some difficulty. It was hard for me to first find a distributor who would sell your work, and secondly, once I found it it was basically one of those copies meant to preserve historically significant work. So, my reader probably knows nothing of you.

I found your Madoc poem and Joan of Arc suitable in name to create my own renditions of them. For a few months I thought I was subconsciously plagiarizing you; that some demonic force had implanted in my memory your poems, and I was rewriting them. Thus, I spent my twenty dollars---which was reimbursed for some reason---and bought your collected work.

I must say, I understand why you're Poet Laureate. Your work was on the cusp of the Novel's invention, and it had a refined style easily comprehended. Your verse, by modern standard, would seem superfluous, as like the Iliad and the Odyssey are translated today, your work might be better read as a novel rather than poetry. As your work is one of the first works which called the sky blue---it's hard to find a poet. or really, a writer prior to you who would have the audacity to call the sky blue. Most writers didn't describe anything, but rather their imagery was secondary to the concept being discussed. It's not like today's literature where the image is compulsory.

This gets to the strangest part of your work, that it's more novel like in its diction. Which, is likely why you became poet Laureate because you innovated a style that is still in use today. Neither Byron, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth or Coleridge's style are in use today, unless you count my pitiful attempts at poetry. 

Truthfully, Southey, you are Poet Laureate for a reason. While your work is hard to find, your style has become the standard for writing.

I am reading Thalaba the Destroyer right now, and I might say it's very relatable to my own feelings. I don't know if many people could or would read it today, and be able to extrapolate from it a sense of enjoyment. But, I do, as I feel a lot like the Prophet in the work, forecasting doom on the world. I'm looking for that one bit of kindness toward the Camel, so to speak. 

The story is archetypal, and probably your chief work. As I'm thinking about it right now, and I just sense that there's a truth to it. That a prophet---should one exist in modern times---would exist in that manner. The fact that you knowingly synthesize Islam and Christianity confused Byron; yet I'm knowledgeable that some Eastern Orthodox Christians who speak Arabic still call Jesus Allah. I'm even more knowledgeable, by the subtle innuendo, that it is the Christian religion you are speaking of.

And quite, the story is what it would be like if a prophet walked the earth in these current times. In diction not dissimilar to the Novels of a generation after you. I have to say, you deserve Poet Laureate. 



Dear,
G. K. Chesterton 

I was first made aware of your work, when speaking with a rich man in the forest. He told me about your idea of Communalism. We didn't speak much of it, for he had to be on his way. Then, you became recommended to me when I threw away all of my correspondences, for in the act of cleaning, new ideas began to be uncovered for me.

I had now just purchased "The Everlasting Man." It was also said to me recently, that Christians will accept my work because of G. K. Chesterton, that because my Pseudonym is B. K. Neifert, that will lend to an easier acceptance of my work. 

Providentially, I do in fact liken Christianity to the Eastern Philosophies. I do write stories on its magic and mysticism. I do, like a Shaman, make a new feast of ideas and thoughts for the religion. I do take an old, stale tradition and make it colorful again.

As, you're right. If one were to look at Christianity as one would look at Sun Wukong, as an interesting and rich mythology, it would spark new and great thoughts revolving around the faith. It would be something which---as you said---would carry on for two thousand years, maybe even bring us to the stars. It would satisfy all of our moral failings, and teach us the laws of liberty and truth.

But, it's not Sun Wukong who I exemplify. That is just a myth. I exemplify the Confucians, the Mozis, the Taoists---never the Buddhists---as speaking common sense wisdom for future generations. Yet, each of those philosophers got something very wrong. Lao Tsu said that one cannot ever speak truth. Confucius said that women must be allowed to drown, if saving them meant touching their hand. Mozi would have music abandoned.

Propounding the Greek Philosophers, Aristotle didn't believe in Evil, Plato didn't believe his Forms could be found through poetry, and the Moral Sages of Greece could only find fragments of the truth.

Never once did a sage find all wisdom, nor has a sag ever so concisely divine truth as Christ did. Christ, who was a historical figure---his birth records and death certificate still exist---he was a poor Nazarene who couldn't afford books, yet philosophically, he understood things which no other sage ever could or would. 

It's not that Christ, Chesterton, had original ideas. He truly didn't. The same ideas can be found fragmented throughout history, at just about every stage, and in every place of existence. It's that throughout history, no one man had found the whole of it, and presented it to us by example. Not even Moses.

It is this reason that I believe on Jesus Christ. And simply stating, the distance of the True Eastern religions---because Buddhism is Western, not Eastern---they had found portions of all that Christ would speak or say, yet all of them had chaff among the wheat. There was no chaff in the purity of Christ's religion, which is why all must enter through His gate. For He has moral teachings, which men having Intelligence Quotients far superior to even mine hadn't but compartmentalized, and possibly dogmatized like we humans so often will do with truth. We will be like the Confucians and Mozis warring their competing philosophies, trying to make their truth superior. When, each philosophy has a compartment of the truth. The Mozis Agape and the Confucians Filial respect. Yet, these two, Confucius and Mozi, warred, and their disciples hated one another. Each one, like the respective Republican and Democrat, were ensconced in their truth and thought very little of the other's.

Yet, Christ had purity of teaching that no other teacher had. Lao Tsu found "Word" in the crudest sense, that behind all communicated things lay their nature, just as Plato had, yet the two philosophers would semantically argue about whether the utterances could be expressed. Plato saying words could carry meaning, and Lao Tsu saying they cannot. Yet, each one saying the same thing that truth Is, regardless of how we perceive or retort it.

The fact being that in Christianity, it found even this truth, the most difficult of all truths. The truth that There Is, and all utterances, all knowledge, all wisdom is about tapping into those veins, rather than sophistically bending words around to utter any fancy we like. That truth remains---and this is why Plato hated fiction. Yet, the same things he hated about fiction could be hated about science, philosophy or any other discipline. For, the true geniuses found the Truth. Yet, no genius, save God Come in the Flesh, had found all of them, and this is the miracle of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.



Dear, 
J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter is perhaps the most important work of fiction in my lifetime. All I know of it is the movies, yet within it, it speaks some very critical truths about human nature.

What is the magic? It is knowledge. The combat between good and evil forms of knowledge. How practical knowledge ought to win against academic knowledge. How life is superior to death. How there is a constant struggle between life and death, and also between good and evil.

That sometimes good and evil must war, the book elucidates. When Voldemort silently takes the stage, and begins to purify racially your Wizards. He represents the Dictator. He represents the Iron Man taking up his cause, and using his cause to bludgeon the world into suppression.

Your work genesysed the innocence of youth, the purity of it when it becomes corrupted by the knowledge of evil. Slowly, there is a struggle in every mind between the good and bad instinct, and man must sever from his soul the wicked force within it.

I was watching a video online---as is my habit---and on it a Millennial and Gen-Z were having their metaphorical fight. And then the Baby Boomer came on, listening to their music. The rebellion against the old Folk Hymns of the past, the hatred of the wisdom of a generation who fought in two ferocious wars---your generation---the despising of their knowledge, it is how we will get Voldemort.

Do understand, Ms. Rowling, the danger lies far greater than that. They say only six million were killed in the holocaust, when it was fourteen million. They say only one hundred million were killed by communism, when it was five hundred million. They say that there are no genocides today, when nine million were killed in Myanmar, several million were killed in North and Central Africa, one hundred thousand people die each year from global conflict, not including the eight hundred thousand killed by the United States. China is purging countless of its citizens who are not Han Chinese. Forty-one thousand people were killed in America with guns in 2021, and possibly another ten thousand killed by knives. China, Iran and the United States Saber Rattle. There is rumor of a genocide in South Africa---though none can confirm nor deny it. Immigrants flood the United States, and many are left in mass graves on the border, or die in concentration camps. It's neither democrat nor republican who will stop it.

They say these are peaceful times we live in. Yet, everyone is kept indoors, afraid of a virus a little less uncomfortable than the flu. People stay indoors, and billionaires capitalize on it. Speech is censored through de facto means of control, and of course that Gen-Z thinks your books are not important. Because no books are. Yet, your books warned of these times. As, all the great litterateurs have warned of these times.

The problem is I don't see a Harry Potter right now. Because Generation Z are more like Malfoy---and that is why they don't like your books---and the Millennials are too weak to take up the mantle of a hero. I speak my mind in an age where people are getting arrested for doing so.

Know I respect you, as the only author in the Twenty-first century who used her words wisely. All else is propaganda, or even worse essays.



Dear,
G. K. Chesterton

I had read your The Everlasting Man, and I must say, Mr. Chesterton, that you have made the chief argument for God's existence. Not that you had gotten all your facts right. Really, the chief fact on which you based your whole argument was wrong. But, the fact that your fact is wrong gives credibility to the chief principle of your argument. That an animal can do art, it must certainly be true that there is indeed art and universally so. That an Elephant can paint is significant, because it means there is an objectivity to what can be painted.

The hardest thing for we humans to understand is genesysed in your argument. The development of a conscience. You expertly argue that the conscience must have developed when man had first developed, for we cannot be called "Man" without first a "Conscience." Though, what we appear to have discovered in my age, is that animals all share some of the same faculties of human beings. They are on the cusp of developing a sense of other, a sense of right and wrong independent of our training. And where animals develop reasoning skills, it's often been seen that they grow more compassionate.

Should we find in nature a creature which has all the faculties of intelligence, but without the conscience, I'd say it'd be the same thing as if a fish had evolved into a man like being and with all its intelligence, it is nothing more than a predator. For we have such examples of men who appear to be like this. Men who are devoid of conscience. And such men are not the disproof of the rule but rather proof of it that where some faculty of humanity exists, which they cannot understand but others can independently. Not mores or social constructs... I'm not speaking to those. I'm speaking to general kindness and compassion, which some men lack and others do not.

The animals tend to appreciate this compassion more than the men do. There is a trope of the Saintly Man being a friend to all animals. He can as easily make friends with a scorpion or tiger as a dear or a dove. The saintly man is a friend to the animals because we recognize in animals the timidity and meekness of their wildness, that they will run away at any presence of humans, but should a man be able to touch or even have the animals linger nearby in his presence, we call this man a "Saint". Because the man is so freed from his Shadow that the animals recognize he is not a threat to them. Yet, there is the exception of a Polar Bear who will eat men, and that without fear because they have not learned instinctually to fear men. Yet, that is slowly changing.

The man who is so freed from his wickedness, is the man who is the most compassionate. The least like a predator. This man may eat meat, but his cattle do not fear him, but rather give their meat willingly and without bitterness. For the man who is like a "Sheep" is the most like a man. The man who is most like a "Wolf" is the least like a man. And we see in Dog Breeds, that the more intelligent they become, the more aware of the distinct otherness of those around them, the more compassionate the animal becomes. Though, a man without compassion is just an animal---we call the man without compassion a beast. But the beasts, when they become more like a man, have compassion. It is this universal truth which the Atheists cling to to say "God does not exist," yet, they abandon their compassion oftentimes for the sake of worldly gain. For the sake of cooperation, careers, or even to have friendships. They willingly sacrifice their compassion for these things, and what causes Christians to be ignoble in their eyes is that Christians do the same. In fact, Christians teach it is a part of their religion to abandon compassion for the sake of worldly gains, for that is what the Gospel has become to almost half of all evangelicals, is a hearty approval of the State of competition and Solitariness, and they use God as a self soothing mechanism. They teach the highest ideal is to be self satisfied, self motivated, and self assured. And this reason, Christianity is pugnacious in many Atheist's eyes, for they have no qualms about Christ's teachings, but when they see His followers, they do not see the loving and tender sheep they desire to see, but rather a pack of wolves.

Yet, it is precisely this Sheep Morality which makes Christianity so special. That in being sheep, we are led by an invisible shepherd, giving us greater liberty than the Wolf who must acquiesce to their pack leader, or the dominant male or female. We, being sheep, do not wander or need men to guide us, for the Spirit of God blows upon our sails into the directions where we must follow. We get led by an invisible shepherd, but so many Christians make their shepherds on the Earth, and it is why they will be damned. They scatter the flock, and do not gather the outcasts, but rather create their functions and strict organizations which are to most men boring and structured to a point where no true relationships can be created. In fact, this structure has been divorced from God, and has been implemented in the Mainline Church, where Atheist Christianity is at its peak of worship, and the congregants do not believe in God, but believe in the service and the comfort of the music and the comfort of the social gathering. Only, in that gathering, there is no true fellowship, but rather everyone in it have selfishly gathered themselves to benefit from one another's spoils, much like a Dog seeking a hand to pat it on the head.

Yet, should there be true fellowship, or true love within the Church and Christ's body the elements of what make us Christian would shine, and men wouldn't be in question about whether God existed. For we'd have the Spirit among us, and it would lacquer our hearts with its joy and peace and love. We'd be filled with Spirit, and full of grace and charity. We'd be strong in the LORD, and believe on Christ Jesus with all our hearts, knowing it is just as important what He taught as what He did. We wouldn't half heartedly seek worldly success, or gain, or men's approval, but would rather diligently serve the LORD and demonstrate all of the truths which people admire about our religion. We'd overcome the predatory instinct and allow all the sheep in the field to gather, and chew on their cud, without infringing upon their feedings, and the Christ LORD would shepherd us to the pastures where we would get fed, and we'd be in holy communion, and this would prove God exists to all men, for they would say, "I see Christians have love, and it is a supernatural force. I wish to seek Christ to, to remove from me this wicked nature."



Dear,
Mr. Kapinos

You created the show "Lucifer". In it you have a protagonist who isn't atheist because she believes in "Good and Evil and Right and Wrong." I applaud you for making this character, as Lauren German's  character is of the kind of Atheist as Marcus Krantz---my lead character in my first novel, "The Fifth Angel's Trumpet". If I may put my input, Lucifer is not proving himself the Devil to her in order to ensconce her in her Atheism. As, what better proof of God's existence, than the Devil Himself? Very wise thematic choice, as Satan cannot evangelize the Gospel, but rather can only cause suffering and hell.

With that being said, Lucifer is an interesting character. Portrayed as a man with Histrionic Personality Disorder, who is a sexual predator yet is seeking justice. What a wonderful world it would be if Lucifer sought justice. Every time I watch your show, I say, "If only the Devil were like so."

When I was in the hospital, there was a demoniac within the walls. He'd cry out, "I'm going to destroy you," In a deep voice, like one might see in a Death Metal song. He didn't sing it, but had that tone of voice. And he said, "I'm going to destroy you," while I was weeping in the other room.

Then, I heard the same voice within my head---one of the few auditory hallucinations I'd ever had, though I understood it as a demonic apparition. This particular devil I call a "Babylonian", as there are a multitude of fallen angels, and at the top echelon there are three with twenty-two distinct personalities. Lucifer, the "Covering Cherub", was one of the Cherubim, the four creatures who stand at God's throne. There must have been six of them at first, yet distinctly, two of them were different than the other four, thus, pride must have settled into their hearts. Lucifer sinned according to his "Brightness".

Yet, there remains ten distinct demonic personalities within the being called "Lucifer". As there are ten horns to the Dragon. And seven heads. Meaning, there is an enclave of Ten Kings and seven heads of state who will be possessed by this once Cherubim. Lucifer is Beautiful, and can take the form of a man. Which gets us to Job, when he roared like a lion, and on the command of God, he did everything in his power to strip from Job his salvation. And Lucifer caused Job to act defiant toward God, to question God's reasons for punishing him, yet Job sinned nothing in the trial because Job didn't curse God, therefore, Job was left with double of what he lost.

To understand Satan, one must merely look at this story in Job. Satan cares nothing for justice, and only on expanding his empire. The Satan you created is a metaphor for a Sex Addict, yet Satan is more like Adolph Hitler combined with Errol Flynn. The Babylonian I talked about earlier, the one who spoke within my mind and manifested in the one patient of the hospital I was staying at---understand I am innocent, but its desire is to kill me. Just like Christ was innocent, and Satan's ultimate plan was to obstruct justice by not allowing Christ to die on the cross. Now, I am not Christ---I am not a God---so therefore, I am not completely innocent, yet what crimes I have committed have been atoned for, yet Satan wishes to continue his assault upon me. For like Pharaoh or Babylon, they did not want to withdraw their torments on the Israelites. So, God sent Moses and Cyrus to free them.

Therefore, your show is interesting. Yet, it is not the true devil you have created. You created a picture of a Psychopath. Yet, you hadn't created the picture of the Devil. The devil will place Christians in concentration camps, will purge the world of all religions save the one where he is the head, and will most likely advocate the very morality of the Bible yet replace himself with Christ as the head. In fact, Satan will call himself Christ. For Lucifer is perfect from his begetting, until there is sin found in him. And his Prince, the Beast, will act like he is Jesus Christ.

I say all of this to show my love for your artistic rendition. As it submitted the DC universe under the Yoke of the Christian God. And I am happy that it did. Though there are falsehoods in the DC universe's moral telling, the fact remains that it opens the minds of Atheists to the possibility of God being greater and powerful enough to create a vast universe, where the forces of light and dark stand somewhere outside of it, beyond the constraints of time and space. And God, being all powerful, will still have dominion upon all of Earth and the worlds.

Dear,
Chesterton Society

I have in my possession "The Everlasting Man", which I had just bought from Barnes and Noble. Now, it would turn out I have read more C. S. Lewis than any other writer. I read two of his Narnia books, two of his Space Trilogy books, The Abolition of Man and Mere Christianity. The Abolition of Man being one of the greatest essays of all time. One of the greatest apologetic arguments of all time.

However, G. K. Chesterton has come up with the most solid foundation for belief I've ever encountered. It's nothing I hadn't organically come to on my own, but it is the argument that can convince a man of God's existence. Emanuel Kant had found the argument--- And possibly the reason C. S. Lewis fans don't like Chesterton is that many atheists claim the appearance of a conscience only proves a conscience exists. Which, isn't true.

Should Good exist, and not merely a preference, then God must exist, too. If Good objectively exists in this world, and it exists beyond human definition---if men can understand it independently, and therefore find it like you would a scientific principle---then God must also exist. It's a modus ponen argument. If there is good, then there is a God. Because if there is not a God, there can, quite conceivably, be nothing truly good as it's all a matter of subjective interpretations. Nothing subjective can, inherently, be objective.

So, what Chesterton found was objective good. He derived the genesys of the conscience in Cave Men---where we'd presume to find it---and traced it to the first burgeons of civilization. He found quite accurately that if the conscience existed and was found in the Earliest Civilizations, it could naturally be traced back to all human history. And he begins this by alluding to Cave Paintings. Which proves men had not been savages, but where rather observational and had tenderness. Which is important, because if we can objectively find this conscience in primitive man, it means the conscience is universal.

Which is the reason why Chesterton was a great apologist. Though, he got a few factual details wrong, quite paradoxically, it's the fact he got wrong, that it is wrong, that proves his argument. I'm sure Chesterton would be pleased at that. For, the mere observation of conscience in animals must indeed prove God exists, as it proves the fact of the conscience is able to be discovered. And that those principles of conscience are universal.

Which, the question remains, which God best describes the conscience. In my argument, that's the natural course we'd follow. And the best God at describing the Conscience is Jesus Christ. For no other had come close to even describing it. 

So, I hope you enjoyed reading this, and I bid you to not pit Chesterton and Lewis against one another. As each of them are equally capable men of producing sound and foundational wisdom in their audiences.



Psych2Go

I have a High IQ and this might seem like a stupid question, but why does a lack of confidence in my own knowledge make others pounce upon me? If demeaning myself makes me vulnerable, then it means those around me are predatory, and I am their prey. Doubly, by your own admission I am not intelligent for saying two of those things. Regardless, maybe I am not intelligent, and I'm some idiosavant. I'm only smart enough to make that portmanteau, and my intelligence is lacking. I'm also entitled, of course.  

Socrates, considered the wisest man in Athens, asked a lot of questions, making himself look the fool. He was also martyred, which, by your standards he would have been less intelligent when he drink the hemlock poison, therefore, according to your psychobabble, he wasn't martyred because he wasn't confident enough to not drink the hemlock.

I also looked into the PPI-R. I'm having a psychologist friend of mine look into the accuracy of that test, and whether Trump's is 177. That would mean Hitler's is 169. And---if I'm being mean it's for a reason---on a Swiss Government website I saw the average college student's score was 291 for a male, and 266 for a female.

This gets to my point. Why does demeaning myself make me a prey? There's something to victimhood culture, because I'm with Black Lives Matter that I don't want to have to hunt my prey with a stick, and play this awkward, white people game where I have to know all the social cues and self affirmations to fit in.

I have to be mean to you because what you promote is something most destructive to the Western Tradition. It is your freedom to write it. And perhaps I am being mean in this post--- But I have it on a hunch that a shrink thought I had Histrionic Personality Disorder because I wrote her a letter in this tone. Frankly, if I do have HPD, it's because I've been taught to self-love more than anyone else. I love myself dearly, and I want the exact opposite which is to escape myself, and invest my time in someone else.

I've been through six years of intensive therapy. I went twice a week to group therapy, went once a week to individual therapy, seen a psychiatrist---about the only helpful person out of the lot of them. I was hypnotized to a point of trauma, I was inundated with this "Self Love" culture--- And they told me to throw my mother under the bus because she made me feel sad. A lot of people made me feel sad at that time in my life. 

What I'm saying gets to the root of your comment, "Smart people don't demean themselves, because it makes others feel less confident in them." What world do you live in? The one I used to know---a long time ago---never punished me for doubting myself. I never had to be a predator to make a living. I didn't have to put up a facade in order to fit in. Then came Elementary school, where I was abused nonstop by peers and teachers. To your credit, I was put in special education programs built for retarded children. But, as I said---and you called it entitled---I have an IQ of 157. About the same IQ as Ralph Waldo Emerson. One of my favorite writers, actually. And it was this psycho mumbojumbo I lived with my whole life, and crippled me into becoming a writer. I had nothing better than to escape the abuse of my peers, and invent imaginative worlds where I could retreat into, and about the only people I did get along with were my brother and his friends. Was it that I didn't display self confidence? Was it that I broke a social taboo? Was it that I was really retarded, and needed a B-Tech and TSS? The shame of that time of my life, and you have the audacity to tell people that their problem is that they aren't confident in themselves. Most of the self confident people I know are borderline sociopaths, which accounts for almost 100% of the College Population according to that test you recommended the PPI-R.

When all's said in done, Therapy made me into the monster I became. Jesus took me out of it. If you want to know Psychology, read Freud, and know Self Love is the exact pathogen this culture suffers from. Self-Confidence and Self Esteem are the very cancers eating away at our bones. What Freud said is that we need a Catharsis or love object. As the greatest secret to psychology is that we are all narcissists, and our deepest desire is to find solidarity with someone else. And I half agree with all of these Liberals when they want to create their utopia of feel good and inclusivity. Yet, I can't be inclusive. I can't condone self deprecation, and especially, I can't condone sacrificing humility for the sake of being liked. What's humble is pulling the child back from the street when a car speeds by. Not smiling while he gets ran over by it. And all of modern psychology is sin; it's claiming the train doesn't exist, while your car stands on the warning track. And if that test is any proof, the studies I saw show that almost 100% of our generation are, indeed, psychopaths. And we have a whole lot of psychology to blame for that.

The greatest psychological truth is to fix your own damn problems, and make yourself better for everyone else.




Dear,.
Brandan Robertson

A clip I just watched on Mike WInger's podcast showed you endorsing Polyamrous relationships. I often wanted to link Homosexuality to this. But nobody believed me. You, the proof of the declining moral fabric of society, proves that the two are insufferably linked. And it proves that there is no love in our culture, if this can be accepted. To call yourself Christian, I'd rather you be a flagrant atheist than garb yourself with Christ's veil.

I don't believe you believe in God or Jesus. If you did, you'd realize that the Bible condemns Sodomy. That is any sex, beside what is permitted in heterosexual sex. I hope you have your deconstruction of faith, and take your followers with{} you. As you are going to go to hell if you continue in this sin.

Frankly, the Gospel is for people like me. Who've made severe mistakes, and want to change their lives for the better. It is not for people like you, who love your sin, and want religion to be a way to embrace sin. If you loved Christ, you wouldn't want to sin. You wouldn't want to be homosexual. It would burden your conscience, and you'd feel dirty and depraved. As, I was once in a homosexual relationship. And I felt dirty, and I wanted to keep i{t} a secret. It was a source of shame for me, and I know that feeling of shame came from God, to lead me to Repentance and therefore live a changed life in Jesus Christ.

You are an abomination to the Cross. I'd rather you have nothing to do with Jesus' teachings, and be an opponent to the faith, so you could actually come to it organically, then use it in the way you are using it right now. As the Church in Laodicea speaks, God would rather you be hot or cold. For if you're lukewarm, He will spit you out of His mouth. Be God's opponent flagrantly, rather than veil yourself with the cross and subterfuge little ones in the faith. And perhaps, maybe, you will find yourself confronted by the True God of creation, and not the one you've constructed and have taught.

Dear,
YouTuber

You opened up a really interesting topic, with your video describing the Lord of the Rings. Whether J. R. R. Tolkien had constructed the narrative with this in mind.

I'd say yes... Tolkien was trying to basically create a mythology for England---as you said---one like Ovid or Homer's Masterpieces, or the Irish, Welsh or Scotish folklore. Tolkien wrote a lot about myth, believing there should be mythology to supplement the real world. That myths could contain in them important knowledge.

So, what you're getting at, Tolkien would probably say the retellings of Frodo and Bilbo are more important than the actual historical events themselves, because they fit the formal ideation, and therefore, theme and moral can be extracted from them.

Tolkien was writing a mythology---it was fiction---and he wasn't deluded to believe his Myth was actually English. He created the books because he was frustrated that all of England's mythology was basically borrowed from other cultures. Beowulf is Danish, and Arthur is basically a retelling of Charlemanian mythology. But the primary point of Tolkien's was to highlight the importance of fiction, and very real benefit of having it as a supplement to reality.

Tolkien was not talking about the Bible. I don't think his beliefs were that the Bible was fiction, as he was a devote Catholic. And the correct way to view Middle Earth is to understand that the story is, in its formal elements, constructed in a way to communicate what was true from the myths. That Aragorn needed to be a paragon for a king, so other kings could model themselves off of him.

It gets to the point, where probably what Tolkien wanted the reader to come to, was that the pedantic scholarship was basically unimportant when compared to the overreaching structure and story of the Lord of the Rings. It was his life's work to validate myth, and the fact remains that it is his retelling. In effect, Tolkien was Illuvitar, thus, what he wrote was the canon and actual accounts of the events. It's interesting to think that Tolkien made himself into the god of Middle Earth, so the real analogy to take is that it's moot what the scholars he invents create. They are, in actuality, his inventions too. What's important is that Illuvitar left the Lord of the Rings for people to study. And the formal elements were the most important aspects of the story. The symmetry and the knowledge.

Which gets into a person like me's field, where I study literature. The point of which, that what the canon of the literature is---as some novels like War and Peace have an actual canon, and some passages are omitted from the work---that the author wrote it, and intended the work to be read like that. Meaning, it was necessary for the story to be constructed in that way---as intended by the author---and therefore presented in that form.
It's important to understand this when approaching literary studies. That the moral of Tolkien's was not to get bogged down in the meta scholarship, but to rest in the fact that Tolkien wrote the work, therefore, since Tolkien wrote it, it is the literal events. Because Tolkien was Illuvitar, and the canon he presented, while working through Bilbo, Frodo and Gandalf, was the canon set forth and given to the folk of Middle Earth.
Which, was an apologetical argument in defense of the Bible, that it was really moot what the scholarship entailed, but rather that God Himself had written the work, and intended it to be read in the form it is. Using agents like the Prophets, whom he divinely controlled.

 And if you think about it, we are a lot like the thoughts of God, so it's not that far fetched, and I think that was what Tolkien was aiming to display. That he wrote it, it's his characters, so it's written exactly as its intended and miraculously at that. It's what his Middle Earth people need, and was given by Illuivitar. And the scholarship, at that point, is moot. Because Tolkien knew he wasn't God, but he wanted his Lord of the Rings to be a supplemental mythology for the English people. The Lord of the Rings isn't Metamorphoses, as Tolkien is not writing within the framework that the mythology is true. Only that it's a supplemental way of understanding the world, which is what all fiction is. Tolkien loved all mythology and all literature. To him, a story was more important because it had a Formal Element which could teach you higher laws and greater truths. Which, would be probably what he'd say about his Lord of the Rings, too, is that the Red Book is like the Bible, and Iluvatar preserved it for Middle Earth in its the most beneficial form it could be rendered.

Dear,
Freddy

You are leaps and bounds more intelligent than I. I cannot compare to you. I've often feigned intelligence, saying I had an IQ of 300. Seriously. Yes, I was a fool. But, I am a genius, too. My IQ is 157. Not 189. You're probably learning the numbers of Pi out to two thousand decimals. You're probably a musician, a poet, a master at physics. The world is yours, but I'd advise you not to take it.

The danger of intelligence is a contempt upon less intelligent men. However, even the most atheistic tribesmen who are hunter gatherers believe in Heaven--- To them, the soul travels to the Sun and that is the extent of their religion. There is nothing more nor deep about it. But, they believe in a soul and they believe that their loved ones reunite in the afterlife. And good thing, too, if we could all come with this template of having shed our superstitions, and just been taught the basics of religion.

However, as I said to a prominent YouTuber, Christ is our food. Here upon the planet, He's as necessary as our daily bread. Food builds up ou bodies, but Christ our spiritual lives. The world may be round, old, and men might have come from apes, but the fact remains that there is a God. I cannot prove Him to you, nor ought I prove Him to you, as He can surely prove Himself to you if He wants. 

This gets into the fact that you are so intelligent, and you'll invariably find a lot of opposition to God. Think to yourself why this is, when Jesus' words were harmless. There's some real evidence for you, that a man who lived a perfect life, spoke words which even the most simple could agree with, is disparaged by all. Some will say they like his teachings, but not the Christians. And I hope you don't fall into that trap, as I've been abused by Christians more than most. I've been abused by atheists, too. I find all men are traitors, but we have to hold onto faith that there is good. Humans have very little aptitude for goodness on their own, and the more I go through life, the more I find that love grows colder with every generation and the shining lights grow warmer. Those shining lights are Christians. That this is the core of religious belief, that we hold onto the good in men, and understand it doesn't originate within ourselves. Rather, if we reject the source, we grow shallow, cold, rude, and petulant. And sure, you're going to grow cold in your life. We all do, but that is the renaissance of Christ, that He can reawaken in us a passion for all the good we knew as a child.

Your joy, your love, at the tender age I see you is nurtured. But, sin will creep in and people will try to steal it from you. It's illogical why humans have to steal from other humans the good things within them. Unless you account for a very real enemy who wants you to lose those things. But, we know that Christ is greater than he, and Christ has overcome the world, in whatever form the world may be. That human passions are illogical, often times outright cruel, but the joy and love experienced in childhood is a seemingly obvious antidote to that. And soon, you'll be with peers who will want to strip from you that joy. They call it jealousy, they call it lots of things. It's just sin. If you were beautiful, they'd try to fill you with lust and pride. If you were strong, they'd try to fill you with aggression. Because you are smart, they will try to fill you with doubts. And, if you hold onto your faith, they'll try to strip away from you the very real intelligence you have. And there is no logical reason why. Not when everyone can share in the joys and passions of this world equally, there's no reason for us to have to strive against one another, yet that very strife is the thing that runs the world.

The smartest an in the world, he receded to a farm and tended livestock with the love of his life. That is a wisdom I wish o pass down to you. That if you are gifted with intelligence, you'll see a vanity in the world which only a few things are truly good. They'll want you to fix the world, they'll want you to grab life by the wrists and fight it into submission. But truly intelligent people see the vanity of it all, and really all they want to do is live a life worthy of the gift of breath. Truly intelligent people know that life would be a lot better off without the striving and competition. They know that solidarity and unity, and even love are superior to all else. And certainly, the more we grow into our adult lives, the more these attributes wane and the more we recede into a vain life filled with superficial people and superficial events. Things which happened a month ago are seemingly earth shattering, while the great truths of history are forgotten, and even repeated. 

All I can tell you is that when you're older, you'll see the same things repeated in the next generations, and the things you thought were new might be, but likely in many ways aren't. You'll see that the childlike wonder and curiosity is discouraged, and everyone wants there to be a damned purpose for everything we do. I'm not saying you need to become an artist, heaven forbid it. Just, remember that what task you choose in life is only as important as the amount of joy it brings you. And also remember that the very meaning you strive for isn't found here, but is found in Someone Else.

Dear,
Richard Dawkins 

Pi ends at the thirty-fifth digit. Does it not?

Dear, 
Mr. Atheist

When I see your channel, I imagine DNA manipulating technologies that can make a male a female. I think of Quantum Computers opening portals to other dimensions. I think of Time Travel. I think of grotesque acts only depicted in Hieronymus Bosch's the Garden of Earthly Delights. The absurdity of my invention, Jotunheim which I had the displeasure of visiting in my dreams... Where absurdity after absurdity was witnessed. 

I would say, if it were possible to have a penis for a nose, you'd probably heartily approve. 

To which, every reason not to be an atheist is demonstrated heartily by what you accept as normal. And I'll be one hundred percent frank with you, I might have been an atheist, if people like you didn't display the grossest forms of human corruption in the things you tolerate.

Everything you believe is like that DNA computer I was just looking at. An abomination, a corruption, a bleeding, cancerous sore on the body which weeps and foretells of hailstones and painful darkness. I will be happy when God shows you the truth. I'll be there, sitting next to him because I had seen firsthand the truth. And when you see what I saw, you'll be flush as I am embarrassed for you right now.

I see morals exist. I see good exists. I see evil exists, and it's demonstrated by your very lack of them. Modesty might be culturally dictated, but it exists for a very good reason. Because as I sit next to attractive women, I cannot help but be attracted to them. To which, they present an ever present danger to me. Do they not? Because of people like you, beauty is dangerous, that even looking at someone beautiful can enrage their ire, and so have real world consequences. Which, you're too much a fool to admit.

I call you a fool. Because you are one. And I hope this letter shows you why your mentality puts all in present danger.

Dear,
The Atheist Church

Why do you want religion without Christ? I think you display something poignant, that many people go to church for the wrong reasons. Maybe you are just a manifestation of that trend in culture, of people wanting worship without a diety. People want the benefits of kneeling and standing, and sitting and standing, and singing bad songs, and the hysteria of rolling around on the church floor babbling in a made up language. Frankly, it offends so many Christians that you are doing this, but you only can do it because so many churches are doing the same thing.

It's interesting to me how you want the most boring aspects of Church. Personally, as a child I found it boring, I still can't bring myself to go to that kind of a gathering. Church to me is sitting with a friend discussing Jesus. I feel that is more like church than any process I'd ever went to. I don't get socialized at Church, I feel rather empty when I go. Except for one thing, which is the very thing you take out of it.

If it weren't for Christ, I wouldn't even dream of going to church. If it weren't for the connection I had with God, and the overwhelming sense of peace I receive by communing with Him, the prayer, the two way discussion... I wouldn't see any reason to go. Sermons are pretty boring, and if it weren't for the direct communication with God, strengthening my heart, I wouldn't even listen to them. 

Church is boring. Why do you need to do it? Why do you remove the only part of it that makes sense? Sitting around talking about morality isn't going to fix the problems in your heart. Only having God point to the flaws, and then empowering you to uphold the moral laws, that's the only benefit I can see from moral teaching. A friend of mine said Gandhi used his authority to elicit oral sex from his followers, so obviously there is no follow through with moral teachings without God to help empower you to follow them.

Which leads me to the question, "Why?" Many Christians are asking it. Why would you want the ceremony of church, when you could just get together and have a barbeque every week? Often, I've thought Church would be better if that's what it was. Why do you feel the need to sit down for long hours, listen to boring lectures, sing mildly annoying songs and get up and sit down four to five times? Why raise your hands and get tingles? Why? Experientially, why would you do it?

Unless God were connected to those events, making even the worst melodies something soul cleansing, why would you even do it? Are you experiencing community? Why not just join rotary club? Why not just join an Atheist club? Why form it like a church?

Just some questions, as I abhor going to church. It's one of my dirty little secrets. If for the hordes of superficial relationships I'll make, where I know people by name but know nothing else about them, or the bad songs and redundant lecturers, I don't understand why you'd want to recreate that, and just remove God from it. For me, God's the only reason I would enjoy it.


B. K. Neifert <bkneifertauthor@gmail.com>
9:59 AM (6 minutes ago)
to gmskeptic

Dear,
Genetically Modified Skeptic

I've looked at all the same evidence as you. I'm well versed in evolution. Well versed in modern science. I find a completely different conclusion. Here's why.

First off---and you can watch the Yale Lecture---they describe what the Bible actually says. Kind of verbatim. That Abraham was one of the first people to have direct revelation from God, and he lived in Mesopotamia, so why does this "Cult of Righteousness" spring up in Mesopotamia? Around the time of the making of Hammurabi's code. The Biblical genealogies place Abraham right at that time period, which would be less of a miracle, if it didn't do that two other times. Some scholarship even goes so far as to identify that God had a son---so, it can reasonably be assumed that the Trinity was always worshipped. What's even more spooky, is that Jews in th centuries leading up to Christ knew that God had a Son, and predicted His Son would be the Messiah. Even more spooky than that, is that Zechariah names the Messiah as Joshua, which if you know anything about Jesus' name, Jesus is the Greek form of Joshua. So, the Bible kind of names Jesus to be the Messiah. And we have evidence that the Trinity was worshipped, even as far back as Mesopotamia.

Second, Moses' lineage lines up right with the cult of Aten. You can do the math. And some other historical facts line up with that, too, which I was reading in my Dad's textbooks. It mysteriously vanished recently from textbooks, to where you're taught now that the Jews basically were a creation of Persia by some crazy prophet named Isaiah II. Which, certainly, cannot be true because we have historical records of Judah existing in the Tel Dan Stele, and the Nebuchadnezzar Chronicles. So, really, it ought to be established fact that the Jews, specifically Judah, existed prior to Babylonian Captivity. As the whole biblical minimalism movement hinges on that. And, frankly, it's not true. What is true, is that the Jews forgot their religion several times. It's recorded in scripture, which can only be a historical account of a people. Certain details show up such as the Bronze Serpent or the King's lineage which stays pretty consistent through the whole of the Bible. The Genealogy in Matthew lines up with the King's Genealogy in the book of Kings. And before you contest that fact, may I remind you that I read the Book of Kings, and can use the Kings to orient myself in the Biblical timeframe. For instance, when the King is Hezekiah or Joash, when reading the prophets, it annotes two very different time periods. And that same Genealogy I use every day to orient myself in Biblical time. The fact that it is so accurate---with some minor problems, but I don't think the Bible ought to be perfect, as then men would worship it and not God, which kind of is the problem facing modern Christianity today---that I find the Genealogical accounts to be about 99.9% accurate. In modern manuscripts, where the Genealogies are accounted and updated, the only error in the Gospel of Matthew is "Admin.", which really isn't that much. I think the Bible gets a lot more right than it gets wrong, and really, the only things it does get wrong are factoids, which accounting for the overwhelming amount of things it gets right about human sociology and psychology, and even details and predictions, it's pretty much a mystery as to how it cannot be accepted as the Word of God. As, the reason why Moses lining up with the cult of Aten is important, is that the Pharaoh randomly decided to convert to monotheism for no apparent reason. In my estimate, it's probably because he saw the Red Sea Parted and the firstborn child of every Egyptian die.

Third, there's the fact that the Bible tells us a lot about Prehistory. It gets a lot of details right. I heard it claimed in some circles that Babylon never existed. That's an actual theory floating around, just as absurd as Jesus never existing. But, let me tell you why I know Jesus existed. First off, the Vatican contains His death certificate, which said, "He who claimed to be the King of the Jews." I know someone who saw it first hand. And, there's also records of his census. And, then there's some textual evidence that Jesus lived. Namely, that Jesus sweat blood which is an actual medical condition, and that Jesus had a heart attack on the cross. The water flowing from His wound was the water sack surrounding his internal organs, which is pretty accurate, and confirms that Jesus did in fact die. Now, we know he raised because the religion's still around. Men don't actively die for a lie. The apostles who saw Him resurrected were willing to be burned, impaled and crucified to keep that testimony.

Then, theres the predictions the Bible gets right. Namely, Psalm 22, Psalm 2, Isaiah 53, Jeremiah 31. If you account for prehistory, the Torah even predicts Babylonian Captivity and Isaiah predicts Cyrus would restore Israel to Zion. Which, given that Isaiah 53 is in the Dead Sea Scrolls, it's almost a certain that those prophecies weren't edited in later on, but actually existed.

And for the Bible being a bunch of Sumerian myths---really, that's impossible. The more probably truth is the Sumerian myths were sourced from earlier material, and that earlier material became the reference point for Moses when He wrote down the Torah.

Yes, the Bible is God's word. It's not perfect, and that's why you need to have a relationship with God, because only by that relationship will you be able to be a good person. You cannot be a good person without God's help. That's what the Gospel teaches. There's no way to be forgiven without the Blood of Jesus, and there's no way to walk in accordance with Truth unless you have God shepherding you. As Tolstoy said, "It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken, an[d in] nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong." This is why Christ needs to be our teacher and shepherd. Because a few geniuses like Mozi, Confucius, Lao Tsu, Aristotle, Plato, [Maimonides], Socrates etc. have found bits and pieces of truth. But I adjure you to find a place that has more truth than the Bible does. Even the verses on Genocide speak truth, that some cultures are irredeemable, but let God damn them, and not man; let God give the command on when it's ethical to go to war, and let no man be given that burden. That's the highest command in scripture, is to allow Christ be the judge, and not ourselves.





























Dear, Billy Joe

Dear,
Billy Joe

I have to say a few words to you. You're my favorite modern artist. In that you are not a modern artist, but sing of the ancient subjects of war, political theory and romance.

Myself, I am obsessed with words. Words of all kinds. Censorship is my enemy. All forms of it.

I love ideas. I love notions. I love all forms of poetry---even the ones I disagree with.
 
Make a well orated lambast of my religion, and I will applaud. Which you do well, and I see those same faults in my churches.

I love words, a truly spoken word. But only when such word is true. However, much falsehood needs to be tolerated, so men can attain to the bigger truths.

Learning is a journey, from whence we come from some ideological framework, and we multiply ideas until the mere breadth of ideation becomes fascinating. The communication of difficult concepts, the predictions people make, and how they can be more accurate than any prognosticator's.

We are not fortune tellers, we writers, poets, bards. Yet, we often understand the truths the world would like to forget. Those it would like to hide. How many foolish things had we said, before we got to a point where truth was recognized?

Freedom of speech is America's most sacred value. More sacred than religion. For, religion in the Middle Ages suppressed the truth, just as much as any Fascist or Communist regime. And there is a reason to be afraid of a government regulated by the church.
 
Though I would never be a Mormon, they too must exist, as with all Arians. As forbidding them only makes it less possible for another man to express truth. For, if we regulate our ideas, men who have truth cannot speak, for the government will be a obelisk which defines everything for the masses. And therefore, it being a black, calculating machine bent on power, it will never let truth be spoken again.

I despise many things---but with speech and not violence I combat it. My words are the exorcising of my demons. Those strong inclinations I have for war and justice. The same ones that make you adealistic. I understand you... For I am you. I see injustice in everything, and every establishment.

Unlike you, I understand it is a necessary evil the world must tolerate--- Yet when those princely powers rise up, and strip from the people their voice, then truth ceases. Truth must be allowed to exist--- then so must falsehood, for pursuit of the truth means much falsehoods must be entertained. For no man is perfect in his knowledge and intellect, and by a congruence of many voices, truth is pursued.
 
Speech is America's most sacred virtue. The seconds only Privacy and Jurisprudence. For racial equality, religion, the press and all other sacred rights are borne from this one. And speech is also the vehicle by which we correct what is wrong with everything else. And I commend you on your use of it, though a few F words are sprinkled in. I myself have dabbled with it.

Dear, C. S. Lewis

Dear,
C. S. Lewis

I know you are resting. Rest easy, I do not make conference with the dead. But I shall speak to you, the you I know in your books, and I shall say a few words.

First off, that I do not believe the world is flat. And secondly, that I do not worship Christ because he can make the world a better place.

The world is a faltering star, slowly waning into a state of evil. A state of wickedness. At my age, men wear masks because they are wicked. I wear a mask because I have spoken wrong, on many occasions.

The faith is waning in these years, and the more I read, the more I realize Christ is true.

It's not because Confucius or Aristotle haven't made cogent moral philosophies, but that what they had gotten right, it was taught and demonstrated by Christ. Mozi and Lao Tsu are complimentary to Christ, proving quite objectively that his morals are discoverable. As solid as the Tele Dan Stele or Great Isaiah Scroll, these moral evidences are precious to me, that I had chosen the right religion.

But, understand that Christ would make a better world. And as my world is waning into its age of "Science", Science which steals every man's liberty, I find the principles of faith, that there is a God, would free me from my duties of wearing masks, and would stop me from being censored and having my words erased from the common public forums.

Is there a group of Witches who writhe and control the earth? I do not know. You write about them in your Space Trilogy. And though it is my least favorite of your books, the faith you have to believe despite everything is paramount.

I would believe no matter what. Because as we both know, whether the earth is round or flat, or spins on Satan's finger, there is a God. And Jesus' words prove Him to be that God.

I have to admit, I fear being alone. Much of what I wrote was to make less doubtful the tenets of my religion. To make clear that there was a flood---

How I do not know. I liken it to some spiritual event. Where literal water fell from the sky, and flooded the whole earth. Maybe several billion years ago. Maybe man had been upon this earth for eons, and maybe there is a cycle of birth and death, where man's civilizations perish in fire.

When you wrote, Mr. Lewis, it was paramount that people believed, just like it is today. But, today we traipse close to war. In your time we did as well, but now, my happy existence is threatened by the belligerence of nations.

I am powerless to stop it. I am not its catalyst. Rather, its cataloger. And as faith disappears the world becomes like Philip K. Dick's story I just read. A world where men are unable to ideate and project into the future. They are unable to think critically, and only details are given to those who strive in the higher castes.
 
And because of this censorship, because of this ignorance, some man finds the Robot, and he gives it life. He is taught that it was a moralist who destroyed happy living, but it was---as of modernity---the robotic hive clusters of men radicalized by propaganda.

Freedom I espouse. Let man put any word to ink. That is speech. But men play the dreams of Morpheus---They watch so much Television that their dreams turn to Black and White, as my Grandfather's were. And they play those dreams and corrupt themselves.

Yet, it is censorship that is destroying us.

A Portrait of Humanity; Finished

Prologue:

The following is in praise of free speech. It combines my “Odes of Strangers” into a likeness of human nature, set against the current political landscape. My Odes of Strangers were inspired by Horace’s “Odes and Epodes,” where I felt that the works were comparisons of everyday people with heroes. So I did the same, taking unlikely people I’ve met and telling their lives like they were historical or mythological figures. All culminating into the Poem’s recurring meditation, on whether humans can actually communicate and understand one another. Which is what the work is considering. Can people understand one another? Or are we trapped in our own opinions?

The work is dedicated to all who practice Free Speech, and the expression of that speech. Most of the individuals I tell the stories of have controversial expressions of speech, and have used their free speech in my life. And I wish to simply look at them as individuals, and think about the ramifications of censorship, which would be war. Will a Cyrus like individual need to raise up right now, and fight for Freedom of Speech? And will we have to fight to have our unique expressions protected? Or, can we come together and recognize that each of us have contributed to the larger conversation, and what needs to happen is more listening, rather than censorship?

Thank you and Enjoy.

Proem

Circles


Mr. Emerson, may I just attain
What you said about circles.
It makes me first get offended.
As is true with all wisdom and
All truth, we resist it at first.
We do not like things to be 
So simple, nor do we appreciate
Patterns we ourselves have not attained.

Yet, looking at the mountains
The trees, my palm, my fingers
My gloves, the rocks,
My calves, the cow's horns
The lizard's ovular body
The worms, the flies which are 
Shaped like eggs,
The grasshoppers which are shaped
Like fingers, the birds
Which are shaped almost ovular
The frogs, which when scrunched
Are like a little oval
The bushes which are ovular too...
And cats and dogs and horses when they lie down.
I do say I see the pattern as well.
And I do believe I have a theory on why.
Pi---being infinite, as is the infinite measurement of the curve---
Must inherently be the natural order of geometry.
So everything, running off, and smoothing over by rain
And evolving over time,
Naturally must produce a circle.
As, Pi is the natural shape, the natural
Number of nature, by which all other things are dictated.
Surely, it has its subtle imperfections
Making each specimen different,
But given the natural shape of all things
Are likened to a circle---
And what is straight
Often we can assume was man made,
How men create things in squares
And nature its circles---
I do say it's an 
offensive little thought.
That I hadn't attained it first---
Maybe I equal you in genius
For giving an explanation as to why---
Is it the infinite reality of Pi
Which causes this?
That number naturally representing
The geometry of a curve
Therefore, randomness must
Inherently, be shaped into curves.
For, the patterns in nature show
That all things, built by God,
Are as a curve. Men build in squares
And God builds with circles.
Because men must shape our environment
To order, and God must shape His environment
To the natural world toward that infinite 
Shape, that infinite number Pi.
And Mr. Emerson I do not plagiarize you
Rather, as you said about great poets
Writing in an age where there are few,
We take all things and make them our own.
But, my solemn task is finding in the past
Things which ought to be remembered by all
For a better future.

Another peculiar thought.
It seems that man is the only creation
Of God's which is like a rectangle.
For, the Golden ratio
By which men create and shape their world,
Is dictated by the rectangular shape of our body.
No other creature is dictated by its rectangular
Form. None which I know.
For, they are either cones, spheroids
Or outright shaped like circles.
The Human body, when standing upright
Exhibits the Golden Ratio;---
That being Five to two.
So do trees, so do bushes,
But only human bodies seem to be nature's rectangle
Which may be why we prefer them in our creations.
But this strange ratio has been told to me
By a much beloved professor
When describing the Acropolis
Which is fitted to our human shape;---
Which does appear in nature;---
Perhaps it is nature's rectangle
Which we men are formed closer to----
Yes, it is most defined in our human form.
For, perhaps these two measurements
The measurement of Pi
And the measurement of  Phi,
Perhaps these numbers are scientific
Facts, oblong and shaping the world
Through their infinite order.

Perhaps Pi is nature's curve
And Phi is nature's rectangle
Both working together
In their infinite measurements
As if planed and scaled by God
Like the Bible said, 
"Wisdom was with God when he Planed the Scale of the Earth".

For, by observing this order, 
I am confident that God exists.
For, these measurements create
Upon the earth, and define all Aesthetic Beauty.
That, and of course, Fibonacci's sequence;
Which repeats itself through all natural shapes.
For some reason, these numbers lay down the law
Of how our natural world gets shaped by the 
Eons of textures and winds, and rains.
And, certainly, to have such geometric certainty
As this---for randomness cannot truly occur in nature
According to these principles---
It must be that an architect, by design
Created our world.

And as certain as these mathematical principles are
Which are observed in everything from trees
To mountains, to rock formations
And even the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls,
So are the moral principles laid down by Christ
As certain. Which, Mr. Emerson, 
Is my scientific foundation for believing in Him.

God's Word

Word and Tao seem to be called opposites
Yet, each speaks to the same discovered truth.
Beyond the legalistic letters we
Try to use, lies the sense of expressed truth.
Not through matter of interpretation
But through matter of the senses given
We understand one another through truth.
Even more, that lay hid beneath all things
Is an unseen force which does define them.
That we, attempting to stray from that path
Do create for ourselves unhappiness;
For underneath everything is the truth
Which cannot be expressed by the letter
But can be  fully expressed through the sense.
For it is this sense which defines all things
And straying from this sense is what creates
Bitterness, malaise and unhappiness.
And this same thing is the proof of God's Will.

Imagine We Were Characters in a Book

Imagine our Earth were a book.
And imagine God were the author of that book.
God wrote the book.

And, isn't a book something different
Than our three dimensional world?
It exists purely in thought.
It cannot be accessed
Except by comprehending what the words on the paper mean.

It's the difference between our four dimensional space/time
And pure imagination.

Now, imagine everything we could experience
Were like that book to God.
And God were like we reading it.
How silly would it be for the characters
In that paper to use the events of that book
To comprehend the man who wrote it.

Such is with Genesis,
That if one authored a book
And edited it
It would look different
Describing the edits one did
Than it would if one read the events
In their chronological order within the book.

For we and our history are like the book
And the Bible contains a literal history of 
How it was written;
It catalogs all of its edits
And presents them to us chronologically
In the point of view of God's Eternal Present.

I

Alexander, your love for life exudes
And your love for meaning in the little things.
Like a child, you look upon the world
And see greatness, you see unexplored
Alleys in every nook and cranny.

The strangeness of the world is still fresh
In your youthful mind,
So your sense of meaning is founded
Upon a love for life and its victuals.

Grow older, though, Alexander,
For one day you will,
And looking upon the turtles
Chirping their love songs
In the spring
You will at once find all things artificial.

The aspirations of love
The charters of worlds gone and far
Of new lands, and sailing over the world's edge
It will be a far off thing,
When standing before the turtles chirping
Their mating hymns.

To which, life will be somber and melancholy,
Yet, it will be sweeter, for the Turtles singing their hymns
Will bring you the knowledge,
Sweet it is, that within their happy little tales
Lies the force of life, and the gay little charm
Of something deep within every living thing.

And when you find that,
You will have found all wisdom
And all charity.
You will have stumbled upon the outer breath of God.

II

Jacque, you cry for a storm
Against the church.
You ire, and are indignant.
Aught had such indignation at a time.

You wish sin to be removed from this world
And believe with your heart that all sin finds its root
In the institutions of man.
You see it, for they have always rejected you.

You rage against a machine
That neither you nor aught fully understand.
Yet, the machine, dirty it is---
It brings upon its apparatus 
The sustenance of the poor.
It is a place to tell dark secrets.
Those secrets told, they will
Vanish with the wind.

Yes, you and aught rage against
It, for it never accepted us.
But, as black and dark the machine is
It makes men civil
And protects them from themselves.

For in all things is sin,
And to take away sin from a man
It takes mercy, and a covering of skins.
For our shame is bare before all mankind,
And these institutions are the places
Where the spinstresses weave our cloth
And wrap us so we are no longer naked.

You wish to strip the cloth
From men
When you wish to dissolve those institutions.
For aught do understand it,
But certainly, those institutions are good
Because men need to cover their naked shame.

III

Cleopatra, your domain is yours
Who gives words of strong guidance.
Your ire is just, your indignation furious
But your favor like a copper piece,
Choice among the coinage.

Silent and swift, your judgment comes
While strong are you to battle.
You lead this one, and he goes there.
You lead that one, and she goes here.
They all hearken to you.

Egypt is guided by your strong bow
But strange are the Satraps who preside
Over the prosperity of our world.
For much strong gain,
The flows of the Nile overflow your head
Yet you strive, even though the rewards are dim.

For the fruits of your kingdom are small,
Small among the kingdoms,
Yet you man your post with dignity of office
As a Prince among princes.

The war comes, and allies flock to your aid
For your reign is good, and just
Though there are kings above you
And kings above them.
The peoples are wary
Yet you keep your subjects under the yoke
Of hard effort, and strength
For you join yourself with them
And thresh the corn, 
Beating out the fitches
From the fold.

IV

Atalanta, you stand among your thorns.
Everything you touch withers and dies.
Your anger and shame behooves you
As the food you feed the nations
Wilts and does not satisfy.
It is ashes in the mouth.

You make haste to do good
Yet only grief and shame come from your deeds.
Your good is only ashes seeping from clenched fists.

How the nations love you
Atalanta. They cheer your fame
But they curse the name of man
Who challenges you.
You, like Death, bring the shadow
And the gray of the thunderstorm.

Your benefactor is rude in his abuses
And your lover is unkind.
Slowly, your creeping vine tangles itself around
The world, as you stand among your
Thorns, and pluck the Corolla of the Rose
To shape it into your deign.

Fortunes you cannot make.
And it flees from you;
All things die and wilt in your hands.
For the rose does not prosper
For you do not proceed with
Diligence. Your garden is fertile
But your slack hand makes the bulbs stoop.

V

Sela, I see your strength
And bitter rage.
You course through the seas
O' Bitter One,
Ruler of a Thousand.

When Cyrus came to Babylon and Ecbatana
The peoples fled from your tyranny,
For your wrath was kindled
And your ire, your wrath
Your broken pride, it caused the peoples
To flee from their cities
And they allowed Cyrus' forces within the walls unhindered.

The Medes hate you, O Sela,
As your hideousness is made the Form.
The peoples lament
While you set sail on the ocean,
Mighty Princess of the North.

You grow to hate
So you draw forth your oars
And pillage the coasts
Causing all things beautiful to age.

O! Sela, the world has become yours through Scythian war.

VI

Bitter David, I see you unravel
The mysteries of a song.
Your heart in melancholy turn, studied
What would become vanity.

Your daunting effort goes noticed
By those who love music too,
Of ages gone by.
Stand at the age where deep
Calls out to deep;---
But the Cypress in its
Mourning replies,

"Death has taken over the valleys.
"Meaning doth sing her lute
"In the Elburz
"And armies travel through the Gate.
"For the sun makes his revolution 
"Over the mountains
"And on one side is day
"And the other it is night."

Yet none do draw the wisdom
For men are marked out for their sins
In youth.
For a man's sin is discovered
And it is now altered new,
So that David, your effort was in vain.
And with it the Cypress
Mourns, for even the work of man
Is besmirched by what's misunderstood.

VII

Hera, you were strong in 
Courtly abodes, where the messengers
Could keep your stead
And give you the sustenance you required.
For it was the infidelity of Zeus
Who led you to your humble position.
This the peoples knew
And gracious was their kindness toward you
In your low estate.
Completely innocent you were
While Zeus made off and courted
Danae. They were but men.

You required rest;
So with Artemis and Apollo.
Yet, you instead wished to smite
And like Prometheus steal the heavenly fire.
You thundered, and your rage flung
For the thunderbolts, but Artemis and Apollo
Were sick of loves, and cried day and night
For peace. Yet in your wrath
There was no peace,
But made war as Egypt's vine.

Then, you established your house
And cast your thunder at Cyrus
Not Zeus; no, you threw down lightning at Cyrus
Just as Cyrus had feared.
Who would free God's people?
Yet you, seeing yourself as a god
Smote the one who shew the most kindness on you.
For Artemis and Apollo's sake
Cyrus rose early to counsel thou, Queen.
Yet your fury hath spilled onto him
Who was your greatest ally.

Furious art you that one had told the truth?
That war among the Titans would ruin
The happiness of your children?
This will be your ruin;
And alas, God has told me it already is.

VIII

He came down, that Aeneas
With his cloud,
Shrouded in the mystery
Of faith. "What liberty do I have?"
He wondered, wishing to appease God
Through the Moegic of the Law.

The mystery is, that a wise man
Can tell his riddles
Without repudiation.
That a man who has it in his mind
To create worlds
May create them.
That a man, struggling to overcome
Sin, does not have to abstain from anything
Except what is sinful.

If there be a train of bitterness in the heart
That is sin. If Aeneas, you strive with Achilles
And Odysseus and Virgil
Then strive not with them
For they make you doubt.

However, stories contain in them wisdom.
Hercules the right of passage for every man,
And Bulfinch, a Christian
Spun many a myth with joy
For it was his work.
For a man like me has very little use in this world
Except to look at it
And turn over its riddles.
It does not have to be divine...
Yet prophetic nonetheless
God speaks, and it is my joy to write.

Yet, you ask me a question...
I suppose the answer
Is that beauty is an utterance
But since there is so little beauty
Any trace becomes an idol.
Yet I see no thing for me to do
Beside utter beautiful utterances;
Such it is that I do not sin.
No more than Spenser or Wordsworth
Or Coleridge.
But, since there is only ignorance right now
Any truth uttered will not be trusted.
In fact, an utterance of truth
Could set the world ablaze
For men are spun their dreams by Morpheus
And not by the poets anymore.

IX

The shadow within you
Oh River of the Jordan
Flows like the Styx into the recesses
Of cold, imagination.

Passing through desert lands
The ashes of millions
And the starving bodies of billions 
Flow through your wise deltas.

Embrace the shadow?
The cold, monstrous thing
Within us? Who like Death and She'ol
Twists and turns through hideous
Forms, dark and seductive?

Within the heart lies this
The very thing Christ will exorcise.
For twisting in passions and desire
Murder and blasphemies
Is this darkening of the soul.
The Shadow,
The Doppelganger.
Latent, all feel its pressure
Those who are wise;

Those who are fools do not know it
Yet it exhumes with all of their tongue.  
It is man's perfect enemy
The shade which the white sepulcher contains.
Find it, grab hold of it,
Release it with kindness.
Push it not back down into the body,
But let the wicked beast
Be like mist which steams
Out from the soul
By the sweat of faith
And the renewing of the strength in Christ.

X

The heart-felt joy of play
One finds in youth, ever striving
For the pure emotion.
And Nero, your heart is light,
In you is joy, the turning of your marble
Toys and the marching of them in their rows.

Old, though, we find you
As you put on your wolf's attire
And with drawn leash are led through
The meadowgrounds.

Innocent, though strange,
Your boyhood's emotions flood into you
Pure, like the syringe.
You bark, you trot, you kick your feet
In the mud.
You wag your tail and I find no sin in it.

Then, the disapproval settles in.
The peoples look on you
And do not understand the spectacle,
The unstructured exorcism of imagination.
What is beautiful, what is serenity
What is joy, is now poisoned forever.

You push it down into your soul
For play was all you knew.
Play was everything you had.
The joy, the frivolity,
The utter freedom.
Constrained to your dog costume---
For you are now old,
And have chosen just this one form of play
As is consistent with sagacity---
But noone shares your joy.

It is I who sees you are not sinning
But are filled with hearty laughter
And you feel pure child's joy.
I understand you...
But the stranger shares not your joy.

So, what was first innocent
Becomes howling sin.

XI

God of Our Youth

What the devil wants are happy monkeys
Silent, with no knowledge of future's past.
Dancing with the strobes lit, and faces pale.
Exerted with all fun and copulate 
With the familiar sting of sexual touch.
Children to be raised by their bonobos
To grow up without knowing what love is.
Silent, with no knowledge, no speech, no thought
Language simplified to terse chords of
A ten thousand word vocabulary.
No one works, no one has their property
Starved; feeding on the remaining surplus
Of past generation's stores of green corn.
Breaking down the windows of good people
To steal from them their hard earned silver coins.
At the end, hell's the deserted cities
Its deserts the overgrown farmer's fields
Its dried up river beds the State's drained stores.
This is Socialism, God of our Youth.

XII

To the Hymn of Auld Lang Syne
Not an Original Piece, but One I Can Remember Singing
But cannot find anywhere.

Keep Your Eye on the Grand Ol' Flag

Should all acquaintance be forgot
And e'ry a heart do sag
Should all acquaintance be forgot
Keep your eye on the grand ol' flag.

Should old acquaintance be forgot
And all guns hammer their tacks
Should old acquaintance be forgot
Keep your eye on the grand ol' flag.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And the nation come under attack
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
Keep your eye on the grand ol' flag.

Should our acquaintance be forgot
And men forget this song
Should our acquaintance be forgot
The days seem ever so long

But if all acquaintance be forgot
And e'ry a heart do sag
If all acquaintance be forgot
Keep your eye on the grand ol' flag.

XIII

Sir Lucan and the Sphynx

Canto I

Upon the pass there came Sir Lucan 
And His squire Beowulf the Less.
Beowulf the Less had a page
Gregory.

Gregory, the page, armored Beowulf
From head to toe.
He latched on helmet,
Shield, shoe, girded Beowulf with
His sword Gwyndylyn.
Beowulf had aegis
Strapped to his chest.
However, Beowulf's helmet was weakened
By a blow taken in mortal combat.
Beowulf had slewn a man down in dishonorable show
Of arms, where he and a knight Valiant
Took to blows in the ring of combat.

This knight threw down his gauntlet
So Beowulf picked it up.
Sir Lucan was Beowulf's 
Knight, and this knight beckoned 
Beowulf to stay home,
And not to pick up the gauntlet.
Yet, Beowulf picked up the gauntlet;
And thus, battle was struck.

The two warriors showed, down in the arena
While Lucan watched, with scowl on his mug.
Arthur sanctioned the tournament
As Page Gregory was with damsel
Thus, he did not throw in his lot to stop the tournament.

It took to blows, the black knight, 
Called Sir Rancor, first took his sword
And smote it down upon Beowulf's head.
Beowulf took the blow;
Sowith, his helmet cracked;
Thus, Beowulf became wroth
Who took his shield and smote
Sir Rancor upon the breast, and 
Smote down his sword upon Sir Rancor's head.
Blood poured out of Sir Rancor's joints
As Sir Rancor took to a blow
At Beowulf's shield
Bowing the shield with his chain mace.
Beowulf, without helmet nor shield 
Acquiesced for the battle,
And took his sword and ran it through Sir Rancor's
Joint, by the armpit.
Sir Rancor fell wounded,
But took a dagger from his leg
And shafted the weapon
Into Beowulf's ankle
Breaking his shoe's belt.

Beowulf was uninjured; however,
Taking his sword, he smote it down upon Sir Rancor's head.
The knight fell, to wit, Beowulf drove his sword
Into the heart of Sir Rancor
Who lie on the ground, wounded.
Arthur saw that the knight was dead
So called the tournament closed
Where Beowulf lost all his armor
And Sir Rancor was lain smitten on the field of battle.

Beowulf expected to be knighted for the feat
However, Arthur saw no honor in this feud.
Thus, Beowulf was yet still a squire.
Beowulf saw the disdain on Lucan's face
And saw he had disgraced his knight valiant.
Lucan who would be later slain in battle
To the Caerbanog, was disgruntled with Beowulf.
For some say, this led Lucan to the Caerbanog's forest
For he would no longer listen to sweet Beowulf.
Page Gregory was not there to help Beowulf
And Lucan was furious with Beowulf
For accepting the challenge of so unworthy a knight.

It came to be that Beowulf and Lucan had a quest
Together. To shut up the Nile Dragon
Who would attempt to Swallow the Daughter of Zion
On that day. Beowulf and Lucan left 
In their armor, and Gregory
Left Beowulf with these words:
"Lucan cannot be trusted,
"Do not believe a word he says
"And be wary and wily of the things he does.
"For Lucan is a savvy knight
"Who only thinks of himself."

Beowulf considered it,
But knew it was not true.
However, Lucan was furious with Beowulf
For smiting the knight Rancor.
Thus, Beowulf and Lucan set off on their journey.
They would crusade down to Egypt.

The Nile Dragon knew that they came,
Thus he employed Nebo and Abaddon 
To come 
With the Elf Moegic
And thus, cause Lucan more anger
At his squire.

Nebo came with his daughters
Seventeen Thousand
And Abaddon came with only himself.
The two were chosen to be Pharaohs
Kings of Egypt,
And if they would slay Beowulf
They would retain Egypt
For themselves.

Canto II

It came to be, that in the salt valleys of
Meggedon, Abaddon sought
To conspire and therefore slay Beowulf the Less.
Lucan and Beowulf---Gregory not behooved to come,
For he could not---
Were on steed, Beowulf with Chantz
And Lucan with his steed Crevan.
Where Beowulf camped,
Abaddon snatched him from his bed
And took Beowulf to a village
Where Beowulf would dream half his life away
For sleep was better than the waking hour;
Beowulf was captured by Abaddon
Hencewith, he was brought to the low valleys.

Now it was Abaddon who traveled with Lucan.
Abaddon filled his mouth with many flatteries
Toward Lucan.
The two set out on the quest, but
Abaddon was foolish, and no wisdom was in him.
He did not slay Beowulf
For he enjoyed the man's riddles.

Thencewith, Abaddon walked with Sir Lucan
Through the valleys of Meggedon
Until they came to Africa's Gate.
The two passed through
But Abaddon was exceedingly happy,
And more foolish than Lucan remembered
Beowulf to be.
However, Lucan fell to love Abaddon---
Because of his joy---
Like he were a son, and so pardoned Abaddon.
For Lucan was enchanted.

They walked for days
Through the desert
With its barren crags
And salt rocks.
It came upon the warfield, Nebo
And his hordes of Daughters.
Nebo, on his steed with leather skin,
Was untransmogrified by the elf jewel;
Thus, showed himself for what he truly be.
He was leathery, and his ears a point;
He was fat, and round, and gluttonous,
His teeth were yellow
And his lips were thin.
His skin the color of ash,
He had a face which was horrible
To behold.

Lucan mounted up on Crevan, 
And hoisted her javelin.
"Beowulf, I have enjoyed your company
"On this journey, yet now I go out to ride
"Against this beast."
Abaddon creased his lips into a grin
Because he had loosened Lucan's armor
When placing it upon him
As was a squire's duty.
Lucan hoisted up, and flung for Nebo.
The seventeen thousand daughters of Nebo 
Flung down the mountain
Into the bowled valley.

The battle was gruesome
As blood poured into rivers
Through the ravines.
Lucan had slaughtered so many
Of Nebo's daughters.
Nebo, thus, flung into a fit of rage
And transformed himself
Into a Giant.
Lucan fell to a flight yet
Lanced the Giant's foot;
However, Lucan's armor joints came undone in battle
And he was bare before the Giant's wrath.

Abaddon danced a wicked dance
And joined the fight against Lucan.
He rushed at Lucan on Chantz
However, Chantz knew 'twas Abaddon.
So, Chantz stopped in mid gallop;
Sofore, throwing Abaddon off his back.
Lucan retreated toward Abaddon
Trampling him with horse's hooves
Seeing that he was not Beowulf
But was Abaddon. Lucan fell into a sore fright
That he was without his squire.
Thus, Lucan galloped as fast as he could out of the battlefield.
He had found himself in the Nile,
And so discovered the black, fertile soil.
There began to grow a vine from it
And it shot out large, and heaved itself
Upward. It grew tall into the sky
Like the Tower of Babble,
And it sprouted smaller vines from without it,
Lit; it were starflesh.
The Sphynx was spreading his vine
All throughout the world
A verdant weed, it
Raised into the sky, and spread itself across the entirety of the earth.

Lucan felt frightened,
As he drew back on Crevan and galloped 
Toward his dominion.
Lucan was no coward but saw that this vine had spread
Throughout the whole of the world, 
And who was he to fight it?

Howsofore, there came one who was beautiful.
He took Lucan by the hand,
And told him,
"Do not give up on your son
"He needs you and your love at this very hour.
"For, Egypt is spreading its vine throughout the whole of the earth
"And you must help him
"By fighting back the fear
"Of this vine,
"To show him that he is still loved."

Lucan had received a vision of Beowulf
Encased in a place where he was rendered useless.
Thus, Lucan had to go rescue him.
For Gregory could not
As only Lucan's love could free Beowulf from his curse.
Only Lucan's forgiveness, and alliance
Could free Beowulf from this unholy trap.

Canto III

It came to be that Sir Lucan traveled into 
The heart of Egypt,
To the Tombs of the ancient Pharaohs.
The Sphynx prowled
With shifting shoulder blades.
There rose mummies
From their crypts
Five of the pharaohs of the past.

The Sphynx spake,
"Lucan, if you can beat me
"I shall spare thee from the Caerbanog.
"And thy squire Beowulf shall live."

Lucan, upon Crevan, hoisted up his javelin.
"I will be angry with my squire
"For fighting his feud with the Knight Rancor.
"However, I see that he is a man.
"And he has made his own choices."

The Sphynx spake, 
"Choices, yes.
"He has made many choices,
"And smote down the knight Rancor.
"And for this, we see you cannot forgive him."

The mummies flung toward Lucan
And it was all Lucan could do to stay
Upon his steed.
He would slash the mummies
He would kill them
Only to have them resurrect themselves
With their moving limbs.

"You do not know the moegic of Egypt.
"These are stronger than Orcs
"And cannot be killed
"By one who harbors anger."

"Beowulf was my friend,
"My companion from long ago.
"Now, he is broody
"And sad, and I do not know if I can love him the same
"For his sadness is of his own making."

The Sphynx said,
"Then, Lucan, he shall die."

Lucan fell upon his knees
As Crevan Whinnied.
"He will die?"

"Of course, a man cannot bear the despair
"Of having one so close to him
"Perpetually angry.
"For, Beowulf is entrapped by his own despair.
"And that despair we are using to fuel
"The spreading of this vine
"Which shall feed on the world's joy
"And it shall replace all joy with despair
"Just like your son's.
"For his grief is a weapon
"We use to throw down the nations
"And to give them no joy henceforth.
"How can a man who is innocent
"Have no joy? It can only be
"That Pharaoh's vine
"Recompense the world
"Double for what it has done to Beowulf."

Lucan then spake,
"What has the world done to Beowulf?"

The Sphynx spake,
"The world?
"What had it done
"But cast him into shame
"Through its unforgiveness?
"Beginning with yours
"Which was harbored long before
"He smote down Sir Rancor.
"For, you had resented him
"Ever since he had chosen
"Gregory as his Page."

Nebo and Abaddon receded into the corridor
And drew their swords.
"Now, see, Lucan, I can save you
"From the Caerbanog,
"The Fairy lORD
"If you defeat me."

The Sphynx grew haughty.
"What are you Sphynx?"
Cried Lucan.
The Sphynx said,
"I? I am the flow of the times."

The five mummies flung forth
To maul Lucan
And Abaddon and Nebo 
Attacked her
At once.

It began to grow into a horrendous feud
As the seven fought mortal combat.
No matter how much they fought
The seven prevailed over Lucan.

Lucan saw the Sphynx 
Prowling like a lion
From without the battle.

"Yes, Lucan, I am the Zeitgeist.
"I am the thing you cleave to.
"Surrender Beowulf,
"For he is not your son."

Lucan cried out a mighty roar,
"Beowulf is my son!"
And so she threw her lance
In a mighty strike against the Sphynx's 
Chest. It sunk deep into the Sphynx.
The Sphynx was smitten.
He fell dead upon the bier of the golden
Tombs. The Sphynx was dead.

There came from time the Caerbanog
As it spread forth from the vines.
For the vines were the Caerbanog.
It lit its fiery glow,
Yet, Beowulf flung from his sleep
Where the Caerbanog hid him.
Beowulf took Lucan
And galloped with him
From without the Pyramid.
The whole of Egypt quaked,
As Nebo and Abaddon
Rushed from the tombs.
Pharaoh was dead
And the mummies were crushed 
From beneath the pyramid's falling Aedicules.
The Caerbanog was spread throughout the whole land.
Abaddon and Nebo disappeared from without the pyramid.
After which, a quake,
And the Caerbanog fell 'pon
A hard fall;
Its verdant vines
Turned to ashen yellow.

"Wot not you that thou would have perished
"To this cruel vine
"Had you not saved me from this
"My spell?"
Spake Beowulf.

Lucan saw that the deuterocannon
Of the analogs of Fairyland
Were now altered.
The Caerbanog was defeated.
Thus, Beowulf could live his happy life.

Thus, Beowulf lived happily ever after.

XIV

I Saw Truth with Her Lover

I saw Truth with her lover
In the dark;
I took my raiment, and galloped far away
To where I slew a knight in combat
And took his woman from him.
I had then found a tree
Of which I wished to make her a garland from
Yet the tree bled and spoke.
He told me of a wicked sorceress
Who made he and his lover into those trees.
I had found, also, that the knight I slew
Had two brothers.
I found too many enemies
Yet was I angry with the Truth
For her adultery;
For why would she be in another's bed
And not mine, when I was her betrothed?
I had not seen t'wasn't her
In that bed, but rather the apparition of Morpheus.
For Truth, she seemed, slept nude with Hecate
Yet it was only a magical spell
Which made Truth seem a whore.

XV

Trivia, riddle odes
And weave webs of lies.
Every word you speak is
Invented from the world,
You make yourself more ancient than Hecate
Who stands with her torch.

You occupy yourself with every fact that contradicts
Strange, ancient wisdom.
The Love of the Two Peaches
Is constructed, born a twelvemonth ago.
Yet, it is born as ancient wisdom.
Trivia, you weave a web
Of factoids.

Wisdom can still be purchased
So the ancient accents are known.
Paul Revere did ride a midnight ride
Yet, Trivia, you make Boston's Massacre 
Riot control---
It was a massacre.

Auld Lang Syne replaces "You're A Grand Ol' Flag"
And Trivia, Mnemosyne is silently demented
So all acquaintance is forgot.
Good men are turned into Joseph,
Yet all his mourners are comforted
For great lies are being spun by Trivia.
It soon becomes apparent
The Love of the Two Peaches
Isn't ancient.
Neither was the City of Sodom one which stood ancient.

For there is truth:
And it is hidden
By you Trivia.

XVI

Sing, oh wary ship traveler.
Cyrus sees your weary eyes
As the watch prowls the street
Asking for bribes, and stirring the 
Little townsfolk into their homes.

Prosperous was the land you fled to.
Prosperous, and kind
Until Sin's dark shadow grew over the basin
Of the gorges.
O! If you only knew our freedoms
If you only knew.

Cyrus, stir the Medes
Stir the Medes
Stir the Medes.

Cyrus spoke,
"I would cut them to pieces
"And rip out their throats.
"I would ravish the town squares
"And purge the evil of this land.
"I shall not spare their children.
"I shall not spare the rod.
"For I destroy even the Babes
"When I go to war."

O! Babylon! Prepare for war
For the peoples desire the law of Yah
And scorn the laws of Sin.
From the East, from the North
From the South, comes the armies
Of Persia and Media.

Sing o strong ones
For freedom is meted 
And the war shall be fierce.
Weapons shall unsheathe their naked steel
And in one night the battle shall be lost
For thee, o Babylon.

For the Barren ones in the East
And the Barren ones in the South
And the Barren ones in the North
Are ashamed of you.

XVII

Dark and ancient truths
Which still burgeon in the world today.
American soldiers slaughter children.
Iraqi soldiers violate women.
War still gets fought by civilized countries.

Were you offended by Cyrus?
Yet our modern wars are fought just the same.
Children die in bombings,
Women are violated
Men slaughter one another.

What justifies war?
What justifies the crimes attributed to war?
War is the supreme evil.

What justifies it?
When is it justified to commit all atrocious evils?

Surely there is a time,
But now is not it.

XVIII

Let me fight our wars in verse.
Purge the violence from our souls.
Let me...
Let me speak of rebellion
Of slaughtering
Of killing
Of being unkind.

Let me tell you of war
You who wishes to kill the children
You who wishes to violate the women
You who wishes to plunder the spoil
From the homes.

Men die---
The very strangers I sing about
The very souls who occupy my verse.
These men, they die
Picking up the rifle.

Let me tell you the raw, uncensored
Emotion of war.
What kings feel when they send their troops into battle.
Children are to be dashed against the stone.
Women are to be ripped apart
Their breasts ripped open
And their bodies made into a heated flash of fury.

No... what I write ought to be offensive
Because you burgeon close to war.
These things you all will be guilty of.
So, let my poesy purge you of the evil.
Show you the guilt.
I'll draw you close to suicide
I'll draw you close to homicide
And then you can inch back
And say, like it were a dream, "I had never done it."
To know the feeling of a man's warm blood
Upon hands---
I do not know it, but I know the feeling
Of battle.
I will show you,
And let you meditate on it.

For is my verse offensive?
It ought to be.
For both Woke and Nazi youths
Will die with one another's
Fluids upon them.
Blood, guts and the ravished.

My poem should be offensive.
For war is offensive.
Do you wish to walk to the brink?
Do you wish to learn the regret
Of having taken another's life?
Of having violated someone?
Will your conscience ever be made whole
After knowing and tasting violence?

So I say, eat with trembling.
Drink with haste.
Prepare your hearts for war.
And if it doesn't come
Give a sigh of relief.

XIX

Xenophanes, you poetically, and surgically
Weave your origins of doubt.
You find God to be cruel
More like man than actual deity.

I see the traces of wisdom in you
How you want an origin of God's being
And callously say,
"Christ is only two thousand years old."

Yet, ancient was the deity Who gave Moses 
Law, and more ancient was the deity
Who gave some of which to Abraham Hammurabi's law;
El is Hebrew for God
And El is traced to Mesopotamia
To be worshiped at the time of Melchizedek and Abraham.
El, it turns out has a Son.
The Scholars at Oxford and Yale
Say, "It is the cult of righteousness."

Yet, I say it is not so.
What cult of righteousness springs up in China?
What cult springs up in Greece?
As if this God's truths were universal
Found throughout West and East
And firstly discovered in the Middle of the world?

Greeks found Word, Charity, Agape
Chinese found Tao, Filial Respect, and Universal Love.
Jesus is the Word, is the perfect picture of Filial Respect and Charity and Love.
How cultures found morality independent of one another.

Yet, there are those who contest it.
And Xenophanes, you find them
Secreted in your doubt that man had anthropomorphized God.
And that is what causes you to doubt.

Yet, I see the same notions springing up in separate cultures
Meaning there must Be.
What is there? 
What can be found?
If it's there to discover
Who put it there?
And these my God answers
When He took on Human Flesh.
No other satisfies it;
Yet predicted at the beginning of human civilization---
When one man and another agreed upon their social contracts
And thus forth bore rule---
Is the fingerprint of my God.
That El, the nameless deity
Had a Son
And from this sprung what academics call "The Cult of Righteousness."
And then I find philosophers discover those same truths.

I say to myself, "The evidence is overwhelming.
"And then add to it the Heavens and Isaiah's scroll;---the stories written in the constellations."
I find one hundred percent proof that God is the Hebrew's God
And that God's Word put on the Flesh of Man.

XX

Cyrus, I understand you
The way you think.
I know you from the inside
How you have petulant doubts
Yet rage at the heathen.
I know you rage against God
And seek to destroy Him.
Yet I also know you secretly wish
To use his laws to exact vengeance on this world.

You do not believe in God
You do not...
But His laws are enticing as an engine
To siege the Capitol
And to tear down walls and bulwarks;
To stir Media and Persia
Against Assyria and Babylon.

I know you from the inside
And your rage which burns toward the infidel.
Religion to you is a tool
The Messiah an engine which you will use
To usher in your reign.

Alas, I stand here
Arguing with you for the second time
As you tell me, "On your death bed
"You will say as Jesus said, 
"My God, My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?"
Yet you take slaves,
While you dash the infants upon the rocks.

Christian you do not hate---
No, you love God's people.
For it is in you to love God's people.
Yet you rage against God as Satan himself
And you move upon your holy quest to purge
Sin's temple from the world.

I see you in my thoughts and visions
And I am like you
So it disturbs me greatly.
I am gentle, and meek;
You are a warrior
Believing in the law of my God
Right down to the tittle---
Yet you do not believe in God.

Such a strange doubt in you
That I feel in my chest
But I do not understand why you believe in my God's law
But not the God Himself?

Is it, like so many Jewish men
You like the burdens of lamb stew and drink oblations?
I say to you,
You will be used to purge the land of its idols.
That is what you wish.
Yet it is I who shall prosper in the LORD's name
For I will declare my portion
That your rage may be just
But it is not a wholesome intention to 
Desire to fix the world.

XXI

Alas, I call you Cyrus in this book.
But you are not Cyrus.
You are Nero.

XXII

Gahanna was shrouded in mystery
As the Styx flows through the Acheron;
Descended into the deep
Son of a king, you trifle there.

King of the scouts
The minstrels sing of you
In the woven dreams of Morpheus.
The gum of Acacia is upon your thigh
Yet I rejected it, for such is the disease
Of mind, which your magic spun
Through dirt and vulgarity.

You sought me, and you found Cyrus.
You found me, yet you were but a boy
And our lives crossed on the banks of the Susquehanna.
I do not know what powers are over me...
Only that an Acquaintance, a man my equal,
So says David,
Whom I had counsel with in the LORD's house
Will betray me.

Forsooth, such a strange thing to be
That it was a happy accident
Which brought you to my humble life;
Yet you should be one plotting against me.

XXIII

The Savanna is rubicund
With delightful golden grains.
Most gorgeous are her valleys
With the hills among the rolling veldt.

I, the animal, enraged
By Serengeti hunger
Am driven into mindfever
Where I cannot perceive
Nor understand;
No, I am crazed by possibilities.

If I had you, your plains would be mine
And I would be the lion
Within his Pride.
There would be only nature and I.
It would be of no use
For only the air of the veldt
Could satisfy me
Should I be satisfied by you.
I would desire nothing more
And would never wander from my bounds
In the safelands,
Where poachers could not find me.
For I will stay upon your plains
And meander among your hills.

XXIV

There is an Amazon in the forest. 
Lusty she is, bare, exposed
Easy to take and be pleased.
Yet, she will tear you limb from limb
And take your leg upon her gnashing teeth.
She will bite it, with blood down her chin
And her hair is knotted with the blood of men.

Pleasing she seems far away
Until you come close to her
And she is too big for loves.
You cannot marry her
But become her slave
Where she will malign you
And break your spirit.

I say, I have seen the Amazon kingdom
And it is frightening.
All men stay indoors
And are frightened to peep
Out the lattice, 
For the giantess walks among them.
Elephant for steed
And lust in her eyes.

XXV

Though you speak untruth
Sor Juana, 
And always turn the right for the worse
My love for you waxes
Like the moon,
But it shall never wane.

Violent, you protected your blessed young
Though worthless men tried to steal
Your fruit from you.
And he is blessed
The fruit of your womb.
For you had taken your wounds
And stripes, and your joy was made fruitful
A man, more intelligent than I.
More blessed than I on this earth.
A man who possesses the sea
And all of beauty..

Though you do not speak
Words which are wise to the ears
Your zeal and love for your child
Is a light to my eyes
And a longstanding gem
And treasure in my heart.

When men malign your name
I speak in its defense.
For there is speech---
And what of us have not been silly in our years?---
And then there is action.
And though you speak
I know you act upon your better nature.
And for that I love you, Sor Juana.
And I always shall.

XXVI

Cain, you present your grain offering.
Your two hands labored day and night
For the produce of the field.
You present your offering
And say, "Look upon my fruit
"It is good."

Lot, however, gave his beloved daughter
To appease the lust of the Sodomites.
Broken by this, and also the loss of his wife,
Cain, you look upon him and say,
"What had this man done that was good?
"He gave of his women to be maligned by Sodomites."
Lot, who loved his daughter,
Felt maligned an entire lifetime
For this sin. He had cried day and night
Yet, it was either her, or the Holy Being.
For, they would be slaughtered
By lust, had Sodom's lust not been appeased.

Oh, Cain, you look upon him, disgusted.
Then you say, "My brother is poor
"Why had not my mother killed him in the womb?
"For he grew to be a lazy shepherd
"And does nothing all day, except peer
"Into the stars of heaven
"And spin Idle tales by which he wishes to teach the peoples.
"He is lazy, and is a degenerate.
"For I know his sins, that he has done far
"More wickedly than I.
"Therefore, why had not my mother buried him
"And his poverty in the womb?
"For I am rich, and right,
"And have grown my crop by my own sweat.
"And all my brother did was stand in the green field 
"To tender his flock."

XXVII

Censures of the Ass

He wants evidence for God's existence;
Beauty comes under attack, censorship
Threatens to destroy all things of conscience.
Evidence, he claims, yet it is his whip
Which tortures him like the mad Catholic.
Holy is his crusade, holy and thick;
Offended and driven mad by beauty
That the mountains are hoary and frostbit
That the trees are wooded, and the ponds green---
He, with his unholy, black candles lit
Sings his prayers to the form of ash decay.
Angelic voices he forbids to pray;
Evidence is what he seeks to destroy:---
Art he calls pretentious; beauty a ploy.

XXVIII

Some lies are sown by the minds of worthless
Men, who, knowing that they have lost their war,
Will seed a tare of doubt to germinate
Many decades later. It is cunning
At its finest, to fallow the soil
Of another generation to take
Up the Burdens of the Past and spill blood.
By it, crafty Fascists tilled Christian men's
Hearts, and sown their seeds into the future
Through ignorance of the past, and factoids.
Some fascists place condemnation on tongues
So to wag at long forgotten heroes.
Others sow their seeds, using Christ's good name
To then crucify devout believers.
All the while a chorus sings their hymn
To summon bestial intelligence,---
To blaspheme what is holy in heaven
And to call what is beautiful, grotesque.

XXIX

I

The idiot said on national TV
Disparaging religion once again,
"It is religion that separates us
"And maligns the human spirit!
"If we just got rid of it, people would have peace."
His raging lunatics cry for a third of the earth to be lobotomized.

Oh, yes, I read how Prods and Papes
Hate each other in Ireland.
Eerily, I see a different truth.
How Blue and Red hate each other
In America,
And Democrat and Republican
Hate each other.
No... there is bitterness enough
To be expelled from a man's house
Should you consent to the wrong flash of insignia.

Or, shall I talk to these idiots
About race? How mobs burn down Manhattan 
Because of skin color
And stores are looted because of class struggles?

Really, maybe we ought to be adealistic.
Then, perhaps we'd have peace
But the idiots I referred to
Have managed to give Hitlerian mindset
To atheists, who assume themselves good atheists
Only, throw the unruly Jews---I mean Christians---
Into the Gas Chambers.

Should I ever talk to that idiot
I don't think I could speak.
He's an excellent rhetorician
Who turns a news article about how Hitler was not a Catholic
And sources it in a debate
To prove that Hitler was.

Frankly, I'm about tired of it
But in that little microcosm I cannot understand---
Why do Catholics and Protestants hate each other?
I liken it to something that isn't religion---
It's just hate, and hate comes in many colors.

II

No, I'm not talking about you.
Perhaps it is that you don't understand
That educated men have taken the Idiot's
Thoughts, construing it to launch a crusade
Against religion.

But this Idiot,
Misjudging Christianity as the force of evil in the world
Mistakes what is something primal
For something artificial.
Wars between Prods and Papes
Are as equal as a civil war
Defining what slavery is.
And it is hardly a thing common to religion
Slavery. Obviously,
Your impression of Christianity
Is that we like to kill people who disagree with it
And that we go around starting Nazi revolutions
And banning books about evolution.
Silently, I understand your contemplation
Though simple. Reality is often nuanced
And often bad men have no real ideology beside power.
It is that, since the worst of humanity has been touched in this soul
To understand what it is that drove Hitler.
And certainly it was not the teachings of Christ.
Christ, who would be despised by Hitler
As Jesus is a Jewish Name.

I look at you,
And see you influenced by the same Idiot I'm talking about
Giving your factoids about how Nazis censored
Things which they deemed destructive to the "Volk".
You are likely not wise enough to understand it.
I do, however.
Religion unites a people
So does skin color
So does nationality.
And you reject the fact
That the religion was going to be a bait and switch
Where men replaced Yah with Thor and Odin.

No, it was not Christianity.
It was human nature.
As simple as a Blood and Crypt killing each other on Harlem's street
That is as simple as the in-group out-group phenomena
Which you blame on my humble religion.
Often my religion has been in the out-group
And persecuted by all men...
At least the true devotees to my religion.

You rage, you rant
But I do not blame you for your mistake.
I understand what you're saying.
But I understand it is easy to look at the artifice
And see Hitler built a tower with the remains of Christian mortar.
In that, I suppose you're right.
It is the worst of religion
But it is also the worst of Atheism:
It is the worst of ideology;
As you do not see it,
But I see in your atheism the same kind of destructive heresy
That led Catholics into the Dark Ages
And led Hitler to slaughter millions of my people.

Perhaps you will not see it because you are blinded by it.
And with that, It is why I silently bow away from you
And let you be led by your Idiot leader.
When you want true wisdom,
Come here and read and drink
From Brandon's Water.

XXX

I

Is poetry an expression of the self?
Or is it an expression of the truth?

II

Are all our minds just solipsist teacups 
And no man, however penetrating
Can truly know what is in another man's heart?

Is all our poetry simply an expression of self?
Or does a stranger share in our sufferings?
Can there be an utterance of the truth
Something true for all men
Or even just two?

Can there be an expression,
A word uttered that is truly understood?
Can the best poets be penetrated
Or are we trapped in eternal silence
Of the solipsist called our soul?

We reach outward, but do we truly see
The world for what it is?
Do we share our sight
Or are all men that of blindness
And can only see what is seen for them?

Are we truly alone
In our bodies
Our souls an isolated remnant
Which travels,
And it is only us and our sufferings?
No one to reach out to
No one to truly know us
Nor no one we can truly know?

Are we just solipsists?
The answer, I do believe
Is no.

XXXI

Siegfried Asher, among the Choir
I heard your song, like a Castrato
Androgynous. Hermaphroditous,
Among God's elect, singing
The hymns, beautif'lly  
The hymns,---melodious, sonorous.
At a point within the music
You touch a note, and realizing its sheer
Magnificence, it pleases you,---like Aphrodite
You make the gathering fall in love.

XXXII

Drink wine. Make love. Merry the heart a bit
With the pleasantry of vaginal skin.
Oh, Dionysius, to whom Kingdoms
Are but a game, and legions march out to war
On orders, by programming upon the screen.

They march, as you work upon them
To get the droves to do your bidding.
You wade in your underground hot springs
And you dine upon flesh and flagons.
Then, you hide from me your sin
In our conversation, like a Roan Cleveland Bay.

No, for all are guilty, but this you cannot admit to your own guilt.
You hide it, oh Northern Prince,
Your claims for evidence behooves you
As piously you sit upon your throne in your den.
You sit upon it, telling me there is no evidence for your sin.
When, it is written all over your shameful acts
To try and humiliate me.
For humiliate me you did, for I cannot call to mind
The potions you have drunken, 
The women you have made love to
Nor the roughness by which you treat your own kin.

To me, oh Dionysius, 
You are like royalty;--- Far beyond this jester fool
Whom given the license, can critique you.
For you are like royalty, 
And I am like screed.
My words have none affect upon you.
They do not move you.
They bore you.
They are sonorous sermons
To wit, namely, should I shame you like you have shamed me
I cannot. For my shame is in the open
And yours is locked away tight in your underground labyrinth. 

I speak of this to your benefit, that
Yes, most men are guilty of the same shame as I.
In one form or another.
Laid the orgies of Dionysius,
It is like murder upon your soul.
And I, wishing to ease you from your sins
Have been humiliated by you
When you point to mine.
For mine is a matter of public record.
And yours is not.

XXXIII

I hate the tastes of the populous
So I follow my muse where she leads me.
I see a wicked man cannot believe in God
But a righteous man cannot but help proclaim the name of Jesus.

Wherever I go, I see in people's heart a light
And the older they get, the more it dims.
It's like when a young maid loses her virginity
A dark frown furrows her brow.
Her glow becomes dim
And her inner light ceases to shine.
Or a young man who has heart and courage
And is like a lion, without knowledge of a woman
When he enters into her, he too loses that innocence.

Virginity ought to be prized,
As once it's gone, it never ceases to be a vapor.
Yet, a woman who was molested does not cease to be a virgin.
She is not consenting, yet I do see she loses some of her inner light.
Not for what she had done, but for what she had done to her.
And it is a shameful thing among the sons of men.

Yet, I also see men caught in a summary offense
Whom having offended the virgin they had deflowered
Be accused of committing a more heinous crime.
For a fifty dollar fine, they find themselves shackled.
I do not say it is injustice, for the woman ought to have been married
And her lost virginity cries out to her
Though many women pretend like it is not so.

I look also to the wind, and see change comes
To correct bad behaviors of the past.
What looks wretched and tyrannical
Is actually a chain which binds evil nations.
It wraps around them, and it chokes out the sin;
And while we all suffer for a while because of it
Soon, it is better left that sex be for a married couple
And for procreation. For, the nude show of woman's skin
Is something she does feel guilty for,
And though she shows her breezier at work
The men who stare at it are condemned.
And that whip chastises them,
Yet the lack of love in her life chastises her.
For all had been exposed for the purpose of vanity
And still, that vanity cannot hide its shame.

So, I look to the current age and say,
"Is it that I must suffer too?"
And the answer is yes.
For a short time, and then it will pass like a raincloud.
Yet, the dark storm is wrought by God
To correct our foul notions. 

XXXIV

The sheep with the Golden fleece
Was tasked by a divorced bride
To bring her children across the sea
And to save them from the jealousy
Of their stepmother.
It dropped the girl into the water.
And she, unapologetically, disappeared
Without a second thought in the narrative.

XXXV

To avoid the tyranny of
The stepmother's disloyal rage
She sent her two children upon
A lamb to swim them o'er the bay.
The daughter fell off the sheep's loin.
She drowned, while the boy was then saved.
In this journalism I see
Vacuous truth, unconscious in
That it had no symbol, nothing
The storyteller of the fleece
Would wish to cause us pay heed.
Rather, no moral does it spin
No deep truth for a heart to win.
Yet a past land's conscience it leaves.

XXXVI

Phusis and Chronos

Purple hair of the setting sun's fire,
With robes of the sky's daytime amethyst---
Her sandals are peridot sward, nestled
In the earth of her skin's sun-kissed velvet.
Her eyes are the ocean's green, with glass foam.
She wears the skins of all the beasts she took
In combat; the insects are her jewels.
She is betrothed to Time as man and wife.
As time will age, so will she weaken.
Until the two pass on to the heavens.
For nature grows weaker, as time passes
On, and the more unnatural man becomes
The time of Nature's magic wanes, so with
Her love, and mercy and her swells of joy.
Until she dies, and so does Time, and the
White Rider comes upon clouds of heaven.

XXXVII

A Poem in Iambic Tetrameter

The truth is ne'er as strong in wise
As lies which speak in quickened fire;---
For specious words which lies surmise
Are stronger than the spoken truth.
But words well thought, in clever fay
Do shine on minds who mull away
A day's eve in one single thought.

XXXVIII

Sistine Chapel

Michelangelo, the cretic beauty of your namesake,
Let me diverge from my folksy wisdom, and sing
Upon this lute the song of your Sistine Chapel.
No, I shall not use my utterances which bring on songs'
Mystic echoes, to my rigid verse and primal
Muse of meters sung without their feet conforming to the
Standards of the ancient lores, spun upon papyrus cloth.

I watch and listen to the sage who says your art was dulled
By the washing of a thousand hands which stripped from
Them their shadow like the cross shall strip away our sin.
And, yet, it is the most precious sight my eyes had ever seen.
For by the sins of careless hands, a sin brought grace to me.
For wrong it was to strip the work its shadowed veil;
Yet not a thing more beautiful had my eyes ever prevailed.
For Christ, our sin, shall wash away, to scrub off our darkened shadow.
And by this washing, because we sinned, we shall be beauty's mallow.

XXXIX

Thou Disagreeable Abductor,
Onusion---have you any skill
At portmanteau...?
 
Two maids sleep in your bed---
You live a life of leisure upon the earth
Like a king with his harem.
You plough your heifers with the row
And you make the Jewess cry.
You spread your seed.
You write works
And with your prowess
You bring them to the world.

Me in all my compassion
Cannot take but a few
To hear my desperate pleas.
Yet you amassed a great following
And fortune.

I spend years mastering my craft.
And I am not paid.
I am not successful.
Your enemies feed you
For you are more alike with them
Than I.

XL

The songs of Melkor fill the land
And all the bards must dull their thoughts;
The lutes and pipes and strings do wane
To the primeval rhythm's drum.
Words are their most raw utterance
And all wise words are now called wrong.

XLI

Canto I

There stood in the plains a warrior
Whose name was ancient as the days are long.
He travelled from very far
To the land of mystical Greece.
From his home in Zion
He travelled to the Athenian shores
Where he landed, and saw a culture
Much unlike anything he had seen previously.
Brittos disembarked from his galleon 
With Chantz his steed,
A black stallion with no blemish on it.
He took and led Chantz by foot
Stroking the horse's gentle face.

He saw many strange things.
There were women in love with women,
Men in love with men.
There were men who dressed as women
And women who dressed as men.
Some, by way of moegic,
Made themselves of the very sex.
The only thing which showed them 
What they were, was the face
And even some had faces which none could
Tell were of a man or woman's.

He saw the philosophers,
The Ionians,
The Atomists
The Evolutionists,
The Pythagoreans.
He saw much knowledge
In this city, where men rode upon their steeds.
He heard of the gods of this region
Baalim whose mischief with the science of Babylon
Was strong. Yet, none were of the thirteen
Save Minerva, who once ruled over the Grecian borders.

Brittos saw their marble homes,
The plenteous activities,
The Olympics in their nude displays.
He saw the Parthenon, the Domes
The Aqueduct, the Pantheon
The Hanging Archways
Taught to these Greeks by the Etruscans.
'twas not as beauteous as Brittos' home
With the Sistine Chapel, Sophia and Notre Dame.
But it had the same aqueducts;
It had the same warmed waters.
Yet these men took their aqueducts  
And made their pools
Where the men had their sodomous orgies
And the women's mouths were filled.

Brittos marveled at
Their wisdom...
They had knowledge of the cosmos
They had knowledge of the beginnings of the earth
They had knowledge of the waters
The seas, the gardens.
Their science was exact
And brought pleasure to the whole land
Like none before them
Save Nebuchadnezzar's kingdom.

 Canto II

Brittos found among them a champion.
His name was Hercules.
Much like a Nethinim was he.
Therefore, Brittos challenged him to a wrestling match.
Brittos, thin and white, and wiry
Was looked at by their champion.
Hercules scoffed at him.
 
"Look at you, gangly, spindly limbs
"And skin as pale as the daisy.
"You wish to challenge me?
"A god?"

Brittos disrobed.
"I wish to challenge any who
"Would call themselves a god.
"For, I had slain gods before.
"Thor and Athena."

Hercules scratched his chin.
"You had slain Minerva?
"In these days, we call that goddess Minerva.
"And you claim to have slain her?"

"Yes, good sir. And I wish to test my bout with you
"To prove that a man is mightier than a god."

Hercules scoffed.
"I am as strong as one thousand men.
"I had cleaned out the Augean stables,
"Had borne the Earth on my shoulders, 
"To unburden Atlas,
"Had defeated the Hydra,
"And had wrestled Antaeus in the garden of Hesperides"

Brittos nodded his head,
And said to Hercules,
"These are fine feats.
"Since we boast before combat
"I had defeated Thor and Athena both in mortal combat.
"I had beaten the ladies Grea
"I had overcome the Chok who could bend a Nethinim's verse
"I had even overcome the Giant's Soul."
 
Hercules paused.
"You had defeated a giant?"

Brittos said,
"Nay, not a giant, but even worse.
"A Giant within me."
 
Hercules rubbed his chin again.
"I say, you have slain a god,
"Of this I know
"For I too have subdued one.
"And this Thor, I do not know
"But you speak of him
"The same as Minerva
"So I assume he rules over a different land."
 
"Yes," said Brittos.

"I sense there is great power in you."

"No, none whatsoever. All my faith flows
"Through the LORD Jesus."
 
Hercules spake,
"My strength flows through
"Knowing what is right
"For I had sailed with Jason
"To attain the Golden Fleece.
"I did it to attain riches for the impoverished.
"And riches I had won from that."

"Then it is righteousness that holds you to 
"Your victories. Saved, I had been afflicted by the Giant's Soul
"And I had done much wrong by it."

Hercules was affronted by this.
"You had done much wrong by the Giant's Soul?
"Then are you evil?"

Brittos bowed.
"I am as evil as any man.
"But, if I subdue you
"You shall see it is not my righteousness
"That makes me strong.
"You will see that it is grace.
"For all men have done wickedly on the earth."

Hercules turned his head around him
Seeing a mighty crowd had gathered for the battle.
"Do we take to weapons?
"Must I slay you, since you are wicked?
"And you have committed crimes?"

Brittos said,
"I had been afflicted by your emperor,
"Nero, who had done to me
"What he sought well to do.
"For I had worldliness in my heart."
 
Hercules then said,
"How can unrighteousness
"Beat a hero like me?
"You had done wrong---
"Much from what you say
"And I had freed men and women 
"From their plights."

Brittos then said,
"But I too had freed men and women---
"I had defeated an entire army
"Of Thor's with the jawbone I plucked from one
"Of their square chins."

Hercules then spake,
"Well, I have had enough of this.
"We take to combat.
"I shall pin you
"And prove that it is my strength
"Which overcomes weakness
"And that you shall fall
"By your wicked devices."

Brittos then spake,
"Yet, if I win, it will 
"Show that grace is stronger
"Than my great surplus of sins.
"And that it is not strength which wins in combat
"But the deliverance of Christ."
 
Hercules, with his muscles and skin
Burnished by the oils of many olives
Was thrice the size of Brittos.
The two threw off all their clothes
In Greek fashion.

Canto III

Brittos and Hercules
Bull rushed into one another,
Their arms like horns,
Taking into their hands
The sinews of each other's triceps.
They both writhed in that fashion
Trying to throw the other to the ground
And therefore win their points.
Brittos would not let Hercules escape his grip
To which Brittos flung forward
And tackled his opponent to the ground.

Hercules and Brittos strove upon the shale
For fifteen minutes.
Hercules spake, "I am more righteous than you
"And I shall prove it by defeating you!"

Brittos saw his enemy hold equal strength
So he exerted all his effort to thrust
The opponent to the ground.
The two made wild jerks
To which Hercules and Brittos
Both scored many points.

Hercules then spake,
"I have more points than you
"So, your only hope of winning is to pin!"

Brittos knew this a lie,
But took to thrust his opponent
To the shale beneath him.
Brittos had commanded the fight
Yet Hercules spake,
"I am beating you.
"You are not righteous
"Brittos. I am righteous
"I had done many feats of good works
"And you have none, save the sins
"You overcame within you."

Brittos thrust forward
Breaking his opponent's armhold on the shale
Sofore, he swung around 
Hercules' four-anchored body 
To get atop of him.
Hercules spake,
"I shall beat you.
"For you are unrighteous.
"I have many works of heroism.
"And all you have done
"Is conquer your demons."

Brittos then spake,
"I shall prevail
"For Christ's grace covers me."

The two escaped one another.
Hercules, then, thrust his hand
Into Brittos' throat
And the two knelt, facing one another.
Hercules spake,
"I shall squeeze as tight as I can
"Your throat, and I shall kill you.
"That shall prove that you are wicked."

Hercules squeezed as hard as he could
Choking Brittos.
Brittos then spake, 
"If I am evil, then kill me.
"I do not wish to live if I am evil.
"Let us make this pact
"That if I am evil
"You shall prevail and kill me
"Hence here, to prevent my eternal suffering.
"For if you prevail,
"And kill me, I shall know that I am evil.
"But if I prevail,
"I shall know that Christ covers all my sins
"From now, and furthermore forever hencewith.
"Even if all my sins be exposed."
Brittos, thus, stood upon his nimble feet
And thrust himself between the gap
Of Hercules' knees.
Hercules tumbled over and 
Brittos thrust himself overtop
Of Hercules.

"You can only win by a pin
"And I shall never let you pin me!"
Cried Hercules.

Brittos spake to Hercules,
"I shall pin you,
"And you shall see that Grace is stronger than your heroic deeds!
"For in you is murder
"And it had not even once crossed my mind
"Nor entered into my thoughts!"

Brittos pushed down upon the shoulders
Of the hulking Hercules
And squared his shoulders to the shale
For five seconds.

Hercules spake, "You hadn't pinned me for three seconds."
Yet, it was for five seconds which Brittos pinned Hercules.
The match ended
And Hercules vanished without a trace.
The battle had been won
By Brittos, 
Yet the Pride of Grecian Honor
Forbade Hercules to admit defeat.
For to a Greek
Sin can never be atoned for.

XLII



Aegis, you are strong and Merciful
Yet I AM is merciful, too
Forgiving the debts of those who are sinners.
My sins reach into heaven
Yet so do yours.

When the Red Cross Knight
Went into the house of Morpheus
He caused a dream where the knight's maiden
Lie with another man.
Thus, the Red Cross knight scorned her
And left her to the protection of the Lion;
For none would defend her.

Thus, a hag became The Red Cross Knight's
Companion, who hid her withered flesh beneath her cloak
Hiding her foul form from the knight
Yet she exposed a fair face, dolled up with make up.

It was the dreams of Morpheus which caused the knight
To give up his fair maiden,
For she had made a dream to show her adultery.
Yet, it was not her adultery,
But rather, it was a vision spun by the witchcraft of Morpheus.

So, like I told you,
Be sure you are a shield 
To the true maiden.

For some knights walk with a withered hag,
And have given up their fair lady to be 
Guided by the Lion of Judah.
For, if this dispute I am in the wrong---
Or you are in the wrong---
Both of us are certain of our verity.
Let God be our judge,
Yet let there be peace between us.



XLIII



The net is set before,
And the Fowler garners his devices.
Oh! Steel trap!
It is sprung and wound taught.

He seethes with venom
And with his black veil
He shows himself as violet light!
He dawns the clergy's robe
And stands above
Beyond, with his fowler's instrument set.

The congregation dances in their red hooves
And cloven feet,
As the witches draw their enneagrams.
They do their dances
Ecstatic with the tongues of asps.
They bow, they raise
They dance to the light of their own fires
And they say, "I see."

The Black Priest
Raises, in the robes of Baptist's flannel
They shout their glorious shouts
In ecstasies,
They gorge and smoke their peace pipes 
Outside of their Holy Cloisters.
They speak of life now,
And they speak of prosperity
To call forth holy visions to bring them their good
Fortune, and their just deserts.

He draws his cup, with the pentagon
Pits at the back of his church
Where he sacrifices the goats.
He destroys the content man's life
With his counsel he gives to the man's wife
Impregnating her with her desire for life.
He implants this same desire in his whole flock
As the fanatics bear their arms
And draw forth their swords
Ready to wage the Holy War of Armageddon.
He calls forth his armies from the woods
Whom he has also impregnated with the desire to live.

He speaks of gaining beauty in the wife
And of physique and flesh.
He sways in his black robes
And hood dawned which prevents his face from being seen.
He is the Judas Priest
Presiding over the Black Sabbaths.
He is our modern Preacher
Preaching the good work of self content
And prosperity, likening this fallen world
To the land of milk and honey.
He says, "Heaven is a place on earth,"
And he tells his troop to take it
To slurp down the victuals and to feast upon
The sea's fats.

Prosperity, beauty, contentment,
These are his sermons
To a lost generation.
Saying to them,
"Receive your bounty
"For you shall provide for yourself!
"The poor are a scourge upon the earth
"And the rich are the inheritors of the land.
"The meek are all sinners
"And those who mourn are chief among the blasphemers.
"Those who are poor in spirit, they are the filth that we despise
"And those who are peace makers, they we hate because we love war."

The congregation spins in their pews, 
And dance to the beats
They sing their magical chaunts,
They shout their "Hallelujah"
To the Jesus of Suburbia. 

And though they sprout wings
The net flung into the air.
And only the righteous escaped.

XLIV

Bellerophon, you are accused.
You rest on your innocence.
Yet, know I do not speak in your favor
Kindly. I am not your surety.

For you ride Pegasus.
You've defeated Chimera.
You spy you enemies
And perhaps Stheneboea lied---
Yet perhaps she didn't.

I do not know which course
Yet though you are my mortal enemy,
I place myself in your shoes.
I would not want man to accuse me falsely;
Nor spread the infamous deeds of my youth.

However, know this---
If you ride to Olympus
If you soar above Ganymede
The gadfly shall sting your horse.

I do not judge you,
As is my Christian office.
I fend off the Sword of Stheneboea
Not for your sake, but for my own.
For, he who accuses you
I know not whether he is true.
For that ignorance,
I lay my aid not for any approval of your deeds.

Yet, what is unknown to me,
Ought to be unknown,
And I will not tolerate a talebearer or slanderer.
Yet, had you or had you not,
Let not your pride bring thee
To the status of a god.
For then I shall strike you down,
And if your arrogance is lifted up
To say, "I am completely innocent,
"Like God Himself!"
I shall slay you with the breath of fire from my mouth.


XLV



There was once a man who accused his father
Of a sum of offenses, which would shame his father
For the rest of his life.

Such it was, that all had sympathy for the son
Who shamed his father, until a righteous messenger
Overheard what he was saying.

The messenger, grumpy and possibly sounding arrogant
Said, "You remember something which never occurred."
The man insisted his father had told him this secret.

To which, the messenger said, "Then keep your father's secret
"For you tell his secret to everyone, he will be ashamed."
Yet another man, concerned with the truth

Came and intervened. "Why do you harass this man?
"Do you not see that his father had committed a terrible wrong?"
The messenger spoke wisely to the man concerned with truth,

"We all have sinned like thus. His father may or may not have
"Acted shamefully, yet it was a secret which should have been kept.
"Now I know about the secret, and so does all who listened.

"It is only a matter of time before this man's father
"Be implicated in the crime, and whether it were true
"Or not, only the LORD knows. Yet, it is not our business to be this man's judge.

"Rather, we are to deliver one as such, as the son had claimed to have forgiven
"His father, yet you encourage him in this evil matter of spreading slander
"Throughout the community? Who is right? Let God be the judge

"Yet when you read this many years from now,
"Do not slander my character, for I strongly prefer to stay on the man's
"Behalf who was not present to defend his character, and it is yet you who have sinned against him.

"Will you sin against me, in spreading hatred for my rebuke
"Or will you allow the incident to be forgotten
"Like the son ought to have forgotten his father's secret?"

XLVI



Sin's strong curse is that it is fate
Which will cause we men to woo guilt;
It compels callow couth to stray.

So Jesus we need to be saved,---
When crass shame comes, compulsory,
To turning souls,---to tame the grave.

XLVII

The Kingdom of Heaven wages
Its war against the Kingdom of
Shadows. A sore battle all must
Set out to glory's field. Rages
That war for all human ages
Where the soul must bastion its love
And forfeit all of worldlust.
It must purge all of its hatred.
In my poesy all of my good
Wages war with all of my bad.
And only by respite in Christ
Do we receive our daily food
To purge our soul of all its slag.
My poetry is this good fight.


XLVIII


Grace, my love, is a pardoned
Offense, so when one's walking
Through lush greens of a garden,
One not offends, by mulching.

For though the dirt is privy
Upon the foot of a man,
He used right his story
To make rich the neighborlands.


XLIX



Upon globular spheres, Atheist hell
Will be wandering like Neanderthals
In a cosmos of alien hunters
Without goodness to prove God does exist.

The moon shifts all phases of its cycle
Regardless of where the sun shined that day,
Yet the eclipse shall prove the earth's shadow
Upon globular spheres---Atheist hell.

They shall be upon the earth, frail and scared
Beating their wives womb for the fetal meat;
They shall build fires and their stone tools; they
Will be wandering like Neanderthals. 

They shall worship the aliens as gods
And civilizations shall never be
Built, for they shall be like farm animals
In a cosmos of alien hunters.

They shall have no proof of good, no love or
Joy---Morality shall truly be a
Subjective lie, and they'll survive through strife
Without goodness to prove God does exist.


L


The camel through the needle's
Eye---if thought a city's wall---
Is only gainful fable
If we see its burdens fall.

For if we interpret Christ's
Words only the city's wall,
We may lose great miracles
And not hear Christ when he calls.

Conclusion

Deconstruction of My Faith


When I was young,
About eighteen,
I was talking with God and told Him
"I don't believe in You."
I heard His voice, saying, 
"All men have gone astray, and there is none which does good."

My Ex Girlfriend and I were atheists.
We were bound to hedonism
And neither of us were happy.
I was atheist for a few months.

Then, doubts crept in.
Almost immediately after becoming an atheist
Doubts about my atheism crept in.
What of Universal Good?
What of Universal Truth?
It was at that moment
I realized every atheist I'd ever spoken to
Hadn't believed in Universal Truth.
To them, truth was subjective,
And was only a matter of perspective.

It took serious blows to my faith.
Such a serious blow to my faith
That I began to write "The Fifth Angel's Trumpet"
And crafted Marc's Atheism with my own doubts
My own atheism.
Yet, at the end, Marc was to discover that the love
He shared with Erin was the proof of God's existence.

For, the greatest doubt in my mind
Was, "Why isn't this love universally true?
"Why do people scorn it, and malign it, and choose not to believe in it?
"This love is real. I know it. And this love can fix the world."
For that love, I have etched into my conscience as
The proof of God's existence.
It wrecked my faith in Accidents.
Nothing Accidental could be truly meaningful
Yet I had found meaning which transcended even myself.

What followed was I met my best friend Solomon.
And he introduced me to the hardest Atheism I'd ever seen.
Nietzsche. He introduced me to Robert Greene's ideas.
Then I had encountered the hardest atheism I'd ever seen.
But, my faith in atheism was already deconstructed.
Nietzsche's argument was disproven. 
For there is something genuinely good about love
And monogamy, and trust, and fidelity, and 
Most of all, I had discovered truth.

In my earliest burgeons of intellectual curiosity
I took a quarter, which was 1 inch in diameter.
I tried to discover what Pi was.
I had found Pi was a measurement
Of a circle's circumference if the diameter is one.
Meaning, truths were measured
And universal truths existed.
This peace I felt, this love
I measured in the real world
As a solve to all of our worldly problems.
And its source, I soon found, was Christ Himself.
It was not something we could generate on our own
And even saying Christ's name,
I feel the genuine peace.

For this peace, I found it hadn't come from human agency
But was rather something which Christ Himself had taught.
It was the very teachings of Christ---this peace I had found.
And with that, I realized immediately that this universal truth
Which I felt, and made me a better man,
Was the truth which I must teach the world---
And that truth's power source is Christ Jesus.

The Philosopher's God

I do not talk about Plato's Word
Or Euclid's Elements; both of these concepts
Are sufficient evidence for God's existence
That there is order in both the ideated and corporeal world.
The first premised that there is in fact reason
And one has the ability to understand someone's words.
The second premised that there is in fact reality
And one has the ability to understand it through measurements.
Thus, the universe can be explained in both ways,
By measurement and by word,
And because of this, there must be a Creator.

This is not the God of philosophers,
But is merely the way we can infer that a god of some sort exists;
That there is order both through what is possible and also what can be communicated.

But, the God of philosophy is Aristotle's "Unmoved Mover"
The "Prime Mover", or whatever else philosophy invents
A priori to describe god's existence.

And certainly, there's always an atheist like Hume who says
"It always was." And we have two sufficiently complete systems
Of believing in the universe.

Rather, it is why I don't use philosophy to describe God's existence.
The "Unmoved Mover" the "First Cause" the "Supreme Self"
The "Architect"---which this last one is closer to being a proof of God's existence.

I find people who come to faith through philosophy
Often have the weakest faith.
It just takes a little bit of science to knock over their foundation.
I, instead, believe because of science.
I believe because of communication.
I believe because of mathematical principles.
I principally believe because I've seen and witnessed good
And can find no other way to explain it.
For, very often what I've found to be good
Other men have soiled with their opinions
And trampled on like swine.
Universally, what I found was good
And it was bad men who soiled it
So, I'm happy there is a hell to put those people in.

My belief is simple.
I know God through having a relationship with Him.
I observe God when I see kindness or love or joy.
And to b honest, the cosmological argument makes me doubt
More than it strengthens my faith.
Just me personally, as I have an imagination
Which can conjure anything up,
And it's not hard for me to believe in a universe
Sufficiently created of its own natural forces.
The model science has created seems to be atheistic
And should I believe it---and I don't---I'd have to be an atheist.
Yet, I see so much good in the world that goes without explanation
And I cannot escape Earth's Atmosphere to see if it were truly
A sphere, and I cannot go back in time to watch Cave Men evolve
And I cannot---especially---know if there was some quantum form of nothing
Which started the Big Bang.

To be frank, the only thing I can know is that there is good in this world.
And it remains good even when I'm told it's not.
And on that, I rest my faith because it is far easier to see
Than an "Unmoved Mover" or "Prime Mover"
Or "Sufficient Self" or "Supreme Consciousness."
To me, God sits in the form of a white robed man
Tall, in the background of heaven like he were a mountain
And above him is a rainbow;
And He like a rainbow, just stays his place there in Heaven's background
And when you move toward him, he remains fixed;
Like a rainbow. And HIs Son and His Daughter our Holy City---I'm being foolish---
Are there beside us, talking to us as citizens of a city so magnificent
With its pearlescent green and red towers as tall as the space between the Earth and Moon
Its forests of the Trees of Life, its country sides, Mount Zion the Everest Sized Golden Peak with Silver Cap
Its mansions, its river the size of an ocean, its temple where the LORD sits,
The fish, and all the animals and things yet to be understood created.
Libraries, playgrounds, bakeries where the bread is free, coffee shops
Chocolate Factories, Carnivals, Street Fairs...
And all of this will be free of charge, fully supplied by God.
Architecture so lush, no modern structure can rival it.
Painting, sculpture, murals, flowers, possibly even a beautiful flora and fauna filled with colors unimaginable.
Everyone will be friends. Everyone will know everyone else.
Eternity will be spent meeting new folk, growing to know them, inviting them to your mansions,
Exploring the infinite planes of heaven--for the city is huge, but there's suburbs and country sides for sure---
The sheer fact I can imagine this wonderful place---
That the imagination is good---proves there is something inherent in what we call good.
And if good is self evident, it can only be that God made it so.
As there are men who cannot see what's self evident,
And in our day, those same men spoil life for everyone else by corrupting it.
And I would like to go where life is incorruptible.
For this life is spoiled and maligned with sin and selfishness.

Where those who have committed offenses will go
Is hell. Sandstone tan, lit by the shadows of flames.
A heat above ninety degrees.
Ugly COs with horse hooves, red chests
Worms all over their faces,
Hideous shadowy cloaks
Needle pores.
It's unlikely they will torment you
Unless you did something really bad,
But they will wound you with a spear or sword
And place you in solitary confinement.
There, you'll feel your lowest low
With the festering of your wound
Sore, and without healing.
Worms will feast upon it.
And if you're truly a miscreant,
You'll get a cellmate.
God help those who do.
For, Hell is a real prison somewhere.








(C)2021 B. K. Neifert

All Rights Reserved

Odes of Strangers XX

The net is set before,
And the Fowler garners his devices.
Oh! Steel trap!
It is sprung and wound taught.

He seethes with venom
And with his black veil
He shows himself as violet light!
He dawns the clergy's robe
And stands above
Beyond, with his fowler's instrument set.

The congregation dances in their red hooves
And cloven feet,
As the witches draw their enneagrams.
They do their dances
Ecstatic with the tongues of asps.
They bow, they raise
They dance to the light of their own fires
And they say, "I see."

The Black Priest
Raises, in the robes of Baptist's flannel
They shout their glorious shouts
In ecstasies,
They gorge and smoke their peace pipes 
Outside of their Holy Cloisters.
They speak of life now,
And they speak of prosperity
To call forth holy visions to bring them their good
Fortune, and their just deserts.

He draws his cup, with the pentagon
Pits at the back of his church
Where he sacrifices the goats.
He destroys the content man's life
With his counsel he gives to the man's wife
Impregnating her with her desire for life.
He implants this same desire in his whole flock
As the fanatics bear their arms
And draw forth their swords
Ready to wage the Holy War of Armageddon.
He calls forth his armies from the woods
Whom he has also impregnated with the desire to live.

He speaks of gaining beauty in the wife
And of physique and flesh.
He sways in his black robes
And hood dawned which prevents his face from being seen.
He is the Judas Priest
Presiding over the Black Sabbaths.
He is our modern Preacher
Preaching the good work of self content
And prosperity, likening this fallen world
To the land of milk and honey.
He says, "Heaven is a place on earth,"
And he tells his troop to take it
To slurp down the victuals and to feast upon
The sea's fats.

Prosperity, beauty, contentment,
These are his sermons
To a lost generation.
Saying to them,
"Receive your bounty
"For you shall provide for yourself!
"The poor are a scourge upon the earth
"And the rich are the inheritors of the land.
"The meek are all sinners
"And those who mourn are chief among the blasphemers.
"Those who are poor in spirit, they are the filth that we despise
"And those who are peace makers, they we hate because we love war."

The congregation spins in their pews, 
And dance to the beats
They sing their magical chaunts,
They shout their "Hallelujah"
To the Jesus of Suburbia. 

And though they sprout wings
The net flung into the air.
And only the righteous escaped.

The Striving of Brittos and Hercules

Canto I

There stood in the plains a warrior
Whose name was ancient as the days are long.
He travelled from very far
To the land of mystical Greece.
From his home in Zion
He travelled to the Athenian shores
Where he landed, and saw a culture
Much unlike anything he had seen previously.
Brittos disembarked from his galleon 
With Chantz his steed,
A black stallion with no blemish on it.
He took and led Chantz by foot
Stroking the horse's gentle face.

He saw many strange things.
There were women in love with women,
Men in love with men.
There were men who dressed as women
And women who dressed as men.
Some, by way of moegic,
Made themselves of the very sex.
The only thing which showed them 
What they were, was the face
And even some had faces which none could
Tell were of a man or woman's.

He saw the philosophers,
The Ionians,
The Atomists
The Evolutionists,
The Pythagoreans.
He saw much knowledge
In this city, where men rode upon their steeds.
He heard of the gods of this region
Baalim whose mischief with the science of Babylon
Was strong. Yet, none were of the thirteen
Save Minerva, who once ruled over the Grecian borders.

Brittos saw their marble homes,
The plenteous activities,
The Olympics in their nude displays.
He saw the Parthenon, the Domes
The Aqueduct, the Pantheon
The Hanging Archways
Taught to these Greeks by the Etruscans.
'twas not as beauteous as Brittos' home
With the Sistine Chapel, Sophia and Notre Dame.
But it had the same aqueducts;
It had the same warmed waters.
Yet these men took their aqueducts  
And made their pools
Where the men had their sodomous orgies
And the women's mouths were filled.

Brittos marveled at
Their wisdom...
They had knowledge of the cosmos
They had knowledge of the beginnings of the earth
They had knowledge of the waters
The seas, the gardens.
Their science was exact
And brought pleasure to the whole land
Like none before them
Save Nebuchadnezzar's kingdom.

 Canto II

Brittos found among them a champion.
His name was Hercules.
Much like a Nethinim was he.
Therefore, Brittos challenged him to a wrestling match.
Brittos, thin and white, and wiry
Was looked at by their champion.
Hercules scoffed at him.
 
"Look at you, gangly, spindly limbs
"And skin as pale as the daisy.
"You wish to challenge me?
"A god?"

Brittos disrobed.
"I wish to challenge any who
"Would call themselves a god.
"For, I had slain gods before.
"Thor and Athena."

Hercules scratched his chin.
"You had slain Minerva?
"In these days, we call that goddess Minerva.
"And you claim to have slain her?"

"Yes, good sir. And I wish to test my bout with you
"To prove that a man is mightier than a god."

Hercules scoffed.
"I am as strong as one thousand men.
"I had cleaned out the Augean stables,
"Had borne the Earth on my shoulders, 
"To unburden Atlas,
"Had defeated the Hydra,
"And had wrestled Antaeus in the garden of Hesperides"

Brittos nodded his head,
And said to Hercules,
"These are fine feats.
"Since we boast before combat
"I had defeated Thor and Athena both in mortal combat.
"I had beaten the ladies Grea
"I had overcome the Chok who could bend a Nethinim's verse
"I had even overcome the Giant's Soul."
 
Hercules paused.
"You had defeated a giant?"

Brittos said,
"Nay, not a giant, but even worse.
"A Giant within me."
 
Hercules rubbed his chin again.
"I say, you have slain a god,
"Of this I know
"For I too have subdued one.
"And this Thor, I do not know
"But you speak of him
"The same as Minerva
"So I assume he rules over a different land."
 
"Yes," said Brittos.

"I sense there is great power in you."

"No, none whatsoever. All my faith flows
"Through the LORD Jesus."
 
Hercules spake,
"My strength flows through
"Knowing what is right
"For I had sailed with Jason
"To attain the Golden Fleece.
"I did it to attain riches for the impoverished.
"And riches I had won from that."

"Then it is righteousness that holds you to 
"Your victories. Saved, I had been afflicted by the Giant's Soul
"And I had done much wrong by it."

Hercules was affronted by this.
"You had done much wrong by the Giant's Soul?
"Then are you evil?"

Brittos bowed.
"I am as evil as any man.
"But, if I subdue you
"You shall see it is not my righteousness
"That makes me strong.
"You will see that it is grace.
"For all men have done wickedly on the earth."

Hercules turned his head around him
Seeing a mighty crowd had gathered for the battle.
"Do we take to weapons?
"Must I slay you, since you are wicked?
"And you have committed crimes?"

Brittos said,
"I had been afflicted by your emperor,
"Nero, who had done to me
"What he sought well to do.
"For I had worldliness in my heart."
 
Hercules then said,
"How can unrighteousness
"Beat a hero like me?
"You had done wrong---
"Much from what you say
"And I had freed men and women 
"From their plights."

Brittos then said,
"But I too had freed men and women---
"I had defeated an entire army
"Of Thor's with the jawbone I plucked from one
"Of their square chins."

Hercules then spake,
"Well, I have had enough of this.
"We take to combat.
"I shall pin you
"And prove that it is my strength
"Which overcomes weakness
"And that you shall fall
"By your wicked devices."

Brittos then spake,
"Yet, if I win, it will 
"Show that grace is stronger
"Than my great surplus of sins.
"And that it is not strength which wins in combat
"But the deliverance of Christ."
 
Hercules, with his muscles and skin
Burnished by the oils of many olives
Was thrice the size of Brittos.
The two threw off all their clothes
In Greek fashion.

Canto III

Brittos and Hercules
Bull rushed into one another,
Their arms like horns,
Taking into their hands
The sinews of each other's triceps.
They both writhed in that fashion
Trying to throw the other to the ground
And therefore win their points.
Brittos would not let Hercules escape his grip
To which Brittos flung forward
And tackled his opponent to the ground.

Hercules and Brittos strove upon the shale
For fifteen minutes.
Hercules spake, "I am more righteous than you
"And I shall prove it by defeating you!"

Brittos saw his enemy hold equal strength
So he exerted all his effort to thrust
The opponent to the ground.
The two made wild jerks
To which Hercules and Brittos
Both scored many points.

Hercules then spake,
"I have more points than you
"So, your only hope of winning is to pin!"

Brittos knew this a lie,
But took to thrust his opponent
To the shale beneath him.
Brittos had commanded the fight
Yet Hercules spake,
"I am beating you.
"You are not righteous
"Brittos. I am righteous
"I had done many feats of good works
"And you have none, save the sins
"You overcame within you."

Brittos thrust forward
Breaking his opponent's armhold on the shale
Sofore, he swung around 
Hercules' four-anchored body 
To get atop of him.
Hercules spake,
"I shall beat you.
"For you are unrighteous.
"I have many works of heroism.
"And all you have done
"Is conquer your demons."

Brittos then spake,
"I shall prevail
"For Christ's grace covers me."

The two escaped one another.
Hercules , then, thrust his hand
Into Brittos' throat
And the two knelt, facing one another.
Hercules spake,
"I shall squeeze as tight as I can
"Your throat, and I shall kill you.
"That shall prove that you are wicked."

Hercules squeezed as hard as he could
Choking Brittos.
Brittos then spake, 
"If I am evil, then kill me.
"I do not wish to live if I am evil.
"Let us make this pact
"That if I am evil
"You shall prevail and kill me
"Hence here, to prevent my eternal suffering.
"For if you prevail,
"And kill me, I shall know that I am evil.
"But if I prevail,
"I shall know that Christ covers all my sins
"From now, and furthermore forever hencewith.
"Even if all my sins be exposed."
Brittos, thus, stood upon his nimble feet
And thrust himself between the gap
Of Hercules' knees.
Hercules tumbled over and 
Brittos thrust himself overtop
Of Hercules.

"You can only win by a pin
"And I shall never let you pin me!"
Cried Hercules.

Brittos spake to Hercules,
"I shall pin you,
"And you shall see that Grace is stronger than your heroic deeds!
"For in you is murder
"And it had not even once crossed my mind
"Nor entered into my thoughts!"

Brittos pushed down upon the shoulders
Of the hulking Hercules
And squared his shoulders to the shale
For five seconds.

Hercules spake, "You hadn't pinned me for three seconds."
Yet, it was for five seconds which Brittos pinned Hercules.
The match ended
And Hercules vanished without a trace.
The battle had been won
By Brittos, 
Yet the Pride of Grecian Honor
Forbade Hercules to admit defeat.
For to a Greek
Sin can never be atoned for.