C.J.Sellers

by C.J. Sellers

“If you can do a half-assed job of anything, you’re a one-eyed man in a kingdom of the blind.”
~Kurt Vonnegut

He was born in November in that senate win.
What he won no corn fritter had ever had before.
In the city in the garden, you might say he found a plan;
You might say he even found his campaign therein.

Come from Honolulu to join the inner beltway loop.
He was on his way, fueled by waves of corn.
If promises are broken, the corn won’t really care.
Better popcorn than Republican.

But Manhattan’s Smoky Mountain lie
will bring a rain of fire in the sky.
Our stalks will be outlines against what walls remain.
Smoky Mountain lies,
Smoky Mountain lies.

He soon climbed the polls, saw his sea of fans below
spread wider than his eyes could even see.
To elect him might be crazy cuz he said we’d touch the sun.
We were glad to lose our minds and memories.

Now he stands at the podium, wondering if he’s wise.
Fine words replaced the corn and they’d won.
History tells if POTUS transcends or hides the corn.
Like once Moses did, clear words divide our field.

But back that old Smoky Mountain lie,
someone somewhere gets a mushroom in the sky.
Talk to POTUS in the town hall, this one might again reply
Smoky Mountain lies.

His rise was a wonder but our hearts still know some fear.
Of a simple thing we cannot comprehend–
They build bombs at the mountains and now want to make some more,
more bombs as a means toward our end.

But Y-12’s Smoky Mountain lies
will billow a bright fire in the sky.
He’d be just a corn nugget to believe that he could fly
Smoky Mountain lies.

Its believin’ Hocus-pocus lies
that feeds us this ol’ pie in the sky.
Roll us/smoke us, prize or POTUS, use us to fuel your car…
Smoky Mountain lies.
Smoky Mountain lies.
Smoky Mountain lies.

“A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.” ~William Blake from “Auguries of Innocence”

“I don’t think literature would be possible in a determined world. We might go through the motions but the heart would be out of it. Nobody could then ’smile darkly and ignore the howls.’ Even if there were no Church to teach me this, writing two novels would do it. I think the more you write, the less inclined you will be to rely on theories like determinism. Mystery isn’t something that is gradually evaporating. It grows along with knowledge.”
— Flannery O’Connor (The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor)

by C.J.Sellers

White hair, blue suits and red lips
ruled the decorous front line.

She wandered up like a silly duck
about to squawk at lions.

She stood tall for a child,
at the podium, as all the rest had,
even those two, three times her age.

She’d walked up there to protest,
but to their surprise, she talked about
the voice itself in a sing-song way.

She let her voice go high
and then very low and swung her arms wide
and up as if she really would just give up

And one leg pitched out to the side.
She might have even flapped.
I don’t recall what all she said
amid this circus act.

The whole room was confused smiles
and silence before she walked away.

Defying sense,
the old folks spent millions on a new
nuclear weapons plant that day.

Kali & Death (reposted from Maria Mango, folksinger)

Kali’s boon is won when man confronts or accepts her and the realities she dramatically conveys to him. The image of Kali, in a variety of ways, teaches man that pain, sorrow, decay, death, and destruction are not to be overcome or conquered by denying them or explaining them away. Pain and sorrow are woven into the texture of man’s life so thoroughly that to deny them is ultimately futile. For man to realize the fullness of his being, for man to exploit his potential as a human being, he must finally accept this dimension of existence. Kali’s boon is freedom, the freedom of the child to revel in the moment, and it is won only after confrontation or acceptance of death. To ignore death, to pretend that one is physically immortal, to pretend that one’s ego is the center of things, is to provoke Kali’s mocking laughter. To confront or accept death, on the contrary, is to realize a mode of being that can delight and revel in the play of the gods. To accept one’s mortality is to be able to let go, to be able to sing, dance, and shout. Kali is Mother to her devotees not because she protects them from the way things really are but because she reveals to them their mortality and thus releases them to act fully and freely, releases them from the incredible, binding web of “adult” pretense, practicality, and rationality.

Download Maria Mango free mp3s!!
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It occurs to me that I am a preacher and so are you. Everyone is biased and we wear our bias/colors like plumage, some of us to bond us to a group out of defense or to better attack, which may still be some sort of defense.

On my pulpit, as an ex-patriot of the herd, I wear no colors in particular. Mine are a kaleidoscope of holograms reflecting the whole of creation, just what I can see from my vantage, this little spot here that I own, I own all that I survey, you included. In my ex-patriotism, I’m for no one in particular and everyone in general.

I just want to tell you, from my soapbox, that the sting you feel from the preacher man/woman on the corner is not from what is said or from accusing silence, but at the implication that you are not of the same ilk, that you, one or the other, are an alien object, not you both the integral subject. What stings you is the sense of disunion that comes from the absence of love.

Three quotes on love that illustrate my meaning:

“Love is not just looking at each other; it’s looking in the same direction.”
~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of withering, of tarnishing.”
~Anais Nin

“Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies.”
~ Oscar Wilde

You can ignore the man on the corner but you can’t escape him in your heart. And you will never reach your enemy if you call him the enemy. You will never know his love if you tell yourself he is not capable or worthy of yours. Never love the lie that we, as individuals, are separate from the whole of creation and from each other, it has been proven untrue, not just in our hearts but by modern science! When I’m dead, I hope they put that on my tombstone so I can keep preaching love from the grave.

Cheers!

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.

A dove-house fill’d with doves and pigeons
Shudders hell thro’ all its regions.
A dog starv’d at his master’s gate
Predicts the ruin of the state.

A horse misused upon the road
Calls to heaven for human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain does tear.

A skylark wounded in the wing,
A cherubim does cease to sing.
The game-cock clipt and arm’d for fight
Does the rising sun affright.

Every wolf’s and lion’s howl
Raises from hell a human soul.

The wild deer, wand’ring here and there,
Keeps the human soul from care.
The lamb misus’d breeds public strife,
And yet forgives the butcher’s knife.

The bat that flits at close of eve
Has left the brain that won’t believe.
The owl that calls upon the night
Speaks the unbeliever’s fright.

He who shall hurt the little wren
Shall never be belov’d by men.
He who the ox to wrath has mov’d
Shall never be by woman lov’d.

The wanton boy that kills the fly
Shall feel the spider’s enmity.
He who torments the chafer’s sprite
Weaves a bower in endless night.

The caterpillar on the leaf
Repeats to thee thy mother’s grief.
Kill not the moth nor butterfly,
For the last judgement draweth nigh.

He who shall train the horse to war
Shall never pass the polar bar.
The beggar’s dog and widow’s cat,
Feed them and thou wilt grow fat.

The gnat that sings his summer’s song
Poison gets from slander’s tongue.
The poison of the snake and newt
Is the sweat of envy’s foot.

The poison of the honey bee
Is the artist’s jealousy.

The prince’s robes and beggar’s rags
Are toadstools on the miser’s bags.
A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.

It is right it should be so;
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro’ the world we safely go.

Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.

The babe is more than swaddling bands;
Every farmer understands.
Every tear from every eye
Becomes a babe in eternity;

This is caught by females bright,
And return’d to its own delight.
The bleat, the bark, bellow, and roar,
Are waves that beat on heaven’s shore.

The babe that weeps the rod beneath
Writes revenge in realms of death.
The beggar’s rags, fluttering in air,
Does to rags the heavens tear.

The soldier, arm’d with sword and gun,
Palsied strikes the summer’s sun.
The poor man’s farthing is worth more
Than all the gold on Afric’s shore.

One mite wrung from the lab’rer’s hands
Shall buy and sell the miser’s lands;
Or, if protected from on high,
Does that whole nation sell and buy.

He who mocks the infant’s faith
Shall be mock’d in age and death.
He who shall teach the child to doubt
The rotting grave shall ne’er get out.

He who respects the infant’s faith
Triumphs over hell and death.
The child’s toys and the old man’s reasons
Are the fruits of the two seasons.

The questioner, who sits so sly,
Shall never know how to reply.
He who replies to words of doubt
Doth put the light of knowledge out.

The strongest poison ever known
Came from Caesar’s laurel crown.
Nought can deform the human race
Like to the armour’s iron brace.

When gold and gems adorn the plow,
To peaceful arts shall envy bow.
A riddle, or the cricket’s cry,
Is to doubt a fit reply.

The emmet’s inch and eagle’s mile
Make lame philosophy to smile.
He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne’er believe, do what you please.

If the sun and moon should doubt,
They’d immediately go out.
To be in a passion you good may do,
But no good if a passion is in you.

The whore and gambler, by the state
Licensed, build that nation’s fate.
The harlot’s cry from street to street
Shall weave old England’s winding-sheet.

The winner’s shout, the loser’s curse,
Dance before dead England’s hearse.

Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

We are led to believe a lie
When we see not thro’ the eye,
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the soul slept in beams of light.

God appears, and God is light,
To those poor souls who dwell in night;
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.

~William Blake

by C.J. Sellers

She’s running away to a Nevada bordello.
Knuckles spell out a  N-E-U-R   O-T-I-C  plea.
Hitch a ride with a truck-stop hello.
She’s running away.

Unmasked, there’s not much these ringed cat’s eyes don’t see.
Dark cobalt dreads bunched in a black bow.
Below, orange roots show and tell. This world ain’t free.

Where her breast folds sleeves of a tattooed bolero,
scarred veins snake to a laden tree.
Just needs some fast cash to blow.
She’s running away.

by C.J.Sellers

you there who are a bullet
and the gun and the hand and the wound
not knowing your without or within
you think you cannot know your purpose
until the action or the war’s won

you don’t see start, trajectory, or end all
you think, you lose, you win, you wind eternal
you nonsense exegesis spectacle

you think this is your heart’s now
you think this is your place here
you feel you know the reason anyhow

you thief, cop, martyr, monkey, Hyperborean
shoot your godsend, suck the treason, wile
fuck, breed, eat, shit, beat, breathe, dial

you think you are between or as you are
you tower, you to and from
you sweet and salt of

you one, you one, you one
you one of many who make your one
you body, cell, nucleus, quantum, logos, holy ghost

you seed, planet, universe
you’re flat, you’re round, you’re diaphanous
you’re subjective and objective as

you god, you speak your logos wrong
you speak it like a web to catch all
you fateful aspect spinning sins and angels

you past, you present, you future danger
you part and participle, noun
you solo, orchestral, polyphonic child

you sun and moon, you all and nothing
you lives, you deaths, you births
you sentient, loud and silent sound

you unity of all of
you one who has no name to speak of
you who is and is of
[...]

by C.J.Sellers

Woman is a jar of untold jellybeans.
Who keeps a jar of jellybeans? Why?
Who wants a jar of jellybeans, jellybeans?
Who knows the jar of jellybeans, jellybeans?
Who owns the jar of jellybeans, jellybeans?
Answer: Just the woman. I say it oughtta be the law.

by C.J. Sellers

Willy blasts into the air in an iconic splash, escaping the bad men’s wrath faster than I could have plunged into its ocean depths. And to see this, I should thus feel suddenly more human?

Of course, the movie pushed all the right buttons, I wept, I laughed, I felt suspense but because I am who I am, in some ways, predetermined, I get the sense afterward, that of some things, the human is too curious and vainglorious for its to-some-irrelevant revelations. We are too proud of our “inherent” sentience and emotion. We give the animal a human name–”Willy” for the kids. But that’s just where it begins, this anthropomorphizing anything from God to black fish.

“Free Willy”, a play on “free will”.

The sick plea behind this movie is that our prey must have a human face before we spectators, can’t help ourselves but agree not to contain, hunt, kill it, or call it prey. By omission of threat, we are free to call it friend. That is “Free Willy”.

Where is the respect for Orca as it is? It is not cute. It carries its steely knives at the fore whereall it goes, rather than behind its back as us. That is not a human face. Why pretend? It offends my sense of otherness necessary to understand this world’s true wholeness in which human is a pestilence.

Skinner would ask, why do we hastily determine an animal can be “freed”? Is it due to apparent sentience? We are sentient. Are we free? Are you sure of that? Do we all agree? This has yet to be confirmed through logic or dogma, so in Willy’s defense toward the nature of default, mankind’s “free will” is simply a matter of opinion.

Roman men named Orcus a god of the underworld. Orca is a hunter of whales, yes, which is the largest of all living things but he’s as complex as our senator or Caesar in his domain. Yet we’d make him a kid’s pet? Rather predictable, yes? Does it help to understand the Orca any better to do this, or not just us as slavers, saps, and showmen?

Wittgenstein would say if I had an interpreter for a dog’s language, what would it matter? Just as, can I know what it is to know the dolphin’s life or the nature of its fate? We both breath air, may eat the same foods, both birth live kin, we are both gods and demons, but touch his skin and my repugnance tells–it is alien. I could press my lips against its flesh but would I as I’d kiss some random human being? Even if I felt disgust, this distaste is not the same from whale to human.

If I could lock Willy in a pen and feed him mammals or fish, “amazing” what good friends we’d become. We’d be more than. I’d be master of him but am I master if I then compulsively serve Mammon?

Am I comforted that the Orca eats the thing that would eat me? Therefore, we are friends? This is as the proverb goes and again, “It is good to strike the serpent’s head with your enemy’s hand.”

Because I am not to his appetite’s affinity then I am not his enemy?
Because I don’t eat the mammals he eats therefore, we are friendly?

What does this “friendship” mean? What is this obsession of human’s to find meaning? Is it shared by him? If so, how can I know what it means to him and not just what it would mean to me if I were him? As if I could ever be.

If “Free Willy” had been beached. I could walk a mile of sand to look into just one of his large eyes, imagined enormous to match his girth and wit, fierce and fiery as alleged thirst for vengeance. But what if it’s blank and dark and weak, as small as the palm of my hand? Is he then like us?

The sounds he would make, chirps and coos, more like a bird of prey than a baby man are these anything I could understand even if I had a dolphin lexicon?

Tell all this to the Orca. He could not care less. The sounds that come to him are as meaningless. I’m just saying, I stand at the shoreline, human. To his ocean, I can do no more than delve a toe in!

I could stroke his spanse as a connoisseur or a lover and he, with no arms to resist this, dumb to my language to even protest, and I of a species that contains rapists, he’d on land, succumb to the rape of my imposed friendship.

I exploit him now just to write about him much less make a movie about us or pay money to watch our adventure “together”. A spectator is not innocent.

On land, how easily I could skin him thus, strip him bare just to see what’s underneath and some humans do in fact, do this. Good thing he has no convenient, toothless orifice. Just let him try to grow legs and traverse the sand to look straight into mankind’s great and glorious face.

I could kill and eat this contender just as easily as he could hunt down a shark for its liver, in our avarice. But there’s a difference. He eats for food, Human consumes for mere amusement and entertainment.

I will prove to you I am his master, here he is “Free Willy” trapped on DVD. He is forever immortalized thus and his only escape is our thirst for novelty will eventually render this conception of him bland and tasteless.

Someday, the human, for its ignorance and proliferation that rapes the land and now the sea, may one day soon eat its own weak and while the Orca may hunger for the food it lost to us, its avarice and cunning is not as great as it needs to be to survive our trust.

It must grow armor and harden its teeth to torpedo our ships. It must toxify the fish with a poison to which it hopes to form a resistance. It must stake claim to its domain by freezing it with a glacial crust. And if it does all this, then it may become human. And then it will know of man’s inhumanity.

Already, I am developing a taste for Orca.
Someday soon, Willy, you’ll be mine.

But for now, while I can I would rather leave the Orca alone to its mysteries, free to be whatever it is, wherever, and at the very least,
blessedly, anonymously inhuman.

[Author's note:  Title refers to behavior psychologist,  B.F. Skinner and the movie, "Free Willy".  ]