The opposite of Love is not Hate
it is indifference

Nature is not cruel she is indifferent

She looks upon the screams of young gazelles 

and the roars of lions with equinimity

because she knows that in time 

the apex predator will fall 

unto the ground to feed 

the hungry worms that wait

So I do not pray to nature

to intercede on my fate

I pray to God, God is Love

And I never ask for an explanation 

why an all knowing, all powerful being

should place me ahead of all creation

and break his rules, just for me

I need to believe in Love

but all God's children must eat

and I favor meat and potatoes with gravy

Love is blind, for that I am grateful

as I close my eyes to say grace over my full plate

God never says too much, and never once to me

after all, who am I but a humble man who works the dirt

Pagans dance their way to hell

I tell myself as I turn out the light

and go to bed. Worship your fearful Dieties,

 they will not save you from the night

that awaits us all, or come at your bidding

I need only call out his name and I will be saved

because I believe, I have faith.

But in the darkness between prayers and sleep

there is only silence, and a dread of what comes next

The dark moments before my dreams

where nothing is as it seems

 ahead lay only lions and worms.

the undone poem

To be honest I cannot find

A momentary word that rhymes

To plug the leak in my poem

Long enough to sail her home

And so I bail and toil and sweat

As her nails come loose from wet

And her bow turns towards the ground

To where ever unborn poems are bound

still I can’t help but feel regret

after all this pain 

     I will forget

  her name, 

and let her slip into the brine

to be forgotten for all time.

H.P. Lovecraft's old ones, cthulhu synthesis.

A reading of page 751 of the fictional Necronomicon, from The Dunwich Horror by H.P. Lovecraft.

Nor is it to be thought that man is either the oldest or the last of Earth's masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod Earth's field, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man's truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath? The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraven, but who hath seen the deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles? Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.

The Horror in Clay. Call of Cthulhu, by H.P. Lovecraft.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things—in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.

The Carol of the Old Ones
Lyrics by A.H. Leman, to the tune of ``Carol of the Bells'' by M. Leontovich:

There in the night stars are now right.
Eons have passed: now then at last
Prison walls break, Old Ones awake!
They will return: mankind will learn
New kinds of fear when they are here.
They will reclaim all in their name;
Hopes turn to black when they come back.
Ignorant fools, mankind now rules
Where they ruled then: it's theirs again
Stars brightly burning, boiling and churning
Bode a returning season of doom
Scary scary scary scary solstice
Very very very scary solstice
Up from the sea, from underground
Down from the sky, they're all around
They will return: mankind will learn
New kinds of fear when they are here
Look to the sky, way up on high
There in the night stars are now right.
Eons have passed: now then at last
Prison walls break, Old Ones awake!
Madness will reign, terror and pain
Woes without end where they extend.
Ignorant fools, mankind now rules
Where they ruled then: it's theirs again
Stars brightly burning, boiling and churning
Bode a returning season of doom
Scary scary scary scary solstice
Very very very scary solstice
Up from the sea, from underground
Down from the sky, they're all around.
Fear
(Look to the sky, way up on high
There in the night stars now are right)
They will return.

--Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, Call of Cthulhu

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.” --call of Cthulhu
"That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.."

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky.Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.

There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.

These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape — for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? — but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die...


synthesis:

Mankind dwells on the island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinite time and space, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. Nor is it to be thought that man is either the oldest or the last of Earth's masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. There are others, older than man's gods who think little or care about us. Not in the spaces we know, but between them,into the terrifying vistas of reality where they are imprisoned. In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. But that is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons can even death die.
Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. Look to the sky. There the night stars align as they did long ago. Up from the seas and underground arise the awakening old ones to reclaim what was once theirs. The old ones who were whispered to us in our dreams. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet; Whereby the prison walls crumble. We shall surely flee from the sight into madness or a dark oblivion. The mountains shall boil. the air shall burn. The unseen who now walk among us will glow brightly as hot iron.

When time is shattered, you will know, and be consumed in the forsaken darkness everlasting.

Im Memoriam: Robert Heffernan

Pablo, He wandered barefoot to feel the sand across time with a cigarette like someone on his way to catch a bus i first saw him in a sari sitting on a boulder with the light behind him like a halo watching the masses pass beneath him with their packs along a trail in Allegheny Forest in single file. The hand that held his smoke resting casually so it touched the ground like Buddha "my debt is paid" The sun was warm, so I laid down my bundle and sat beside him the conversation followed the moon and swayed like the tide it had no beginning or end first silent, then set to music, then silent again or over coffee and laughter or sad nods and regret still it continues somewhere he is still lost in Amsterdam 7 days late for his plane.

Poems on Nature and Solitude.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think... you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

--Emerson, the oversoul

"...our life might be much easier and simpler than we make it; that the world might be a happier place than it is; that there is no need of struggles, convulsions, and despairs, of the wringing of the hands and the gnashing of the teeth;...Nature will not have us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds and wars. ..We pain ourselves to please nobody. There are natural ways of arriving at the same ends at which these aim, but do not arrive...Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls.

Emerson, Self Reliance

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer 
by Walt Whitman

WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

668

"Nature" is what we see—
The Hill—the Afternoon—
Squirrel—Eclipse— the Bumble bee—
Nay—Nature is Heaven—
Nature is what we hear—
The Bobolink—the Sea—
Thunder—the Cricket—
Nay—Nature is Harmony—
Nature is what we know—
Yet have no art to say—
So impotent Our Wisdom is
To her Simplicity.

Emily Dickinson

Vanishing point

In the far distance all lines converge
at a point in the haze that is infinitely small

too small to be seen.
too small to matter
too far to be heard from,
no matter how loudly I yell

so I just keep on walking,
satisfied with persistence,
and that I cover terrain.

And when I looked back in the distance
where I was in my youth
where all lines emerge
I strain to listen
for somone or something that mattered.

But the truth rests too silent in the haze to tell.

Appian way

Appian way

Countless feet have worn the stone
That went to war or back home
That raced to lovers in the night
That ran to chase the wasting light

They made their mark upon this road
That like all others led to Rome
That laid where placed a thousand years
That afterward laid two thousand more

But i fight no wars and burn no oil
I have no lover, plough or toil
My steps are on the fields of clay
That bend like waves and wash away

I'll leave no ruin like that of Rome
And leave no scar upon the stone

Pieds innombrables ont érodé la pierre
qui mène à chez soi, ou à la guerre
Qu'est monté aux amants bonheur
qu'ont chassé la lumière du jour

ils ont laissé une marque dans le sentier,
que comme toutes les routes, à Rome sont dirigés
qu'est resté là bas douze cent ans
qu'est resté par la suite deux mille ans pendant

Mais je n'ai pas de guerres, et brûle pas d'huile
l'amour et le travail sont inutiles
Mes pas sont dans les domaines de l'argile,
que se plient comme des vagues océaniques faciles

Je laisse aucune ruine romaine derrière,
et aucune cicatrice sur la pierre