Every day the cold wind blows along the clear path and the seashore gets sharper as you near.
Someone died in the window and their corpes is hanging out and rotting and some of the bones are loosing their sockets.
There’s a fire behind a beautiful white woman with long blond hair and deep sockets for eyes like a skull on a skeleton but now fires burn behind and lick and flicker out of her sockets. I suppose she’s very beautiful, but her eyes spoil the whole effect. Anyway, I’ve always liked a little more pigment in my wives.
The dangers coming down the path with big monster feet wide and hairy that leave impressions in the soft shale where the creek had lived when you were young and the banks of layered rock rain with strange orange factory runoff. It was all natural, it was all sacred, it was all wet and splashing.
Now I can’t recall.
A lot of noise is pestering me at the corners of my ears but enough about me.
A wild wind drove the cold into our skin and then into muscles and even bones and so we were chilled to the bone with the dank wet wind that chased us into small rabbit holes where we twitched our nervous rodent noses wet and soft and our eyes were red because we were albinos yes albino bunnies hiding from the wind and also not fit for the sun if it ever showed its face round here.

A knight of faith is a metaphysically binding contract between the knight and his Lord, which is to to say, between the mystic and the Lord, which is to say, between the vessel and the Light, which is to say, between a man and his girl lov’in each other so good to some 50s bop-rock in a diner full of food no one should ever eat and yet the food becomes holy, the sloppy, wilted-bun burger, droopy fries, and industrial-can ketchup doled into little plastic squirter bottles, even the soda of sugar caffeine and turpentine spices: It all becomes holy in my memory, and I confuse God with wife and Holy with marriage and revelation with sex and Truth with a hug.

A knight of faith takes a metaphysically binding oath to serve God first and foremost.
But so much evil madness has come of such oaths.
How to be a knight of faith and not a self-imposing charlatan?

A dark raven with wide wings swooped through a clearing in the trees, the sun sprinkled on its black feathers and its black belly ruffled by the air it chased through. A landing and a hop a dream a skip and a jump. A raven on the forest floor on the dirt pecking at dried leaves as if they held some secret worth probing. A sharp yellow beak, black beady eyes, a mindless kind of determination. I heard that God is everywhere and no scrap of sentience can completely avoid God’s Light. But this raven seems to be the most atrociously shameless of heathens, with no sense of the Holy, no knowledge of the Good, no insight into the Love that chooses everyone.

A knight of faith dons the armor of the Lord. Faith that Love is Real and that Love should lead and that Love is kind, gentle, joyful, giving—too kind to ever be mean, too honest to ever be angry, too aware to ever be proud. A commitment to making sense to oneself: aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing: You cannot follow God if you do not make sense to yourself: If you are to be a conduit for God’s Love, you must think, feel, and act in ways that are meaningful to you so that your gears span your whole conscious space. A human straddles what is prior to all particulars through feelings and ideas out into words and deeds. What is prior to all particulars is God. But if God is not kind, gentle, joyful giving, or if God is not compatible with aware clear honest accurate competent compassionate loving-kind joyfully-sharing; then God can never guide us because our own feeling and thinking is incoherent to us to the degree we fail to follow those inborn guides for thinking and feeling. And so our Faith that Love is Real and should lead also contains a faith that Love is kind and gentle and flows with not against aware clear honest accurate competent compassionate loving-kind, joyfully-sharing.

A knight of faith dons the armor of the Lord. Faith that Love is Real and that Love is meaningful to us. It is persistence in seeking to grow ever deeper in Real Love—the Love that chooses everyone and that can and will help us to be aware, clear, honest, competent, compassionate, loving kind, joyfully sharing,humble—that differentiates a knight of faith from a metaphysical fraud.

The water in the creek is thin and wide and crinkled at the surface. I can see flat stones and soft silt a few feet down. This bridge is narrow and the concrete is old. Black metal railings always bounded it for as long as I can remember. Once they were playing basketball and I climbed up in the big square metal-tube box that still holds the backboard up to this day. At first they thought it was fun, but then they yelled at me for messing up their shots and said I need to get down. Once some bug kid offered me chew, which was bad, so I threw it in the creek. Then he yelled at me and said I had to buy it back for him. So I went home crying and took all my quarters and dimes from the little plastic purse inside my little plastic wallet and I took it back to him and I don’t remember if he was still there or not. None of this is my fault and none of this was ever real, but still I wish there was a way to get out of this rut.

A knight of faith is a thing of degrees. The Holy bids us on and on. Fools say they’ve reached the end of Love of God of Truth. The wise open and listen. The wise are always beginning, always young, always careful with themselves and others. Because God don’t make no junk.

Author: Troublesome Times
Cheerleading & Snacks: Bartleby Willard
Old white sneakers, tall white socks, short black shorts, and an old yellow T-shirt stretched around a giant belly, standing there in the wet grass exhorting thirteen and fourteen year olds to hit harder to be men men in cleats mean in the damp fall of our quiet town hugging a giant lake with waves fish and boats like on the ocean but on a clear day I think maybe that’s Canada a way off yonder: Amble Whistletown