Tranquility is a Shattered Television Though it may not seem to be... ...the Cold is Good.

For the soul frozen under layers of unaddressed pain, it is warmth, with its false and somehow complacent frivolity, the forced smile response to How are you today? , the required nod of the head, the delirious vestibule, full of unworn jackets and neatly ordered shoes, It is to the scabbed soul, these warm delights are most offensive. Set the shoes on fire, I say... but first spread shit on the heels! Pour wine-soaked urine stains on the cloaks in the closet, bring fresh living earthen mud onto the sterile parquet floors! And immerse my soul in a bath of ice cubes! The biting wind is my understanding, attentive ear (who but the wind, tearing through the desolate and decrepit hallway, in a broken house just west of Spring St, in the ghettos of Charleston, South Carolina, could relate to my unspoken howls and moans?) The cold, the biting wind, these are the welcomed echos of my waiting, my borrowed and rusted iron patience, like the calm, but cracked, yet resolute, face of the sailor as his ship sinks into the Arctic waters... Storms, dark clouds gather. My friends! You have opened your hearts to me once again! You bear all the weight of my suffering, the flood of waters to cleanse me of my grief at last! The seagulls appear from nowhere, like hungry whores on Canal Street after 2 am. Yes... New Orleans! You understand me! What did they do when the storms of destruction arrived, just as the gypsy predicted? (Uncertain memory of Jesus' black angel! Sent to predict the coming of retribution, oozing blood-chilling blues into the microphone of the believing street performer in City Market, Savannah, who, too, was waiting for the storm's peaceful prophecy...) They were afraid!

(Who wouldn't be afraid?) But when the rushing cold, and frothing waves and assaulting invasion of wind (Like Baghdad but more pure, like an earthquake under the vaults of Los Vegas) there were some that felt mortal, unfathomable relief! Like the ones that had stopped paying child support three years ago. And run from the arm of the law in Kentucky, And lied to innocent young hitchhiking hippie women, So they might feel empowered and in control, Enough to send them to their impending arrest across the Canadian border, while they themselves took off for the only city which would take them, just beyond the sun-tormented city of Mobile, Alabama, deep into the germ-infested bowels of Louisiana... ...the relief and horror mingled into one single vampire kiss of tortured sky and angled rain, sheets of endless pelting rain to wash away the chaos of amours and friendships, small businesses mingling toil and hope, hopeful romances between poor high school seniors, aspirations of greatness on a musical instrument, though he couldn't afford lessons, families themselves, snuffed like unnoticed cathedral candles... and the pain of living itself, while the President contemplated relief while fishing in the local waters...

and while the rest of us were cleansed... of possessions, jobs, stability, comfort, and the four-letter word that the cursed and oppressed utter only in their prayers... h.o.p.e.... Would it not have been easier to study Truth from the beginning? Would it not have been easier to recite the teaching of the Buddha? Would it have not been wiser to choose the craggy salt crusted rocks of Pablo Neruda over the uncertain, Pteridophyta-covered twin paths of Robert Frost? Waves break in certain proportion to the decay of relationships, of stability, and of sanity among the so-called elite! Waves break certainly over the clinging to platitudes, the desire for order,

the immutable rock of Law and Order. Let it be as cold then... as the decision of the judge in the unimportant criminal case... Let it be as cold as the wife who decides her loving husband not a good financial investment after all... Let it be as cold then as the woman that promises fidelity upon appointment, and after secret hours... Let it be as cold then as the perfect career in the hands of corporate greed... Let it be as cold then as this 40 ounce malt liquor bottle I obtained from the decrepit floor of my handme-down sedan. Let it be as cold as the death of the record industry upon Napster's unrelenting guillotine.... Let it be as cold as the silence of the Swami as he doles out the punishment for distraction! Let it be as cold as the Swami's silent mercy, as he forgives your Western impatience, in Silence, and you feel as broken and vulnerable as a tortoise without his shell, and the New Orleans waves remind you, finally, to shut the fuck up, and sit with your back straight and your eyes closed... ...and so the cold is no longer cold, but just a sensation, also passing, like the waves that swallowed the city in which the man hid, that let a young hippy girl go to jail, pregnant and trusting, ...and so the cold is no longer an enemy, but the impatient arms of a True Friend... ...begging you, no DEMANDING that you do something about the Television! ... Since the city of Baird in the UK was swashbucked in the unfortunate year of 1928... So too, you an I have been blinded to the danger of the craggy rocks so close to shore! Just as the delinquent naval captain fails to avoid the danger of shoals so close to shore, we too left the obvious unexamined: Creative souls struck silent with wanton eyes, the screen black and white, unlike the, nurturing and natural autumnal freeze, The warm dinners by the box emitting cancerous rays for generations to come! In 1884, Paul Gottlieb Nipkow, a 23-year-old student of Satan in Germany, patented the first electromechanical television system which employed a scanning disk, a spinning disk with a series of holes spiraling toward the center, for rasterization. The holes were spaced at equal angular intervals such that in a single rotation the disk would allow light to pass through each hole and onto a light-sensitive selenium sensor which produced the electrical pulses. As an image was focused on the rotating disk, each hole captured a horizontal "slice" of the whole image of the Unmanifested Reality. 1884, the year that the unmanifested superseded the Real. Lucille Ball, amongst other actors and artists were the first to submit themselves to the worship of Ba'al Hammon, in the Age of Electronics. No sooner were infants born than they were subjected to the infiltrating influence of the invisible Affluence!

Commercials designed to support the new medium soon became a centrifugal force of corruption, in which the unknowing recipient was agitated into an increase of desire and emptiness, as well as physical stagnation caused by ocular preoccupation. The Second Noble Truth... how could it stand up to both moving pictures and sound? Not to mention color? The color that clouded the senses themselves! Good and evil were no longer concrete, as the innocents in South Vietnamese soon discovered! Confusion and coherence, written by the complacent and blinded, were full of color: red as blood, orange and the agent itself, black as the night in which the malaria infected, gray as the the color of the uniform violence could not ascertain, blue as the truth that was hidden from the masses, brown as the color of the ground in which the darker skins were buried.... And so, now, in an era of economic upheaval, you would ask me to forgo my Blood Oath? You would ask me to accept the lie, to eat BBQ chicken wings at Hooters, and sleep soundly? And what about my children? Not only do they suffer the repercussions of my personal failings and sins, but they achieve mediocrity through the workings of the forces of Desire, in 3D, on TV and on their ever-innovated lap-tops? The Second Noble truth? Where is the promise that the Elders will themselves instruct the younger servants of Allah? The Qur'an states: Why should I call you to salvation, and you call me to the Fire?" I call you not to the Fire,

but to the freezing rain, the endless snow of our sorrow! I call you not to ignore the pain of Lies they fed you, but instead I call you: destroy the instrument that weakened your knowledge, that infiltrated your family, that corrupted the truth about State and Sovereign, that came between you and the knowledge of the horrors of war! I ask you, if you desire Peace in the Inward Parts, and relief for your suffering, to pick up the Anvil, the Axe, the Hammer, the Microwave. The sleeping cousin that fucked the love of your life while he was drunk, The stone in your garden over the tomb of Aunt Margrethe's cat, The coffin in which they tried to put your father, but he divorced the bitch instead, The aching emptiness of your life that they deny with new movie releases on Netflix, The stone of Uncertainty in which every friendship you have attempted to cement, has buckled, then retracted, then finally denied... in the business of Life with Television! And maybe, just maybe, the cold water, the cold water. Awakens eyelids and nipples! Slap to the face, awakens remembrance of pain and pleasure! Anger in the face of injustice awakens the remembrance of Equality... Just as cancer awakens the remembrance of the importance of joy and relationship! Just as the television, shattered in pieces, by the unswerving anvil of community, reminds us of the concentration camps that the world was asked to forget or ignore!

Jer 29:10-14 "For thus says the LORD: After seventy years are completed at Babylon, I will visit you and perform My good word toward you, and cause you to return to this place. For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the LORD, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart. I will be found by you, says the LORD, and I will bring you back from your captivity; I will gather you from all the nations and from all the places where I have driven you, says the LORD, and I will bring you to the place from which I cause you to be carried away captive."