I moved from small open air insane asylum Key West back to multitudes flew over the cuckoo’s nest Alabama

    I mostly lived in Key West from 2001-2018. Locals called it The Conch Republic. Before I lived there, the city briefly seceded from the Union, until it realized it depended entirely on FEMA to resurrect it after being clobbered by a big hurricane. 

    Locals also called Key West, Key Weird, where the weird go pro. I viewed the city as an open air insane asylum, where you couldn’t get locked up for being different, and unlike Hotel California, you could leave any time you wanted.

    A small city, Key West had people from many ethnic backgrounds and nationalities, and I concluded it was a proxy for the rest of America, and as Key West went, so went America. 

    I was wrong.

    Although Key West had a lot of churches, about 1/5 of the adults living there were not heterosexual and the religious right had very little sway. A lesbian Democrat living in Key West was elected to the city's county commission seat. A lesbian Democrat was elected to the city commission. Now she is the city’s mayor.

    I was further wrong.

    Key West voted Democrat in every national and state election. Perhaps that dated back to the Civil War, when Key West was a Union port, but the locals sympathized with the Confederacy.

    I was further wrong.

    Even the professional weirdos in Key West thought I was weird.

    In the late fall of 2018, I moved back to my home state Alabama, which bills itself as The Heart of Dixie. 

    Montgomery was the Confederacy’s capital. 

    When I was growing up, Alabama voted Democrat in national and state elections, until the U.S. Supreme Court, Congress and President John F. Kennedy and the Alabama National Guard and President Lyndon Baines Johnson de-segregated Alabama, and Alabama morphed into a Republican stronghold.

    Today, Alabama is MAGA country. 

    Today, Alabama is right-wing religious freak country. 

    What the fuck am I doing here?! 

    In Al.com’s Down In Alabama today...

Embryos and an alleged fetus

It's good to see y'all back, and I hope your weekend was a good one.

It's no surprise we're going to pick right back up with Story No. 1 in the state right now -- the legal status of embryos and its effect on in vitro fertilization.

Thanks for being with us.

Ike Morgan

Embryo-gate raged on through the weekend, even taking up time on Saturday Night Live, for anyone who might've been watching.

Heading into the weekend in Alabama, Democrats introduced a bill in the House and Republicans in the Senate said they were preparing legislation to preserve in vitro fertilization in the wake of the state Supreme Court's ruling that interpreted a state law as giving human embryos the same rights as children.

Gov. Kay Ivey also said she was working with lawmakers to preserve IVF.

Within days of the court's ruling, some clinics stopped providing IVF services. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said on Friday that the AG's office had "no intention" of prosecuting anyone using the procedure. That prompted some, including Hoover Republican Rep. Susan DuBose, to lean on clinics to restart IVF treatments, reports AL.com's Sarah Whites-Koditschek.

Note that while the AG's promise may have eased concerns over criminal prosecution, this issue arose from a civil case over destroyed embryos. 

 

to fetuses (or a lack of, in this case)   

AL.com did a story last year on the extent to which Etowah County has arrested women who allegedly used drugs while pregnant. It's happened more there than anywhere else -- 250 over a 10-year period -- and led to some women spending much of their pregnancy in jail.

Now, reports AL.com's Amy Yurkanin, a woman recently settled a lawsuit against Etowah County Sheriff's Office employees over being jailed for endangering a fetus that didn't exist.

According to court documents, the woman spent 36 hours in jail and wasn't pregnant at all. Apparently, her young child -- who does exist -- told a case worker that the mom was pregnant.

Young'ns, man.

According to court documents, the woman offered to take a pregnancy test but it didn't happen. Terms of the settlement were not released.

I emailed Ike:     

Your IVF and imaginary pregnant woman in jail howlers today, and what I already knew about The Make Alabama Great IVF FUBAR, left me laughing my ass off and wondering when the Jesus never knew me freaks in the Alabama Legislature will pass legislation to reopen Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa to shelter themselves and their birds of cuckoo feather Supreme Court justices and like-minded dodo bird Alabamians from the bright sunlight, which would reveal the truth that would set them free, if their heads didn't permanently reside where the sun never shines.

    In another of my 81-year-old play pens, Poetic Outlaws:

Sloan Bashinsky

Sloan’s Newsletter

81, with its physical aches and pains, waking up each morning wondering why I’m still here? Still hoping a miracle will cause my body to feel better, or the death angel will take me home, or somewhere new, to spare me what no beloved old, suffering pet has to endure. Living alone, a monk, all but a few months since late 2000, engulfed in metaphysics day and night, in all the way but not of this world, what woman could endure that regimen with no end? Lightly, what is that? Remember, I cannot. Perhaps it’s possible? I haven’t a clue. Is romance possible? Will viagra work? I haven’t a clue. Do I even want to try? I really don’t know. Back in the day, I would be all in.

Lasita

Lasita’s Substack

Sending love; sorry I cannot do it in person... but perhaps you can feel it.

Sloan Bashinsky

Sloan’s Newsletter

Maybe in person, I might go into cardiac arrest and depart this plane and see what happens then? :-)

    I went to Lasita’s Substack to see what was there:

Openness and Love

LASITA

AUG 12, 2023

How do I live my basic principles? Also, how do I continue writing a post? Being a newbie in this practice, makes it difficult. I feel a need to share since so many people are feeling similar emotions these days and to know we have support is important. I met a friend today on my walk by the Santa Fe River: Rachamana, and she asked me; "how are you feeling hope in these times?" I acknowledged that it was very challenging, especially since the invasion of Ukraine.

Lasita

I will keep adding comments UNTIL I work out how to publish new posts.

Today I want to share a LESSON from one of my Spiritual Teachers: HERMAN REDNICK. 

This is from Volume 1 of EARTH JOURNEY, p. 629

BROTHERHOOD

To break the hypnosis and see with a clear eye, imagine for a moment that you love everyone here. There is no criticism or resentment. Your heart glows and you are grateful for the person sitting next to you. You have no fear of how anyone will react or of what they think of you. For a moment you let the divine fire within your heart glow. You feel a sense of joy and freedom you never felt before. The hypnosis that gripped you in the past and your resistance to people is gone. Now it is not your personality but your true self coming through the heart. You experience what it means to truly love your brother. You realize that in the past you were in a state of bondage through a state of hypnosis. You can now taste the pure joy and freedom that come from love without reservation.

mantra:

I love my neighbor.

His (Her) soul and mine are one.

Sloan Bashinsky

Sloan’s Newsletter

I dunno, I just get up each morning and face the day and whatever it brings, the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, and even the horrible sometimes, doing the best I can, being as real as I can, which Includes sometimes getting angry and wondering what’s the point? Because I am somewhat woke after 81 years and climbing, what I see, in the main, looks like SNAFU progressed to FUBAR and even past that to FIDO. But I keep waking up each day, so I’m still supposed to be here, and since I can’t do a lot of things I use to do, I do what I am able, which kinda reminds me of a line out of a Rolling Stones song, "You can’t always get what you want, but you always get what you need," which kinda reminds me of the title of a Gloria Steinem book, “The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off."

This came to me as I was moving into something new in 1995.

Love without Truth

is mush

Truth without Love

is harsh

They live together, 

or die

I then proceeded to forget all about that and ended up in a black night of the soul, which made an earlier dark night of the soul seem wonderful. But, if I had not experienced the back night, I might not have been able to cope with what came after it, which was, well, not exactly a bed of roses, but it was a lot easier than the black night. 

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

The Old Man and the Sea presents at a starving writers as a mystical experience conference

   In an American novels course my senior year at Vanderbilt, the professor seemed to admire Ernest Hemingway’s novels about maintaining grace under fire, and the professor said we knew when the bad guy showed up in a Hemingway novel, because he didn’t drink. Hemingway was well-known for drinking, writing and fishing in Key West, Cuba and Bimini.

    When I lived mostly in Key West, late 2000-2018, I sometimes was urged to enter the Hemingway contest, in which inebriated old white men with white Ernest Hemmingway-like beards, wearing Orvis fishing outfits, stood on a stage hoping to be chosen the winner. Sometimes I said I wouldn’t enter the contest, because I knew how to write and fish, and I didn't drink.

    Yesterday’s post about a tale of a Pleiadean colony in Kundalina, Alabama, whose hero didn’t want to practice law, and two tales about a chubby redneck gal with anger issues and her lover boy lawyer with angel issues, who didn’t want to be president, garnered a response from a fellow in nowhere Nebraska, who might have a bright future disturbing the status quo far beyond where the buffalo once were said to roam and the clouds were not cloudy all day.

Free Radio Rulo 

@bigjim777

100 subscribers

Free Radio Rulo

By Free Radio Rulo

Backwoods, vegetarian, off grid, eco-socialist, Big Jim operates a pirate radio station and publishes a newsletter from an old Wonder Bread Truck in rural Rulo, Nebraska.

Free Radio Rulo

God speaks in strange ways through art! Any other substances involved my dude? Sounds like a my kinda novel!   

 

Sloan Bashinsky

Naw, other than body fluids :-), of which there are plenty in parts of Kundalina and Heavy Wait, but not so much in Return of the Strange, which wriggled up out of me last year, after all the blooms had fallen off the roses, so to speak. 

 

Free Radio Rulo

When the divine works through you ya just gotta let it flow brother! I can't imagine ever writing a novel, that must be an experience! 

 

Sloan Bashinsky

Based on what I have read of yours, your Muse is working on you pretty darn good, and that’s why I took a shine to you. There might be a novel or two or three in you, and if She shows up in that way, go with her wherever she takes you. 

 

A couple of years before Kundalina, Alabana started showing herself to me, I was invited to be a speaker at a writer’s conference at Birmingham Southern College. I then lived in Colorado, and by then was deep into my writings being steered by something much bigger and smarter than me. Out of the blue, it came to me use “writing as a mystical experience” for my topic, and then I was swamped with looking at Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, the last novel he completed, as his unconscious suicide note. The boy left behind at the dock was young Hemingway whose father had no time for him. The great marlin was Hemingway’s manhood. The sharks were his feminine, come to take back what he had tried so hard to prove to himself, and the the cancer that would eat his brain until he manned up and killed himself.

That was my spiel during the first day of the writer’s conference in a small seminar room. There didn’t seem to be much interest. The 2nd day, I had the entire conference for my audience, and I tried again, and there didn’t seem to be much interest in writers writing about themselves unawares, and I was feeling stuck, when someone asked me what I did about writers block, and I said I didn’t get it. When there was something to write, I had to write it. When nothing was coming, I did something else. And that’s when it got interesting. 

About a year later, Kundalina started showing up and I typed maybe 100 pages, and then seemed to dry up and I put her aside. I was playing golf at different public golf courses, picking up playing partners at the pro shop. One day, I was put with two men, one lived in Alaska. I asked him if he knew a fellow from Birmingham, who was a college fraternity brother of mine, and then he went to law school, and ended up making a whole lot of money suing auto manufacturers in Alaska, for defective products? The man said he knew the lawyer very well, they were good friends. I said my early childhood next door neighbor sweetheart and the lawyer became an item, and then it didn’t work out and it was rough for them both. The fellow said he had not heard of that and he would be sure to bring it up when he returned to Alaska. I advised be careful, it was a big owee for his friend.  

The next morning, I woke up feeling like an idiot. That little girl was the model for the heroine in Kundalina. I went back to work on the manuscript, and after completing a draft, shared it with the desktop publisher lady, who had gotten my book Prisons & Freedom ready for printing. She read the manuscript and said I had done a good job on the hero, Riley Strange, but not on Mary Lou Snow. I needed to bring her to life. So chastised, I brought her to life. 

A friend in Birmingham read Kundalina and asked my clinical social worker Sandplay therapist wife where in the hell did Sloan fiend Mary Lou, he was in love with her?! Betty told him, Mary Lou is a part of Sloan. 

About a year later, two novels showed up at the same time and I wrote on both of them each morning and finished both on the same day. Br’er Rabbit Meets the Devil and Krazy Justice were wild rides, too. But before they could be published by a vanity press, Betty said she wanted time apart and my world imploded and I left America for a while and those two novels eventually were lost. 

How something a lot bigger and smarter than me caused me to write Heavy Wait about as fast as I could type it is explained in the beginning of that strange tale about two very different Rileys and Mary Lous, and a redneck gal named Willa Sue Jenkins. I thought when it was done that there would have to be a sequel, but it didn’t come, and it didn't come, and finally it came last year. 

The Muse is different for each writer, poet, novelist, etc. I describe how the Muse is for me. 

A little while before the two lost novels were coming up out of me, this came:

He feels deep beauty in the dark pool from which his writings flow, she clings to him like fine silk, precious oil, she feels solid, compressed, like a black pearl growing from inside out, ever larger with each stroke of his pen, pushing her precious waters over her banks into his dreams and life. 

 

Free Radio Rulo

Wild! I would have enjoyed the Hemingway analysis. So some of your characters often turn out to be parts of your subconscious? This all reminds me of James Joyce for some reason. Is he an influence of yours? Who else influences your style? 

 

Sloan Bashinsky

When I read Joyce several lifetimes back, so to speak, he was much too deep for me to grasp. If there is a writer who influenced my writing style, it was Tom Robbins, whose novels Just Another Roadside Attraction, Jitterbug Perfume and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues left me kinda jangled and enamored. But I think it was Hemingway sho perhaps planted a seed in me that caused me to fantasize being a writer someday. 

 

I wonder if my father had it to do over, he would have urged me to take a typing course during my first year in high school? He said he had found being able to touch type was valuable in his business life. Some things I wrote to him and about our family did not please him. But my goodness did being able to touch type make it so much easier to shoot off my mouth on paper and computer screens. 

 

My writing style evolved as time passed. Professional book editors and a creative writing class helped some in the beginning, Then angels helped some. That kind of editing wasn’t much fun for me, but I fortunately was able to accept it as constructive. 

 

That was before the poetry and novels came. They had their own style which I suppose was buried in me, asleep. 

My writings always were out of the box, disturbing the status quo. The first two poems, which I will fetch, set the tone.

I wrote maybe 50,000 pages of blog posts. Starting 2019, some of the blogs became books, but the novels were stand alones. I did not sit down and dream them up. They dreamed me up. Same with the poetry, and some prose that just up and came out of me.

"Living Poets” 

Dead poets are poets who never write
Who obey shoulds and oughts
Who live to please others
Who value money over God
Who die without ever having lived
Death is their mark 
Dead poets are remembered by the living.
Living poets are remembered by time
Dead poets never sing their song
Living poets never stop singing it 
The difference between the two is this:
One worships fear, the other life 
To be a dead poet is hard
It requires being someone else
To be a living poet is easy
It only means being myself 
One choice is hell, the other heaven
That is what is meant by free will 

(1991)

"The Mockingbird”

I happened upon a mockingbird
singing its fool head off –
I asked it how and why it sang?
But all it did was look ahead,
all it did was sing.
It never turned to see if I was watching,
or listened for money jingling in my pockets,
or asked if I liked its music,
or expected a recording contract –
It was too busy singing
to pay any attention to me.
Thus did I learn
the greatest sin of all

is to kill a mockingbird. 

(1992)

If you read the novels Kundalina, Heavy Wait and Return of the Strange, you will see and feel very different writing from what I post at my Substack and blogs. And you might wonder when it’s made up, and when it isn’t. But then, not a few times I have been accused of making up my non-fiction books and blogs, which often are stranger than fiction :-).

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

Once upon some times, the redneck mystic lawyer wrote three culture busting love stories pretending to be novels now free reads at the internet library, archive.org

    Yesterday, a woman I nick-named “Man Killer”, because of all the boys' hearts she must have broken when she was young, was toting a novel by a famous American writer. I said  she might want to read my novels, which are a bit more exciting. 

    “You write novels?”

    “Yeah.”

    She asked how she could find them?

    I said I would email her links for the novels at the free internet library, and that an elderly woman I knew in Key West once told me that she could not put the 2nd novel down and she read it straight through in one night.

    “Man Killer” asked if I had copies she could hold in her hands and read?

    No.

    She said she liked to hold books when she read them.

    I said, sorry, she could hold her smart phone, tablet, laptop and read the novels.

    I emailed her:

Subject: links to 3 novels, parental guidance advised :-) 

 

Free reads, no ads, no solicitation 

 

Kundalina, Alabama
https://archive.org/details/kundalina 
(1992) 

Heavy Wait: A Strange Tale
https://archive.org/details/heavy-wait-a-strange-tale_202212
(2001) 

Return of the Strange (sequel to Heavy Wait)
https://archive.org/details/retun-of-the-strange-v-20_202306
(2023) 

     I went to archive.org and pulled up the descriptions of the three novels.

Kundalina, Alabama
(1992)
Kundalina. It rhymes with Carolina. It is a strange tale involving mystics, space aliens(Pleiadians if you must know), and all manner of critters and wildlife. Churches, pastors, preachers, sinners, saints- of all shapes, sizes, means and manners. It even involves a particularly resilient strain of carp. Kundalina is NOT nonfiction but it strains the definition of fiction to that of a tightly pulled hair follicle from which an 800lb gorilla is hanging onto for dear life. Another way to say it is this:. Kundalina is a rollicking tale of the state of Alabama MAYBE NOT AS IT WAS but instead as ALABAMA SHOULD HAVE BEEN and MAY YET BE if Alabama were to be so lucky.
This is Sloan Bashinsky's first published novel. 

 

Heavy Wait: A Strange Tale
(2001)
This free book starts with an earthly and metaphysical romp about how the novel came to be written, what it was like for Sloan while he wrote it, and his irreverent philosophy of writing, poetry and living - preferring to be a frog instead of a prince.
The novel is based on a storyline given to Sloan by street performer Birdie McLaine, whom Sloan met in Key West, 2001. Sloan told Birdie he had pretty much lived about half of the storyline the year before.
A non-stop romp. A cornicopia of love, loss, lottery winnings, psychiatry, fishing, law, kidnapping, paradise mating, incest healing, human greed, criminal prosecution, karma, incarceration and spirit set in Birmingham, Alabama, Port St. Joe and Apalachicola, Florida, and the Caribbean garden island, Dominica.
The main characters, Mary Lou Snow, Riley Strange and Willa Sue Jenkins are a the gods must be crazy menage de trois only a mystic, or a street performer, could dream up. The supporting actors are loveable, detestable, unforgettable. 
There really is no way to describe Heavy Wait in writing, or verbally, and do it justice.
It is not for the faint of heart, prudes, people who hate lawyers, lawyers who think they are hot stuff, people who think Jesus loves them no matter what they do. It is not for anyone, who doesn’t have a helluva sense of humor and a fertile imagination.
Sloan wrote the story stone cold sober without any chemical assistance, There was a good bit of other world assistance.
Sloan still believes God wrote the story, and he was just along for the ride, trying to keep up with the many unexpected twists and turns, which perhaps a novelist like Tom Robbins, who wrote Just Another Roadside Attraction, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Jitterbug Perfume might appreciate. 
Sloan doubts a novelist like John Grisham would like Heavy Wait. 
Perhaps minor actor Stephen King would like it. Perhaps not. 
Same for Oprah, the principal supporting actress. 

 

Return of the Strange (sequel to Heavy Wait)
(2023)
The long awaited sequel to Heavy Wait. This book had a gestational cycle of years and it is a rip roaring romp through America and both the kindness and also the dark heart of the American experience. Equally moving, sometimes you will laugh, sometimes you will cry, sometimes you will not know whether to continue, and sometimes you won't be able to tear yourself away from this STRANGE tale of Riley and his paradise mated wyrd love, Willa Sue.

    ]

    Around dawn today, I had a dream about a woman quarterback trying to score a touchdown against my team on which I was a defensive back. She tried an end run, and at the very last moment, she stopped running and lobbed a short pass to a woman in the end zone for a touchdown. I woke up, scratching my head.

    I crawled out of bed, fixed breakfast: dried blueberries and cherries and walnuts and GMO free yogurt, which I eat every morning. 

    I have read that berries are antioxidants and blueberries and walnuts are brain food. 

    I take a dried jellyfish brain supplement (Prevagen), which a bridge amiga told me helped her memory, 

    I take Memantine, prescribed by my neurologist, to stave off dementia. 

    I play a lot of bridge and chess, which exercise my brain, and I do a lot of writing, which exercises my brain. 

    So far, I am not able to find a doctor who will do a brain transplant, nor am I able to find a willing donor.

   After breakfast, I went online and found a private message from a woman who had sent me a Facebook friend request on January 18, 2024, which I accepted, and she private messaged me:

Karen

Thank you for being my friend, how are you?

Me

run ragged by angels, and old, and tired, but still kicking, although not as much as when I was younger 

 
    From her this morning:

Karen

Good morning Bash, how are you doing? Sorry it had been so long but I just moved back to Bham also and am trying to see everyone and kids. Glad to call you my friend. Where did you move back from and why, as they ask me. Talk later. 

 
    I looked at Karen's Facebook page and found the lob pass:

    I private messaged her:

2018, from Key West, where I had hung out most of the time since 2001. My older daughter put “He’s old but he’s ornery” on my FB for my last birthday, 81. I looked at your FB and saw your chubby woman with anger issues post and provided links to my last 2 novels, free reads, about a chubby woman with anger issues and her knight in tarnished armor.  

 

    Bottom line, I think at this point in time and space, the literary gods and goddesses favor Heavy Wait and Return of the Strange. Certainly, they are more relevant in American politics and religion today, and in soul healing, but Kundalina may be more cosmic, and its Mary Lou Snow is to die for.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

an ancient mariner ponders romance?

    I turned in last night reflecting on some women I have gotten to know somewhat since moving back to Birmingham in June 2018.

    A dream around dawn took me back to a point in time and space when I romanced several very different women at the same time, and while it certainly was exciting, it certainly was anxious as well, and I resolved it, I hoped, by marrying one of them, which perhaps was not kind to her, given the great mess I was, which she had to endure, as did her successors. 

    God only knows I loved the scent of a woman and how much I hated being alone, lonely, so maybe God arranged for me to be alone for a very long time, and I got over being lonely and pining for a woman to keep me company sometimes, or longer.

    Of late, and even longer, I think, or sense, some interest in me from women. God help them, if it’s true. God help me, if it’s true. 

    Perhaps I can lay some of the blame on Erick Rittenberry’s Poetic Outlaws Substack Newsletter. Something he published the other day, and today, stirred something in me.

Selecting a Reader
By: Ted Kooser

POETIC OUTLAWS
FEB 20, 2024 

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it. She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf. She will say to herself,
“For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned.” And she will.

Sloan Bashinsky
Sloan’s Newsletter
Thumbed through, but did not actually read? Getting her raincoat cleaned more important than even one of his poems? That’s his ideal reader? A woman he had loved, but she did not dig him?

man of aran
Not to mention, what he appreciates about her most, it seems, is her beauty. Cleaning the coat can only enhance that. 
She has her priorities straight. Poetry in life is a necessity but in book form a luxury. 

Sloan Bashinsky
It’s the male author’s priorities and broken heart I wonder about.

man of aran
Here’s a take. The poem is ironic. The twist is he’s not actually looking for a reader, just someone who creates beauty for its own sake. As he does with his poetry. 

Sloan Bashinsky
Perhaps.
This thing that fell out of me in 1994 probably also applies to poetry.

Although he sometimes tries to write fiction, when the tale is told, every character is a character in himself, every plot a plot in himself. There are no surprises, only his to discover the parts of himself he has lost, forgotten, thrown away, or never even knew were there. In this way perhaps he and God are somewhat alike: they both create to discover just who and what they reallly are.

Yet, I agree. All of life is poetry, and that she preferred to have her rain coat cleaned, perhaps of him, perhaps of tears she had shed because of him, perhaps because his poetry did not appeal to her, either, itself is poetry. 

Whatever moved him to write that poem was deep.

Lightly, My Darling 
By: Aldous Huxley

POETIC OUTLAWS

FEB 24, 2024

It’s dark because you are trying too hard.
Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly.
Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply.
Just lightly let things happen and 
lightly cope with them.

I was so preposterously serious in those days, 
such a humorless little prig.
Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me.
When it comes to dying even.
Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic.

No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious 
persona putting on its celebrated imitation 
of Christ or Little Nell.
And of course, no theology, no metaphysics.
Just the fact of dying and the fact 
of the clear light.

So throw away your baggage and go forward.
There are quicksands all about you, 
sucking at your feet,
trying to suck you down into fear and 
self-pity and despair.
That’s why you must walk so lightly.

Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage,

not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered. 

 

Sloan Bashinsky

Absolutely lovely.

81, with its physical aches and pains, waking up each morning wondering why I’m still here? Still hoping a miracle will cause my body to feel better, or the death angel will take me home, or somewhere new, to spare me what no beloved old, suffering pet has to endure. Living alone, a monk, all but a few months since late 2000, engulfed in metaphysics day and night, in all the way but not of this world, what woman could endure that regimen with no end? Lightly, what is that? Remember, I cannot. Perhaps it’s possible? I haven’t a clue. Is romance possible? Will viagra work? I haven’t a clue. Do I even want to try? I really don’t know. Back in the day, I would be all in.

    Perhaps these poems also are in play?

"Bi Polar” 

 

the world's favorite mood disorder
the cause of all human ails,
including wars,
if the demons aren't counted

bi polar disorder,
the destruction of the
south pole,
the feminine,
the north pole,
he ain't been
right in the head

since she’s been gone

(2016) 

"Eve's Answer” 

 

Vexing Truth
Life is Poetry,
Poetry is Life,
There's no more to say,
but that would make God
a really dull boy,
now wouldn't it, Eve? 

 

So, Eve,What say you?
After all,You have been,
still are,
blamed, 

for everything that went wrong
with hu - MAN - i - ty. 

 

Well, do you really want to hear
what I gotta say?
Is this one of those
be careful what you ask for pregnancies?
Well, is it? 

 

Probably, but say what you wish -
I s'pect you need to be heard. 

 

Heard?
Funny you mention ears.
Yes, ears.
Such important receptacles.
Yet filled with concrete,
shit, propaganda, beliefs,certainties,
well, let's not leave out
SUPERSTITION and RELIGION,
now should we? 

 

By the way,
where do ya suppose
God came from?
Or, out of? 

 

And, why do ya s'pose
I made Eve
in my own IMAGE?’ 

 

'Cause Adam was
so bored and dull -
so ... predictable
He was BORING!!!
the shit outta me!!!
That's why. 

 

Now
Shusssssh -
Don't go round quoting me
on any of that -
I've had quite enough of
the religious right
ta last me 

the rest of forever! 

(2018) 

    And this:

“I AM A MAN” 
 
I am a man. 
 
I said,
I am a man! 
 
What means it, 
being a man?   
 
A man is a warrior:
he lives by a code of honor,
his word is reliable,
his actions confirm his words,
his commitment is holiness,
his enemies are welcome at his hearth,
he fears but moves forward,
he cries and gets up again,
he hates but forgives,
he loves and let’s go,
he doubts but trusts God,
he’s a good friend,
he seeks resolutions,
he demands nothing,
he risks everything,
he regrets his mistakes,
he seeks to make amends,
he puts others’ welfare first,
he accepts apologies truly made,
he expects nothing back,
he lives ready to die,
he laughs when he “should” scream,
he screams when he “should” laugh,
he sings just because,
he shrugs off insults,
he learns from misfortune,
he cusses God for making him,
he wishes he was done,
he loves children and animals,
he relishes a woman’s scent,
he smiles when he’s content,
he knows God’s his master,
he walks in rainbows,
his garden is the world,
his way is nature,
he loves fishing,
his wife is his soul,
his food is life,

his pay is whatever he receives.

Yep, he’s crazy. 

(2003)

    And:

“SHANGHAIED” 
 
A calling to serve carries its own wisdom,
which legitimates both the calling and the serving
so that the two are one:
Only the one called to serve
can know this wisdom,
and for some who are called
the knowing comes easily,
while for others the knowing is a fiery baptism.
Each calling is different,
and while some callings can be declined,
others cannot,
and those whose calling is without repentance
know they are in it for the duration of the calling,
and while others may try to persuade them out of it,
the calling for ones such as these always prevails;
thus is it advised to all called for keeps
that they view their calling as a blessing
even when it seems at times to be a curse,
and that they try to reconcile the loss of their captain status
and allow the Spirit of God to man the helm of their ship
and be glad and willing crew members thereon,
knowing that all sailing ships of souls
need a crew as well as a captain
to maintain and navigate the ship through
seas of many tones, depths and flavors;
so consider each league sailed
as part of the overall journey
going to where the captain deigns to go
by using whatever winds and sea currents available
to navigate the ship to the experiences
this ship and crew need to have
in order to fulfill their calling and its wisdom
revealed by the journey of many leagues,
many known only to the ship and its crew,
all of whom come to know,
some sooner than others,
that once conscripted
there is no safe jumping ship.

(2004) 

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com