Wild Violet online literary magazine » John Szabo https://www.wildviolet.net Wed, 06 Sep 2023 21:11:19 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.41 Particles of Me https://www.wildviolet.net/2015/05/31/particles-of-me/ https://www.wildviolet.net/2015/05/31/particles-of-me/#comments Mon, 01 Jun 2015 02:05:37 +0000 http://www.wildviolet.net/?p=4907 Woman scattering ashes on ocean

Blake discovered the world in a grain of sand,
and I am now among those grains,
tossed from a blossoming, pale sweaty, soft palm
into the darkening surf;
my last wishes.

I am dissolved within
the seaweed and misty, salty air,
deep within a child’s sand castle
slowly eroded by the high tide;
particles of me mixed with coconut oil
rubbed into the brown skin of a Brazilian beauty,
more of me still at the bottom of a
black Labrador’s joyous day of digging.

Particles of me
follow the rhythm of the tides,
taking me on a journey
into the deep green and blue ocean currents
leaving behind the beach of my youth;
hoisted high a top my father’s shoulders
before being catapulted into the oncoming waves,
time after time,
until my fear turns into giddy anticipation.

]]> https://www.wildviolet.net/2015/05/31/particles-of-me/feed/ 0 My Bobble Head Dashboard Deity https://www.wildviolet.net/2013/07/13/my-bobble-head-dashboard-deity/ https://www.wildviolet.net/2013/07/13/my-bobble-head-dashboard-deity/#comments Sun, 14 Jul 2013 02:10:09 +0000 http://www.wildviolet.net/?p=3469 Bobble head Buddha on car dashboard with heavenly landscape

In the hours before dawn, on a desolate Mojave Desert highway, I ask my bobble head dashboard Buddha deity, his once bright colors faded, nose melted by furnace-like desert heat, his bloated, smiling head bobbling like an old man with a neurological condition, whose God is the right God?

 
He bobbles amiably, as he so often does when asked the unanswerable, gyrating his distended belly.
 
Been with me for 30 years since I Crazy Glued him to the shiny, oiled, fake leather dashboard of my 1975 Dodge Dart; now a car show classic.
 
Just like Mother Theresa, near the end of her life, I am not sure what I absolutely believe and don’t believe but they can’t all be right so does that make most of them wrong?
 
Is the humble aborigine, never brain washed, never immersed, in the teachings of a God any less saved?
 
 
“Who would Jesus bomb?” asks the bumper sticker. “My dog is my co-pilot” reads another.
 
A freeway billboard says: “Imagine there’s no heaven…no hell below us, above us only sky..imagine all the people, living for today.”
 
Is your beloved only child doomed when, after his youthful years of religious indoctrination, he admits he is not a believer?
 
Is the science of evolution nothing more than a sleigh of hand card trick?
 
Is the child raised in Japan to follow shinshūkyō Happy Science; worshipping a God known as El Cantare, or the world’s 1.1 billion devout atheists or agnostics any less deserving of a life ever-lasting?
 
Dawn approaching, awakening from a lone highway trance, not remembering the last 20 minutes of cactus, billboards and  occasional freight truck, I listen to a man preaching to anyone lonely and desperate enough to listen.
 
I picture his sweaty corpulent face, his fat, pink, veiny hands, demanding more to fuel his personal empire of dust.

 

 

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