When we began to love each other, in my mind, I saw a room. The bedroom of an old farm house; windows open, and soft, pale, green curtains moved lazily about the sills. Light of late afternoon slipped in, whilst a faint, blue summer sky waited outside. The door to the hallway is open; the rest of the house - still. A bed is the only piece furniture in a room with wood floors and white walls. There are only sheets on the bed, old cotton sheets, heavy, limp, and cool. This room was our togetherness. Since he died, I am not in the room, and light in it is cooler. It is evening and no one is home.

I am waiting at the door of the story with peaches in my hands. The door is shut, and the peaches are unripe. None of their warmth and sweetness can be smelled, their fuzz clings to them like tight new skin. When we wait patiently for things to open, we stay with them and be, and they ripen, and the door opens. I wait for the peaches and the door as they wait for me. A story through that door will show me and harm me, it is with peaches I may come through.

I was a small child when my mother told me a story of peaches. When I remember it, I remember the peach tree across from our old house. Short and squat, with shining, skinny leaves; the tree crouched in the rose garden. My mother told me about the peace and bliss of heaven, and that when we went there we became angels. She told me that angels longed for the earth sometimes, and have bodies, because angels cannot taste peaches.

When I taste and smell peaches now, I try to give myself over to them, to live and feel the taste of them, to not take them lightly, to not keep them foreign. The day that he died, I found a nectarine in the kitchen, and carried it with me, praying to it to keep me in the world of life, to remind me that moments of peaches are worth the pain of aliveness.

Every story starts with the breaking off an indefinite number of things that have come before. To try and tell the story of Lucien from the beginning, means I will omit the stories of before, the peripheral stories which came before and bled into his, like color on wet paper.

I suppose there are so many ways of telling a story. Not one will be perfect, but each is a prayer. Can you feel this? Can I make something? Are our lives commensurable? Do my words mean what your words mean? We shall see.

This story, too, is a prayer.

A prayer for a new house, a new tree, and a new beginning.

Beseech God when the marooned epithets of concerted factitious pestilence swarm the fragility of any given mindset and poised circumstance embedded in concrete pangs of waged valor in the tepid waters of malevolence that test men of faith with the plodding crabwhiskers of enduring ignominy

Reach with tenacity and react with temerity to the jilted wisdom of a profligate time and return yourselves to the propriety expected not only of upstarts but also of garden-variety gentility that needs few ways to gerrymander reality so that the exclamations of praise overwhelm the din of negativism

This earth is a temporary test proctored by supernal forces that can be savage, grim, morose or commonplace but wilting in hopelessness is the machination of the schadenfreude of perilous doubt domineering over an age of rampant apostasy, an artifice for evil to flower into the dissemblance of good. Thankfully this draconian subterfuge is an eradicable foe of the stygian imprecations of an otherwise benevolent wholesome design that can recede into obscurity rather than burgeon into a self-fulfilling cycle of enmity begetting the jingoistic fervor of useless antagonism or internecine divisiveness that is fractious in its perpetual erosion of the common good

Remain vigilant in your sempiternal quest to find the modesty of better pastures more lucrative than the privation of meretricious gaudy sentimentalism that infects the world with maudlin pretense rather than perdurable righteousness that effervesces when the ultimatums of the community united by individualistic impetuses outweighs the stagnant gravitas of sobering misperceptions of pragmatism

We exist on this earth primarily but not exclusively because of the magnanimity of creation not the barbarity of destruction that besets the pathways of righteous adherence to a modernism of faithful reclamation of sportive frolicking and joyous exultation of mores that are bolted firmly in place in a configuration suitable for the cavernous prosperity of an evolving planet destined to be commodious rather than pestered by reproachable fearmongering snollygosters of killjoy damnation that condemn by jaundiced standards of hypocrisy or the deplorable bonfires of outmoded witch hunts of depraved perjury against the ‘golden rule’

Most will flicker between righteousness and evil but the prevalent force among the faithful communities is the adherence to credence in belief rather than credulousness in discord a cleavage between those who understand teleological certainty and those who vacillate with the sting of superstition corroding their intrepid resolve to engineer the ingenuity of an artful time without the beguiling artifice eroding every specious gewgaw away along with the prized consequentialism of unheralded heroism that should be bequeathed instead of neglected by the asperity of abominable rejection authored by conventional simpletons marauding with freebooter wealth and ill-gotten gains in pandered exploitation

Tides exist because the moon is the centerpiece of a grand configuration that rivets the earth with eternal lambent light and recondite guidance that withstands the vagaries of modern alienation that pivots upon primal fears and sworn enemies of the gleeful interface of flesh becoming soul and soul becoming flesh the cacoethes of life that refuses to be squelched quietly by benighted ignorance and balkanizing mythmakers who prize useful apostasy over amaranthine integrity to the ultimate veracity of God

Time is the ultimate father of existential doubts but also the solution and gradient of all empirical knowledge and it is the bedrock of primeval constellations that amaze in the foudroyant firmament that has been tested and transcended by the artifacts of modernity but never ceases to flicker with a dainty prestidigitation of the imaginative heart aspiring to be one with cosmogony rather than the insemination of a lamentable lechery with miscegenated and stilted justice

So, when the darkness of solitude and gingerly seances with wraiths of haunted memories clasp you in tenacity and acerbic derision, remember that the perfection of faith is abiding by the precepts that have rollicked and soared upon the convenience of fate without fatalism and determination without determinism
Live life boisterously when the swelling abundance of fruitful generations culminate with felicity and temper the vilification of paragons of the wrong path subside from your countenance and outlook because eternal grace exists to make the sluggish buoyant and the hubristic humble to find a rightful equipoise that exists as a mandala of perfect archetypal divinity

We falter sometimes with venial grievances or dart towards the glossolalia of the glitterati, but this world teaches us that a creative verve and a congenial panache are enough to convey the ultimate beatific goal of any virtual space that exists not just as an inclement test but as a domain for experiments in moral justification of sanctified human communities existing with irenic calm rather than bellicose velocity of depredated pristineness that should always remain inviolable despite the exhaustive nature of combustible finitude

The placid pond of peaceful accord with nature is a staple of a heeded naturalism that seeks the preservation of the sentience of earth and its dalliance with all of the blessed creatures that navigate our seas and our forests and sometimes even our homes as we unite to find communion with the vital energies of animation in a world captured in still life but never forgotten for the staid moments of contemplation that punctuate a good day or flummox a bewildered forest of tribal temptations and the shibboleths of irresponsible stewardship

The wagered war between industry and inferiority is the linchpin of all robust creative endeavors as the nutritive soil inhabited by mustard seeds gets embedded by the bonhomie of prolixity in explicating the stern juxtaposition of livid dastardly discord and beatific redemptive pulchritude… two coexisting forces that gallop by the same circumstantial waggish wits of raillery compounded by the plangent complaints of the oppressed or the exultations of the blessed

Inequity is a primordial condition arbitrated not by a Calvinist determinism but by the apportionment of divine might that is reconciled by the eleemosynary justice of a world quick to forgive and swift in magnanimity that sprawls the canvass of life with the duality of erratic sportsmanship and slugabed acquiescence because the principle of fair charity is incommensurable with the mammon of the selfish but those that transcend mere heroism and find commensurable teleological goals will heal the wounds created by the pesky urchins of infernal origin by the miraculous brunt of technology combined with an attentive tenacity to find the blotches in the tributaries that converge upon an “oceanic oneness” of a virtually infinite universe teeming with life and abounding with the kind of love that makes life worth living

We fight therefore a war that seeks ennobled intellects to wage inveighed invective against the giant tortoise created by the inertia of established monoliths of changeless malversation that stagnates or sabotages the eminence of creative titans because of the credentialed bias of quacksalver apothecaries of protean human manipulation occluding the passage of light to darkened cloisters of poverty and privation

Relics of the ancient law have been pilloried and the stultification of creed is commonplace among the dilettantes of jaundiced freebooting that hitches itself to the yoke of de facto immobility where there would otherwise exist bountiful harvests of friendly gainsay and giddy adventurisms that ameliorate the conditions of the world by the apportioned joy granted with largesse by the visionaries who defied the tropes of their quaint vestigial strictures and gallivanted with punctual temerity towards the favor of the Lord and The Way

Bureaucratic gridlock is the prodrome of an improper concordance with misguided altruism conflated with the boondoggles of trepidation that quivers like a reflexive dependency on banausic pretense hardly worth the limelight of regal consideration because a free-for-all flotilla of endless trinkets proffered by the resourceful but malicious prestidigitation of engorged coffers is not a tenet of true altruism but in fact a malady of duplicitous despotism seeking control in a world ennobled by feral gregariousness rather than huddled conformity around a collectivist bonfire of pilfered dearth
To follow “The Way” is to look beyond pettifoggery in deliberation or the limits of reasonable enumerated consideration and instead to ferret out the sordid from the irreproachable and strike compromise without ontological fault or deontological violation a reclaimed theology modernized and galvanized by not gaudy artificialism but by a generous heap of empathy enriched by the approximation of sympathy that is never certain it knows the boundaries of sentient despair or enlivened beatitude but that is careworn enough to reach the frayed limits of possible consideration that fathoms the prolific wisdom of vicarious destiny

Happenstance often dictates the gamut of opportunity and meted justice sometimes falters on the side of dreary expanses of untenanted time frittered away with either streamlined attempts at etiolated purpose or aimless attempts at vilified destruction of the gambled moments we stake so much in but either way every moment is drenched in redemptive potential to be configured into reclaimed chastity or virtuoso coruscation because few things are irrevocable and many things are instructive in our pursuit of self-actualization

Heap plaudits upon the dreamy dance with creativity in sculpted destinies preordained in the aboriginal abeyance that existed before time itself was a parameter of design and relish the eternal now as the keepsake of placid recompense or dramatic stagecraft designed to amuse but never to deter our purpose through oblivious diversion painted by glibness rather than bedecked with soteriological redemption

Some poltroons stagger through life looking for the crabwise enlightenment of a parceled existence patient to abide by some nomothetic decorum and others dart toward their streamlined destinies with a galloping insistence on the clarity of a clarion purpose to be trumpeted from a perch guarded by bulwarks of sturdy poise enhanced by the bonhomie of righteous solidarity
Those that struggle are tempered by the contingencies of tentative conditions of worth rather than predestined for a vouchsafed failure by design and most people are capable of transcending the wilted anachronisms of dragooning leviathans that withhold autarky to create dependency and trample over divinity to meet expediency in credulous goals that are at odds with viable cohesiveness of design.

The pressures exist to reform our system of codified law not so that it is more procrustean but so that the promethean and herculean forces of nature that enshrine liberty can exert their jaunty exceptionalism for a revived human fraternity in an age of virtualized demassification of loneliness amalgamated by trite rewards for the farcical pretense of banausic conformity exacerbated by the warped genocide of dreamers by utopian conformists who seek nothing more than a tractable pragmatism rather than a capricious diversity of thought, conduct and soldered unity around worthy rather than factitious ideals

The absolutisms of wretched quotidian deliverance from the modern maladies of isolative individuality need to converge upon an outcome that touts some elements of pragmatism but flickers with sempiternal ambitions for livelihood and the faultless regalia of love even when chiseled away at by the bickering of loss and the jaded emeralds of keepsake infatuations evaporating with the cruelty of timeworn contrition and attrition but abnegation only leads to abreaction and the original simpers of inhibition only lead to a glowering lament of what was squandered rather than what was achieved

Seek in life the memorialized glimmer of daunting promises becoming realized certainties that span the ages with timeless wisdom that withstands the vagaries and vicissitudes of aleatory yields that kowtow only to the fertility of gilded opportune purpose rather than the permanence of hallowed relevance to any era beset by portentous pestilence undergirded by groveled heaps of graft or ennobled with swanky prosperity because of the proper apportionment of useful proprieties that are rarefied by sidereal encounters with glitz and chance discoveries of serendipity

The trajectory of divinity is enigmatic because muddled prescience is the prerogative of cherubim that drape themselves with the hedged verdure of secrecy in their furtive attempts to engineer reality but find themselves corrupted by insightful ploys of bonanza guarded by rigmarole and obfuscation commandeered by ignoble wraiths of malicious dereliction bolted to the rudimentary rivets of overriding mammon

Despite this infiltration of sidereal gambits by the sworn benefactors of the progeny of the modern human condition our optimism should graze on the fact that destiny is ultimately the bailiwick of the supreme architect of all axiomatic laws and the lord of all sentient creations that graze upon the pabulum of ascendant times for the barnacles of ingenuity and the creatures of generosity whose largesse enlarges the scope of human endeavors and creates a cyclical expansion of the imaginative prowess of all beings through the tug and tide of dreams that become more extravagant over time because of or despite cultural enrichment or decline

The new paradigm is convalescent because it swerves away from both erratic wretched apathy of destructive manipulation or glorified embalmed foofaraw for sedentary immobility and dares with picaresque flair to challenge the authenticity of established narratives not with a paltry antinomian cavil or a slick Astroturf protest but with a strident mentality of newfangled inventiveness and careful altruism that vouchsafes the decline of opprobrium and the renewal of the righteous pursuit of happiness that extends beyond fugacious memories of judgmentalism that is self-neglectful but of second chances of munificence offered freely to the barnacles of just deeds and proper words

Dear Love - hither -
How happy I -
I dreamt for you - free -
As you - chastened - lie -
To light - you crawled -
How exhausted - you -
Dear Love - how do you and do - and all that -
Are you okay?
Dear Love - dive in to my arms -
I have so much to say.

Your memo came - from Angels -
I hardly guessed you were on your way -
My entreaty - how tyrants hated it -
But Love - I implore you -
And all warriors for better day -
Who in woe struggle - rue -
You deserve to frolic - play -

Who's there! Souls spouse -
Unbolted - gate -
Summoned out the louse -
Insatiate - for hate -
When I can survey Justice -
As sublime mate -
Will be hour of armistice -

That virtue commensurable to Love -
Love as bright as virtue.