THE PRODIGALS...BRINGING DEATH'S HOMELESS CHILDREN HOME!

THE PRODIGALS
BRINGING DEATH'S HOMELESS CHILDREN HOME
by CliffMickelson
cmicke1065@aol.com

Ah, yes...If only the empty desert could talk, what tales would the wind in the sagebrush whisper to us?

And..

If only the city alleyway and flophouse hotel, the mission feeding station and the freeway overpass could speak to us, of what unknown mysteries would they gossip?

Would they perhaps call to us in the name of our lost children? Our numbed and numberless prodigal brothers and sisters?

Our once and future flesh and blood?

Would they then speak to us of what its like to be homeless in America?
Perhaps they would.... But then again, perhaps not.

For...

Few Americans who have not been directly touched by the world of the homeless are able to comprehend what it is that they see before them each day on city busses and in public parkways.

Little do unwitting members of the emerging North American Union realize that the alleys behind our comfortable homes are just one more level to Dante's street-wise Inferno; and that THIS is the apartmentalized furnace wherein dwell the homeless...

More ominously, fewer North Americans still, truly realize how close to their own front door that alleyway grows with each passing day.

In fact, the world of the "homeless" is a complex and multilevel hierarchal world.
It is a universe rife with violence, death, rape, addiction, petty crime and despair.
It is also home to a large group of people who profess to prefer it that way.

Freedom, they say, isn't free. They gladly pay the cost.

Ironically, some of the most intelligent and talented people I have ever met were citizen shipwrecks on the jagged shoals of this homeless shore.

Great numbers of these faceless men and women are dead now.

Their faces are long gone, but a growing number of their brethren's bodies remain extant among us to stand as their witness.

Many are the current and past homeless who began their journey overtly. They were looking for the "easy way." A quick buck, an undiscovered or unguarded path leading to an easy way out.

Some others began their journey oblivious. Mental cripples, they were completely unaware that their life's train was leaving the station.

Still more, throttled by the addiction of an insidious disease, found themselves huddled amongst Kith and kin along the far shore of the River Styx.

So many childlike spirits, being ever impatient for the return of Charon's ferry, instead daily choosing to recklessly throw themselves upon the mercy of another world's churning waters; preferring to drown alone in a black liquid whose ragged course rages inexorably toward the abyss of night's indigo oblivion.

From 1985 to 1995 I lived and worked in an environment pervaded with participants in this world...this...inverted North American culture!

I came to know that the world of the homeless clings tightly upon the dark underbelly of North America. It is the mirror form and microcosm of the world that spawned it.

All its talent, all its beauty, all its horrors and especially all its ugliness, are to be found here. These vises and virtues permeate every molecule of each and every huddled form found in every darkened ally and every reeking empty dumpster.

The world of the homeless is a hall of distortions; a house of mirrors that cast back grotesque parodies of another place and time. It is the Dorian Grey of the false and shattered land of dreams that whelped it.

On cold park benches and in urine-stained doorways, only a thin cellulose tissue of lies serves as yesterday's discarded newspaper blanket; a sad hand me down of all that is no longer theirs to dream.

In this final inadequate broadside of daily obituaries, their names will someday be found missing, as they themselves are now severed, post partum, from a world that no longer shelters and consoles its abandoned denizens from the icy cold hand of waiting death.

But, the homeless know that the dark Lord of Death is patient. He bides his time. For he has marked each and every one of his prodigal charges.

Of all those waifs lost in the polyglot family of Man, these are his special children.
And...All too soon the long reach of Death will silently gather in his markers.

One by one.

One alley and one doorway at a time, Death will bring his homeless children home.

We would do well to remember, America, that someday sooner than you may suspect, there, but for the grace of God, go you and I.

-CliffMickelson

WORDS & MEANING..AN INTERCOURSE IN CONGRESS WITH THE BEAST!

Greetings, Readers:
And...Welcome to yet another renewal period on the short term lease of life.

The post below is relevant in every way to the above mentioned time remaining to us as we travel through the dream of time and space upon this blue rock.
But I dare say it is not intended for the frivilous nor is it for the faint of heart.

Simply remember this as another year dawns:

WHOMSOEVER CONTROLS YOUR WORDS CONTROLS YOUR WORLD!

And THAT is why...

WHY WE MUST EVER GUARD THE VIRTUE OF MEANING
-CliffMickelson

cmicke1065@aol.com

***
My Friends:

Behold the power of words... To control the word is to control the world.

Words whose past values are perverted through the intercourse of a present congress with the beast will become integral components in the structure and potentiality of a mutant changeling reality that our children will be fated to endure tomorrow.

Therefore, all generations, those before the light, must bear witness to an endless struggle ... for to control the conceptual essence of the word is to gain the richest conceptual prize.

This "prize" is a reward highly sought after in the Metaphysical as well as the physical universe. It is known by those in the self service and illumination of keen ambition that the word possesses as its passenger, a great power ... that whomsoever controls the meaning of words, controls the destiny Of Man.

Yet, despite this power, our words are but a frail vehicle charged with freighting a fragile cargo of perishable human perceptions.

Herein it is that meaningless sounds form a conceptual womb of meaning and birth forth substance and nourishment to all forms of past, present, and future perception.
Thus are two wary symbiotic energies mounted one upon the other. In that joining they become more than the sum of their parts.

In this way does our species then pass through time and space bound severally to its own creation in a symbiotic covalent union, a magnificent consummation of the energies of form with matter, and a divinity inspired out of clay; one whose residual substance is the ultimate arbiter of all human reality.

Again...It is the intangible essence of words; their ethereal "cargo" of perceptions, that forge the socially agreed upon potentiality of not only the world that once was, but the world that is, and most importantly, the world that will be.

Yet there is no known truth as delicate in drayage as the integrity and nuance of a word's meaning ... nor is there a tiger more fearsome than the capricious faithlessness of that formless beast of Adam upon which it so precariously rides.

We must beware...

It is understood by the masters of both dark and light; those who would possess us and those who would set us free; that meaning is lord of word and though word serves to delivers its servant unto a master, its delivery is amoral and only given virtue of the tenuous hold of meaning on the back of that guttural metaphoric tiger.

Therefore, meaning avoids usurpation only by agreeing to live or to die by the code of a specific relationship. As is the mother, so is the child. Meaning is in this way imprisoned by the nature of its umbilical connection to word.

This presents a great weakness. This is the flesh ne'ar touched by the immortal waters of the styx and so becomes a target to the arrow of Paris. It is here that evil can and often does wound the apprentice light force.

And...It is here on the underwomb of this grand opportunity that the fury of the night ever seeks to implant the seed of itself.

Evil impregnates itself thus: Essence, being the cargo of a word's meaning, is subject to form which owes mortal fealty to two creatures of eternal and universal corruption. One such corrosion is a natural corruption. It is benign. It is naught but an endless flow towards an end-time "entropy" of thought and motion. It is a value in pursuit of a worthy balance. It is a handmaiden of evolution and can be considered to be a positive process.
It's dark twin however, is unnatural and malignant.

It seeks to discharge and pervert its kin by allowing it to be slyly devoured piecemeal by the tiger upon which it rides.

Hence, it is of great importance that we remain vigilant against the dark force and growing present power of malignant corruption.

It is a virtue to husband the moral essence of our words and guard well their meaning. The cargo born of words is ever dear. We alone can arbitrate which seduction is benign and produces fruit and which is malevolent and brings forth monsters.

For both the malignant and the benign effect themselves upon those intangibles that are wrought out of the ribs of the vessel with which we forms our lives. Too easily therefore are they, (And as a result we) despoiled by dark intrigues.

It is against the Byzantine then, that it is our duty to preserver. We are charged to act as sentinels, and to post ourselves as pickets. We must forever be wary in the discharge of this cargo or live to see our patrimony lost.

This struggle is one without end. Our forefathers fought it, we now fight it, and our descendants will also fight it.

It is but one theater in an eternal contest that knows not the boundaries of time and space. For, as we ourselves were once destined to be, (as we are now) self-defined children of a future now passing, all that we are today will perish without a trace should we even once fail the memory of how it was that we came to be what we are at this moment.

For if there exists but one truth, it is that there will ever be children of the future Who will be, like us, self-defined by all that their perception tells them came before.

In this way are the future potentialities of generations unborn, brought forth from the womb of truth, or sprung from the loins of a lie...And, therein lies the importance to human kind ... That terrifying difference between the freedom of a self-empowered destiny or the slavery of a predetermined fate.
-CliffMickelson