Betrayal

What happened when you read the title of this post? Did you hearken on a definition, or did your mind replay the events of the past?

They say betrayal is something people do to the ones they love. How profoundly interesting a thought. The TV show The Strain, for instance, shows how the infected return to murder their loved ones first. And in the history of the relationships we’ve had throughout our lives, chances are its the closest love that got us. People who admire our work are those who have a history of hating us for the very work they wish belonged to them. Not all admirers but those who secretly hate when we improve. Like the song says, “Smiling in yo face, all the time wanna take yo place, them back stabbers.” They say some do it with a bitter look. Some a flattering word, and others a sweet kiss. And in the words of Dennis Haysbert (the All State Guy) in a clip from the movie Love and Basketball,  the most bold is right at your front door.

Deception.

It comes in many different shapes, sizes, and motives, and often enters under the banner of love. A smile, a wave, or a joke or two that happens as the knives enter your lower torso. Since hate transforms itself into an angel of light, the love we have for these people makes for an invisible wound; a wound that is not instant thanks to our blindness but that appears later. Dripping from holes unnoticed by the sister you called friend, or the brother you thought loyal. The pain has no calendar to which it wishes to disappear into, and is not interested in evaporating so that you have the privilege of time, in which you decide when to trust again. Not likely. Know that the pain will  sit there long enough for you to put up the proper walls that only true love can tear down. As for trust, it is a mirror that only time can restore. Yes, betrayal, it is a broken bone of trust capitalizing on the scars already on our backs.

So what’s the good news? What’s encouraging about this post? Well, nothing. Nothing except that while Betrayal shows up often, it really only has one job.

To make you stronger.

You Can’t Leave…

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You can’t leave me
not now
not ever
not while my kiss is in your bloodstream
and not when your tongue has danced on the insides of my mouth
not when your teeth have carved “I luv u’s”
on my heart like hieroglyphic images
to remember when were far apart from each other
like
long standing memories
And if I 4get to say I love you just use the seal of my kiss and put them in parenthesis
but not for a Greek tragedy
so you see
there aint no leaving me
Not unless you wanna leave you
and then our bystanders can tell stories of those days back when life made sense
back when you were already a man of pride
and serious eyes were already making love to the tears of my innocence
Not unless you want them to weep at our footprints
But if your heart continues to cry my tears
And my heart continues to cry your tears
Then it will be impossible for you to leave me
Because our hearts will be tongue tied for years.

Struggle

“We must embrace struggle. Every living thing conforms to it. Everything in nature grows and struggles in its own way, establishing its own identity, insisting on it at all cost, against all resistance.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

 
What I love most about this quote is that struggle is such a powerful teacher. It passes down the knowledge of self, which without such cannot be obtained. If not for the hardships many of us have been through we would not have understood who we were as individuals. It is a healing experience to transform the mind by having endured struggle, pain, obstacles. No discipline seems pleasant at the time we receive it, but what in creation produces a greater reward than enduring struggle? Show me a better teacher than pain.

Did YOU Know? ….. National Sunday Law

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The streets are empty of people, and the grocery stores void of movement. The people seemed to have vacated the Earth; perhaps they have residence on the moon. (I wonder if it really does taste like cheese.) The automobiles have stopped dragging their tires to the next corner for fear of being arrested, disassembled and then thrown into the nearest junk yard. (We do not accept gas as bail payment….sorry).
Why is Sunday’s so quite? Why do the people lock themselves inside their homes as if the taste of air itself will chock them? Why are the streets empty?

National Sunday Law

Many believe it is because it represents the seventh day of rest; a day to relax from all our labors, and to focus our thoughts on the thoughts of the almighty. But is this true? Is Sunday our day of rest? Is this why the people have vacated earth, the reason the stores have shut their mouths, and the vehicles have stopped running?

 

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In A.D. 325 Roman Emperor Constantine held a worldwide Christian Convention with the Council of Nice. Great dissension arose among the pagans at that time about when to celebrate holidays and how to worship the Gods. Troubled by this, Constantine as the Pagan High Priest, held a convention in Nicaea in Bithynia, to which Bishops were invited from all over the world. It was a meeting that would culminate in the current Christian belief system by merging scripture with pagan beliefs in order to solidify the many viewpoints of the council and appease the Pagan priesthood. It would also result in the death of many openly Pagan groups so that the revelation that this new religion included Pagan beliefs would not be revealed. Constantine commanded that the pagan temples be destroyed and the people killed.

 

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A Pagan is someone who worships Gods and Goddesses, or they may worship Satan altogether. As a Pagan, Constantine worshiped the sun-god Apollo, having the image engraved on his coin. Issued in A.D. 321 as part of the decreed, Constantine instituted our current legal institution of Sunday as the day of rest as a National Sunday Law; to which he called “The Lord’s Day”, or “Dies Solis”, that is, “The Day of the Sun” because he worshiped the sun-god. From this point on, people began to keep the Sabbath Day on the first day instead of the seventh day to which it was originally established according to biblical law. Constantine ordered that stores be closed and that activity of labors cease on Sunday. It was Constantine who first made a law for the observance of Sunday as the Sabbath who appointed that it should be regularly celebrated throughout the Roman Empire. Before this, as stated, everyone properly observed the Sabbath day as it was instituted by the almighty from the foundation of the world.

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CONSTANTIN’S SUNDAY LAW, ISSUED A.D. 321, WAS AS FOLLOWS:– {GC88 679.1} “LET ALL THE JUDGES AND TOWN PEOPLE, AND THE OCCUPATION OF ALL TRADES  REST ON THE VENERABLE DAY OF THE SUN; BUT LET THOSE WHO ARE SITUATED IN THE  COUNTRY, FREELY AND AT FULL LIBERTY ATTEND TO THE BUSINESS OF AGRICULTURE;  BECAUSE IT OFTEN HAPPENS THAT NO OTHER DAY IS SO FIT FOR SOWING CORN AND  PLANTING VINES; LEST, THE CRITICAL MOMENT BEING LET SLIP, MEN SHOULD LOSE  THE COMMODITIES GRANTED BY HEAVEN.” {GC88 679.2}

 

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Let me make it clear I am not a Christian (nor am I a Jew). I do however believe in the principles of the bible. As such I must say, that to observe Sunday as the Sabbath day is not in accordance with the commandment we have been given. If you believe in the bible not at all, this post does not concern you. But if you consider yourself a bible believer, and you wish to keep the commandments as they have been issued to be kept, keeping Sunday as the Sabbath day is transgressing the command to keep the Sabbath day set apart because you are actually not keeping the Sabbath set apart, you are instead observing The National Sun-day Law, and worshiping the sun.

Guest Feature – Exerpt from Ntozake Shange

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For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When The Rainbow is Enuf Copyright © 1975, 1976, 1977 by Ntozake Shange

i can’t hear anythin

but maddening screams

& the soft strains of death

& you promised me

you promised me…

somebody/anybody

sing a black girl’s song

bring her out to know herself

to know you

but sing her rhythms

carin/struggle/hard times

sing her song of life

she’s been dead so long

closed in silence so long

she doesn’t know the sound

of her own voice

her infinite beauty

she’s half-notes scattered

without rhythm/no tune

sing her sighs

sing the song of her possibilities

sing a righteous gospel

let her be born

let her be born

and handled warmly.

 

Guest Feature: Waiting for Someone – Lamar Jorden

“Somewhere
In the Northwest region of Seattle Washington
There’s a homeless man, armed with a beer can
Trying to drink away war memories
Waiting for someone
Self-less enough to lend him an ear
He sits on the side of a Pizzeria on the corner of Queen Ann and Mercer
In a chair, they probably kick him out of after business hours
His skin
Has grown all too fond of the concrete beds that he rest his shell-shocked head on
His braggadocios body
rocks back and forth showing off to the world the only gifts war veterans ever receive
He addresses me, “Ey lil Bra, you got a dollar?”
Without even checkin my pockets I tell him, “I aint got it”.
Having anticipated this appointment he responds with,
“That’s fine, cause I really wanted a 20.”
Amazed, not that he still knows what humor is,

but that is one of the few possessions that the war actually let him keep, I laugh
Before digging into my coat pocket filled with a ton of change I’ll probably never use
He lets me know that more than a 20, what he really wanted was a conversation
And takes my 75 cent donation as an invitation to start one
Without offering much space for me to converse,

he lets me know how in this country,
war veterans are rarely anything more
Than patriotic flies on a wall
And that for all these people to ignore his request
Is just as second nature as swatting at a pest
I guess
None of them realize that here lie their tax dollars at work
His body jerks
To the percussion of his bones
Dancing to the song of post-traumatic stress syndrome
How wrong
Is it of humans to lack humanity
Demanding he keep his lips locked but
Possess the audacity to ask where he got his army cap on
To think it’s a trigger you can purchase at a gift shop he tells me
That they’ve labeled him as crazy and they say

he has to take medicine called percadine but the one time he took it
It made him high so why would he continue when it makes his mind worse with time
It seems like the perfect crime
Having people fight for a country that won’t fight for them
The goal
Was for one of those countries to take his life from him
And the opposing country failed when he
Returned to civilization but
The home country would succeed by stripping him of his home
How long
Will this be the standard in this country?
Where if war doesn’t kill you
They distill you
Sending you back home just to rot and mildew
the phrase
“War is good for absolutely nothing”, is still true
Before he lets me go,
he tells me
that he wants to die.
And I see the tear-shaped white flag surrender from his eye
I give him a pound
Before digging back into my coat pockets surrendering

the rest of the change I found.
I tell him I have to go
Cause there’s a white man, screaming at me through traffic
Waiting for me to end this conversation
There’s a young lady at a bar and grill across the street
Waiting for me to join her for dinner
And there’s a poem
Scratching at the insides of my soul
Waiting for me
To tell this story.”

Copyright Lamar Jorden