Caroline Duke – Point
‘Heaven Can Wait’

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
…Or does it explode?
-    Langston Hughes

Is a dream a lie
If it don’t come true
Or is it something worse?
-    Bruce Springsteen; The River

I ask these questions tonight of a few friends, dear and departed, both dead of violence.
Martin Luther King.
Petra Kelly.

(For those 88% of you who have never traveled abroad, the 75% who believe in angels, the 40% who don’t believe in evolution and the 30% who don’t read, Petra was the GI military brat who founded the Green Party in Germany, and the world).

The answer came home last night, in the form of my son, brought up as best a single mother can do.

“Mom, I have been born again.”
My universe, with its shifting supernovas of heat and light and black holes of cold and dark, just imploded and died.

I had been reading George Elliot, she who had endured her father’s wrath for renouncing the Church; now here standing in front of me stood my son renouncing me.
I was hearing what Elliot heard; “the roar at the edge of silence.”
He went on; going abroad on a missionary trip, hoping to ‘cure’ other cultures, gays, women considering abortions.

I think I need to cure you, I said.
Listen mom, he said, “you don’t need to worry about all that stuff you worry about late at night; global warming and poor people and animals.”
“It won’t matter when Jesus comes.”

Maybe it doesn’t matter now, with the fundamentalists taking over here, there, and everywhere.

No science, no evolution, no learning, no growth – real growth, not the western cancer cell variety – just sit back and keep taking it until the end.
No wonder the whole world is self-medicated, obsessed with ‘faith’ and violence and trivia and filled with bleating, and bleeding, sheep.
Their faith and prayers leading us all to the slaughterhouse; willing victims, Willful Ignorance.
What was that Jonathan Swift said?
(Boy his Modest Proposal actually looks pretty modest in today’s world). “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”
Or how about Aldous Huxley; does anyone remember him?
“You never see animals going through the absurd and horrible fooleries of religion; only man behaves with such gratuitous folly.  It is the price he pays for being intelligent, but not intelligent enough.”

And Sheep begat Idiot, who begat Terrorist, who begat Fascism, who begat Hopelessness, who begat Sheep.

And that’s my son on their cross now.

Our Nada who is in heaven, Nada be thy name.
Thy kingdom nada thy will be nada
In nada as it is in nada.


Felix Cross – Counterpoint
Heaven Can’t Wait


“You see things, and you say ‘Why?  But I dream things that never were and I say ‘Why not?”
-    George Bernard Shaw

“Dream as if you will live forever; live as if you’ll die today.”
-    James Dean“

“Families is where our nation finds hope, where our wings take dream.” 
    -  President George Bush


I have to admit that it used to be an abstraction.
As much as I believed with my heart I still couldn’t taste the gunmetal in my mouth, smell the adrenalin and burning plastic.

It didn’t matter; the conflagration of Revelations and the Second Coming was real.
I needed it to be, and it was so.
But you think you know what form it will take and unless you are God you know nothing but the belief in it.

So when it walks into your house in the most normal guise, that of my eldest son, you don’t hear the dull roar or lick your chapped lips or sniff the smoking fog.
“Dad, I’m gay.”

He wouldn’t even pray with me; said I was praying against him.
So I unlock the cabinet and bring out the .410, and clean it while I pray, for both of us.
Now I can taste it; it is real and it is close.
When the Godless hordes take over the country in two years they will feel it too, because it will wash over them in a cleansing fire.

Handling this gun I have to keep other thoughts at bay.
One above all others; I Want It Now.

I composed a letter once to Eric Rudolph in prison, but never sent it; maybe I should have.
I wanted to ask him why he agreed to go to jail; why not follow the purity of his own actions and go willingly to heaven as an example to us all?
What else do we have to look forward to?

Hillary?
More dead babies, more infidels?
More gays?
What would Eric do?
The righteous pay for their faith, their beliefs; doesn’t God want us to carry out his retribution?

The world is so beset by the Beast that Eric would say; ‘make it something they will never forget’.

The Mossberg shines and weighs heavy and light in my hands.
The roar sways the trees like a tornado wind; the pistol grip cradles my own.
Look up, then get up, head to the door.

The door slams behind him, he has left.
Thank God.