The Job Who Said No

The Job I had in mind
is just like the other
ragged, broken
blistered with boils, bereft of kin
herds scattered and lost, dead
aimlessly wandering without reason
or meaning or desire

But this Job who I've been pondering
did not get to yes
but found within a resounding no
who rejected the test
and the Tester and all of the
silly pointless suffering

No, no this Job is the one who
in rejecting the Demiurge
put forth a challenge
to come forth and reveal himself
from behind the veil
and explain and justify
what "He" had done

And Job listened.
At first there was a comforting voice
the voice of a Fathers soothing his Child
But as he listened he recognized
that it was his own inner voice
Job was talking to himself somehow
He was soothing himself:
speaking to himself as though he were a Child

And so this Job did not listen to that voice.
In the black cave, the wind whirred
And he listened carefully and heard nothing.
Thats what Job heard and therefore knew:
he knew nothing at all.
There was nobody there but himself.

Sheer Drop

Robert Bateman "Sheer Drop" (1980)

Its the Immigrants

We were working on a very nice estate on North Lake that had received significant storm damage. A 'microburst' they say: a ten yard wide swatch, several hundred yards long; every tree the tops snapped out. There were hickories sixty feet high, snapped in half; a norway maple, several crabapples, even an oak--all, all had lost their tops in this sudden burst of wind at the epicenter of the storm. It is not a tornado.

Well, anyway, I was working at this site and this property is right next to Sensenbrenner's--yes, you heard that right, "Sensenbrenner, i.e, Congressman Sensenbrenner's' little cottage resort by the lake. And as I was chokering off loads down in the forest that leads over to the cottage I see him, or, rather, a man who from the rear is white, somewhat tall and portly, wearing a cap and dark shades and is on the property who I know to be none other than Congressman Sensenbrenner's. So there he was, or most certainly was.

But in the air--mind you, the lakes are high around these parts because of storm flooding--there is this odor in the air of a dead body or carcass somewhere nearby, possibly on Sensenbrenner's lot. And I thinks to myself perhaps Sensenbrenner has been disposing of some of his political rivals and that the world would soon discover a mass grave in his yard. I passed this along as a hypothesis on to the caretaker of the estate I was working on.

He stopped his weed whacker and pulled off his ear muffs.

"No," he said in a hush tone, "its the immigrants."