LBT Jackie Sandberg is a Seattle musician/writer/activist.  As an activist they fight for the rights and dignity of other homeless LGBTQI people in Seattle, and they are playing a key role in organizing around the concrete needs that came out of the March 3rd Town Hall to address a spike in hate crimes on Capitol Hill.  As an artist, they use their words and music to make sense of the worlds and times around us as well as to uplift and unify the people who make up these worlds and times.  They play keyboards in the group Sunshine Subconscious and can be seen busking with their melodica all over Capitol Hill, Downtown, and neighborhood farmer’s markets.

36The Others

What about the others?

Who used to be around these parts?

The crazy ones, who no one knows quite where from

or how

but were beheld howling drunk on insanity, screaming of stupidity and neurotics from rooftops and out of alcoves

filling the city with a bright golden

aiming their eyes at the sides of building which they painted themselves to

drinking sunlight reflecting from the skyscrapers

Did you notice when they stopped lurking in the back of your eyes?

 

You remember

The ones who used to take to every nook and cranny here but now aren’t seen as often on our ways to work, dashing magnetically mid spirit-quest, through hazy 5 AM streets into wormholes which sucked them out of existence and into oblivion for a week or two until they came back reincarnated

Who spun vortex’s of chaos about themselves which circled their lives like halos

Who lamented the tremendous weight that 7.125 billion worlds of pain have upon our world

Who made us recoil timidly as they gazed at us through eyes that glistened intently from far too much knowledge to have gained in one lifetime

 

Who, while dancing in the night to celestial rhythms, would receive divine knowledge from inter-dimensional angels who told them how to save the world, and to save the world

Who took glass shards, gravel, and booze to their faces to rub the bullshit out of their eyes only to hypersensitize themselves to bullshit once all the divine knowledge they had been kinetically compelled towards burst into the epiphany that they were angels

 

Angels flying through the night channeling an immortal cosmic pulse which they suspended themselves in via needles, impassioned love, and reading too far into the mechanics that turn the universe

Angels whose voices cracked desperately from years of warning us, night after night, of the terrible existence we endure from not living in harmony. Bloodshot and crazy eyed from us not letting them live in harmony with us

 

Who would be found to often, by blind police officers at dawn

who saw them twirling paled frays of scarves through the still cold sun’s fresh rays

who booked them for our inability to comprehend their public displays of awe about life and love

who booked them because we were all so dumbfounded when they told us that each one of us came to being out of single thought

 

A single thought that gave birth to itself and then to all of us

A single thought that is the breath of life, Love

A thought that we cannot escape because all that exists is this, breathing all and everything into life and back into the night, so beautiful that it cannot be repeated enough

A thought so beautiful, so literally encompassing, that to ignore would surely mean

Death

 

So what about them?

They seemed relentless, like they would never leave

As if despite their perpetual and furious voyaging, they were just waiting for something

Like all we had to do was to get it, to spare more than 3 minutes out of our commutes to learn about unity and love and the immortal beyond within, and they might have taken us with them

but all the times we complained about the scenes they made, all the time the cops were called

for unbridled energy running free in the streets, and freeing themselves from the streets they were run by

What about them then? What about the others? And why how come they won’t talk to us anymore?

We’ve become the others because if you haven’t noticed

Because they aren’t here anymore

They must have gotten tired of waiting for us to transcend with them because eventually they realized that we will never take our eyes far enough away from our pride or far enough out of our wallets to look them back in the eye

They must have gotten tired of hearing us take the word Love in vein

They must have gotten tired of hearing us take all other words in vein

They must have gotten tired of waiting for us to realize the world actually is ending

So I bet one morning the angels all got together and had a meeting

They probably decided that they couldn’t wait for us anymore

I imagine that with solemn looks all around they each nodded their heads

And then they were gone.

 

 

Posted: June 10th, 2015 under Uncategorized