three green beans

Picture one green bean.  It's about six inches long.  Follow the slender point on one end, up the length of the bean.  Follow the dark seam to the opposite end, where two sepals collar a short stem.  The slender bean pod is the distended ovary, one of the plant's many ovaries, and the beans inside the pod are immature seeds.  When we eat them green, we call them green beans.  When human beings are immature, we call them green, we call them wet behind the ears.  I cannot remember the last time I got wet behind the ears.  Imagine a shower head, but issuing from each hole instead of a stream of water a green bean more slender than thread.  Imagine how different the world could be.  

I am a lapsed saint, a lapsed god, a lapsed perfect human being, and there are crickets in my garden.  I walk around in the stone wildernesses, and rattlesnakes sing their mute lullabies.  I walk around in the Stop n Shop.  When my love wants only to be heard, when she wants only that I listen and understand, my blood sometimes presses through all of my veins and what comes from my mouth is exactly what I am not supposed to say.  Have you ever done this?  Bean with two sepals and a tail that ends in tip, where do you fall when no one is watching you?  Stop n Shop becomes a premise for barbarism.  I am loose and my thoughts are decaying.  Have you ever been loose?  

It is amazing how much we overlook food, even those of us who pay it so much mind.  If we don't eat, how well do we do?  Food is more primary than sex.  You cannot have sex if you do not eat.  Maybe you can have a few quick goes, hamburgers or nachos swirling around you uneaten, but tell me if you have ever sustained anything without stopping to eat here and there.  Have you?  When?  How well did it go?  I am actually thinking about grumpiness.  When I go too long without food, my mood crashes.  I'm a happy dope who loves the world, and then I'm a dumb asshole.  Show me the man or woman who doesn't think the world is at least an okay place when he or she has been satiated.  Even the plants follow this rule: they eat from the earth long before they seed.  Fruit comes second.  This is why it's always best to eat and then make love.  And then nap.

Our world, of course, doesn't revolve around love making and eating.  There is work to be done, and this is probably the way it needs to be.  There was a time when I hated all wise men and all wise women, of whom we hear so much less about, and I wanted nothing more but to dream of a world where that which harms us heals us, or even better where nothing harms us at all.  Why should anything harm us?  Who would design a world with harm?  Shouldn't there only be peace and ecstasy?  How come there is balance?  How come gravity?  The sloppy and dangerous are only sloppy and dangerous when we call them sloppy and dangerous.  The world is what we think it is, and it's so hard to imagine another, our ideas so old and firmly rooted in bull.  Where is the free movement among nothingness?  Where is the alligator with one ecstatic apple drilled onto his tooth?  I must go away soon.  When I find the dentures of greasy fire and flowers, I will write you and send you the address where they are.