 Well, well, well, welcome back, good gentlemen, ladies, friends, elders, sly thee toves. This is going to be an exciting read. Really exciting. I'm sharing with you today Thomas Merton, the poet and writer of the 20th century who died relatively young in 1968 in a year where many people like him, who were public figures, who were stood made a stand against the Vietnam War, which he had recently done in a letter and over Vietnam on overwhelming atrocity. Many of these people, like Malcolm X, Thomas Merton, Martin Luther King, they were assassinated. Now you're going to say, wait a minute, Merton wasn't assassinated, he was, he died by an accident. Well, okay, that might be true, but look into it. That's not a normal kind of an accident that happens. Plus there are two versions of Merton's death. There are two different ones. Both happened in a hotel room in Bangkok and both involved a fan, but the two versions, one he was electrocuted, the other the fan hopped off of its rocker and lodged itself in his side. No one's, I haven't heard anyone try to address this discrepancy. No one in public or publishing or media or anything like that or even anybody in the Christian faith that he was a part of. So this is a great poem by Thomas Merton. I hope you've, well, you've listened to the introduction to it, a long introduction, but it's a long poem, it's about a five or 10 minute poem, and it's worth reading. It's from the collected poems of Thomas Merton right behind me there, all right, Cables to the Ace. I read you the sonnets of a blind captain. He has eyes full of brilliance. He celebrates the division of electric communions, gold and money, tinkle like chimes on the top of a building, about to terminate itself. It is the hour of melted wagons in the night of the city. In the caves, the secret voices of bulls have nightmares. The ocean climbs into the hallways of the eye until the dawn of the mornings. And they are there, both of them, the sun and the outspoken rifleman imprisoned in wholesale mud. Poseidon eats the flags on the stage of the wars. He ponders the veroons which he loves. He considers the regulations of shipwrecked outlaws. He meditates on the seaweed business. He hears the sound of pearls. The uncertain dawn catches fire from too many people breathing. The burn is terrible. The slow fire of slaying eats up conversations. The decorated escalator of futile questions leads to the judge who has a bench on the most informal layers of opinion, a message from the women. You can wait for us in the shadowy mirror. You make us adore the products of the stars, the dynamic Babylonian construction firms. The proper words come down the escalator from the floor where the angels have their sports games. Now they find themselves among the swallows. Plato is there with the girls. He listens to them. He encourages them. He travels incognito. Art becomes benevolent in the circuses of winter. In the valley of tears, the championship game of the smile. To the abyss, the eyes of fire, the lamps with bony wings. The escapes around the equator. The brown sun of the antipodes is equipped with arrows. It pursues the naive bird into a cablegram decorated with storms. It is time for the nerve, which electrocutes the mass flash of feeling. Feeling is recorded on a memorandum pad. Hell summons the neuter verb. The bird rests, finally atop a thunderbolt. The ascetic beauty of the awakened arsenal. The little bearded consul of copper chews up the silent smoke. He thinks about flying buttresses, the broken hearted bridges, the goats going crazy. These are some of the children of his age, these fickle sailors. He has seen the fire of their nostrils, the flame at the bottom of the pier, the amateur. He dreams of his coat edged with blood. He walks through the targets, stuffed full of pins. He inhales the rising salt. He enters into the traffic of weddings. He is swallowed up there, stuffed with pagan songs. The red sea of the pharaohs, where the spectacle vanishes in an unemployment of fireworks. The sudden disappearance of the wise man, hieroglyphics riot in the temples of the octopi. The masked high priest walks again to the end of the rivers to search for the lost Moses. The mothers, they live on the roofs, they mold little birds. They have understood the wisdom of the egg. They offer you patience of ecstasy. They smile at you, and intimately, at the moment of your choice, do not choose the neuter. The sold forehead cannot look at you, oh flowers. You clues of pleasure. The turtle is proud of her jewels. She stretches out her palms to show them to the rain. Fantolch is beat up in the whore frost. You have embalmed us like silkworms. Go look for your apocalypse in the unexplored subways. I sit in my green field like a quiet diamond. I engulf the blue domain of naked air, light, and all the letters add up to this. Music is a joy invented by silence. Daisy's, a geography of little unknown girls present in the grass, charm the baby monsters. I hear the great red bell of summers, the messenger of deep times, cloud and testament. I am quiet about the ghosts of tears. I complain about the useless muscle which cries, me, the frontier, a little further. It is green clear, the summit, nothing. The little silent girls enter into the shadow by the door of the chosen that was published by a New Directions paperback 1968.