15 Thursday Jul 2021
All the unacceptable parts of you
you catapulted into the junk drawer as a child
the moment someone you loved
clearly didn’t approve,
they don’t belong there.
Try singing them back out of the dark.
Back into you.
The best sauces dance on the tongue with
their rightful bloom of spice and vigor.
11 Sunday Jul 2021
When you think you are failed,
a shameful gash of a human,
misdirected, twenty years off course
and without a single storyline resembling your own
to take to your dreams, to warm a milk of recognition,
read a poem aloud to the trees.
They lean in, I swear it.
And when waters rise to your eyes
maybe your throat catches on memory
and disorientation fogs your vision,
pick up a stone, full with its permission,
and ask if it would like you to feed it the tears.
Springs of salty waters rainbowed with cares
are precious,
not to be wasted on regret.
There’s a much bigger world beyond the fears
binding you to confusion.
Cry a while with sweet words forming upon moving lips.
Walking a path others have not will wipe you out,
no need for surprise there.
It will also leave you, eventually,
soulfully
in the welcoming arms of Spirit.
And isn’t that always where you’ve wanted to be?
06 Sunday Jun 2021
Seems I’m becoming the neighborhood wild one,
unkempt, bedraggled, living out of pile and box,
a two-legged more attuned with the four and winged,
becoming something I can’t yet recognize,
likely to speak a language closer to the birds and loping raccoons
than the stuff that’s tangled my brain until now.
Night walks are introducing those I live with,
swooping bats among them.
There’s lots of soft chatter out there…
23 Sunday May 2021
The fourth decade
walks me between prayers,
of one blinked forth twenty years ago,
a blessed ‘Fuck it’ rising from the earth
to cup and guide and split open, and
of another gathered in the thirties–simply
‘Thank you.’
With solid scaffolding of experience under me
I can walk with the first tucked in a back pocket,
the second, on more able days, held in heart,
and the infinite wanderings between
growing a garden of ripening fruits and blooming flowers
with seeds maturing slowly toward ground
rich with Life ready to receive them.
11 Wednesday Nov 2020
What if you woke up each day pissed off.
Pissed off that you’re still here, that things are the way they are,
feeling impotent to change any of it,
that, somehow, crucial basic needs have not been accounted for
in the constellation of whoever is responsible.
What an enduring and repetitive hell.
And instead of beating yourself for–yet another–failing
you settle in
to an endless buzz of unspoken confusion
to wonder,
where could such constant pain come from?
And what, truly, is the soil to tree relationship
between rage and gratitude?
Don’t kid yourself,
those roots do tangle together
and grow in ways
so large and unarticulated you haven’t yet
begun
to trust the imagination entrusted to you
to welcome the discomfort of the discovery
Life is asking.
25 Saturday Apr 2020
A full circle closed today,
from expectation to loss,
from pedestal to the fall..
A journey made time and time
again.
Bound to a nature of its own making,
the question of when the final turn
arrives being that eerie shimmer
at the horizon.
With delusion’s slap in the face
what you do with the broken fantasy
remains the treasure
at the end.
What shall be created from the rubble
and bruises?
Can you be what fed you?
Could you embody what your heart was sure
you couldn’t live without?
15 Saturday Feb 2020
A box marked EXPLOSIVES
sits beside my front door.
Red paint on wood, hinges on lid;
a trunk for ammunitions
holds my shoes.
Today the light dawns,
it’s time I walk possessing
that kind of power,
reside within what transforms
not through simple destruction
but vast imaginative
Creation–
Stepping forward not one, but two.
04 Monday Nov 2019
She pours glitter out of the glass slipper.
Ridiculous thing, sweat filled, fragile and unyielding.
With a moment’s further pause..
She hucks it and its mate straight
into the Sea.
Maybe there, in salty, living brine
they can return silica to sand,
or, at minimum, make homes
for lonely crabs looking
to entertain the holy wisdom
within their ocean-loving neighbors.
Glass slippers be damned, She mutters,
and skips off between broken waves and flattened
wet shore
simply to find her own fleshy rhythm.
Perhaps for the first time.
16 Wednesday Oct 2019
Without a story to tell
who are we but people who have not lived.
Watching children play,
approaching hand in parent’s hand
to a park that is my front yard,
Spirit
is restored.
Sliver by sliver
and dose by dose.
While now there are trees that whisper and swish
in every kind of wind
instead of uninterrupted concrete and destructive voices,
I have the long view
knowing what it is to live between rage and despair.
And I don’t like who it made me.
Sometimes I realize,
when before I could not,
we may become who we do not want to be
simply to return, along the long road,
to who we are.
09 Thursday May 2019
Wild rose
has begun her bloom once again
held safely within bower of thorn and halo
of virile and lustrous poison oak.
She reaches toward fullness,
touched by bee and blue,
balanced in sun and flickering shadow.
We, too, grow into bloom,
toward heaviness of fruit
and bounty of seed for generations to come.
All in time,
all in good time.
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 