18 Sunday Mar 2018
And what are those skills
sitting,
unkempt, ignored, without mastery,
in the ashes
much as you’d like to abandon them there?
Only your gifts, the spells and support
needed, castable with no other’s voice or hands,
the workings for which you were born to suffer
and give.
Step, rich and slow, into your place.
A gyre of vultures, forty strong,
turns ’round at the base of the mountain
pushing remembrance of how small
you’ve been playing it, and
how large you now must be.
17 Saturday Mar 2018
Grabbing at her skirts with reaching manly hands
uninvited
toward a desired body-
not hers (the particular) but any-
that flipped the switch, dramatically,
from her naive Oh I’m Wanted
to the real He Thinks He Can Take Whatever He Wants,
and she wheels around, out of his greedy, cruel grip
leaps out the window onto a roofline she knows like a cat
and stops doubting her worth, while learning
to doubt his,
and smiles with bare feet hugging the tile crest
of a building she’s perfectly willing to leave, bearing
a trail of grief so light it brings only
a rush of relief.
16 Friday Mar 2018
A princess in the tower,
at a distance looking down,
wishing
and kept.
How to get out? How to get away?
Desperate for rescue, a puddle of tears
and fury.
Why me? This terror and despair.
But, one sunrise, a light switches,
the kaleidoscope shifts,
her untapped power surges
along with the sight that she is on the inside.
An inside most would never know.
Following the sun
with fingertips searching slowly
the walls that keep her,
Somewhere, like the chink in the dragon’s scales,
a crack in stone
will bring the first ray of wisdom,
and freedom for which she was born
hungry.
02 Friday Mar 2018
Curses
Crashes, Stomps, and Sighs,
Why, and How, Blather & Spot,
Torsion, Inertia, served with all the goopy grey sides.
Grrrphufl and sniff!
Discomfort.
Course, without it
exactly what would- or could-
ever become of us.
Growth…who ordered this dish anyway?
20 Tuesday Feb 2018
A conditioning of impotence,
reaching for the salt when another swipes it first,
mounting silence in heavy boots, step upon step,
crags of volcanic history ignored by all
but you.
Buttons pop in flights of frustration,
and the weight of carrying baggage,
generations of status quo,
threatens to break your back
until
the ludicrous heart-heaviness and surge
for a real place in family becomes visible
for the impossibility it is.
Pitching the straps off your shoulders,
searing sight of that graveyard of the forgotten
rising skyward
into memory, you shake your head
at the Sisyphean absurdity,
turn around
and walk away.
26 Friday Jan 2018
To what cost,
this silence?
Protecting normal, the naked Emperor,
who rots your bones of its mineral support,
your heart of its song,
your pelvis of its dancing motion,
your mouth of its natural speech.
Stop pretending.
And, with it, generations of loss.
Open the vault.
You may find yourself alone.
But the outcome
will be possession of your own soul.
21 Sunday Jan 2018
At forty
she felt seventy.
Experience’s weight
had sunk posts deep into the landscape of her being.
Ache and limitation, an undertow of fatigue,
confusion at the seeming permanence
of the uninvited, the resisted,
lead this human to take possession, fully-
and for the first time-
of a life unwritten, free of guarantees,
and her own.
Entirely her own.
Her landscape now is a garden,
loved and wanted, with posts that may disappear.
Or not.
With their origins recognized, appreciated,
and their presence finally respected,
perhaps a hammock will be slung between them
in honor of spring’s arrival.
09 Tuesday Jan 2018
Gnarls and knots-
twistings of difficulty and experience
train the tree toward ancient mastery.
R i n g s
spread in stilled ripples-
water’s character in wood.
Toes wrap in dark, salted earth below,
fingers stretch through blue air above.
In storm, drought and calm
echo countless ancestral voices
from forests long ago gone.
06 Saturday Jan 2018
At a beginning,
with the closest solitary prayer being
“I don’t know,”
my hips work to keep the rest of me in the saddle.
Movements in the sky-
valley fog, and clouds weaving high through the hills-
live their nature in waves, currents, and vanishings,
grand teachings of the cycles of continual change.
Sometimes, I wish I knew.
But, unintentionally, artfully, that greatest illusion
has been set on the shelf-
a furry trickster friend
who flashes me a smile, and snaps his tail
at the most wicked, and absurd times.
I don’t know becomes
a delicate, gritty daily worship.
10 Sunday Dec 2017
And what if it turns out,
or turns in or turns about,
that you find yourself starting over
-o-v-e-r-
at roughly (obscurely) halfway through
-as best you can tell-
the life you’ve been given?
Did you miss something along the way?
A flowering path, a waterfall dive, a hollow
to watch stars fall?
A tricky switchback, a higher climb, a conversation
with a person you ignored
(or whose shoes you noticed but whose words you never met)?
The questions fill every available basket.
Meanwhile.
An unobscured landscape has poured itself out
before you.
Maybe there,
there is the place to begin.
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 