04 Friday Jul 2025
Wetness of the earth
after night’s sudden and generous rain
settles the sharp dust of hard happenings.
Sleep came long and heavy,
dreaming ridding a poison too old to name.
Bless the waters
and millions of emergent stars hitched
to an approaching clear darkness.
03 Monday Feb 2025
Lightest snow falling,
earthward stars drifting,
fireflies curious to kiss the ground,
and a new birdsong has joined dawn.
Migration keeps on,
my breath expands with the music
and I smile.
The art of waiting requires immense courage,
no panic at the unknown can fix it,
choices wrenched from an undeveloped state
only put off the inevitable.
Wait when the waiting asks.
You’ll see its velvety cloak swish
from the corner of an eye.
Wait.
Dissolution and decay create the fertile
in darkness.
Until a yes, an enoughness of a way, opens,
no right action.
Seeds know when,
now is for tending inner terrain
and now is for trust.
In the waiting, the fruit.
02 Thursday Jan 2025
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Withstand the Void.
Please.
Be upon your own two small feet,
at the edge,
darkness cloud-forming,
ledge a tipping perch.
Night ocean crashes on rock straight below,
the rhythmic waters moon-guided, rich and dangerous.
Call forth in echoless open and
wait,
the wind will snap and take it up.
Let the Void offer
all your fears, inadequacies, foolishness,
rage, grief, shame and sorrows.
Be with them.
Sense their intolerable
movements in your one body–
these are the monsters
you are to marry.
In union, living through and beyond
your exiled, an invitation
to what Beauty is yours deeply,
the gift to be offered back.
Leave no aspect behind–
you are here to love the denied.
Blood needs circulate.
Bones need grow. Air must enter.
Bring the outcasts and castaways under
warmth of your grand cloak.
Allow them refuge of your beating heart.
Welcome the unwanted,
a feast-filled table is set to feed everything
in dawn of this new year.
11 Tuesday Apr 2023
I live at the borderlands,
between mountain and grassland,
river and sea.
Here, vultures gyre above the hollows, high
as the peaks
in gliding circles,
where death meets light
and darkness greets the sun.
I live the in-between,
not expected, not sane, full
in constant emptying,
I rise as others fall, gather while
the confused lose.
Accompanying all, I am ever ready
to catch the tender hand
finally opened
by life.
I can not be held,
you will never be without me.
In cracks cursed for tripping you up,
that’s my nestling place.
I can not be found where money buys me, nor
in the thing anyone else swears will conjure me–
but my laughter will.
Eventually,
you will feel within
the kindness in those peals
and the years of loss, confusion, pleading
shall mulch the most fertile ground
you could set restful, strong,
willing roots into.
Welcome the borderlands,
for in them I dwell
ungraspable.
15 Saturday Jan 2022
Do you know hell?
Hell. Funny word. It is a concealed place;
Only, it isn’t a place–it has no where.
Hell is a how.
How withheld the light. How the ghosts possess.
How living has not Life within it.
Flames? There may be…but they cast dark upon
darkness, and a way beyond seems
to have no way at all…
Until, a laugh. I mean, like the kind that jiggles your belly cells.
Or whispered breeze wafts rose your way,
or homemade bread greets you as you walk in the door..
Once in a while–and a while in hell is certainly interminable–
the lid gets cracked. Gasp! The light! Air!
…holy hell, how did I come to you (or, you to me?)…
Keep following the holy, wondering,
wondering,
robe yourself in the wondering:
She’ll guide you through the non-place
back to you,
and Life,
richer for the knowing, with a precious crumb more
for the offering…
11 Wednesday Aug 2021
Day enters, the birds have yet to wake.
Outside, settling in beside stone and succulent,
greetings begin.
First, to the distant trees.
My, they have much to say
and they know what it is to hold it
in silence.
To the white faces of flowers, turned up
towards a sky leaning in,
I whisper hello.
Hummingbird swoops through the half-dark.
Surprising to see her beside me on a branch
this early.
Are you here for poetry?
It seems to be so.
Owl hasn’t stepped into dreaming,
and he calls, and calls, and calls…
25 Sunday Oct 2020
I’d like to sit in the room
there with that pajamaed boy upon his knees,
crumpled blankets and bed beneath him,
staring out windows into the dark,
to sit silently with him
wherever he may be.
Not to pluck the darkness from his sight or sorrows,
his fears or confusion,
for he needs the darknesses,
they feed him as much as light.
And Heaven knows he must gather experience
and knowing
and skill continually grappling with both.
Both, ever both.
Here, it is an All sort of existence.
May it be that he (and you, and I and they)
feels what it is like
to be he, only he, and to sense
that that being is more
than even a growing imagination
can conjure
in vast nights silently sitting, and
finally with darkness
not alone.
04 Thursday Jun 2020
A big moment arrives,
likely without your (intentional) bidding,
when no Golden Key arrives.
You swear you aren’t looking for one,
assure others you know there isn’t one,
and yet?
Yet, when you open that door
none appears.
And everything comes up short.
Where is your way through?
Surely, following such pain and strife,
with the endless effort and hope,
some
Thing
will
raise its head and wag a greeting
of arrival.
Because your faith needs food.
Instead, you are told
humanity is a shithole
with moments of beauty between.
And how that isn’t trauma added
to the heartbreak is beyond you.
Because Faith needs not only Beauty
but connection.
Not unending loss
and rage,
but nutrients for the lost souls and
the begging souls who try,
try,
try
for a beautiful life founded on self-respect
and a worth unquestionable,
unquestionable by color, origin, belief,
or day alive navigating a difficult and messy
and Beautiful world.
Finding the faith within to keep on
may be the magic
all of us seek.
04 Saturday Apr 2020
A man walks beneath black umbrella,
Calla lilies bloom in the rain;
A woman stands at the kitchen window
staring out with soapy hands and sponge,
singing,
“And you look at yourself,
pacing the cage…”
The playground is taped off in yellow tape,
A child speeds home on scooter with no cars in sight,
“All the spells I could sing, it’s as if the thing is written
in the constitution of the age…”
Grass is greening, lungs ache,
and hearts are breaking,
“Sometimes the best map will not guide you…”
Stay strong and bend, be well
We are in this together together together
We are all pacing the cage–
Not alone not alone
As we walk thin line between birth and death
Now and here
Now and here
Together
Not alone
Hold that thin line dear,
Dear,
Hold it dear.
19 Saturday May 2018
Not until the attentive itch
do they exchange glances to mean
It’s Time.
And off we pile into the car, heading deep
into night and whatever flight waiting
with breath, rolling, in the wings.
Winding round and up and up and round
through dark and sensation
into rolled down window sweetness of valley grass and oak,
Stumbling, graceful, grit of dirt road scuffing,
spinning under 2 a.m. sky and flopping across hillsides,
the stars, sharp and grabbable,
become a spiral
spiral
spiral
as alive to be tucked in a pocket,
as hover, massive and in reach, directly overhead,
as rest in mind twenty-five years on.
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 