14 Monday Jul 2025
Dreaming of ghosts
those around me sought to manipulate
and control, power being their drive,
I wanted only to know where the unsettled were,
their movements, their inner state.
Less concerned with ghosts than the living
and that sickness acting from within,
I walked outside in darkness,
exiting half broken buildings, for clearing,
for simply to see.
Night brought vision.
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.
30 Saturday Dec 2023
The limitations of our fathers,
they are not ours to live by. See
and be done.
Do
and live beyond.
The next generations are here to end
that which came before.
17 Friday Mar 2023
The horrible truth, felt,
finally spoken,
worse than death. Many times worse.
Sky fills with vultures, high,
dozens spiraling dozens, circles and circling.
Perhaps nothing so beautiful,
nothing before.
Large, black, some golden with angling sun,
every one of them alive with death,
their carrion feast,
every one of them, all, in flight,
wings extended and eyes bright, alive
in partnership
with Death.
Alive and flying, together, loosely
through sky,
floating and effortless,
in partnership
with Death and Wind.
Effortless.
Flying, floating, free.
And effortless.
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.
03 Wednesday Apr 2019
Women, warm, round and expecting,
wandered my dream, greeting me,
and I wondered how
how;
Three before me, at three drugstore registers,
buying sodas, and sodas and alcohol,
at 8 a.m.
and I wondered how
how;
Baristas, happy, welcoming, enjoying
each other, customers, both and
still… how
how.
Knowing fullness, itch for escape, joy,
and my own irritation with life that,
conveniently, hasn’t been included in the list,
leaves confusion with a half-smile at how
all this exists now
along with much, much…
much more.
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.
08 Wednesday Mar 2017
I always entered and
exited
through side doors.
quietly.
..slipping in or out with as few eyes following
or ears noticing
or minds rippling
as possible.
Now,
however,
that I’ve bought my freedom
I will be using the front door
as often
as loudly
as visibly
as this once-silent spirit
needs be.
And some houses will never
be catching sight of me
again.
21 Saturday Jan 2017
The women speak
and dogs lay down side by side,
cats walking railings sit in spots full of sun,
the cursed dust no longer cursed
becomes, finally, nutrient moving
from here to there.
(Trees nod slowly in recognition.)
The women speak
and silence begins again to be known-
an expansion from where
the most needed, sassy ideas rise.
The women speak,
and our planet shakes off a yoke
we think we’ve set around Her neck.
The women speak,
hummm, yes, listen.
16 Monday Jan 2017
Shy at the gate,
toss your head, flip your tail,
switch ears, twitch nostrils-
a fine tension builds,
keep with it.
Shimmy your skin and whinny, yes,
a whoa-what’s-happening kind of alarm.
Stay with it.
That gate’s got words for you,
and not of a sort your brain’s going to comprehend.
They have teeth, and dirt, and a strange wind to them,
which may be the reason for the fleeting,
repeating
blood chills, maybe.
Rushing to run misses the opportunity.
Kick the temple bell with an eager hoof if you have to
but know
this place between,
at the gate before god knows what and you,
holds the field of promise.
Hang in, possibility calls you far,
far from the familiar.
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 