Category Archives: home

Along the long road

16 Wednesday Oct 2019

Posted by in aging, becoming, change, community, death, home, learning, Loss, poems, poetry, release, the road, work

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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.

Woman, shave your head

08 Friday Mar 2019

Posted by in beauty, Body, break out, home, honoring, learning, Love, movement, pain, poems, poetry, prayer, strength

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Got long hair?

Got any hair?

Woman, shave your head.

And collect the assumptions hoisted upon you,

the ones you weren’t quite certain,

but now you know,

have been dragging you down.

Belly scraping the road.

Woman, got long hair?

Shave your head, and learn how confused

perceptions and expectations of you

are.

Where you may have been pretty, attractive,

desired,

suddenly the sight of that is gone

and people, most people, don’t have a clue

how to respond, how to comprehend–

But you were pretty.

You were attractive.

You were desirable.

Watch them turn their eyes away, unable

to look at you.

Hear them,

hating what they see and can’t understand,

say, “You look so…different.”

The least offensive, yet unasked for, comment

they can make.

Woman, got long hair?

Shave your head,

and discover what assumptions shove you low, in place,

a shallow ditch where you have been put.

Some react in adoration,

others with titillation, however briefly,

or with shock envy disbelief disgust.

Woman,

if ever you didn’t fully get it,

not in the tautness of your sinews,

how the appearance of a woman is believed

to belong

to the public,

that it is open invitation to

critique judgement opinion desire and rejection,

stick a personal act of transformation,

like dynamite,

within social view.

Woman,

if you want to know not

what others want you to be

but the stuff you’re made of,

Go,

Shave your head.

Light casts red

08 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by in change, community, Fire, home, learning, listen, movement, nature, poems, poetry, transition

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August,

the light casts red.

Dry season wilt and crunch, yellow

becoming brown,

and hungry fires chew acres

to miles

of hillside and range.

Fire’s satiation point moves further out

each passing year

as our own deafness to species and spaces

beyond our own grows.

Dim the constant noise of phone, computer,

bottom line, app and sale-

play a role smarter than consumer-

and how life continues from here may

be more inclusive, open, mindful

and naturally sweet.

The fires have much to say.

Through bright sky

06 Friday Jul 2018

Posted by in abundance, adventure, break out, change, Deliverance, discomfort, flight, home, learning, nature, poems, poetry, work

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The swallow dip of joy,

swift arc and cut through bright sky,

has been on lengthy migration

to lands unnamed.

Yet the time allotted here, however long,

confined in concrete, noise, requirement and excess

may finally break me of this place.

What follows out

of the daily abrasions of adjusting

while not giving everything and nothing away

may open space enough for that swallow

to return truly

home.

Come back

05 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by in abundance, beauty, Body, home, movement, nature, poems, poetry, welcoming, wonder, work

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In search of meaning

but having to pay the bills.

Needing to matter,

but busy cursing the neglected dogs keeping you awake.

Reaching, yet thick in mud,

being with a sideways mess of months of days

and snarled in the wonderment of

what, in hell, this is all about…

Coming back, returning to echoes of your own one body,

again, again, again, again,

the home your fantasy conjured

minus the straightforwardness and glitter

of safe comfortable forever there

except it is precisely that in folly

and learning and diligent removal of concept

and heavy cultural residue.

This is home, your body, waiting,

waiting

for you to come back

to what is real, always with you, and still

strangely

not known.

A fire, a wave, a mountain

23 Wednesday May 2018

Posted by in becoming, break out, change, courage, discomfort, dread, fear, Fire, home, learning, movement, poems, poetry, work

≈ Comments Off on A fire, a wave, a mountain

The basements, bathrooms, shrouded corners,

narrow, black to seem endless, alleys,

the Do-Not-Enters,

these are the intended places.

Go to them.

What courage lies docile and low

will rise up, a fire, a wave, a mountain

to have your back even as growing fear

dissolves

what you think holds you together.

Clearing the pasture

17 Tuesday Apr 2018

Posted by in aging, change, community, home, movement, poems, poetry, the road

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I’m surrounded by endings here.

And I came back,

came back

to where what can grow

I don’t know.

The ties, bindings, wrappings and scenarios

they’re old,

done, hardened and strange.

Perhaps the ghosts need herding,

finally clearing the pasture for

what belongs beneath this patch of sky

of salt, and pine, cypress and stone.

Too much concrete dulls the senses-

Sun aches to touch earth,

it may be my time to help her do so.

Displaced, longing, spent

04 Sunday Mar 2018

Posted by in adventure, change, discomfort, home, poems, poetry, transition

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If displaced, longing, or spent

a gnawing twistiness of home

erupts

with an ugh, tug, a grrrrmph

and out tumbles a wish-

well, a need-

for a spot, covered nook, a nest or wee corner

stocked full of warmth, quiet, books

and visiting songbirds to the window ledge

but

an illusion of safety, the net many speak of

(what, again, is the fabric of that?),

mocks such steady states in a mind

abuzz with too much time

and hunting

for the next place to call one’s own.