26 Sunday Aug 2018
If a push,
somewhere a pull.
Where taken,
pray it has been given.
The Western sense of community..
in itself a paradox?
We’re part–everyone–of centuries of history
cycling, tumbling, molasses-thick onward
with nanosecond “advances.”
No mystery that you, and you, and I
can not seem to catch our breath.
Faster is not forward,
as bigger not better, nor more money success.
Where lies the soul stuff making life
Life?
08 Wednesday Aug 2018
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.
01 Wednesday Aug 2018
He slams the door behind him.
You think, Good riddance!
When next your heart stops and breath catches,
out comes a gasp, What have I done?
Melting down, falling to bits, the world goes
from complete sense to non-sense,
and it is on that iceberg of moment
(and each drifting ice island following)
when wondering, Is this true?
might most gather you back together in a form
strong enough,
wise enough
to hold all the sensations and feelings
threatening to tear you to pieces
to be with Now,
an actual fullness of Life
for which you have the grandest capacity.
31 Tuesday Jul 2018
This day he walks slowly,
approaching in nearly a shuffle.
Handing me a candy- the kind once known as penny-
saying, this aging stuff, not so easy.
I used to think, he shares with a soft shake of his head,
I could stay a perpetual teenager. But not so.
His health, not good,
the poetry, music and culture
having always fed him
no longer enough.
Or so it seems to him, on this day.
Clutching a small handled paper bag, one somehow
always carried,
he steps away, looking emptily into distance
not physically there,
leaving me with a golden,
foil covered chocolate coin never to be eaten
and an appreciation for his difficult facing
of what he long imagined
could be outrun.
06 Friday Jul 2018
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.
05 Thursday Jul 2018
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.
26 Tuesday Jun 2018
While sitting in a slurry of nettles and skunk,
a confused mess of fury and grief,
I had to remember,
remember those I know well who will do anything not
to change.
Clenching to what doesn’t grow,
but metastasizes, brings more comfort
than trying it all, somehow, differently.
Yet the questions have yet to be born in them,
and time, with practice, has taught them not to find any stirring
since the familiar is the balm that keeps the abyss
from glistening up and pulling them under and out,
as it is for me now from the slick, hard cornered rock
I seem desperate to hold.
Time and body say, release this faithless fight and self-loathing,
those committed shackles of the past,
and give in, set adrift and enter
what is unimaginably larger than the Seen.
27 Sunday May 2018
The transformed steals the love-light,
not for greed
but for our preference.
What’s left behind in grit and dust,
even discarded in rank alleyways,
is the work of the chrysalis.
The
cramped
confused
identity-erasing
dark
of wrestling for the next life form,
of flight,
of nectar,
of tumbling in gravity’s wave
among flowers, bees and blue.
Remember what beauty lies in ugliness
before walking away from the misunderstood.
22 Tuesday May 2018
It’s the twist of a good story
to say it begins where it begins.
Because who is to say what happened first?
The lines we lead, roads we walk, families we form,
always
always something came before..
and during.
Land of birth, food of soil, light of sun,
books read, laughter lived, sex, music,
slumber.
Infinite details of the turning of the world,
and equally many perspectives,
makes knowing
a sweet impossibility.
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 