14 Thursday Nov 2024
I see her, red hair aflame,
paint flying.
Swaths of blackest black,
gashes of scarlet–
blood, bone, ash, scorch,
ochre of marrow.
Enough words, make image.
Shock the system with truth,
Pandora’s box wide,
coffins nesting
and thrown open, skulls screaming out,
souls of generation upon generation of women:
This will not stand.
This will not stand.
No!
07 Monday Aug 2023
I gave up pretty for a greater feast,
potato chips and jellybeans turned in.
Wrinkles declare descents into primal deserts,
splotches and patches and spots imprints
of the boot crush of heartbreak,
greys the stories of the non-forgotten.
Pretty hasn’t much to offer
and with it comes trails of trouble,
trials of the kind modern fairy tales
simply can’t grok.
29 Friday Oct 2021
What’s it like to live the lives of the ghosts that inhabit you?
You know it well.
Ask the parts with poison in a syringe
ready to inject each time you step off their worn,
possessing and ever hungry killing path.
They seek–you know this, even without words–all light,
your light,
and they search with senses unimaginable,
like magnetism, or gravity, the tender flame
at the heart of you. And feed.
The very heart of you, the Spirit of you,
the stuff they, while living, could not tend in themselves;
the marrow of their being they nurtured with death ways.
When can the exorcism begin? How can you reclaim
your own Self,
that beauty and gift of which no one else is replica?
That’s in you,
still.
Reach for Her with every ribbon of strength
you thought you’d lost.
You are here, now, with feet on this sweet Earth,
not lost, no, only wrestling
with the ghosts your family left for you to battle.
Some warriors do not carry sword or shield,
yet they walk the battlefield alone, year after year,
collecting back the bones of those who were truly lost,
giving them, finally,
Burial.
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.
08 Friday Mar 2019
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.
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.
28 Thursday Jun 2018
Undefined,
perpetually assumed,
the answer to the question
of family legacy.
Is it money?
Name?
Philanthropy?
Power? Fame? Title?
Accomplishment?
Keep digging. It resides
well beyond the surface of things.
Might it be anger, abuse,
enslavement, enslaving, addiction,
a thick poison, barely visible
and acutely sensed?
Might it be secrets held, shames and generations of fear?
Likely, aspects of these remain
and are being carried-
whether chosen or not.
The question then emerges from distant,
unvisited places, whispered
as warm mother to sleeping infant,
And what would it be for you
to transform
such a legacy, slowly, steadily,
with loving devotion
so as to soften- just a little-
the burden of a misunderstood life
with a dash more kindness, and fist full
of intent.
Far from easy, and miles east of glamorous,
that work may be your simple, impossible,
and singular gift
with the breath you borrow
here,
one day at a time.
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.
23 Thursday Nov 2017
If you need more time
for the new birds to find you,
take more walks with your awkward, fledgling self.
Squawking and flight, a generous song now and again,
will always surround you.
Being the only of a kind in a place
opens more relationships than you might think, while
flavor of faith develops
with your stronger listening ears.
It is needed as you continue, seeing ahead
and noticing the talon prints you’ve left behind.
14 Tuesday Nov 2017
Being caught by gratitude
between yes and no, by was and is,
between having and not,
brings the dance.
Heart suddenly solid, present and strong
like stone, not ice, with loving-
goodbye floods body with needed nectar
for not an awayness or an isolation,
neither a grip nor a grab,
not a mine or a missing or a fright,
but a moving of grace
onward.
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 