18 Wednesday Nov 2020
Ever
read a book
and find yourself
stroking the page while tears drop,
uttering, “God, I love you,”
and wanting to wrap that author up in your arms
to say,
Thanks?
Today is like that.
Not sure how it is to relate with actual humans
but books,
books do walk along beside
between the breathing, the hefting, the washing
and all
the
rest.
17 Tuesday Nov 2020
Such kindness lives in “I don’t know how.”
Past a freedom of “I don’t know”
little HOW asks in the mystery tender
after years of silently absorbing assumptions,
a force feeding of belief that you are supposed to have
already
walked the path no one had shown you and
you hadn’t yet found.
How, on this fault line shaking, cracked
and dappled light lit earth
are we to know before we know
and who–back to who before who before who–
syringed that toxin into our bloodstreams
fueling generations of debilitating pain and shame
saying we are broken
and must fight a way through
simply
to
endure?
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.
09 Monday Nov 2020
This is not stick feathers in your hair and prance round
the earth as if you are one. You
couldn’t not be if you tried. You
can, however, think it, feel it, behave it as if
it were so. You aren’t here
to earn it. To remember it, Yes,
and to work it through.
Mass microbes work upon you–feathers
are the cartoon version (blessed though they be).
If no brook bubbles beside you, neighbors’
televisions blare craftless tales, and your mother
is dead, Remembrance,
work though it must and will take,
is what these days reaching toward your own death
are for..
Slow into morrow, into marrow..
not only could you lose everything–
you will.
With that might your cellular awakening bring glimpse
before the end
Gold of what you are made.
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.
03 Saturday Oct 2020
Orange light shines
through half covered window.
Not sure any of us have footing now.
Collective free fall may be exactly
what’s needed.
Don’t hang on,
time’s come to rearrange all the pieces
on the board.
27 Sunday Sep 2020
Posted in poetry
≈ Comments Off on Words now
Words now
come a half-step short of the stair,
one breeze shy of the butterfly,
for a blink of my eye carries too many stories,
too little sense heavy
inside bones that make me
and keep me
here,
now.
Words might dribble out. . .
missing the earthen nobility of their rise;
Instead, quiet
sensing
initiates movement forward,
outward
into something that has never yet been.
Following body first,
leagues of time,
thirsty and bent grasslands stretching
horizon to horizon,
pass,
pinning me to learning that
Life
depends upon.
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.
25 Saturday Apr 2020
A full circle closed today,
from expectation to loss,
from pedestal to the fall..
A journey made time and time
again.
Bound to a nature of its own making,
the question of when the final turn
arrives being that eerie shimmer
at the horizon.
With delusion’s slap in the face
what you do with the broken fantasy
remains the treasure
at the end.
What shall be created from the rubble
and bruises?
Can you be what fed you?
Could you embody what your heart was sure
you couldn’t live without?
24 Friday Apr 2020
When the worst in you climbs out
pale and slick from a basement of your own making
do you cower and freeze?
Do you move fast as distraction will whip you
toward anything,
anything at all but that?
Do you block the acquaintance with projects-type
fast, cheap, ugly construction,
forcing it into another, though now above ground,
prison?
Who are you in your fullness?
What do you do with the wretched creature who is, also,
you?
What if you stop your steps away from the intolerable,
turn in your terror,
and place a crown on that wretched head?
Even if, at first, it is made of paper
and sags a little.
Because one of gold has yet to be forged.
What would the welcoming of one forced down,
forced out and away,
move like?
At the start,
even a whispered hello
will do.
Until you can both bow
to the darkness in light and soften
toward light
in the dark.
Free.
Salt, Smoke, Water and Stone 