Days long

Days long

become years

and one most loved becomes a harm,

and through protection and confusion you seek

understanding of drastic change,

and the heart must learn

Safe? Not safe?

Safe? Not safe?

While you search blindly for pillar of heaven,

with eyes playing no part in this pilgrimage,

Heaven rests closer than the newly loud beating

in your chest..

so it goes and on it goes and through you go

asking for direction to the River when it has sunk

far underground within life that continues on

always always life continues on

beyond twist, injury, death and journey toward Spirit

alone.

Generative

A box marked EXPLOSIVES

sits beside my front door.

Red paint on wood, hinges on lid;

a trunk for ammunitions

holds my shoes.

Today the light dawns,

it’s time I walk possessing

that kind of power,

reside within what transforms

not through simple destruction

but vast imaginative

Creation–

Stepping forward not one, but two.

What has sounded

What has sounded

to others

like endless gripe and grating unfinished complaint,

a chosen rageful fixation,

certain Pathology…

has been body and mind finding its way

through toxic darkness.

Nature being destroyed by humans

in blind arrogance and greed,

consumption wired into how many “likes” and “followers”–

those empty signs of worth and feedings of narcissism–

in ever-widening circles,

in rapid speed, increasing.

How.

How does a body and mind adjust to such devastation?

To home being pillaged and raped?

To the Temple filling with piles of trash,

masses of people,

noise and excrement along every path?

There is no adaptation to that.

There is constant heartache

and anger.

With home now being just another thing for sale

and silence and solitude disappeared,

what illness have we invited through our collective front door

in exchange for one more meaningless photo

gone viral?

It’s time we spend time on the virus

we have ignored

for entertainment.

Perhaps for the first time.

She pours glitter out of the glass slipper.

Ridiculous thing, sweat filled, fragile and unyielding.

With a moment’s further pause..

She hucks it and its mate straight

into the Sea.

Maybe there, in salty, living brine

they can return silica to sand,

or, at minimum, make homes

for lonely crabs looking

to entertain the holy wisdom

within their ocean-loving neighbors.

Glass slippers be damned, She mutters,

and skips off between broken waves and flattened

wet shore

simply to find her own fleshy rhythm.

Perhaps for the first time.

November 3

Is it true that time changes?

Not here, but there, not past that imaginary line

but an inch before it.

Waking today brought an altered number

on a clock

yet Sun didn’t hiccup or falter.

Who are we to roll such dice?

Upon opening my eyes today

I’m living out a past pain through new labor.

Which is true–

the old pain, the fresh effort?

November 3 offers lost agonies returned,

a dawning, growing prayer

and broadening recognition of space

expanding into the Grandmotherly arms

of a beckoning,

wrinkled

and rollicking humor.

Along the long road

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.

At the Crossroads

Tension builds

where the incomplete blow

as storm winds

toward completeness.

With worn boots and ragged clothes

after years in the woods

a brightness comes.

What had been too frozen to speak,

let alone move,

imprisoned by experiences of youth,

is warming with daily lighting of the flame.

Who had been silenced

who had been harmed

who survived by freezing in time

and not breathing to avoid giving herself away

is no more a fossil

a casualty

a repetition of a story too old to tell.

With spark, a light in thick darkness,

a new way forward.

Without knowing, or plan, or shape

to follow,

entry into another world–

full capacity–

at the Crossroads.

Bloom

Wild rose

has begun her bloom once again

held safely within bower of thorn and halo

of virile and lustrous poison oak.

She reaches toward fullness,

touched by bee and blue,

balanced in sun and flickering shadow.

We, too, grow into bloom,

toward heaviness of fruit

and bounty of seed for generations to come.

All in time,

all in good time.

Much more

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.

Tumbled like rocks

I put myself down

sitting smaller after words from my own mouth

tumbled like rocks onto my own head.

I put myself down

so you wouldn’t have to–

having learned early if the insults would come

better from myself than anyone else.

Shrinking, inflated, making a joke of myself

before you could slip in, undercut, diminish.

Having grown up to be little

must break

at some point.

That point is now,

and I take it back.

I didn’t think I was special,

I knew I was.