PREPONDERANCE
Tisanes of my own making:
I still say coming forward for others
Is more than my own reality
The vague blur of expired lenses
Less keen than real perceptions
The radiation of my Chernobyl life
Pulsing in the machinery.
My heart decides its own measure
Diverging from the body’s hosting.
Finding that hidden doorway,
I sit shivering in shiva for myself.
Once held so closely to my chest
Now put aside in contemplation
Of The Other.
Yet this is current reality
My clickbait body
To which I return each morning
While sliding down the ropes of immortality.
I land with a jar of bones & teeth
In the town of not-enough & nevermore
The boundaries of why bother
Tightening their borderline personalities.
Will I mist to shadow
Transmogrify to barbered edges?
Shredding & shedding humanity for the Divine
The nature at central core
Patiently emergent.
Shall I pick my way through minefields
Fraught with memory, unbounded, unleashed, unremembered?
Does it matter?
As one among many
Unmanned by the sheer topography –
Of this experiential life,
Once glossed by heaven
This blank page
Forever scribbled now
Crossed out
A mess of blots & misspellings
A dictionary of what not to do.
My mind off to the side
While heart seeks another drummer.
Of all the doorways along the
Corridor of Eternity
Of all the tiger or the lady decisions
Shall I find forgiveness only in salvation’s selection?
MOVEMENT TOWARD
The channels of perception
Sharpening
Repelling static for clarity
I fight free of the physical
For the liminal of heaven
Washed by words
Scarred by sayings
I glisten at tidal edges
Will love refashion & reconstitute
Who I shall be?
Will crass materialism win over
Incandescent immortality?
I wander fields of inquiry
When answers are only found
Along the horizon.
Like babies
Cats keep their own timelines
Pulled to the watered-silk moon
An insistence upon awakening
Shedding sleep like virgin’s tears
Of awakening to a man sleeping alongside;
To single digits on the clock
From sleep to not-sleep
A bleary coming-to
I cross & recross that boundary
Between morphia & the mangle.
Her plumed tail floats last out the door
Her existential nature of query
Draws no worry in the night
She only wants to walk about in it.
I’m hardly awake & worry catches
Me up in headlong rush
Enough! These thoughts need brighter light to think
I drift upon the couch, ticking time
In decisions.
Pain is a slowed-down travel companion
A discernment rushed into decision
A refocus upon the means to journey
Through to the promise of arrivals.
Darkness to light
The words ride a tunnel into the light.
The night
Picks its way among gardens & highways
Taking cities by storm
Bringing the brace of salt & bitters
To a candy life
Too sweet to manage alone
I reach to friends who break taffy edges
I savor them as only perceptions
Of spice to be stirred into the stew.
Broken Like Mercury
The pieces of my life forever flow
In reuniting
Yet every bubble reflective of itself
Toxic
A balm to unhealed wounds.
I put my hands into the word-soup of life
Pulling out the same-same over & over
Putting them to a picture
Moving along sure edges,
Fitted to an
Other-where of perception.
Indentured abandon
Not yet an adventure
But simply a promise
That all will be new:
That all will be well.
Finished: the Night
Apace with poems
A toe-thorned cat asleep nearby
She purrs to hear me wake
Welcomed to morning
By her expectations.
The numbers on the clock-face
Are liquids soon abandoned
For the solid day
Soon abandoned by the sun’s
Hearty sibilance for the stutter of rain
My erratic heart abandons rhythm
In errata of timing: I am asymmetrical
Wondering will it also abandon me?
I have left off the lid on fear
Once contained
I pull the braided measure
To watch it unravel.
There is none but this now
I have survived to this hour
This night
Only me speaking
One hand clapping
The applause of a universe
Knowing no appendages
But only self-regard.
Will I close one eye to eternity
Or decide to have no body
But only a wing & wonder?
Unexplored, lost joy recovered
That relay of open gates
A call to angels to attend me
A sustenance of grace attendant
To continuing on
Bodiless as a naked soul.
None to greet me in dystopian Paradise
A chair in a corner
A pen & pad
To rewrite me into another life.
Death Is An Invisibility Cloak
Life recedes behind me
A memory before a dream:
A place where God looks up from His desk
Adjusting His glasses
Laying down the Book of Life He writes
To say, “Oh, there you are!
How was it?
Again, why did I create you?
When you passed, a thousand drums went dumb.
Come here, my girl, tell me all & that you wrote what you lived:
The banal & the miraculous…
Do you remember all the times you touched My face in passing?”
I will cross the room in laughter,
“Father! I made it! It was extraordinary!
However did You think of it all?”
I will be whispering for all eternity
Now penned in heaven
Awaiting Your words.
There Were No Clocks
As I drew my last breath
Released in a rattle: there
Was no time left to record,
Only words scattered on the floor
Of my mind.
It was all for You, after all
And I’m not sorry for the mistakes
Or falling from grace to land on my face
In the mangle of years.
Searching only for the
Exit, the entrance,
Knowing neither right nor wrong
Would enter anywhere beyond this realm
The physical of living too well
While overdressed & compliant with survival.
I bought life, spending all that I had
I hand You my purse, empty of only Love’s royal return.
(3/22/22)
Riding the Light 