Bookville, USA

I envision a town where all the streets are named for book topics – Mystery Ave or SciFi Way.

All the stores are bookstores & you can live atop a spiritual bookstore in bliss, soaking in the emanations rising from below, setting your mat atop the Yoga Section for best results, or settling your jack chair over the Meditation Collection with its quiet hum of “Om” rising up.

You can walk along Cookbook Alley for dinner ideas, or Home Improvement Row to learn how to build – what else? – a bookcase.

All the books loitering in basements of libraries, in attics of septuagenarians, in back rooms of houses all over America can be sent here – any book in any condition is free to mail in for repair & residence.

Tiny glass carrels line up like lampposts, an ergonimic desk & supportive chair in each, while wallpapered cells with one comfy recliner and a perfect reading light are availble for rent in Parkbutt Place.

You’ll find skin care on Beautiful Street or banking hints on Money Road.

Are you with me yet?

Heading into town will be strip malls of opthalmologists, opticians & optometrists along Tosee Highway. Restaurants serving only symmetrically arranged food for color & texture branch off on Foodies Lane. Stationery stores will line Papers Boulevard along which reside cul de sacs of Penn’s Way.

Just imagine being able to dispose of old books which is a haunting connundrum for many, by bringing it to a box in the library or post office which can be sent off at no charge, sorted, spruced up, set lovingly into place for display. Every year there will be a Penny Plus Sale to keep things in circulation & set the flow for the following year. Libraries will finally have a resting place for all the donations of outdated novels. Any topic ever written about will be found in its own setting, like jewels.

All roads will have a turnoff for Bookville. Tour buses will be lined up outside town limits & free jitneys available for tours, or to visit the restaurants or stores.

I could spend a day or a season, or a lifetime there. I would live above the Self-Improvement Stair in constant hope of betterment, jog in Grammar Park, cycle around Tours Trail.

[Sigh] Okay. I’m home now.

2

Evil Is Obsolete

Let’s get with the Program, boys n’ girls,

let’s move this show along the road

shovel up the shit we left behind,

pretty it for the next ones a-coming,

let’s re-mind ourselves of how we were sold it would be

bring forth the betterment of mankind

reach into the back of the pantry, moving all the unused illusions

to the heap in the dumpster.

Life is so much more than what we make it

miracles are always the most ordinary of all that is

regardless of the fuss we like to make ’em…

It’s really hard not to smack back

but if you know who you are & what,

the need to do so dissapates a lot

Just get up, shake it off, brush off your lapels

pick up the flag

signal the start-up music

listen for your cue

march forward

don’t look back – history ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

2

The Midnight Papers

SPIRITUAL CREATIVITY: PLUG IN!

We practice life mostly along its edges. Who among us emerges stage-ready, the award waiting only our perspired (inspired) clutch & craving?

I walk the riverbank, longing to be in the Flow. I seek the source outside of my own Being – an ultimate & ulterior stupidity (cupidity)?

Yet this is fine.

One becomes wise in discovery, that wisdom is a, if not the, goal. Putting on music for creativity, then settling an activity atop it muffles an intricate rhythm already in expression. I apply the brakes to examine the flow. How many do this? What matters the number, as I’ve noticed I’m only concerned with myself right now. In (at)tending to myself, I tender to all.

The great God of creative force has only to reach to tap me. I don’t need that cattle prod anymore!

If I search for the god of my being, how may I do so other than becoming a prayer?

I am at the stage in my life where returning to Source is a real goal. Returning to the boundary I crossed over into birth, I  burst out from life influenced by this truth. Back & forth have I gone into the arms of & out again – a reflection of Spirit as powerful as the reality. It all is Spirit! Crash! Boom! Bang! Then resettling with a sigh.

The breath coming from deeper inside releases more of my inner  being out to share. One writes to become real & writing at a time when the blind are in power makes for the impulse to become compulsive.

I cannot say Amen to this life while the prayer is in progress!

Sometimes I’d like that: just once to arrive at a goal that does not springboard me, catapult me, back into living more life. This is nonesuch – nonsense.

My life won’t end when I write my epitaph. An ending is a revolving door, after all. I go round & right back into it, whatever that proves to be.

I admit it is nice to take a breath & think it a compilation or summary. Yet each one is a summons for the next. That next one may bring my keenest & best future to me & why not?

BUSHWHACK LIFE!

Capture it, lasso it, for it’s long past midnight; all conclusions foregone. A period becomes instead an ellipsis, the next thought pulling into a station I thought a destination, As Bilbo said, “The road goes on forever.”

As a Journeywoman of life, I have sought & provided comfort, meals, ideas, feelings, responses & so much more. The continuum of flow belies dead ends. There is no respite from or for life.

Like the old couple leaving the theatre, I turn to myself & say, “Always is coming next week, a good show!”

LOVING VS. FORCING

Love is not necessarily the savior it’s touted to be. Oh yes, love can be so much. But love is also the opportunity to be better, gain more, progress faster. Love & its admission (a hairline admission there) still implies forward movement. It’s slowing down to smell the roses, noticing a flower blooming on the stalk while below is its upside-down mirror on the sidewalk. Instead, we acclimate to speed, to diagnosis & concurrence.

It’s the rarest who respond to disparagement & pain with creative sparkle. Pain is a self-absorption of its own, the body becoming experience. Pain can be the truest digression from living in Spirit unless it is found to be a gateway.

What do I live for? Why do I count forward from my half-birthday to the full? Is this for the very young & the somewhat old? Why am I compelled to tell my age to strangers – a kind of egoic brag – I made it this far! – doing it my own way, with my own vocabulary & dodging the blocking of circumstance. I found the workaround to life & stuck to it!

I am lifelong a morning person. A day begun at 8 is already half-done. I was once annoyed with awakening at 4 a.m. but I have found this a gift: silence, potential, an intake of innocent breath. Pre-daylight is pure. Animals pad ancestral paths to water. The moon hangs separate from earth, earnest now upon its own journey, inviting the sun to follow. This time is the shifting of the energetic Tide, in to out. The breeze freshens to fill limpid sails limpid in dreaming.

My Spirit & my body are less entwined, one seeming remote to the other. I push back the covers & reopen the conversation. The invisible dances back lightly, wrapped in shadow. The divine brings itself to awakening organically. There are no responsibilities at this time of day, no drives to take, no clothes to don. Naked is okay at 4 a.m., sealed in my room, wrapped in my thoughts, standing at the foot of the bridge, about to cross over water. The invisible Divine waits, holding out a hand with its invitation to Light.

Flutters in the interior breeze bring tiny eye movements – I think I see bits of light at edges of dark, I swim from dream into carbon-based life, replacing dreams with solid tangibles.

Life is never ordinary. I won’t believe that in a million years.

0

No Matter the Dream

Did I really mean this life?

broken … but they all say that’s how the light gets in

so I don’t really mind at this age, this stage.

I wandered as if in God’s Maze

my life unfolded like a treasure map

one state after another

of mind, of heart, of locale.

Each a singularity of itself.

I had a purpose once,

I think.

It decentralized as I began finding meaning all over

in the darndest places.

Could I combine the moments,

like some hybridized montage where I’m a central character

I would take the love of the men I shared mine with,

the jobs where I shone, accomplished,

the mornings mirrors were kind, jeans fit, my cheeks had color

I would take the triumphs & tuck them into my bag,

slinging them over my shoulder to ponder later.

I know I’d be kinder, sing more, take less umbrage

but these go without saying. Wouldn’t we all rewrite a life

leaving out anger & sorrow? Just for the hell of it?

I learned from it all but these moments now,

ah! this now is like no other

this walk finds me resting more in the scenery

observing with old eyes all that I see around me new.

There seem no shiny destinations

when each day has a fold of glitter to shower over me.

I never got the pony, or the little red wagon

Or the kind of love I could understand before I

declared it over & done & begone.

I fled so many lives – relationships as well as timelines.

I skittered across the universe, a pinball played by the hand of God

Pinging each bumper, racking up points like a pro

Winning Him prizes, the kinds found in CrackerJack boxes…

Now I feel around in the drawers, pawing old glories, faded triumphs

Brought into the folds I peeled off to get to the meat of the matter.

Now I get to the place where everyday is so routine I must love it so much

that I know it by heart.

No matter where I journey in dreams, I wake in the same body

the same bed, readily living

the same day

Ready to bring it to life once again, to make it a li’l bit different.

There will be one so perfect it will signal an ending

A rightness to wander off from all I know

Into the palace of wherever it is Next to Be.

For me.

2

Watering Flowers in the Desert

I have times of crushing exhaustion. Too tired to even swipe my face free of makeup, I head to bed, catching myself at the last minute to head right instead of left, to enter the bath instead of the bed & clean my face. I sometimes am not as thorough as I want to be, but I do what I can so as not to wake with bits of mascara or smears of eye pencil which I so love to wear.

These times occur mostly after meals, healthy or not. The food, which should energize activity & move me to take on more – or at least finish what I’ve started – knock me out instead. My eyes close over the book & sleep wells up so I nod over the pages. I “lose time,” returning to activity depleted more – the nod-out not even restorative. I nap at 6, wake at 8, returning to the bed at 10. The good news is by 4 I’m back & setting up coffee, brushing Hanna Bell, writing notes to friends… By 5:55, I’m gathering purse & water bottle, heading to they gym to push & pull, to walk & lift, to swing & balance. I come home to fruit & flax cereal, setting out once again for work by 8.

I’ve been blaming age, the heat, my use of a lifelong right eye dominance. It’s difficult, channelling an entire universe through one orb. Tiring (that word again!), enervating. And it’s a lifelong pattern, this losing speed & spunk with darkness. Perhaps it is simply the light inspires me to activity while darkness sets upon me like a succubus. I don’t hear the stopper pop, but the well of energy drains away.

Lately I feel the years settling upon me like a colorful cape fading somewhat. I am exalted by the number I’ve achieved & fearful of losing to them as well. Where this me will go is unimportant. I’m happy with the progress I’ve made, the influence I’ve held. I haven’t built cathedrals, but there are many tiny shelters for hiding away in, there is much nourishment stored in the words I’ve put together, the paragraphs planed from formlessness.

Once a seer asked me if I’d like to know who I’d been in the past, assuring me I was world-famous. Once another assured me I’d have that fame once more but “posthumously.” I live by the sea now; I know tracklessness. I’ve lived in the desert, too, where a footprint can last a thousand earth-years.

That I wink in & out of time & timelessness is appropos to my years. That I may spend more time on one side of the veil than the other is a balance more delicate to navigate when I hold the edge of the bureau to pull on my pants. I once heard a fellow say, “The older I get, the farther away the floor seems to be.” This is a truism as well as a grin.

If the only one I’ve made happy is a random reader, it is enough. If my life satisfied one whim, one promise, one wish, it is enough. If I cannot measure in full any longer, oh well. I’ve built none but stone cairns & buried much beneath them. I’ve made myself happy & had others laugh with me. I’ve taught the light a few things & carried darkness to the outer edges of my life, far from direct experience, leaving it there for the kind of jackals that gnaw this fare to feast well. I am amazed constantly in my ability to move forward when all I want is to turn back, make a pillow of my past to rest upon.

I have no symphonies gathered in a trunk for some child-genius to happen upon, no recipes to feed the masses, no prayers to bring on salvation, except in the personal. My life is an excerpt, a condensing, a draft & a draught of what a life should be, can be, & in my case, is.

That will have to serve.

It is past 10:00. I close my eyes again & pull up the covers. If my life is only a dream: it is Enough.

0

Elemental

ELEMENTAL

I asked the wind where it would go

Receiving no answer, I asked again

When with a sigh, she replied “where I will!

I see no end to all this earth & must explore,

Must texture sand & tousle hair & so much more!”

I asked the rain the same, tho it seemed obvious

Its direction was always down

Except for when it was not

The rain eyed me drolly, with no response

Except to settle overhead more comfortably

I didn’t even ask fire, could not get close enough to

Hear anything anyway.

And earth just sat below, tho if it had moved

I doubt I’d have had chance to enquire.

Yet I do not find the situation at all stable

I find all elements in play, at play

Zeroed in on some mission not my privy.

I am elemental: not sure of where I go,

Except I stir things up,

I drip always downward unless I spin about

Fiery, to consume & not obey

Buried in my own name & dreams to once again arise.

I thought of heading to the pool this morning

Before the sun roared up over the horizon

The second-string sun, the faker put up overhead

When our own ascended in 2006.

This one made of white madness

Mixing all my plants outside,

The ivy grown into the wandering jew,

Who arrays her tendrils like a bride

Her wedding gown,

A bit psycho,

The orchid carefully courting the pencil cactus

With an errant root on overtime teasing outward,

The kroton spilling out urgently, of a sudden

After years of quiet thinking small thoughts;

The spider babies thickly rooting themselves in air

The jade dropping branches into its own soil…

Like people, everyone shoving into others’ spaces

Without so much as an “excuse me” or a “hello!”

I too am overgrown – a target of the powers that cannot be        

My thoughts recorded for some crazy product process

I say new & my phone trembles with selections

Beginning to awaken & shake myself from this

Long Sleep,

Finding clarity

After years living in the Great Cloud of Unknowing.

It’s the Fourth of July

The blood speaks again in fireworks of its own

The great release at hand

Even as the world spins its wobble toward

Separation

The second earth near, gravity doubled for some

Another atmosphere beckoning others,

A place where clouds remain fertile while  being unseeded

Where rain falls in place & not randomly on the patio

Alone, putting out the cookfire…

A world where nothing is controlled, but knowing place,

The one I’m headed to, as soon as I organize everything

I’ve got, will have, ever had.

I am constantly putting old information into new covers,

Relabeling myself, folding one more into what is

Already crowding space.

I expand with information, bettering how I feel

About myself

With forgiveness wrought by joy.

Everyone else has made mistakes –

Why not me?

Everyone else has spots from growing, not rot;

How can I not?

I’ve been waiting for that perfect me to arrive,

The one without that extra flesh hiding that bisecting scar,

The one where they stole my womb away, my fertile womb,

My desiring womb, my id devoured for a kid surgeon

To practice his ineptitude, nicking a ureter,

Using the cash sale – cha ching! – to join the country club

To advance his arts with brotherly second opinions.

What would I say to him now? He is at least as old as me

And not nearly so perfect, with a long history of rendering

While I’ve practiced surrendering…

I would have to turn away & find somewhere else to focus

For if I opened my mouth to sear him, like some rogue dragon

Forming fire in my larynx,

Even then would I know we were both falsely accused

Both right to be wrong

Both fallible & culpable

Both warned & prescient.

My life is what it was from my choices & other’s pronouncements.

All chained together proclaiming FREEDOM!

I pipe up for myself: FORGIVENESS!

1

Dawn Fingers the Sky

I arrive before the light – just sayin’

the air so fresh it has no scent at all

the gulls still on the water

which is pale green with a ruffle of bubbling white wave

under indefinable sky.

I commandeer the lifeguard station steps

Stiffly sitting, fumbling for the camera option…

It’s early March & a chill 68

Yet a young thing in an orange sundress

Poses for her senior pictures, in just-visible light

Her friend in a heavy jacket, boots up to there

While Barefoot girl smiles & combs back her hair.

The world between us – me in wrinkles, she in burgeoning sun.

1

The Broken Chair (Ten Months Old)

Awake at 3 A.M. (Again)

Asking impossible questions

My book too complicated to read:

Future-less, no whereupons, no whereins

My mind sandpapered

My eyes too tired:

May I return to sleep?

No mother to answer nor answer to

The question hangs like

My pendulum:

Dead in midair, awaiting…

_________________________________________________________________________________

A broken chair on the grassy verge

Awaiting a Jesus Carpenter

Past support: its primal mandate

A sullen castoff,

Discarded after a lifetime of service.

Lost to fire, to water, to abandonment

Outside the window it smugly overlooked.

________________________________________________________________________

Existential poems in a pit of metaphor & sigh

A breath breathed only out

Rife with cancellation

I never said that! I am not responsible!

A clear slash slicing memory & reality

Wording & warding

I am in some disappointment

To ever be agreed with again.

That I stood next you in that moment

My witness found wanting: Brushed off like brain lint

By your need to be the rightest in the room.

The real question hangs: am I making this up?

Your disturbing cancellation leaves no room for me at all.

Silence becomes the better part of valor & intent

I surrender & surround myself within it.

Tomorrow you will say: “You never talk to me anymore.”

_____________________________________________________________________

Truth or memory?

I stand erased, zeroed out, discarded

Watching as you lose your phone, your mind, your life, your money.

Our friendship with this line now drawn through. Who bleeds more?

I stomp through poems

With a giggle of splash

Water overtops the wellies

My feet are cold

My socks all wet

A poet dwells in a make-believe world

A made-up turn of phrase

Spun from air & words

As empty or as potent as can be.

A poet has no answers to life’s questions

No affirmations to any but a craft

Somewhat forgot in the everyday of flat fact.

But my feet will dry one day

An echo of joy in their smell.

_________________________________________________________________________

There should be certainty in a church, of all places,

A firm knowledge that God Is

But god seems less to be found where the bills unmet

Sit on the desk of a vacationing accountant.

The vendors stewing outside

Steaming up the windows with hot breath

At their completed work.

As down the line it flows

Their God reduced to a curse against our holy doors:

Their chorus raised to pre-billing or no work at all

In return to our intransigence.

A recipe for failure no God can endure.

He leaves by the back door

Tired & empty, unsure.

_____________________________________________________________________________

You don’t share my divinity – your psychodrama has no place

In my black & white world

You don’t walk your talk, you dance with it in the moment

Not realizing the music stopped altogether

As of the First Excuse

There is no rescue here for Lord nor Love

But only a pile-on become an avalanche.

“As ye sow, so shall ye reap”

Replacing “Be thou blessed all who enter here.”

__________________________________________________________________________

There’s A Lesson Here, Damnit!

The mirror I’ve polished down to thinned-out silver

Over brass, no fault to find fault lines

Where I thought I stood on holy ground

I find my shoes & walk on.

Church bells in the distance

Become warning, not welcome.

Neither sad nor anxious nor beloved.

I empty my canteen of your brackish sentiment

To find Living Water

I fish my soul still kneeling at the altar rail

“Come on,” I say, “We’re leaving.”

I turn my back on your God

To find my own.

The only quest worth pursuit

The only life left to live…

I know my truth of imperfection & freely admit to God

Which is everywhere but not here anymore.

I follow a light still shining, simply swallowing your dark.

1

If the Buck Stops Here: Make Change

Having a mixed-up, shook-up day. Feeling stupid & poor & jealous & all the emotions I dislike the most in myself. I’m doing a cleanse & I thought it was physical or would be so, but it seems to be emotional & spiritual instead.

The good thing is some new thoughts are coming in. One that I had in church today listening to all the platitudes about Father’s Day was that I could simply let go of all the really old, grotty resentment of my dad about his fencing me so fully from his life – so wide I can’t get around it, so tall I can’t get over it – you know the song.

This is quite disturbing & I’m sure it will be liberating when it roots around & finds its soil to grow. It is, after all, a New Thought & you know by now how much I look forward to these.

My dad. Got to see him once a year & sometimes twice in the same year. Once he bought me boat shoes, stylish little slip-ons which, with a Buster Brown Enforcer of a Mom, was just the bee’s knees for my cross-eyed, pickety self. And actually, that’s my only memory of him. Nothing else is in the vault.

I know he was a Libra like me. I know he liked his beer with the guys after work (he painted the huge fuel storage tanks for Sun Oil before it became Sunoco.) It’s purported he had an affair with the town bad girl which forced Mom to divorce him & move as far as the taxi would take her & the kids. Since that was to the beaches of New Jersey, it made for an enviable childhood which did not seem that way while I lived it.

Oh yes, he bought me my Bike. I called it Blue Boy & it was a 36″ high bike while I was a 30″ high kid so that made for some interesting perspectives & a lot of time sailing up & down the boardwalk. My lonesome habits continue to this day, tho not the biking part.

I’m not even sure why I’m writing this. Just been a emotional coaster of a day for me & I’m where I am, digging out but the walls keep caving back in.

Ok. Later on it’ll be tomorrow & everything will change.

1

Reminder: Storm Heaven

So, this morning driving to work, the thought floated from the 8-Ball that is my mind: “You can’t storm Heaven & then complain about the rain!” I pondered this the eight miles to work. Along the way I noticed my car screen had – for the first time – mimicked my phone screen. Except there was a button with an icon of two fingers crossed, labeled “Reminders.”

Thinking to remember this thought, I hit the button. Google roused herself enough to blurt (in a kind of, ‘you wake me for this’? tone – “What do you want me to remind you about?” Well, heck, I thought it was a, like, memo pad where I could record my wonderful Thought. I blurted out “Storm Heaven!”

GoogShe asked me, “When do you want to be reminded?” (I could see her checking her electronic manicure…) I glanced at the red light & said, Tomorrow! She replied, “What time?”

Oh for heaven’s sake! I had not intended a conversation. I said, annoyed, 8 a.m. She noted this & put the music back on (to shut me up, I’m sure!)

By 8:00 tomorrow, I must come up with something to Storm Heaven about.

Any suggestions?

0

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