Lifelines I

My Wealth Increases By Relativity

To the poor I see

Pocket change becomes a standard of measure

To those whose turned-out pockets wave the wind

Small waving flags

To the goods nearby.

I Turned Away

Before you saw

The laughter in my eyes

Your sincerity undone

Unproven by what

You so earnestly affirmed.

Did you think me blind

Or worse, deaf

To insincere verities?

To the immediate gain

Of long-term professions

Of love & fire

In the barren, ash-filled fields?

Oh No, My Friend

I moved before you glimpsed me.

Wiping off my long blade

Of your amorous, overheated blood

On your sleeve, for all the world to see.

I turned, in careless escape,

Leaving my lip-prints

On your soul…

Sucked dry by need & ignorance

By tears of sheer frustration

Blessed by holy men.

It Came To Me

Once so rapt in prayer

To curse & flay

To beat at Fate

Like a child beats at stillness

I moved to shadow from

Holy Light.

I struggle now to find the words

We once abandoned in this dusty field.

Now blown against fences

For all the world to see.

The art show of my world.

No pictures but screams instead

Impossibly brought to bear

Upon my hands.

My Heart Has Broken

‘pon the shores of your pebbled beaches,

The rock-filled flanges of your mountainous demand.

Tis ripped & sore, so bruised, blue

as my sea once was.

The impossibility of love &

Totalitarian Fate

Scraped & scrapped like the palette knife

Against an easel.

Nothing smooth here

Only grated crumbs are left,

The peels of love

Possessed by none

Colored by need.

I Await

Your breath in my bed

The tenure of your hands on

This body, my vanity

Sore from self-inflicted Other.

I have a collar.

Will you not leash me now?

Chain me to heaven

Where I may bark to carry on

The song of the Coyote Angels?

The Glamor of a Life

Unhinged, unfettered, unencumbered

By need to pay but only play along its edges –

Deckled & gilded in

Your words:

My feelings.

This I would live: thus I would pray

Were the words to wash ashore

Like sea-eggs

Filled with salt & potential

Pontificating the hand-over-hand of Life.

Will not the furrows of dawn

Berate the sky?

Encapsulate the ocean, so raw?

Mine/not-mine

The dregs are so much

Sweeter than the life

Has ever been before.

An Afternoon Nap

After a large lunch

Stoked me to write these

A dream on waking

My elbow sore from oldnew wounds

I frayed the edges of my soul

Against the cheesecloth of time

The burlap of sin

Chafing many places

Wrapped in sinew of possibility

Forgot by even God,

My angels fight to keep me sane.

Interior Lights

Work no more

I grope for enlightenment

Choosing sharp edges to fall against

Testing my mettle.

But life is not my former state:

Life is where I live & where

Showmanship dims to facts of

No audience

Inferior to pacing across an empty stage

The nutcracker season

Came early

Finding me late for limelight,

Lost to imperial need

I did not earn the Right

By wrongs of note & number.

Black, Then White

A bard in a barn

Singing to the livestock

Talent un-mourned

For all its likely presence.

Brought up short by Change

By “new normals”

Entrusted to Age,

Wrinkling,

Eyes sinking back

With misplaced bruises.

I tower over the competition

When this there is –

I sing, a cricket in a midnight corner

Keeping you from twin resolutions

Of sleep & prayer.

My scraping song the fingers pulling your hair

In darkling hours,

Drawing your breath to mimic my music

That together we may grow.

October 3, 2020

October 4, 2020 0

Seven Summer Samauri

(2020 Isn’t Even Over.)

(1)

Doldrums not dolphins

Lockdown, not “Hey, stop down!”

I have arrived

In my earliest summer mornings

…I am relaxed…

Body memory takes me back

Anatomically, a switch fires:

I am hanging clothes for Mom in the backyard,

Alongside the Little House.

This is experience, not memory.

I can tie it to the other summer mornings on my belt & move on.

(1)a Sense

I have the Sense that time is playing peek-a-boo

Time meant “life” as we knew it

Before the Ides of March arrived on the 23^rd here…when

Time actually became a worthless currency – erased from the face of the clocks.

(What did it matter when we took off our pajamas?)

We had time all over our hands, dripping off, unimportant, schedules erased, through no fault of our own.

It ran off the clock in inky blackness we tried to catch & put back up. Instead we were made to wash our hands of all of it.

Time wasn’t money…but it was worth it.

We backed into not knowing the next of it

Days passed, even cravings vanished eventually, let alone news accuracy.

It began to feel “right” to seal inside – of course I can always say

it’s part of the heat signature, if asked.

I don’t know about you, but I didn’t plan for the world to fall asunder,

At least as I’d known it.

All the bubbles are popping

All the soap operas ushering on their fat ladies with sweeping bows.

Mom always said, “Have six month’s expenses in the bank.” Ah! The description of a dream of my very own!

Between the moments of evolution & the next Emergence of holy life

We stand poised, yet learning by discovery (as always)

You live by your prayers, your wits, your altered (alerted) senses, until you live by habit, by rote; all alike as box stores at the edges of scintillant consciousness.

(2)

Biblical

Again cornered with un-betokened dark news

Clothing myself in worded Psalms!

O, Lord! Added to the head of the line.

(3)

My Arrival

Is the short reply to a long-awaited answer.

Mystery a lá Alchemy

Finding at the end of “What was I thinking?” a

Long, drawn-out “Ohhh.”

(4)

My Arrival II

A resounding & magical “Amen” to all my prayers

(humble as they were, they were mine)

As a Traveler of Words, I evolve quickly,

Like, with a wish.

(5)

My Arrival III

There is no GPS in heaven – you either know where

You’re going, or you leave.

Some of us agreed to be the leavers

Some of us travel lightly across worlds

In no particular order other than within.

(6)

A Theatre of Words

One letter shy of encompassment –

An Imprimatur emerges in my life

I acknowledge my me as the only one

& thus the best.

My next moments are spent

Tagging the universe & running away.

(7)

I’m Here!

I was waiting for the Light. I was watching it magnify around me

As one by one by solitary one, all the descriptions I might have for it

Melted away to simply standing still.

August 13, 2020 0

Midnight Maunderings

I never thought myself a leader

Yet I have always been skipping out ahead

Finding the way of the Wayshower.

I venture outside at 3 a.m.

To breathe night-ions

Garnering the darkness

In eager search of distant stars

I fly no flags of bedsheet measure

Only tiny banners of love

Protected on my windowsill

But these I fly proudly

Wings open to the heaviness of air

I am the mouse fascinated by the whiskers of the lion

Unobserved yet always overseen by gentle Divinity

Tweaking my tail, tickling my nose/

I paddled in ponds wearing shoes of adventure

I walked away from lifetimes

While laying no claims

Save those of memory & desire.

As to where this shall take me

I hardly imagine.

My face & my name ahead of me

I still search, scanning horizons

Calling myself forward.

Unready to upstage the world,

I can only upstage myself

One accomplishment at a time.

I test the boundaries of constancy

Questing the North Star of God

I live behind no screens

Of televised content

Content I create my own world.

Where I am a hero on the Hero’s Journey of real life.

I boil carrots in the dark

To better see the day

I wipe my pens on my sleeves

Dotted with ink & drenched

With words about worlds yet undiscovered.

I would bestow my wisdoms

To children I shall never have

Applauding their creativity

Inspired by a tiny phrase.

Until I began these midnight maunderings

These densely-packed thoughts only to

Be experienced in single splendors…

It IS possible to love every tree in the forest

Every wave breaking in similar salty froth

‘pon strangely lit beaches

I watch the world lie down in death

Anticipating only resurrection.

The incense burns

Fierce & hot

Devouring itself

In the grace of alluring scent

I burn to be so!

Never regretting the

Ashen remnant; each

Thought clinging to my nostrils

Breathing in & out.

Blessing all, even the unholy

Especially the unholy

My singular quest to bring

New thought to a mind

Steeped in the familiar.

I cry “Poverty!” while bathed

In the richness of a burgeoning world.

I follow growth in a hunger of appetite

Sentient in the awareness all of it has passed.

My life is a bowl of chocolate strawberries

Sweet upon sweet

Succulent & bursting with juices filling hunger

All is moisture tho more appreciated

In the deserts I choose to live in…

I burst with the treasure of living words

All spoken before me by minds so much greater

Yet what I know is sweet upon sweet

As one by one, I choose my earnest, surprising adventures

I am an oft-told story

With hope of teaching another.

Inimitable, this world at the measure of ten tiny toes

I fight no dragons with my bamboo walking stick

Tho I smell them nearby

Feeling jeweled eyes fixed ‘pon my morsel self.

I pray on, an unlimited artesian well of self

Prevailing over their fiery breath

I pay no attention to mirrors

A rooster’s comb of misrule for a crown

I smile at reflecting shadows

There is nothing left behind but the journey forward.

My past is buried, a scratched-over self I claim not to know

How can I remember a name

Called before I became who I am?

Would it entice me even a moment to become that she?

There are bite-marks all over my past

I’ve chewed it to the bone & beyond

To nourish this future!

2/21/20

February 23, 2020 0