See “Coupling” published in Seltzer, Baltimore’s e-magazine for the arts…and see me periodically at the local open mics…
The End of Euphememory
stuffed like dolls
like taxidermied heads
like blackmailers’ file drawers
with fascial paper crinkled
with jugular ink
a rubbermaid bin
of journals
ticks
like an impatient bomb
waiting
to obliterate
comfortable
euphememories
stripping
airy cottonwool
padding
to reveal
bare splintered ends
of forgotten truth
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Thanks Giving
A bow to you, my friends And I bow also If trees also speak to their huggers if nascent ecosystems |
if bodhisattva beings turn full-front to greet a shaman-hunter’s arrow (the hunter’s body later feeding tribes of shining claws and teeth, perhaps, or creeping things and rootlets burrowing deep among the bones) – paragraphThen is the mystery-miracle paragraphOn this feast of thanks giving |
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Passage
Where have the words gone –
culture-encrusted
morphic hammers
nailing
consensual reality
over perception –
assigning meme, not meaning
to pure phenomenon
I sit in woodland
meditation silent
sucked – whoosh –
into a febrile vortex
Tumbled and mashed
in a transmuting maelstrom
of shamanic vision
ancestral mythos
childhood catechism
(cosmic vision/
creational dialogue
sweeping
out false dogma
in true heresy)
Subconsciously squishing
isolate microcosm
through an imaginal wormhole
Words have no place here
slippery acculturated
prisons of meaning
Crush them to Essence
surrender to formlessness
Dance with the nameless
dust of exploded stars
whirling to coalesce
into (inter)Being
(inter)Awareness
enLightenment<
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raw
if the news were a movie i go outside, feed and every human being |
turns up a thermostat drives a car is complicit we are the ones who created fukushima… chernobyl… three mile island… (not to mention deepwater horizon… kingston fossil… how many others) where else will Mama Gaia’s tossing tears responses to our raping destroy us with our own lethal tools while wind turbines serenely lazily continue to spin above the devastated landscape paragraphi don’t want to watch this movie paragraph(choose life. |
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Fox Medicine
sister fox fleeing through forestland never knowing profit if my World is their hunt- |
(no soul they recognize in sisterbrother Beings) how dare i do my job, play my role serve the All with my instincts my Being my redbrownblackwhite Earthmates (all prey like me) how dare we emerge from cover much less openly be our Truth paragraphAncestors speak: shapeshift |
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Coupling
“…whether it is husband and wife coupling in their love and birthing a child; whether it is a widow coupling with the memory of a deceased husband; all love is born of the conflict that dialectical consciousness acknowledges.”
–Matthew Fox, Original Blessing
It wasn’t supposed to happen
like that.
You’d flame out like the Challenger
disintegrating in mid-leap skyward –
not crumble and wither and fail
fighting inch by inch
month by month
even unconscious
for your life.
I’d carry on a bright and burning torch
of conviction, empowerment, challenge,
not sink into isolation, confusion, paralysis
not fall silent and lost
as a child abandoned in a crowd
as a monocle without a lens
as a moon without a sun.
It wasn’t supposed to happen
that way.
Emptying your office
I disgorged our memory chests
saw you transforming from image-maker to visionary;
saw me burying my being in your mission,
issues, projects, goals and views…
quashing Quixote under a corporate cloak,
daggerless and drowning in pages
of proprietary jargon for a paycheck.
My body paid the price; free-
lancing, I recovered.
One year later, you started the journey
that would strip you like Inanna
traveling drumless into darkness.
“His work was too big for his body,” the shaman said. “For him
to continue his mission, he needed to transition to spirit.” All I knew
was – you were gone. It wasn’t
supposed to happen like that.
Years, numb years,
before traveling four paths of heretical hope dispelled
the fog, awoke my being; gave glimpses of
my life, my purpose, salvaged like generations’ mosaic
of shattered pottery, like grandmothers’ scraps for a patchwork
quilt, held tenuously together by morphic field,
waiting to be stitched into wholeness.
Today the Day of the Dead approaches,
I greet it just shy of half-centennial (you expected
to die at 50; the five years following, you said, were gift). For
the first time I am sensing your presence, doubling
in tears at your passing touch…
I see the seed of larger legacy you carried,
a remembered image linking centuries, ceremonies, cultures,
visions, dances, traditions, Teachers and dreams to in-
form a half-glimpsed possibility for me: what if…?
The question glitters tonight like Challenger sparks,
like Danae’s golden rain midway between earth and sky.
________________________________________________
A Cappella
Towering foursquare blocks of lectures and
learning climb against the night
sky echoing a year’s last songs of laughter,
youth swaying in grass skirts, leis,
paper bras strung on rippled chests,
four years fresh and launching outward, free
and coupled and future-bound.
I walk this dark and stairstepped hill alone tonight
as four years of ghosts surge round me:
children climbing from our arms into lives
and work they choose,
parents climbing to empty nests and lives to fill,
grandparents climbing slowly,
turning to bless before their final step.
You did not climb this hill,
did not join the crowds of parents
and children on first and last journeys.
Our son began his climb as you journeyed supine,
your spirit walking with me.
I knew then:
this would be four years’ solitary climb.
You rose long enough to deposit him
with his fellows, then sank
and did not rise again.
Tonight is the last climb for me.
I turn and gaze at the lighted hall
where you did not hear your engineer son sing,
did not see his classmates cheer
and pound his back, did not see him
and his girlfriend snuggle beside me
between sets, did not see him
mobbed by friends and fans after the show.
Did not see him…
in the body at least.
I square shoulders, set foot on stairs,
walk each step slowly to the lot where
the night sky meets me like a cloak.
Stars piercing the clouds now,
the new moon hiding her face.
I turn my face to the sky, reaching for you,
your inner voice, your chill touch to warm
my heart, your nod. “We’ve done
our job,” I whisper. A breeze ruffles my hair,
falls silent.
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Dark Silence
dark silence
desires no words
strikes the hand weak
mouth dumb
that frame them
dark silence like smoke
flees the hands
grasping for it
blurs the eyes
clouds the mind
straining to pierce it
dark silence alone
consumes itself
in unending withdrawal
unending fear
of the silent dawning
Light