Yellow leaves glow luminous against October’s grey dawn while sunlight’s first rays illuminate new white.
My arms brush against branches stirring secret woods like a whisper through the silent expectancy of morning.
It’s then I remember when we ran through the yellow and you spoke of your days
your voice betraying a justification of the time spent and how it seemed to fill with this and this and that.
I thought then of the richness once shared
with only the woods, our words and all the hours ahead.
Still we ran
with bodies tired and older so much older.
Grasping at the edges I asked about your writing.
Dismissively we pinned it to personal growth
boxed it neat and safe
Not naming the electrical charge felt as an explosion through the normal days.
I didn’t push it
letting the whole thing sit with only a scratch on illusion’s shaky surface.
But sweet memories of cracking glass are fresh and real as they ever were.
Easier with the day’s tasks certain
I attend to them one by one
Life’s leftovers
Collecting like dust in dim corners
Still bird wings beat my heart’ survival
As I stand on shaky feet above new ground
When all along I held myself together in the right ways
Polished and expected
Accepted
Ghost life
Now I stretch unused terrifying wings
And spin the daily debris into mysteries unknown
Even to myself
The flowers
Simple but bright
The first ones of March
I bought for you this morning
Got damaged in my life
As I gritted my teeth through back-ache
Soldiering on in the schedule
All the while seeking a clear passage to
The unblocked blue of freedom
Where was it again I was sailing?
mixed in with the piles and piles of laundry
Little lost lint bits
But there it was today
In the tulips that waited
Expectant exclamation points at the end of the check-out counter
In the secret clarity of stars
the owl called
and another returned it over and over
merging memories with midnight’s hidden longing until I heard the call inside as much as out
united in a hidden heart beat pulse of perception
an old initiation
that was lost amidst the days and days of technology’s tired dim lights
and the certainty of structures and schedules and clocks
that bound me bleary to future’s logically laid out life
where mystery was only a stirring outside of me
drifting ungraspable vapors.
It’s time to breathe them in now
breathe them in
back, back, back
to body and breath and blood
and receive like oxygen
the owl’s call as my own.
The words once there,
a wind in morning’s maneuvering of chores and duties.
I set them down in secret corners of cell and tissue,
safe and invisible.
I intended to take them out,
once done dealing with this and that,
dust them off,
to be savored again by tongue, teeth.
I even heard sweet songs to be sung for the world
amidst the clatter of dishes and cars.
Somehow though,
they’re now frayed and ragged
small bits of dust evading me
scattered on fragmented winds that wail for what wasn’t.
And I, the observer,
watch others bring forth secret truths,
my own small hope
an ember.
Easy to say we’re called
to share truths greater
and have felt their power
like a lightning bolt through being.
How we then fumble through the circumstances
grasping for tools once had,
looking for what was lost amidst the daily clutter.
Easy to say this
to an audience starving
when the message just happened to find a pathway in us,
almost;
were it not for constrictions
reminding us of what we aren’t,
turning what we felt into something the ego made.
As if it could ever be owned.
As if it were a commodity.
So let conditioning fall away and shed the outgrown skin of intellectual certainty,
stripped bare,
to see again the unveiled stars amongst which we dance,
imperfect and sincere.
And when you’re pulled
be bold!
allowing movement through you like breath
provide safe passage,
to this,
birth of the unknown
seeking form in strange and shifting times.
I want you to always find a way
because you know it in your marrow deep,
how
to navigate the world on simple foot
seeking earth’s skin beneath bare toes,
to bypass all the streets and cities and billboards that blare their brands and strive to obscure instinct.
Remember
Remember
You can discover the ways that skirt around the paved and perfect sanctioned ways
that would rely only on a blank unsaturated memory
And would be quick to call you a dutiful son
in slick and polished shoes far from the ground
if only
you’d forget, forget, forget
how you once ran through pathless woods with nothing,
content,
and only the beating of your blood red heart to guide you.
I want you
Untamed
You are needed now
Your truths swelling to spill over all contrived and man-made banks
Flooding across vast, fertile soils in which small seeds seek moisture
You quench them
Unleashing a torrent of unstoppable new green growth
Deep, deep into the month of June
I ask only that you expand the honest blue of your clear eyes
Courageously creating connection and community
Unafraid beneath bright and lengthening light
Brave one
Reveal now
Your red, raw, ragged heart
Kept quiet and controlled too long under lock and key
Now is the time
To cut cracks in concrete to collapse and crumble it
Down, down into the soft, warm earth of you
For we are all made new
In the raging rapids of your undammed love
And this is not the end
But only the beginning
The first fragile shoots of a new world
In which we are
Feet to earth
Fearless
Almost had them
the words
driving at dusk through thick veils of rain
and wetlands grey
heaving their saturated, solemn song.
But caught in the unspacious absorption of tasks demanding focus,
straying far from the deep gut tug belly-button pull
like a drunk’s dream of unreachable pictures that grasp and grasp
once clear and bright but
sinking now
sinking.
Was it last night’s or some far off remembering?
Were they ever really there at all?
The words
falling down like grace now
with the rain.
Washed away, washed away,
I stand alone
and empty.
It was there this morning.
I heard it in the wind that knocked a week’s worth of winter snows off the trees
and later,
carrying wood,
the way the light fell
for a moment illuminating particles of snow through branches;
Godlike.
But then things changed back to the ordinary
and I thought of the lists
and all that was still to be done.
And we didn’t speak when I came back inside
instead busied ourselves with tasks,
a mountain of distraction.
While still,
beyond the walls,
the snowflecks continued their light-dance
and all the while unnoticed.
Easy to say we’re called
to share truths greater
and have felt their power
like a lightning bolt through being.
How we then fumble through the circumstances
grasping for tools once had,
looking for what was lost amidst the daily clutter.
Easy to say this
to an audience starving
when the message just happened to find a pathway in us,
almost;
were it not for constrictions
reminding us of what we aren’t,
turning what we felt into something the ego made.
As if it could ever be owned.
As if it were a commodity.
So let conditioning fall away and shed the outgrown skin of intellectual certainty,
stripped bare,
to see again the unveiled stars amongst which we dance,
imperfect and sincere.
And when you’re pulled
be bold!
allowing movement through you like breath
provide safe passage,
to this,
birth of the unknown
seeking form in strange and shifting times.
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