Poetry

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.