Were You Here, Say I

The swells now slowly soften
As they went wading into dusk
“I think the tides are shifting”
And we are here,
…and that’s enough.

“I thought we’d lost each other
In the throes of hearts let loose,”
headlong into destiny
Unfurling ribbons from the seas
…words curled on waves of truth.

Moonlit herons stood like angels
The sea took peace with night
Long shore drift sang lullabies
“Keep us safe,” a lover sighs
“…together in Your sight.”

Their love began on mountain tops
Like tears wrought from the sky
Carving rivers lined with hope
to the ocean off steep slopes,
We are here, say I...

When you start feeling lighter again, ascend.

Locked within us, behind doors we draw closed upon us, year after year; surrounded by loops and loops of locked and rusting chains, is something even more fundamental than faith...an unabashed and boundless and unbiased openness. We had a moment in our infancy and early childhood, where no one but God was watching over us. The chill we feel is the evidence that we are removing those shrouds that hide us from our inspiration and hides our preferred artistic medium - from us. When you start feeling lighter again, ascend.

Ma Leonn (artist) even the sun seems to skirt around china

I remember a time when I didn't have to remember a time...

I remember a time when I didn't have to remember a time. When butter only came in sticks. When the trash men came everyday. When a Chevy was just a Chevy...when it wasn't who had the bigger yard, but which yards could be combined to make the biggest football field. When lawyers were great because we hardly ever needed them. When we feared dying more than being poor. When we called them jobs, not income. When a busy tone or an endless ringing phone required no further investigation...When romantic love didn't grow in diversions like weeds in fertile soils of commiseration...when love meant you don't have to stop looking, just keep looking at me. I remember when you could hear me draw a breath between these spoken words rather than me here alone listening to the tap of the keyboard as I type them.

Nihilism by File

He fantasizes of filing in contempt the corners off squares...but for every shaved angle, two more are made. When no more can be found, he learns to love circles. What's so boxy about a box turtle anyway...

‎~ K. Smith ~ "While his eyes saw the sky, his soul saw Heaven."

You must cover half the journey before its end. And every half journey, is its own. So on infinitum. Hm. It is rational to postulate that our choices (to move) come down to covering half of an infinitesimally small distance… more soundly described as NOW. No matter where we are going, what visions before us, or musical notes and colors remain undiscovered, we cannot escape this exact moment. The future purely depends on NOW. There is no need to begin, you just need to be. And “be” as best you are able; for that is the distance between sky and heaven for this student of Ockham!

On Broken Hearts and Love that Does Start

Our broken hearts…beat loudly. They pound away at the diamond hard surface of love with soft golden hammers. Looking for what? – to perhaps take a chip out of it, or find more gold with which to make more hammers to replace those that have become blunt. The irony is that love we seek, we wield in our very own hands and the truth is that love cannot be broken through. I have three loud clocks in this room, each set for a different longitude on earth…one ticks for the future somewhere west, the other tocks for the past toward the east…together they obscure the one rhythm I wish to hear most…that which counts the here and now. You see, the love we treasure is not buried in past or waiting in the future. Find the restless hearts such as yours; love like another, and you will love no other. These lost moments are the underpinnings of a forever that is behind us; pause tenderly in this moment and you may indeed find that love stands due before you. The paradox is, that we all share in the labors of love and strife – too busy to find the stillness in their balance.

The Gardens of Siam

Whiskers stir on dandelion stems
While dawn departs on fragrant winds.
“We see the sun, his shadow's falling,”
from the treetops, cried the waling-waling.

Wink awake oh dreaming rose
Brush your trestles from the briers
Till the soils of your tactics
And climb the trellis to all you aspire.

Your roses wait another day
To see how green his eyes.
Ruby hues will take their queues
From the orchids when they cry.

Dream you’ll hear a swinging gate
While working in your garden
There past the fountain, you’ll catch an image
Of someone lost within.

You know this scented presence
Though its logic reveals little
Until he steps into the garden
Of long awaiting petals.

The orchids shout to the dandelions
“time to close up, it’s after dark.”
While two cool cats curl up to nap
in the cradle of an open heart.

Goodbye Greetings

Goodbye…

Hindsight.

I’ve heard goodbye whispered softly to my ear, through such sweet lips
And I closed my eyes so I didn’t have to see her go…waiting, that such gentle a sound would not carry very far into my heart.
That something which meant so much, with such gravity, could just go away forever with a goodbye. Once touched by time, it is forever part of us…goodbye does not undo what has come before. Even harder are the goodbyes we have to say to someone; because we have to hear ourselves say it.

See you later – in my heart, my dreams, in the slight change in tack of my sail, the chip you made in the wine glass, whatever is left that differs – because you were once here. It says all the world is unfinished business.

Passion

I believe that while such embers of the spirit might glow with nothing more than the breath of a sweetly whispered word, they ignite with the song in the melodic voice heard by many. Those of true passion outpace consequence…despite there being no faster way to fail, or succeed. And love – love is like a racehorse, she doesn’t know whether she’s won or lost, only the exhilaration of running race.

...Nothing more humbling than watching stars cross, again and again and again. such is the story of we romantic dreamers who'd rather lie sleeping in peace wrapped in the arms of lovers, than wake to the possibility that nothing, but nothing, is true...

(source,http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/upload/2010/12/forget_shooting_stars_how_abou/lyrids_2009-thumb-500x344-58667.jpeg)

...The thought keeps cycling in my mind and I don’t know why. I’ve sensed less than this of things I’ve known more. The quiet inward search for facts fascinates me, but even more so that I cannot contain a smile and nostalgic sense of happiness inspired by the landscape.

There are some mysteries in life by which we are drawn out onto the precipice, undaunted by where the edge might be...or whether we’ll go over it.

And so I say, I’d rather risk failure and sadness navigating the playful patterns of my own certainty, than be happily swept away along the narrow path of another’s illusion....

The dissolution of this illusion

I’d rather risk failure and sadness navigating the promise of my own certainty, than be happily swept away by the illusion of hope that is little more than the certainty of another.

I have embarked on many dubious endeavors; with the best intent, focused more on being open to the possibilities that unfold, than the deliberateness of the choices I make. These are sometimes not the easiest routes – and sometimes they are paths of least resistance. There are many ways to walk this path, many paths to take – but they will all take me to the same place. It’s not about which road we choose; and there’s still time to change the road you’re on…” (Led Zeppelin), it’s about knowing where it leads us. And that has uncertainty – not in our choice of approach, but in our convictions to live in accordance with that objective.

NOW is about time!

Listen up - before you wipe that tear of happiness from your eye....THERE IS NO PAST TO RECONCILE IN ORDER FOR YOU TO MOVE FORWARD - OKAY!? THERE IS ONLY A NOW TO WHICH YOU MUST CONCEDE.

It's amazing how often we relinquish the joy and anticipation and tears of appreciation for someone's good fortune, especially our own, because we question, "why now? why not then? but what about this? but I --- dot dot dot!" bla fuckin bla!" There IS PURE joy...but before you set you mind and precious energy on proving me wrong, here's the deal, you dont even get the privilege of being MEDIOCRE at making that joy; how dare you. Joy is a gift (ah - doesn't matter who it's from) , be grateful for that split second of it...the past is just a bunch of "Joyful NOWs" that you should have clenched with all your heart rather than f'in them up. And so what if you did! But you keep throwing them away...so much so, that you have the audacity to say that all the past is gone and you've nothing left. Any time you choose my friends, any moment you choose, is your forever NOW. I suggest you stop wallowing on the razors edge of "yeh but" and "NO" get all over "Hell yeh" before "now" get's here "later" than "sooner." I have no time for later, less time for the past.

What the hell happened

60 something degrees today... emphasis on "something." Emphasis on "TODAY." Spent a day giving gifts to strangers because of my unbridled desire to excite the world with whatever the hell excites me. I waste more time and money on this...7 billion people in the world and I hope to impact 1% of the 10 of them with my "unbridled-ness." I've not seen many remarkable people - and when I do, it's like looking at the remarkable Colorado River from 6000 feet up. untouchable without a lot of effort... I spoke to a waiters and a guy named George at a store...and sales people on phones...I spoke to not one friend today. I hate this internet shit...I really do. Maybe the cats will join me tonight.

More like an insect than any other advanced form of life...hidden, quiet in the dark, only coming out to do something "functional." Hate the internet...I need two things, a big rock and someone to blame for its invention - so I can throw the rock, at them.

Stars (3/16/05)

How many times have I looked up in the sky
To feel a tear roll back

I never saw you, but I knew you were there
Obscured by the fog of a bad day,
Engulfed by the sun
A sailors moon
Chasing Away clouds
Reflecting off the
Hearing nothing, never sounded so bad
Darkness, giving up, are you there
If so, leave me alone
I’ll find you, it’s better that way

Discovery
Falling star, beautiful as it burns up in the atmosphere, catching fire, burning out, maybe making it to earth, or just becoming part of the ether in the atmosphere.

What is left for me in that universe
Can I share
That last falling light, disappeared, plummeting into the ocean of your soul,
How many stars fill your heart
Was it gravity
Failure to fly
Or a homecoming for the those that have never been
Arranged, placed gently in the heavens by the angels
Shuffling with the music of God, solar winds

The waters rippled as if the
Throwing the silken blanket of
Catching the stars
The stars, reflecting in the dew drops on the grass

--------------------stuff below –drafted from last night - ----- need an extension, I have anthrax---

Suspended in their infinite depth
The light reaches us years after the flame ignites
And we smile and muse at these tardy dispatches
Odd, that only long after we are gone from this world
Is the moment of our acknowledgement reciprocated,
Even after they too are extinguished
So this comedy of mistimed love affair continues with the heavens
We, exchanging smiles with a face we know is gone from existence
The conundrum of returning to a sender who is no longer there.

And here by the fire
In this sandy pit
I listen to the waves run to the shore
Tattling tales from far out on the ocean
Who’s great arc bends the seawater over the distance
Around the horizon
Where whispers from distant shores are heard in our imagination
Lost at a sea,
The Transcontinental chasm of misshapen, asynchronous anecdotes

And you and I are mired in this mud ball
A human conglomerate
Spinning around one star
while so many others beckon from beyond
And out of nowhere, I love you
Illuminates, the rise and fall of the sun light
Like the end of an intermission

The sun sets, as the encore begins
The audience of stars rise, clapping not loudly
Yet their applause flickers in the distance
As my light plummets into the western ocean of you soul
Yours rises majestic in the east
And for a brief moment,
The runner from the dusk sun is connected
To the glow of dawn
The gap lessens and we don smiles
Not for the fathomless distances of interstellar space
But for our closest star,
a mere 93 million miles
We are as close as close can be

Like the bespeckled heavens
We make patterns, we forget them in the day,
until the darkness comes

Indonesia (it took a while to grow on me)

I’ve only been here a very short while. Less than a day. I’m tired and nothing in particular appeals to me about Indonesia. Not even the name, it seems to be a term whose etymology is founded in an inability to remember and a treatment for diarrhea.

The entire city thus far, smells like a casserole of garbage riding thick on the humid night air - freshly hosed down pavement, reeking with diesel exhaust, raw sewage, old dishwater, and smoldering fish grilling for hours on filthy hibachi’s.

There is just a cacophony of vehicles and voices – there are as many 500 rupiah pieces as there are kids willing to work for one…and they are. Millions of dollars to be earned by billions of people.

Silence

Silence is the great harbinger of possibilities
The open space of thoughts
The elixir of two souls

Universal, it is always there
Even as sounds play upon it
Taunting

I am in that silence around you
Stay and tease me
I need your company
You and the tapping of my fingers on keys

PRODIGAL LOVE (explained, 10.18.2004)

Prodigal Love

Amidst the raucous chorus of soul-work,
A shard of sweet harmony bristles.
As love is carved by reckless masons
Beating down mountains with chisels.

I pictured a million souls all singing at the same time. Their own tunes, melodies, sole voices…like a orchestra warming up…each is wonderful by itself but few work together…unconducted. Yet I wanted to find hope…that one little sound of harmony from the din of “soul work” out there…even our other “soul work” before we found each other. All these souls, mistaken for “mates” claim to be in love and beat down every intuition; claiming to be artists of Love…they are only masons, craftsmen making something. I find there is a great chasm between those alleged soul mates who are simply craftsmen (masons) of the love they have and those who are true artists.

A lumbering sledge hews an icon of love
Which void of spirit, may still fain sublime.
A chain gang sings, to forlorn swings,
Pounding love into fragments of time.

So I keep with the visual of people working so hard to build love through all these conventions and icons (possession, wedding rings, misthought gifts, bla bla). And even you and I have built these icons with certain others….and while it may be love as “hewn”, it can still be void of spirit while seeming something deep and wonderfully mysterious. It doesn’t need to be. We do this…partners tied at the feet by chains, swinging the old love battle axe to the rhythmic sounds of basic moaning and lamenting…hoping to really refine and sharpen the love we “made” with others…but really only pounding love into fragments…over time. Meanwhile…someone out there is made for the other…I do not consider you my cell mate…we’re not part of highway chain gang…and we move to wonderful songs of promise.

So the dust rises up from the quarries
and the road cuts of paths left behind.
Course calluses tell that loves journey
may not always be poignant or kind.

I pictured the white smokey chisel dust I’ve seen in the mining operations in the distance of the desert and coal operations in PA…a long time ago. I picture the mountain road cuts…from the blasting of paths through mountain landscape. I look at my past and then at the calluses on my hands…I’ve become accustomed to the adage, that love takes work, it’s hard, etc…I don’t subscribe that this is true and would not explain love like this to a child…love is not always poignant and kind…I suppose in its blasphemy, we “behave” in love…rather than flourish in it as happiness.

As each laborer leans toward the other
Sieving the talus of trouble,
In their eyes, gleans a flame reflected
By a glimmer of hope in the rubble.

Then I picture us moving toward one another as we look over all this short work made over a long time. The mistakes, miscalculations, the “trouble” we have of not being happy or in love with those we are “supposed” to be in love with because we were handled a chisel and hammer and told to make it work. So we sort through the rubble and in each others eyes, I picture the reflection of fire light from the cavities of wrecked efforts…and it’s that reflection in your eyes that brings me hope that after all the dust has settled, after all this “work” we have love saved for us by the pure nature of who we are, rather than contrived by us like craft…I guess so long as it’s art, I’ll make love.


Two destined souls, now shimmer
Through the ages and journeys apart
“How I’ve longed the return of this prodigal love
To the warmth of the home in your heart.”

Well then, here we are shimmering bright after all this time and after separate journeys. And I picture this reckless, rebel love (working mason with a misguided passion to slam square pegs into round holes), returning home over the hill (dark clouds behind me in the distance). I’m here now safe, ordered, and warm in a real “home” (not a house) that is only true so long as I’m in your heart….and yours in mine.

Like a once broken promise, she came to me
Out of my past, across forever seas
Recasting truth into the furrows of dreams
Sewing intimate seeds that hushed the screams

And unsolved riddles of throttling fear
If one day more, hope would not get here
Over rolling swells, far from land
Spices and driftwood and contraband

Like caramel drippings from a Dali sun
Her eyes cast the color on taught sails of muslin
She sweetly falls soft through scents and caresses
Like a settling snowflake on winters dried branches

She is more than a feeling, brighter than sight
She is the stir in the morning to my withering night
And I recall her breath, a fathomless deep
landing home in the heart, from a precipitous leap.

But the bitter serenity when out of my sight
Is her touch to my soul like raw senses at night
I spiral away, she’ll not get here in time
To keep me from falling deeper in mind.

In this strange numb world, it’s just her and me
Afloat on the tears, of wounded poetry.

Life in Three (explained in 9.8.2004)

I recite all my blessings
As is known to happen occasionally
A moment of tranquil lucidity
I glimpse my life in sets of three.


Guilt for fucking everything up…sometimes I’m so far in it, I can’t quite figure it out. But there are moments when I gain perspective and I cast an inward eye. I’m sitting on a plane when I wrote this…give it’s a propeller aircraft, it was a short lift…probably having something to do with work I was doing with the marines. Whatever it was, flying always used to allow me to drift a bit. It makes me feel better.

The props spin hard, a deep numbing sound
And lug this fuselage across the ground
Now entranced, the runway fades
Chastened by the slicing blades.

We are taking off and I’m drifting…I looked through the blades and watched the runway fall away. I guess this is a form of meditation for me. Purely selfish. I never liked propeller aircraft…gives me a sense of vulnerability. It’s a little un-nerving in high winds, short landings or take offs…I think the guy sitting in front of me was the pilot. Maybe I was in New Mexico.

I murmur the names of those I love
And ask safe passage from all Above
In combinations of tender prayer
In quiet voice, into the air.

I am praying for safety…pure and simple, I’m preparing to say goodbye in case we crash. I do this from time to time.

As I skip in flight through altitudes
Or run a path through latitudes
Or longitudes of forest green
I recall sounds and smells and things I’ve seen.

And so I move on to meditation. The same sense of euphoria I get when I’m running latitudes. In the desert, I ran the mountains a lot…thousands of feet elevation distance ( I guess I call them latitudes – wrong term). As I’ve said many times, smell is a big nostalgic drug for me…I can remember the most peaceful of lifes events when I’m alone, in peril, challenging new places with consciousness.

Body Triangle:

Our encounter is through complex webs
Two paths split through walls of guise
We slipped the grasp of the mundane
In the covert moments of Life’s Sighs.


I try to do things in three’s here. The triangle is architecturally, the most powerful shape. I seem grasp that here. Not sure why I called it the body triangle.

I’m not sure why people come together. But I think, as a friend once said, we draw people around us in order to fulfill the promises of life’s lessons. Nothing is chance…we try to pretend, we go numb, we disguise ourselves and we never meet…or perhaps we eventually do, it just takes longer. Destiny, finds us. The more we resist, the more mundane life is…a sign is an expression of acquiescence…a giving in to matches that God makes for us. We have many mates in life…we have many soul mates. We have one life mate…the most expressive sigh I’ve ever known has been a kiss; and that, without any hesitation, is her and has never been nor will be anyone else’s.

Something I wrote in my past, were glimpses of my future. I wrote a poem about war, when I was 10. My mom found it the other day…never did I think I’d be a soldier. I became one. I disdain war…why did I join a side.


My children, friends, and family
And tragic lust and love’s broken ties
Lo, rock-a-by stars through speeding blades,
you there in the restful ends of my Life’s Eyes.

I lament here. I lost my youth, I hate divorce, I missed my friends, and my immediate family was scattered from corner to corner. I chased lust and love and I failed. I was and am so sorry to have let Him down.. I don’t like hurting people…and I’ve spent most of my life breaking myself down to prove it. I had no idea how far I’d go into ruin. I’ve brought a lot of people down. I just want One shining hope in my life. I’m not sure I can find it…I realize, it’s not mine to find, yours to find…but rather, ours to find. That is a scary proposition…because if we lose each other, we fail to achieve it and we find we were all wrong. This was a night flight I guess, because I’m seeing the stars through the blades of the airplane…I’m sleepy. The restful ends of my life’s eyes…as far as I can see forward…I’ve been deceived by my own love; by my own eyes. There is no You in the end…there is an Us.

I ask for forgiveness From All
Taken for granted, transgressed, spat with lies
In Gods cradle with you my heart
Our children friends and family…Life Size.

I want to be forgiven, but I cannot bring myself to ask for it. I have hurt people…and in doing so, I hurt myself. What will it take for me to be forgiven? Why can I not have my choices…why have I had to feign acceptance?

Prologue

Like a mantra, I recite all your names
In parallel this happens all the time
I roll swelling seas and catch the shores
And see the threads of love that bind

I was thinking of all those I know, knew and care for and pray. I suppose I worry too much about the past and people in it. They are not in the past…they moved on. It’s inaccurate to consider someone as “the same person they were.” I remember ocean swimming and how as I swim over the swells, I lose sight of the shoreline and I’m quite alone and remote – lost at sea for a moment. That feeling when I the shoreline rolls back into view is odd…all I feared, felt guilty about, loved, and toiled over are there and somehow provide terra firma. I guess I am trying to embrace the past and my failures. Not a popular stance with some people…many of us wish the other would not only forget the past, but somehow ignore it and extract it from our ‘essence.’ It can be done, but it is through tenderness, not amputation.

Disguised as ropes and chains.
I slip through fields I’ve passed
My companions gone their separate ways
Like things not made of things that last

I remember feeling trapped and desperate in some relationships. I remember wanting to stay but being cast out. I was thinking about Sandy probably…and my good friends. Things not made of things that last…it’s hard to assess the materials of the present; things come and go. Parts remain, others disappear. I’m musing here.

I wander in soliloquy
Inspired by you and ours
No matter how complex the journey
I find you through Archimedian stars.

Soliloquy is an oration to oneself…not heard by others; that’s how I mean it. Hamlet engaged in frequent soliloquy. Idiot. Inspired by you and ours is who was in the present at the time and “ours” is family and friends and companions past. Life is a journey…at that time, I was bent on those sardonic Aerosmith words. Archimedes was a great navigator and postulated (I think) that there was a central point of revolution (the sun). I remember hearing a professor call something an Archimedean point. I thought predestination was limited…we have a pre-established smattering of stars, we have choice in how we connect them and who we end up with. I guess in predestination, we are always free to make mistakes, but we end up at the same place eventually. The “you” that I searched for was a ruse, a myth. What I seek, is an “us”…. And by fate, she connects the patterns the same way and here “she” and “I” are…beholding an “us.”

We are the Archimedean point…one is really two, is really One.

It Just Hurts (7/27/05)

It just hurts.
Something cold to drink,
something like ether to reflect on.

Across the vast sea of hope and possibility,
The bounty and debris of shipwrecks
Drift in and out of contact
Here and gone, here and gone.

In the views interceded by ocean swells
He walked out into the waves
And the wind swarmed in to keep her company
A figure poised with grace in the sand.

The moon was running up from below the horizon
Rushing to cast light from the east.
And as the sun set in the west,

Their breathing slowed
Unfelt, inaudible over the intertidal.
Not even did the ocean understand.

The spirits on the dunes
Watched over the two silhouettes
Looking out at an empty ocean
We're different now, but "different" isn’t gone.

Ignoring the Breeze of a Promise (1/21/06)

Ignoring the breeze of promise
I turn my face into the pillow
And shield your light
In it, tonight, I find only darkness

The phone rings,
And you seem only feet away
Oh if you were,
Only the thin skin of our lips
Would keep us apart

We are flightless in a gilded cage
The latch was forgotten
By the metal forge
A cruel unintentional mistake

Every once in a while
We share the cell
And a kiss teases us
With freedom

Children dance around us
In years not yet counted
They will forget today,
Today, when we parted
And they revved their toy cars
In a patch of sunlight on the carpet

And what was a lifetime to them
Was only moments ago for us
And in a moment, you were long gone
There is a brick office building abutting a lot
Where a barn once stood in the woods

We kissed there,
We defended there,
I will never forget the never-endedness
Of you.

I’ve seen memories come back to haunt me
I’ve aged and cried the same story
Again and again – nothing changes
Except the cast of characters
I am the longest running show
In the Little Theater of life



You will never come through that door
On your own accord
And throw your arms around me
And the seasons will come and go
As our spirits atrophy in the cast iron
Prison of “…love you a lot, but not enough…”

I would take a bullet for you
Even when you anger me.
I hope it only glances me
Because I want to live another day
To feel you, be it heart break or home.

Poem fragment 2 (2/15/06)

If I could only look inside your heart
If these clouds would only clear
A tear
When loving you made no sense

An obsidian sky

Love comes in from horizon

In finding nothing



I love you, I love you, I love you
Why is it that we create,
There is a rhythm in life and we bend around the syncopation
The sunrises like a new promise,
Full of hope
A melody and we pick the sequence of notes
Love doesn’t fail
It always leads us by the hand
Faster and faster into the night
And we let it slip through our fingers
And watch it run ahead, disappearing in the darkness,
Leaving us itinerant under an obsidian sky

poem fragment 1

I stood gazing in the darkness
Against a slope before the rivers
And you came to me
In fragments of mist
Dew arriving for an evening sit

And as you landed gently
On my eyes,
The light shimmered
Collecting

on a hill
In the mist
As an orb gently landed.

Visitation

His child smiles lovingly and with admiration at his Dad, who stands at the coffee bar at Starbucks, paused and smiling back at his son. They sit nearly silent, but at rest at home, the single Dad with the thousand mile stare, blended with compassion; His mind passes gently over the fabric of adoration as he reflects on the lives of others he sees, wishing pieces of theirs were his, seeing his son. His eyes glaze with pensive sadness, knowing its “visitation.” What a cold and awful word.

My Brown Eyed Girl

Looking up through matted locks
I scan the storm clouds from the dock
While you sail the surly sea
Is there time to think of me?
Waiting in the winds and rain
Enduring time and wincing pain

Enter Poet

The paint is worn, the iron rusts
The planks are laden with salt
The barnacles burry the pitted wood
Still my love exalts

And I wonder who your captain is
Who steers the ship for you
Who navigates the stars
And who will see you through

Our love is like the waves
Always heaping upon the sands
Thrashing, churning, and sifting
Time hewn by loves strong hands

And in those brown eyes the sun breaks through
And illuminates your route
Is your ship coming home
Or have you just journeyed out?

JUNE 3, 2005 Balcony Musings

And the thing that really makes it ironic, is that it isn’t.

And so the bottle opener from the Bahamas easily opened the bottle of Red Stripe from Jamaica. There begins the longest 50 minutes in history. The bright star or planet, whatever the fuck I’m told it could be, just edged past the corner of the building into my view. Twenty thousand lightening bugs and one BP gas station parking lot away was the only single flashing piece of modern technology in the town of Jefferson. The brights from that car, even that far away, actually allowed me to read on my beer bottle, “For over 75 years Red Stripe has embodied the spirit, rhythm and pulse of Jamaica and its people.” Only now do I read by lamp light, that it was imported by Guinness USA in Stamford, CT. Jamaican beer, imported by an Irish brewing company with an office in Connecticut. But see, there is no irony in that. Not a slippin drop.

I honestly had no frigging idea why I was out on the deck tonight. In fact, I don’t know how I even got into this walk out level basement rental on 25 elevated acres over the Potomac. Oh, well it wasn’t my deck, it was that of one of the other wayward souls on Marl Lu ridge. I was just enjoying the weather from a venue 50 feet higher. Two divorces, four pregnancies, a half a dozen graduations, and 3 Red Stripes down the dusty road of “halfway their,” and I’m figuring, who in the hell owns this computer I’m typing own. Like a wriggley’s spearmint gum wrapper, or one of those aluminum beer tabs later, I’m trying to figure since when is Bill Gates solely the reason for my ability to put ridiculous fucking thoughts down into binary coding. And why are plastic beer bottles available to m? And I’m not talking about the now, hell if YOU are reading this, I’m making money – nothing ridiculous about that. Or I’m dead.

Hm, it’s just odd how it all comes together into a thousand pieces. The guy who invented number 2 pencil lead is mindlessly poking at his mashed potatoes with his chin resigned into the palm of his hand. What did I do wrong? Nobody carries a pencil anymore.

Note to Self

A squirrel clings to a tree trunk, teasing and taunting a large tiger striped cat slumbering on the path. I run by, but pirouette for a second glance. Assortments of humans in the plaza ate alfresco. The tree’s around Lake Anne undressed a couple weeks ago and right on time, but not on queue. See, Autumn weather has been stubborn and its December – the leaves should paid attention to the weather before leaping. Perhaps this is the dawning of the fifth season – and what shall we call Fall’s failure to launch.

Our heart rates slow and some of us want to disappear into the woodlands for a spell – where we can write or paint or compose a masterpiece without the interruptions of so many pragmatic options. But a long spell turns out to be only a punctuated series of moments – minutes and hours where we create our masterpieces. I would love to just hide out for a month and write.

Rose Petal Rejects


Constrained by modesty, you resist too much fascination with your own observations…that is the impetus for the ionic bond of human nature - it is this gentle downplay of ego, that enables us to discover within another that which fascinates us about ourselves. Self love, projected outward holistically and purely toward others is just love. And in the musical cross-stitches of projected love, two chords will find harmony in the fabric of life.

You let go a myriad qualities in whatever your medium of choice…in numbers inversely proportional to the odds that each will meet and intertwine with those of another. Being ALL of you is far more important than being only those parts that mirror the important parts of another. People will fail to see you as a composite and will focus in on small arcs of light, and not the illumination. But soon, in this new found proximity, the truth of ALL of you is revealed. And the other admits, “I didn’t expect this when I saw your beacon in the dark…I didn’t sign up for ALL of you…” and they draw up their anchors and drift on…

You quietly relinquish to being alone (you’ve failed at doing this at least a hundred times). You realize that being alone is ideal to being an attentive witness to the marvels of nature and mankind and yet it brings this uncontrollable desire to share it with someone. In the desperation of sharing, you’ve missed many a sunsets moments, looking through the lens of a camera rather than your own eyes. You’re learning to record beauty in your mind and be happy with that. Yet as much as you fail to accept being alone, you also fail to find that someone with whom to share in the mutual aloneness of experiencing the magic. Okay, that’s confusing. Frustrating.

Your companions have little tolerance and patience for your proclivity to stop and spend 15 minutes staring silently at a lit up water fountain springing up from a lake at night or slide away into the soliloquy of sunset. But you love to capture it and spin it with belletristic prose and dose it back to them in writing…and some people are happy reading your accounts more than they are to join you in the appreciation.

The ad reads, “person seeking alter ego embodied in another.” Relationship objective: stop the writing and solitary art and just experience… would the discovery of your alter ego make each of you superfluous? Don’t think so. No, you think, strangely enough, that each of you would seek the gentle deviations within the other and aspire to understand those. This is the alter ego seeking to free itself, of itself. Hm, perhaps the ultimate romance may be the separation of the self from seeking itself – romance of this kind engages the discovery of new paths within the strikingly similar world of another.

A “recluse,” a shut in. This doesn’t prevent you from being discovered – in fact, it’s those perfect imperfections of being a recluse that seep through the cracks in the foundation to find another. An objective is to pay attention to detail…look for the glowing fissures within nature and mankind, for there awaits your companion. Serendipity is a fortune we create for ourselves…God leaves us with just enough latitude to discover miracles. But calls us in to be sure we give thanks and the most thankful find the most unexpected fortune.

coming home

Interrupted life.
Having you, protects me from my own web.
Return to me, as you thaw,
Weathering away to smooth edges.

We are at the center, of this expansive disk,
Glimmering prism,
And the line we follow is just a circle
Contained at some distance from the edge.

Stop, wait for me,
let’s turn and head for the horizon of
Incorporated memories…
That’s what coming home to you is like.

Pale ashes accumulated behind the magnesium smoke,
of discarded memories bending in relinquishment,
Behind the afterglow of the spark,
as it burns down the shaft of time.

Of talus and terminus.
When the last ember sleeps, the stars are free at last
To provide all the light, engulfing the past
That is what coming home to you is like.

Traveling anywhere,
Is just a fancy of the earth below my feet.
Go back and be the mystery you were.
Where your chrome softens into pastel.

I’ve seen the reasons I miss you.
A broken moment collapses into eternity.
The world is peering over my shoulders and it makes me nervous.
As I trace a line along the coast from here to anywhere.

I am

I may chase my losses around with a magnifying lens
Trying to figure out what went wrong.
I wonder what went right,
I’m sure it was nothing that I had anything to do with.
I thank god for the tenacity to create
It is not a process, it is the result.
People, get up and face the light
Feel the warmth, let yourself go and bless me, bless us
Who you are is who is truly loved, what is truth?
What is truth?
It is the highlights at the end of the suns ray before it touches the ocean.

I’d rather be lost in your heart then
Discovered in the sureness of wealth.

I need peace.

“You’ll never stop me,” he screamed as he ran into the night,
Faster than the darkness could take.
The silly envelope that cannot close down the acceleration of me toward you
Let me love you to the point of being unreasonable
Do not question.

In a tender yet torrid way
I’ve seen love creep like some shadow
Running from the sun
And overtaking each and every being.
Scanning eyes – moving over the world
They talked and I watched their eyes.
I’m supposed to be with you
As sure as I’m recognized by a stranger
Befriended by an acquaintance
And betrayed by a friend.
Betrothed by a soulmate.

I will be the one – the candle flame,
The world, the cabin walls.
Golden glow, shadowy glower
Scuffling feet over the wooden floor
At some chalet in a wanna be alp.

I’m a ….hm.

The Fall

The chatter of leaves
As they blow over the trail
This is the Fall of my life.
Every breath shivered
and twirled on the air,
Fogging the glass piece
Through which I stare
At lions at play
in the depths of my soul,
fierce and gentle
On other ethereal fields.
Sunrays softened on the curves of your hair.
And now stars on their nightly procession
Clatter like leaves
Across my path,
They will all join the Fall.

A godawful astronomy lesson

How many times have I looked up in the sky
To feel a tear roll back

I never saw you, but I knew you were there
Obscured by the fog of a bad day,
Engulfed by the sun
A sailors moon
Hearing nothing, never sounded so bad.
Darkness, giving up, are you there?
If so, leave me alone…
I’ll find you later, it’s better that way.

Falling star, beautiful as it burns up in the atmosphere,
maybe making it to earth, or just becoming ether.
That last falling light, disappeared, plummeting into the ocean of your soul.
And exactly how many stars fill your heart?
Was it gravity, Failure to fly that put them there?
Or a homecoming for the those that have never been home?
Arranged, placed gently in the heavens by the angels
Shuffling with the music of God’s solar winds

The waters rippled
Thrown silken blanket
Catching the stars
Reflecting in dew drops.

(Poem goes no where, I need an extension, I have anthrax—-)

Suspended in their infinite depth
The light reaches us lots of years after the flame ignites
And we smile and muse at these tardy dispatches.
Odd, that only long after we are gone from this world
Is the moment of our acknowledgement reciprocated,
reaching the void where the since-extinguished star once was.
So this comedy of mistimed love affair continues with the heavens
We, exchanging smiles with a face we know is gone from existence
The conundrum of returning to a sender who is no longer there.

And here by the fire
In this sandy pit
I listen to the waves run to the shore
Tattling tales from far out on the ocean
Who’s great arc bends the seawater over the distance
Around the horizon
Where whispers from distant shores are heard in our imagination
Lost at a sea,
The Transcontinental chasm of misshapen, asynchronous anecdotes.

And you and I are mired in this mud ball
A human conglomerate
Spinning around one star
while so many others beckon from beyond
And out of nowhere, I love you
Illuminates, the rise and fall and rise and fall
of the sun light
Like the end of an intermission.

The sun sets, as the encore begins
The audience of stars rise, clapping not loudly
Yet their applause flickers in the distance
As my light plummets into the western ocean of you soul
Yours rises majestic in the east
And for a brief moment,
The runner from the dusk sun is connected
To the glow of dawn
The gap lessens and we don smiles
Not for the fathomless distances of interstellar space
But for our closest star,
a mere 93 million miles
We are as close as close can be

Like the bespeckled heavens
We make patterns, we forget them in the day,
until the darkness comes

Prey Animals (12/20/06 coming home from Australia)

In the long field, the creature stood –
adorned in a bristling mahogany coat,
dusted with honey and java.
I could only stand their swaying
imperceptibly on the dying grass.
From his flanks, a slight swirl of steam
lifted into the winter air and
without a note, disappeared into the heavy sky.

How inconsequential his state,
than the legacy of his stance.
How endless was the moment
that only 20 paces
separated us in time and species.
Yet connected, not understood.
How inconsequential my stance…
Was he dreaming what I was?

Still as the blades of grass poking through the frost,
he stood,
and I followed the contours across steep pasterns,
climbing strong foreleg,
rolling over the withers
and then across to the only sign of life
flickering in the fields that dusk.
No stone could have rippled the source of his long lashes,
the quiet waters of his eyes -

These almond pools with a shiny sliver on black,
A gold shard that reflected off a terracotta sun,
somewhere melting over the bush country of another continent.

If it were not for the fury in my heart,
I’d not have heard a pin drop into the Indian Ocean
We stared endless not in time, but in depth.
And it was so quiet, I could hear the hissing of the grasses, \
He could hear the rushing of my own blood.
But Neither of us stirred as we moved,
the missing words from this monumental sentence
transcended the message.

It was a moments on it’s way out
From the time it arrived.
And no sooner had I reached out my hand,
Then he was gone.
With only that familiar cadence –
Thundering across the pasture.

And my mortality and limitations
Lunged upon me
Ripping the subconscious from the bone
Gnawing on the flesh of simply being human.
When talking of the spirit of a man and horse
We are all prey animals.
And so we run.

Promise to be Safe (the old boat prose)

Promise to be safe
Ponder with you heart
Breathe deeply and fill your eyes
Be clarity in the sands
Venture with your mind into the white caps

An old remembrance of a boat, adorned with palm fronds and dusted with fine white sand
Resting like a native islander, who froze in mid-sleep while catching his breath
Curls of sun-bleached blue paint barely clings to the hull.
The gunwales pitted by caked sea salt and crumbling barnacles
And in the foreground, the dead keel lying in state held up by two saw horses,
On top, a bucket of shellac lying on its side, its contents spilled and dried
with a crusty brush glued to the lip - unable to roll
Nothing moves in the sea breeze, except a few ribbons of shredded gray canvas
Caught on the ragged edges of sprung planks and tips of rusting nails.

The pouring moan of the tide harmonizes
with the fine rustling grass skirt in the breeze just over the berm.
The deposited waves rush back to the sea
tumbling shell fragments, sea glass and paint chips like a tiny maraca
The thick mingling smells of palm husks, sea grass, and salt condenses in matted locks of her hair – which waltzes impersonally with the ripped canvas – flapping like the torn tips of an unwilling pirates pantaloons.

Even as every wave lifts and hoists a piece of the weathered wood out to sea,
the sand laden slumbering mass never reminds her of anything but
bright white sails catching the wind,
the glistening blue bow cutting through the water with a hiss
the lively vessels wake reflecting a burning orange sun
melting on a curved blue horizon
Free to be on its own on the endless ocean – beginning only on this beach.

Ironically, unable to renew itself
This sage of a sail boat is a modern statement to a pair of displaced romantics
For now, parted by the ocean.
Unable to lose each other along the way,
Their love, is like this boat.

Alone

Alone,
I create the perfect pose,
I’ll sew a bounty of unheard prose.

So proud of my cups,
so magnificent
Ornate, but filled with discontent.

We look for toads
and kettle bearers
and the quenching kiss of wayfarers,

Who catch the drops
of saccharin rain
In hand formed vessels thrown in pain.







Love does not pour from Grecian urns
But is the absence in what we believe,
Embrace all you have
and are able to give
than all you’d hope to receive.

So Close (song me and the Boxcartel are working on)

So Close

It won’t be that much longer then
Just another lost day as dusk roles in
And the sun exhales long shadows
From a heart red far horizon.

I know getting too close to anyone
Is something you could not bear
But I’d not be here alone writing this song
Were it not for the company of your being there.

(refrain)
Because being close to you,
is the furthest thing on my mind…
and getting ahead of myself (with you)
just leaves us farther behind.

I’ve watched the endless pageantry
From the curbside like a child
These rock-a-by days as I drift off to sleep
Tracing the softening curves of your smile.

It’s way too close to a memory
Too close to a once-upon a lifetime chance
You’ll both forever hear the music,
But never again get so close…
close enough to dance.

(bridge/ refrain)
I never thought I’d get this far
was the furthest thing on my mind…
When she left, I was sure it was me
Being left behind.

And the buildings press against the streets
Etched through New York City
When the sky goes cobalt blue
and your eyes go soft as the stars peak through,
That’s as close as I’ll need to get
That’s close enough to feel you.

Just promise to keep your distance
From the hopes you’ve left behind
And love within in yourself,
What another lover seeks to find.

(Refrain)

Those Who Cannot Trust - Who Fear Love

We feel the forest most in its darkness – and it is the saplings of fears that grow into tall trees that we can climb to see the stars above the canopy.

And through the obsidian blackness – an occasional beam of light threads its way through the trunks to meet our wincing eyes. Somewhere the glint of that reflection is seen by another… and then lost.

The torch you carry does not provide the light by which you search, but by which you are found. If you keep it glowing – whether fueled by the laughter of your children or the love of your family – yours will catch the glint in the eyes of another.

May you find happiness in giving thanks for all you’ve received.

Infinite Paths, But One Way to Go

There are infinite paths, all of which are only crossing briefly at a point. It is best to make each encounter count, each breath last, but always stay on your path.

Theory of Creation

Why do we sometimes lose focus on those we care about, and obsess with the reasons why others don’t care about us. When process overcomes reason, when gentle gradations become black and white, when you no longer value HOW you do something because WHAT you do cannot be valued by others…you have become a machine. We as humans are not manufactured, we are created…so it is our nature to create, everything around us…good or bad. Please, go back and find the inner source of your creativity, and you will find the oneness of “how” and “what.” You cannot produce if you cannot care for yourself. You have no greater value than that unto yourself…create where it is you choose to go, and your path will appear for all to follow.

Autumn Left a Note

She mounted the breeze
And shook the trees
Bringing our love to its knees.

“I’m not jaded,
Please look at me,
Look deeply and say goodbye,”
She rustles the rust from the waving limbs,
“…Here’s your beloved azurite sky.”

It’s raining saffron and crimson leaves
As Autumn throws on her coat
She’s gone again,
And all I have
Are the tears she left on this note.

Veterans Day 2011

Sadly, half as many more U.S. servicemen and women were killed on our own soil during the Civil War as were killed in World War II. I am certain in retrospect that not one loss of a single life in any war effected a change that wasn’t in some way deeply regretted. This regret ripples and amplifies through time. With little heed to it’s lesson. The biggest conflict in world history is that which teeters on the thin edge of our individual consciousness…balancing between what is in our hearts and minds and the power of the masses armed with bullets and bayonets … It is the political ideology of winning that makes the loss of life most easily accepted - we will forever lose the war - so long as a battle is won.

Belletristic Bellicose

The following poem is inspired by FB friend Aaron Cook (a brilliant and witty thinker and writer) who posted this picture and caption…

“Hand,foot-less man accepts fate, slowly descends into Hell….I used to know a bellicose man that, when laughing, sounded like he was downing, choking or gargling keys from an old “Oliver” typewriter. Each is tone-spicific. Whith enough typewriters and strident type-set vomitus, I’ll write the great American novel. It’s like reading tea leaves. But I say too much again…. Now I will go light a candle to Mr. Mani-Pedi.”

As with many things I’ve written, I took it a bit further in “Belletristic Bellicose”

I used to know a bellicose man
Who each day fought for a line
That led to the sputum
Of an American Novel
Gagging,
“Once upon a time.”

His pen slashed at sub-consciousness
Enter sanguine patriot
Sinew torn and bleeding ink,
Till all but exsanguinate

His body stripped of ebullience
Yet all the more cantankerous
The mind ascends the spoils of
Men
In a porridge of type-set vomitus

A tempest blows from the open novel
of a periphrastic angry man
That snuffs the lantern at Dante’s door
Without lips
or a foot or a hand.

Eternal Eye for a Flash in Time

Hang on to these moments of our youth, for they become the trusted handholds and firm footing for many a slippery slope as we cross into our later years.

autofox

A friend asked, “…were you listening to what I said just now?” To wit I quickly and quite honestly replied, “no - I wasn’t, I was listening to what I HEARD.” And that’s the way it is…alas, the closer the voice gets to our ears, the less we listen to its source. Perhaps, in seeking to know someone, we begin with what we seek to observe within ourselves.

Two Effects of Fear - Cause for stasis or "fearless" behavior

“we so often lose sight of the truth through our fears…. so much so that our fears begin to create the truth for others. Your ultimate responsibility to the world is to be fearless… do this for me and my children and I will do it for you and yours.”

I wrote this in my mind as I listened to conversations among strangers, lamenting and wallowing in doubt and desperation over the economy, the environment, the socio-political state of the world. Not one action considered except to duck and cover…this fear is a contagious form of compulsion to do…nothing. Even when there is little to do, the willful choice to do nothing, to submit, is far worse. The fearless few need only undertake a little to embolden the masses to do more; even if it’s just a vote, a word of encouragement, or a Facebook post. The world is a chorus temporarily out of key….a few beautiful voices with a little more volume and the willful harmony of others will go a long way. Some just say, “QUIT YER BITCHIN!”

A friend accurately cautioned, that “…we need to be fearless for the right reasons. To be fearless for the wrong reasons can be unconscionable & sometimes outright dangerous. Embracing equality in my opinion is key. Awareness of when, why & how should be taken into consideration…”

And I thought a bit more…

I thought, “were the terrorists that flew jets filled with people into buildings filled with people, fearless.” Some might say they exhibited fearless “behavior,” but even if so, I think they were completely filled with fear…and not of dying. From early in their lives, they “feared” encroachment upon their inner values, they feared leaders, they feared the choices they faced between their moral values and those of others, who also feared. Sound minds, ill morals, and fearful to the point of being incapable of anything but loathsome reprehensible behavior - ironically carried out “fearlessly.” It is a personal, internal, moral, fundamental, and native choice within ourselves to be “fearless.” (aside from those with psychosis, who are fearless!) And I should have been more clear on that. My fear has brought me to many fearless choices…one made to take up arms against a foreign nation and culture that, albeit never visited, became representative of all my learned fears. The precise opposite of fear is fearless… and if the opposite of fear is love (which I choose to believe for myself), then love is fearless. And maybe that is the better message…

what we do, we are

Many times, we stand on the fallow banks, transfixed before such a sullen river. Some remain fixated with a distant vision of the opposite shore; others see just the abysmal current that sequesters them slumbering by; and then there are those with imaginations drawn to a proclivity for action, who cannot help but see a bridge.

On Trust

Trust is the blend of belief and action…belief in motion, motion believed. It is not just given to another, but also earned and accepted with both emotional and intellectual acknowledgment. If trust were just a voice, it would mean little without ears to hear it. There are many forms of trust and each requires “self-awareness” before the “awareness of other.” Trust is a sphere, an ethereal world between two people with their own latitudes and longitudes of permitted change. A world, where secrets, promises and contracts are merely contrived words that approximate trust, but there is something immeasurable and beyond the bond. An indescribable glow in a snow framed window of a cold dark night; whenever you go there, no matter what, you just know they’ll be there too - you need not ask. To be entrusted BY another, you must show your true self to them and you must open your eyes to how they value themselves, their beliefs, their feelings - this is the real estate of their existence - with it’s gardens and shelters. It is the turning up of ones cards first – the boxer who first drops his gloves when the bell ends the round…they trust you, they can be trusted. It is not the revelation of a vulnerability with expected protection, but the demonstration of strength and capacity to protect. The seal of trust marks the gates of love…and even when love has run out between two people, trust is willing to remain. But, once out side the gate – love is lost, unremembered, unhonored.

on 9-11

If every objects matter were no different than that of the next, but for their arrangement of atoms. Then truly all we can distinguish and behold with our eyes, is the play of light on the world. You can knock down a building, but you can’t kill it’s spirit. Peace on earth.

I don’t mind forgetting the right places I put things as much as I do having to remember the wrong places I left them.

I don’t mind forgetting the right places I put things as much as I do having to remember the wrong places I left them.
LDF

…our worries are but a thimble of moments in an ocean of eternity. take care in what you trade your moments for…

…our worries are but a thimble of moments in an ocean of eternity. take care in what you trade your moments for…
LDF

MOMENTS

Each moment – for an instant – is the beginning of the rest of your life; like the first pearl slipped onto a string. When you look back at the beauty across time, the primary compulsion is to find the next pearl, to string the next moment.

As a child I remember collecting sea glass on the beach. I exalted at each discovery, slipping each piece into my pocket as I walked in the surf. Every new chip all the more beautiful as I stowed it away anxiously. For hours my day was beautiful and I never as much as paused to stop and count my bounty of color. Just as dusk fell I found the most beautiful crimson shard, a twinkling drop of ruby, and it was so beautiful I lost my breath for a moment…and I carried it all the way back, running. Little did I know, there was a huge hole in my pocket - and every tiny treasure pocketed was instantly falling right back into the shifting sands … except the last, which I held tightly in my hand.

Which reminds of the poem Winding to a Point by LDF,
“…So are the thoughts of aging men
Holding dreams in the palms of their hands
They cast their stones along the surface of time
And spend their lives trying to find them again…”

(The poem, “Winding to a Point” can be found somewhere, down below, scroll to the depths - I’ll pull you up)

We are vectors in the stream

Collective totality, whether tiers of Gaia or far beyond, can in one way, be thought of as disconnected parts…yet there is something greater in their integrated whole; a “whole of whole’s” perhaps.

Consciousness, which is dimensionless, weightless, and timeless, nearly wraps itself around these transcendental notions. And awkwardly wading through our consciousness, we are able to communicate in the measurable realm of human expression. But it is fascinating how we ironically wander into conceptions of the immeasurable, running headlong into the blackness of our own inexpressibility. Creativity has limits, creative genius pushes those limits, but collective creation breaks through. All objects are ultimately in animation, whether carbon based, silica, or some other un-humanly-discoverable element. So it is best to be a force in the state of motion, than an object that can simply be moved.

As the sun, I may be able to move the ocean in one direction, as the moon, you may be able to move the ocean in another opposing direction…but as one connected and choreographed singular unit – we are the tides that ebb and flow all over the earth, that brings wind when sails are slack, light when it is night, warmth when it is cold, repose for dawn as the day turns to dusk, and rebirth for the dusk as night turns to morning.

Rain Interrupted

The sun pranced out after the rain
As if it were some glowing hero!
As if we weren’t humbled in anonymity,
Pleasant, numbing, insulation
From such villainous precipitation.

Maxwell Parish sighs, the artist
Is always too late to his easel.
Missing the sheets and shards,
the splash and writhing hiss
Of small united rain drops,
Terminating on the ground
In a death pact, shhh, and die.

I wish it to stay
To drown the sun just once.
Aspirating glaucous somber gun metal gray.
Most perfect line, speeding vertically down
Through a windless,
Most un-hoped for day.

Chased by the lumbering sledge of Thor
hastened by this ancient molten core.
Gravity, once more.

…I slide shut a thin glass door…
for the villain and hero to rumble on,
Rumble on….the spoils to the victor.

Somnol-essence

Hopes we take into our sleep
Become the seeds of dreams to come;
Fears then, roots of nightmares.
Stir our hearts awake,
If you must
Wind gypsies crooning quixotic notes
Dappled like leopard in dandelion dust
Caught in the clatter of castanets
If poems were sheep, this one would be black
That one is black,
And that one is black.
Pupils leaping into pathos,
Without a splash,
That one is black, that one is black.
Somnolence, when ripples lull
Where all lambs go, when somnolent,
When somnolent.

it’s often better to be silent in the grace of a humming bird in a flowerpot, than parroting the proclamations of a magpie perched on the top branch of an evergreen. (or something like that!)

it’s often better to be silent in the grace of a humming bird in a flowerpot, than parroting the proclamations of a magpie perched on the top branch of an evergreen. (or something like that!)
ldf

Some speak from the fathomless depths of their soul, others from the shallows, remarkably scant in substance. Both voices carry a resonance – what sound is it you hear coming from others? It is interesting that not only do we speak the voice of our true character, we listen with the very same source of authenticity. The greatness around us, when truly understood creates a harmonic within us…it would stand to reason, that if we listen in such a way as to create harmony within ourselves, then our voices would resonate with that harmonic. The world around us, as we perceive it, is but a mirror of ourselves. Once when asked by someone, “did you hear what I said?” I replied, “no, I was too busy listening to what I heard.”

An Ill Begotten Rhyme with Orange, Purple, Silver, Month

I think it was the harvest month
We grabbed our baskets and begun this
Quest for produce rife with rhymes
Ripe with color on the vines
That’s when I came upon a bowl
filled with fruit, or I was told
By another who had keener sight
For seedy bounty in the night.
So color blind, I thought to pilfer
For I thought it gold or silver
I reached and there I felt a flange
And peeled it back like an orange
A sweetly pungent mist arose
curled my lips and stung my nose.
My cohort called my basin purple
Which I stole, albeit hurtful
To its owner, who’d think me ruthless
But despite the spoils, my theft was fruitless.
I beseech you eschew poems ill begotten
For those sewn with bad taste are reaped as rotten.

I am posthumously in the present moment.

I am posthumously in the present moment.
Lovely dreaming foxes

Fast Food Pair of Dife Loft

Kite strings launch with random Lurching
Taco bell and silent burping
Streams of marbles
Rubbing shoulders
Aspire to be like checkered boulders
With collars up and spring insoles
Big fat men on tall brass poles
Spinning down on sluggish
Moles, who
Scamper and hide
In Panera bread bowls.
Roll the bones,
those lucky scones;
Raise the jambs and raid the homes.
Greedily grabbing a snake bit apple
slipping in a schmear of scrapple
news sound bites
through crumbs of breath
Supersized
with honey mustard death.

(Starbucks now offers the Trenta, 30 ounces cold drinks! I ordered a Trenta Coconut Frappuccino only to be sent away with a Venti - it seems Starbucks maintains standards for how many calories it offers to it’s customers in a single serving. So not to be outdone I ordered to Venti’s.)

:)

:)

Bob Schneider http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDaqigctC6g&feature=fvsr

Bob Schneider
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDaqigctC6g&feature=fvsr

autofox

AutoFox

My body spends most it’s day leaking fluids… Sputtering, shuddering – making wrong turns. It has an unpleasant odor under the hood. My smile is like the evergreen “car-freshner,” dangling on a rear view mirror. When I smile, it usually means I’m backing up. All I do is replace fluids and watch the odometer spin.

ldf

Men always want to be a woman’s first love. Women have a more subtle instinct: What they like is to be a man’s last romance.

Men always want to be a woman’s first love. Women have a more subtle instinct: What they like is to be a man’s last romance.
Oscar Wilde

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDaqigctC6g&feature=fvsr

Things Exist By Virtue of their Effects

We create what we resist. Resistance comes with the symptom of indirectly studying and ideologically manifesting what it is we previously only suspected we’d feared. The more we yield to the condition of resistance, the more we create, empower, and bolster the characteristics which we resist. For example, children are born without certain fears and only through socialization, language, education, and externally inspired inward recollection are given the tools to “embody, describe, and express” and so IT is created…and whether real or not, it’s “perceived” existence is enough to change the course of history….

things exist by virtue of their effects.

I cannot trust a truth that has a purpose more important than itself. When we are through with the pounding pursuit of objectives, and the chisels of tactics are worn down to nothing but pitted dull stumps, we will find we have created a tall berm of talus and dust between us and the truth, but there stands the “fruits” of our labor nonetheless. A true artist can look at a block of marble and know the true form within it before the chisel is ever set and struck.

I cannot trust a truth that has a purpose more important than itself. When we are through with the pounding pursuit of objectives, and the chisels of tactics are worn down to nothing but pitted dull stumps, we will find we have created a tall berm of talus and dust between us and the truth, but there stands the “fruits” of our labor nonetheless. A true artist can look at a block of marble and know the true form within it before the chisel is ever set and struck.
Art at LDF

My gift at mid-life, (which is defined by the fulcrum that shifts continually to the right over the course of a lifetime) was received when I dropped a palette of gold that I pulled from the earth to catch a single white feather that fell toward me from the sky. The gold was intended to pave the trail from whence I came, the feather, to show me the direction I should go.

My gift at mid-life, (which is defined by the fulcrum that shifts continually to the right over the course of a lifetime) was received when I dropped a palette of gold that I pulled from the earth to catch a single white feather that fell toward me from the sky. The gold was intended to pave the trail from whence I came, the feather, to show me the direction I should go.
Art at LDF

Arthur - on the art of Living

Our lives, each of us, are like perfectly tuned instruments…objects of intrigue in our stillness, but exquisitely beautiful when played among the symphony of life. When I go, the strings may snap and wood may warp…but the music is indelible. Go ahead and make a beautiful sound.

Love is Fierce -

Love is Fierce - if you stand in it’s way, it will not swerve.

I have learned in life that sometimes truth (even our own) is largely a function of how well we calibrate and hone the instruments of self observation. I suppose it’s “how” we look at ourselves, more than “what” we see.

Happiness - Water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.

I hear so many exchanges about “happiness” here in the amphitheater of social media. It is everywhere spoken – so much, that we fail to take a breath as we speak of it – it fills space with an abundance like oxygen, yet we suffocate as if it is absent altogether. Ironic. Herman Hesse wrote, “…happiness is a how, not a what; a talent, not an object…” I subscribe that happiness is the cause, not the effect; and still the “best” flavor of happiness seems to finish with a taste of gratitude on it. I find it odd that we know ourselves least, when we are confounded by why we are so happy and to whom we should be thankful. Ah, it is “I” that am the cause of happiness…so “I” am the effect! Take time to listen to what is inside, least spoken.

One evening, I came upon a Lovely Dreaming Fox - I paused and spoke, “Fox, imagine if water were happiness and you were a fish…would you sooner die drowning, than from thirst?” The fox stirred and thought for a moment… “Clearly, in either case, I would be miserable as a fish, which only reminds me of how happy I am to be a fox…”

How Parafoxical.

The Heart of the Matter

“Go away,” I hiss, as I coil in the shadows, slowly and broodingly licking my wounds.
If you are to love me, then do so forcefully to spite the resolve of my injury, but you must not love me for the well of hope that flourishes below my scars.
If you must speak to me, then squelch the pain in my voice with deafening cold volume – you cannot harmonize with the melody that I keep muted.
I will not stay with you to be loved for what you see in me, you may only love me for what I show you. So if you are of keen sight and intuition, and can feel the joy and love within me, dull your senses – and repress such imaginations.

You see, at some point, an unattended injury, an unforgiven transgression, will roost proudly within the cage of our being - doing little else but blocking sunlight – in essence, as “victim” you become the ward of will power. Enough time has passed, and you remain only a victim because you coddle the victim, spite the victim, mute the victim, hide the victim, and turn the knife in the heart of your own creativity. You have willed the victim. You are the benefactor of all you will to be.

Understanding Never

I never gave up calling your name,
it was just done through the tremendous space of silence.
So when you did not answer,
I understood…

I never betrayed my hopes for you,
it was just done through the faith I maintained toward those I loved.
So when I found they were not you,
I understood…

I never doubted myself,
it was just done to encourage my search for truth.
So when I found one drop of certainty in an ocean of doubt,
I understood….

You came to me in all names
It was my silence that spoke to your soul without condition…
So when our lips met,
You understood me.

Through your faith in me,
You always followed close – gathering tears on trails I’d blazed for others
So when the light in my eyes illuminates your own path
You will understand me.

Even in a river of endless possibilities,
You will be quenched by one discovery, left in a curling eddy of love…
While, fathomless currents of truths,
Disappear as myths over the edge of disbelief.

Mysteries Need Not Be Mysterious

You enter me through mysteries
That come to rest inside my heart
Like obsidian shadows from another soul
You brush gently along within me,
Softening luminescence -
an intuition of who we are – not told
You breath, Leaving a trail of nostalgic aromas
Of honeysuckle and dew on the moss
You glisten along the nexus of moment to moment

Like pearls strung together and touching sweetly
Clattering like chimes, pattering
A string of quiet satin kisses
that go on incompletely
From distances beyond what may be measured
With provenance in the tears of angels
On pillows of time
I dream awake, entranced
I enter you, through mysteries
that cannot be seen, not blind

And while bells don’t ring it clear to us
They blend and blend…and blend
To glow from brilliant eyes –
low chimes sound like mysteries not mysterious.

Rose Speak

the color and bloom of a breath when you speak,
I curl around every petal
to see you as a daffodil
would only be to settle

no, I think thou ar’t a rose
In a garden rooted in love
drawn deep down from a blood red heart
blessed by a morning dove

Morning Mischief

I woke to the mischief of morning
sneaking playfully up the stairs
Now I’m not quite sure as I think of it,
But I’m thinking you were there.

Something lithely climbed into the bed
and lifted a curl of hair
I felt the lightness in my head
With a breath, but without a care.

Just like dew on a blade of grass,
Is a tear from the morning air.
Cried from the eye of tender wolf moon
Who Found it’s halo was not there.

That’s how I felt, floating on the nexus
Between consciousness and sleep
An apprehensive acrobat
Do I cross or do I leap?

But, trouble in my bedroom today
Was not what it might seem
Because as you taunted me from sleep
I awakened to a dream.

The Question to Your Answer

Love appears before we ask
To bless the future, heal the past.
Gleaming with wisdom of unspoken choices
It patiently waits for the sounds of our voices.

It quells the fears of space and time
Forever onward, leaving no one behind.
From soft glowing eyes to flames of emotion,
Melting horizons and stirring the ocean.

It teases the mind into taking a leap,
Empties our breath, filling dreams as we sleep
It tricks the heart and draws a tear
Yet sweetly sings in the darkness of fear.

And though two paths may seem the same,
The journey of love will forever change.
Shining one light on the rest of our lives
The answer is knowing it always arrives.

Do I

This moment shall never be forgotten
Here on, the first in the endless sequence of
Breathless pirouettes that lie before us
like the promised sunsets.

This moment will never be forgotten
The last in the progression of a gently walked trail
Dappled with the pattern of footprints, some solitary.

This moment will never be forgotten
Like the link in a chain that tethers our past to the unfolding future,
It is the capstone of continuity, a harbinger of perpetuity

Of All moments that I will ever remember
are those that are always next,
that wait like the new woken eyes
of dreaming foxes.

Kissing Andromeda

There is a fat mad woman
Her head pokes through burlap.
Andromeda’s prodigy
In my space, poking me with her pen.
Her lips are flapping, smacking spittle,
Waxy smears on her chin,
A protruding peach pit knob.
Drained and un-kissed lips
Wrap tight over warm pink gums.
Too late, she sees me
Abandoned by gravity,
Lost focus in her black melton.
She pauses, closes her eyes,
with sighs, breaths me
into a hail of dislodged teeth,
spewing dust tails
like cold, crazy comets.
Andromeda sways and lurches.
Our tongues touch and flicker,
While I’m mouthing
Deep muted thoughts of madness.

It's All About Teeth

Drenched – 1 part wine, 2 parts anticipation;
Waking up to 5 parts sensibility.
Morsels of Fritos and homemade chocolate chips,
Wedged and fermenting in the crags of my molars;
and it’s back to the brush;
Truth hisses and stands steaming
in the temporary halt of its journey through time;
locked to the ground and swaying as I write it.
The “now,” there is the cork of the matter. Pith.
We run ahead of ourselves, and look back
asking about the series of nows,
passing by, swelling, and then disappearing like jet contrails.
Is it truth or is it me as the sum of all the truths.
Tiny pre-summer ants,
Navigate battlefields on the sidewalk,
skirting around the shadows of flattened pistils and stamen.
I run over this plexus of stems and petals –
each day, the pink ripening to saffron
then burnt sienna then blackening on the curling edges.
Ah I run, and you run the crazy out – run the sagacity out.
Would be nice to share the dumb obfuscated silence
that only exhaustion brings; faint breath sounds,
rather than these words
that beat at the gates
and burst out like bats from the Carlsbad Caverns.

I’m feeling battish,
dipping mental bread in the sparkles of crimson
left behind in your steps,
as you ambulate over esplanade and dirt trail
the flavor makes me ostensibly awake,
but sensibly tired.
So I sleep, with clean teeth.

Ice Fissures

Spheres of air are trapped in the fibrous fissures.

A million ends of cilia resonating in my ear,

Vibrating my mind down a silent gauntlet of blurred memories.

The tether of vision slips the loop of modesty

And goes slack over a hemisphere of abdomen.

A sunbath besides a glass of naked ice, beneath a cobalt blue sky.

From behind a strangled trellis, your body fades into view,

Like a frosty exhale from the broken seal of a meat locker.

You split the air with the velocity of katydids

Teeming in the dogwoods.

Another ice cube alarms and cracks open

Just as your bathrobe falls to rest around those winged feet.

I retrace the white terry cloth contrails up the contours of your body

To where I imagine gravity pulling it off those wax smooth shoulders.

Stepping out of a plush pile of white onto the cool decking,

You just stand there, like a melting stalagmite,

Only with a bit more contrapposto,

Lightly browned and accumulating a glistening of sweat.

I hear the purling of water as you wade in.

The edge of the glass is tilted over my lip,

And through it, I can make out your rippling image,

 As another ice cube hisses and then snaps

Time Bitten Memories

Rhododendron and fresh mown zoysia grass,
Fragrant halos that come undone,
Fumes of creosote oozing from poles
Sweating tar under a scorching sun.

Sap on sodden pine needles
Glow wistfully like amber tears
That fall through vaporous piles of leaves
Decaying beneath layers of years.  

Oil stained sand behind a gas station,
Dew soaked chat on the tracks,
Draining colors of autumnal dusk
Into after bedtime black.

Solar apparitions in purling glass
Diffuse through Venetian curtains,
Star chip white bespeckles the night
Where no warmth of color is certain.

Splinters of hope and anguish
Peel like paint off the ironwood transom
Of my family’s boat, set low in the water,
While our spirits hold fast to the stanchions.

Our mother’s love playfully chases us
Through the biting measures of time,
Silhouettes run and ripple down rows
Of linen memories that dry on the line.

Gadaffi, Diamond, and Me in the Basement

Neil Diamond can save the world…woke up this morning from a dream in which Muammar Muhammad al-Gaddafi is living in my childhood home basement. It is a finished basement, with a low ceiling, and it smells like the faint flatulence of cinder block.   So, Muammar, he sits there silently for days on a metal folding chair besides a vinyl covered card table with some bottles of water, Pez, and some old fashion donuts on a paper plate.  He is mostly still, looking up once in a while to reflect on something distantly beyond the corner of the basement and then he looks down to jot some notes on a scratch pad.  I’ve hesitated some tries, but I cannot engage him. One day, a song begins to play on the radio – but the acoustics in the basement are clear like I was hearing it in my head; I start looking at him (non-amorously) and I start to sing, “…hhhands - touching hands —- reaching out—-  touching me, tuh-ching YOU…” and then he stirs and turns his head to look at me, at first like an old steel shed riding mower, his engine sputters and then he kicks over and he begins to mouth the words meekly escalating into full bravado, “Sweet Caroline, DAH DAH DAH, good times never seemed so go, SO GOOD - SO GOOD - SO GOOD…I feel inclined….DAH DAH DAH…” and he speaks over the song, “I remember LISTENING to this when I was MUCH YOUNGER…!”

The Genie is out of the bottle, I recommend we start blasting “Sweet Caroline” over the war torn regions of the world - where rickety old tyrants and despots can listen and reflect and turn over like old riding mowers…. (HEY, I SAID IT WAS A DREAM!!)

Harvest (in progress)

It was the Autumn of our lives
A breath, a breeze, a voice
Aging planks, abandoned ploughs,
Reaps options,
and sews a choice

And so the logic is stressed
As one and one yields one.
Whether we stroll
or trudge in from the cold
We arrive bountiful in a boundless home.

In a test of trust, is a trace of rust
trailing tears down a face of steel
With the season at low
I waited for snow
Pacing wish trails through a fallow field.

For a kiss becomes the fabric
Held together by seams of faith
When Winter is done
The foxes will run
Softly in vernal equinox landscapes.

The earth turns in a moment beneath us
While the sparrow flies sweetly alone
Past the larks
And into our hearts
Now empty where our crops had grown.

We’ll gently cast seeds along furrows
Through summer warmed soils at sunset
Safe in the ground
To emerge with a sound
Of a choir that brings in our harvest.

Lovely Dreaming Foxes

We agreed at 3am on this one thing…we were silently pondering in the darkness; soul kisses and caress cast sparks around us like embers flicked from the flames, soft floating down in the blackness, like crying stars or what could be the eyes of lovely foxes falling asleep in the forest.  She says what I am thinking, she always does this, “I love you, isn’t enough as an expression, to convey what is going on inside me."

Lying there exposed below the weight of the cosmos, I close my eyes, imagining my curled up dreaming foxes, when she appears; clarity in crisp blue jeans, poised with hips sweeping up imaginings from the forest floor.  My lover is standing on a cold brick sidewalk of a city affixed firmly to the soles of her black suede boots, as if the earth would fall out from beneath us if I were to lift her up.  Strokes of mahogany hair, with striations of brushed brass.  Her eyes seek the depths of mine making me a mystery to even myself, and they were like the hematite pupils of lions looking out from holes in the foliage of a verdant jungle. Our gaze meets gently, and then rips open the promise of time, expelling a breeze, and little parachutes of hope float off like soft threads from dandelion blooms. 

Where does our love go today my dear?  Oh, how she stood there in the frozen sparkle of air while her warm, moist breath slowly spiraled out and suspended around her lips. I could feel the spires of frost that nearly had moments on her tongue before they melt in that mouth. I love her so much, that my imagination cries for a voice – beating the chest of eternity for just a shaved second of time before it disappears into the clouds of passion.  I wanted to just walk up and inhale that mist – arriving on a voice that came on the crest of sigh after sigh…  I followed the contours of her hips, she spun around toward me and the moment flashed and froze – like a spirit swallowed up by the darkness.

Bone gripping, I shake with awareness, its presence is lulled from the shadows, sucking the dampness from our skin, leaving us brittle and shivering…the presence of another is called for.  Cold makes us lovers, narrowing that space through presses…bodies fall into the sheets…warmth from sun flees, and our bodies are drawn together.

Trails of life in the crystal powder, white nights, desert, colors seen in the moonlight, tree limbs, dendrites encased in blue crystal immortalize.

The Messenger

I slip an arrow from the quiver
Oh last messenger please deliver,
This note I’ve written from my heart
And without which, I’m only part  “
I licked the feathers, drew the bow
Closed my eyes and let it go.
I hear the fibers resonate
A gentle sound for such a fate
Point, then shaft, then feathers fly
A line of hope across the sky
I open my eyes but lose its sight
A glowing arrow, in waning light
Wishing all its time aloft
I’m unaware the note slips off
Falling gently through the air
It softly finds an archer standing there
Drawing arrow and preening feather
She pauses and begins to read the letter
A kiss of words to hush the shiver 
Returning her arrow to its quiver.
In her heart, she bears the note
While my heart longs for what it wrote
Oh messenger please hear my prayer
Return my note with an archers care.