Inspired by those inspired by those inspired

A broken heart is in want of that one healing treasure, like a frenzied moth to die in the candle flame. There is a painful longing in both - heart and moth - for the same return. Let us tread patiently through the ruins to find the bounty we’d once buried.

The Baobab

All are in repose.

"Under the Boabob Tree" by artist, Carol Howard, Photography

Reddening sun sinks under the will of the earth,
Melodiously drowning into the molten horizon.
My heart gasps in harmony,

“Take me with you.”

Long and low, the shadows of the ancient baobab tree
Yawn and crawl toward the east.
The Baobab, two thousand years older than the father of Qasim,
Says, “I have seen some things; I have felt the slow hand
of many a weary wanderer. ”

These dendritic trees are upside down,
their roots suspended 10 meters up in the Saharan air
cylindrical trunks plunging down, down
into the throat of the earth.

Lions with bellies swollen, roll over in a heap
Exhaling the scent of steaming meat, sweeter than the baobab flower.
Whiskers stained red with blood are tended to by busying flies
They slumber, claws retracted and kneading through lion dreams.

Sated and in repose, the blood is too busy in my belly;
dreams, come without words to carry their ardent meanings.
So that any beings with a tranquil heart and absent mind
Are free to drum with Jilbran and Bayazid.

A Hundred Ways

A hundred ways
to remember the nameless,
stand between the seeker
and that one never to forget.

Ninety-nine abandoned attributes
linger in the faint attar of imbued nostalgia,
wrenched in the twist
of the implacable iron wood.

The variegated visage of the beloved
dissolves within distraction,
revealing the empty path of veracity
to maundering mendicants.

These, collecting the dust of true essence
on the trailing skirts of their khirqas.
Lives bead and flow down a pillar of paraffin
Rendered free by the heat of a flame
Dancing wild on the tip of a wick.

Lovers come undone;
Into river runs of melted awareness,
convening at the coast of consciousness.

Surrendering to the sea
Where seven continents of meaning marry.

worthy to love

When you know yourself – I mean truly know

the bone and sinew holding you upright in the mirror. 

From felted creases along folded chits of memory

to the dogeared pages of emotional reminders –

when your margins are filled with faded scribbling...

when you know what ails you

and you stop selling it as fodder for attention...

then, you learn to be loved.

Prodigal lovers sweep in like gales

Fraying the tips of each others sails.

These careless wave runners of contraband

Capsize and drown as a woman and man.

Love travels deep in the hulls of a human

yet we are unseaworthy vessels

for such precious cargo.

Tend to the cracks in the architecture

Of bridges that it starts to stir

Be the splash when the glaciers calve

and plummet into the surf.

Love me like you're the lost puzzle piece in my identity. 

What we are unable to discover within ourselves,

we find in the love of another...

Moan with self awareness, crumple into mass  

Fold and melt into flowing glass.

Tie into braids of confluent streams

And cool into crystals of adamantine.

Untitled - Unfinished

Untitled / Unfinished

I chanced to meet a ghost writer at my door,

her transportation failed just down the road

A sojourning doppelganger of sorts

…an elusive reflection who in need of a tow.

Transmuting words to wine,
We both sip time to time,
‘Til they foment catharsis
And melt to sublime.

Breathless in afterglow,
From Insouciance and hubris,
Words weather to sediment
That we’ll climb to the precipice.

And once at the summit
We’ll cast words adrift
Toast our glasses to flying
And then leap from the cliff.

I read your words by day, to skirt the wiles of your will
                   but I know your heart by night.
Leave me, charlatan, to my waking hours, I know who’s ghost you are
why haunt my spirit in it’s sanctum by the light.

I contravene with tears in the corners of your eyes,
And push them back, and kiss their lids
And send them off to hide.
In dark whispers, calling you and calling you
To join them by their side.

Why must you take me with you, is this protest not enough?
My importune to tender ears, “I’ve things to do, I must!”
Still you wrap yourself around my world, an overflowing chalice
And turn the wine to liquid gold, the clever alchemist.

Overland: Fight the Poet, Love the Master

Morning brings a clearer vision
as the sun makes its assent
And dwells in the blue
Before it’s journey overland.
Under one God,
Our small animations
approximate gestures
of lives arranged
by a benevolent hand.
How gentle their hearts beat
that resound overland.
Charged with the blessing
For every last man.
That rage in our dreams
And to close the abyss;
Conflict along the Ring of fire.
Love binds souls that blend to conspire.
What is that conspires within us
to create events and then ask why?
I’m fighting the poet,
So, who is loving the master.

Poems in Pieces

(April 23, 2013)

The explosion, the cloud, the light.
Love is an explosion...we are shrapnel.

I am able to see so clearly…

those who drive the cold steel pitons

into the splendid cracks of my being,

so they might safely ascend to realizations

at the summit of my aging symbol. 

Abandoned spikes,

sparkle in the seams of the rock face

to which they clung,

My visage, streaked with chalk

from the clinging hands of … love. 

These are the young, the fickle,

who exalt love into a tyrant…

love’s hand is like that of a hidebound father. 

It whips us into shape, so they say…

Lo, merrily we take its sternness. 

My guilt grows like dandelion

for those whom I embrace –

that they never know when to turn from this lifecycle.

They grasp at rays from heaven,

and oh do they see light everywhere raining down…
it’s all for them. 

Such hope and wonder flourishes,
and I till the soils; in a blind and hazy fury

…and then from the soil,
I bring blades of buttercup
and such a flavor for love gathers.   

They stretch beneath my saffron umbrella
and laugh at the bees,

but for we that shine-out like yellow flowers,

yet never shined upon,

we weary of these morning dandelion parades.  

Turning out the beasts

I remember turning my horses out to pasture…and they’d light out to the furthest corners as fast as milkweed fairies on the wind.    These beasts of burden are stubborn like my heart is resolved at times.  But so beautiful to watch – power suspended in the tender grace of whatever wild things dream.  And you’ve flung open the gates of wonderment, and I’m casting prose like wildflower seeds into soulful winds…and they fly like confetti foil into the sky and disappear to the west.  So when you next see blinking stars on a field of cobalt blue, or scintillation on the surface of a stream, know that it’s my poems, chased to the furthest corners of your mind by the whip snap sound of my mighty pen.  I’m just resting on the high fences, watching my words grazing in the solace of your heart which catches tears from almondine eyes.

Life slips through these open hands

To a fallow path that slowly fades,

Trembling as my faith is turning,

to distant skies of cobalt blue,

winking stars and quiet yearning.

Dreamers casting seeds of hope

into the winds of fertile love

and off they fly to times gone by

Lost, with no one there.

I’m suspended in your animation,

But seeds left in the ground I cover

grow to obscure my past.