Unfree Poem

A poem is a bird

in a gilded cage

a pining soul

on a weeping page.

Open the door

but still it stays

Close the door

and it flies away.

The mountain on your chest

Our messages, 

all of them past and present, 

but an ensemble of One beckoning source. 

It is true, 

how wind, the pen, 

and water, the scroll, 

will lay a volatile couplet, 

a brief fragrance, 

a ripple, a wave and tide. 

When the wind dies, what? 

The mountain on your chest 

is just the summit of the heart.


our whole lives we talk and write and chat and listen and question...chatter...  yet it's all divine expelling of a single existence.  We think we chat in multitudes, but it is merely God dancing on our tongues and fingertips.  And these things we write and say are so tenuous, fragile, fleeting - like the wind laying a ripple on the water...it could be a ripple, a wave or an entire huge tide...it matters not...because without the Wind (the one steady thing), there is no mark or sound left to see, read, or smell.

That huge burden of mind-speak that mounts on top of us, this mountain of sorrows (fountain of sorrows, I know), piles of vain-glory...are nothing but the summit our hearts must mount.

Written

When there is stillness, the Beloved enters like a mist.

I am disarmed of my words.

There are no empty pages to be found…and my pen has run dry.

The hours gaze from a clock with no face

and I am delivered from the clutches of time and space.

My eyes reflect light from that of a lantern held by a wayfaring messenger.

She says, "I am not writer, I am written."

On Wisdom

When the mind speaks, wisdom puts a finger to its lips, “Hush.” That I fail to find order in my life is evidence that I am seeking the means with my mind and not the ends with my heart. So, I place myself in the path of wisdom, with faith that “order” finds me before each next step taken.

The mind is like the moon. An illusion of beauty in the darkness of night, and an eclipsing silhouette arresting the day.

Wisdom is interrupted by the constant quest for order.

The mind is thimble afloat in a vast ocean of wisdom… riding low in the water.

In-between-ities

There are immeasurably small instants
in an immeasurable eternity.
These "in-between-ities" are where
we neither regret the moments "once-now-gone"
nor those "longed-for-to-happen."

It is the gracefulness of presence
when present.
There at the node of a lamniscate,
a unity so beyond you and I,
that even a "we' cannot be so fathomed.

Not here nor there,
nor now and never.

Coffee Shop Selfie

Anyone can stage a prolific book, a computer, salt and pepper butterscotch cookie, and a steaming cup of cappuccino – heart swirls and all. Photoshop it to misty tears. But really – what’s going on in this picture? Nothing. Nothing the heart can tell.

Why signs

Why look for signs? 

Why even expend an atoms effort to find them...

for we worry a mountain if we don't 

and doubt when we do. 

Nay, everything is everything; 

and I have faith in the signs I don't see. 

And the less I look with my eyes, 

the more I believe with my heart.

Death and LIfe share the same door

Whether abandoned by time or will, 

the rose will endure its falling petals, 

which reunite with the soil,

from which it grows again.  

Were I not to die, 

of what use, this life.

Recipient Becomes the Sender.

I’m just passing it along,

All has come - to become gone

But for a fleeting instant at most

love is a guest of an eager host

I become aware that sender I must be,

which is how it now arrives with thee

This golden dove, thy gaze, the time

Carried by messenger from the Divine

Over the Bizarre - this cloud passing by -

Is a trader’s exchange across a bartering sky

Tis only suspended by my arresting eye

Then off again, I let it fly

A poem, a song, a painful illness

Ecstatic whirling around the axis of stillness

Gone from gone, as gifts unwrap

What’s given is done, to be given back

Finding it’s way to hand and heart

By hand and heart once had a start

So you who arrive had come before

I saw another close a door

Waiting within a package sent to ourselves

arriving like stars in a hearts black well

I lean over the edge of introspection

Down to dark waters of a captive reflection

In the ripples of light and shadow I see

A present returned, and the present is me

Am I light emitted or light received

Where am I on the wheel of destiny

All I seek is its cycles center
Blessed reunion of recipient and sender

Inside out

How is that such vast encounters can be taken in by the small portals of our eyes and ears. Perhaps it is already within us - and it takes but a single ray of light to illuminate the entire temple of the heart. To see the world like this, is to turn oneself inside-out.

I asked myself, could it be that the altar of happiness is built on the ruins of sorrow?

…I mused an eon of my life one evening, on the purpose of existence and on what leaves me with the most certainty, those being both birth and death; as well as that which gives me the least certainty - the life that falls in between.  For, in my quest to understand the world, I am continually preempted by my own thought of what, in the meantime, I am to do in it.

We unfurl parchments of love, like recipes conjured through charts and maps by wayfaring spirits in their navigation of uncertainty; with it’s pendulous swells and troughs, writhing storms to the curved horizon of placidity. In our ecstasy or agony, whichever compels us to reach to the heavens for answers, from the black firmament, rains down the white light of stars.

Besotted with beauty, we invent our own answers – swinging angrily at the words, despairing, disillusioned or disinterested. It is not what we hear, but that we listen – “purpose” is the captain of our ship. The journey is long, and the captain seeks only the safe passage of moments in the timeless sea of uncertainty. The meaning of our lives is unveiled through the examination of purpose in others...the mirror of meaning.

I became deluded by my own idea that happiness is an infrequent preoccupation of life, a proverbial “comma” to a long-winded sentence; a quick paradise of dust kicked up by God stepping through a parched desert. I thought how a moment of happiness seems to pass so quickly and yet, how our disappointments seem to echo through deep valleys of consciousness.

As life progresses there is this proclivity to toil with the recollection of our sadness, leaving us amidst a talus of strife. I asked myself, could it be that the altar of happiness is built on the ruins of sorrow? That the happiness we deserve is measured by the high mark of our grief – layers for which we labor the years to build.

Dwell not in grief over friends and strangers, lovers and strays. Adam named us all in the dawn of the pre-eternal and we have all known each other for very, very long time, and yet nary a moment of mingling. These port-o-calls are neither long nor short - whether church bell at midnight, camel bell, or the wind whistling through the halyards of a listing ship.

Our lucubrating in any language, by keyboard or blunting pencil earns no more than the meaning of its pause. Mingle with the secret culture of those who form silence with their lips and tongues and whose punctuation is set deftly by deep and bespeckled eyes. The sextant of the soul navigates these stars and it takes but a gentle turn of the helm, to spin the heavens.

From the bow of my vessel, I see an Albatross, 'tis me; and that awareness is rooted in the depth of ages below my hull, not the duration of the encounter. My soul has sailed on many ships. Oh seekers of meaning, you’d sooner capsize and drown alone in a deep ocean of unspeakable love than slip safely across the shallow pond of dalliance.

Life drifts into the hallow sound of a departing reflection in my eyes. It sails not away, but deeper into the distance of my boundless ocean heart, where no beacon of mine, nor fair word will ever find.

let it lie, let it fly

A feather softly landed.
Let it lie.
'Tis an attribute of another name.
Eternal light,
Not intermittent flame.
When called through lips
A sound, a kiss.
When a breath says “love”
It’s lost to winds,
Only to land
if it flies again.

Sated Fierce Ones

There is a sweetness when we realize that all we seek on earth is only for temporary nourishment...the truth is in the dreams of the sated fierce ones. What gives the lion his strength is the softness of his dreams.

A Poems Flight from a Gilded Cage

sketchings for Unfree Poem

Writing spills off the tip of a diluted paint brush,
but the true color
is hidden in the bottom of the bucket.
Such is the same with humans.

Their authentic "hue" pools
in the undiluted depths of the heart.

We feel it when others dip their quills into the ink black wells, and write colorful stories from our own blood. We pray that the parchment of our soul is as pure as our artistic intentions.

Poems are palettes, not gilded cages - I no longer desire to own anything.  My words have broken out of the barn gate.  Where they go is God's will!

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A poem is a bird
in a gilded cage
of a pining soul
and a weeping page.

open the door
and still it stays
Close the door
and it flies away.

Sojourner

Across the surface, drag the hand
Knotted wood and obsidian.

Splinters sliver, skin sliced through,
The surface bleeds an ocean blue.

Stroke the metal torn and rusted,
pitted rock, lichen crusted.

Press the door oh sojourner,
press the surface ever more.

Slide your fingers along the crypts,
a three thousand year old obelisk.

Reach through water, place a kiss;
The face of God calls pious lips.

Press the door, it’s hinges hold
behind the surface, secrets told.

bleeding hearts

Hearts imbued with redolence

fill the garden with others sent…

…to pour their wine in waiting chalice

of servants drunk in sultans palace.

Fragrance comes before the rose,

then long after the petals close.

Following the scent of flower white

a nightingale came to rest one night.

Amongst the thorns she made her bed

there from her chest, the colors bled.

So the rose received its hue,

from the winged messenger of Allahu.

And Finally, We Sleep

Heart beat, let me breathe, “goodbye,”
A shooting star in her midnight sky.
Just one more breath for a candle flame
To slip the grasp of a love in vain.

Night curled bodies, pressed and warm,
Rose petal kisses to quell the storm.
We both knew, but still we held
Each other tightly, breaking spells,

Cast by those who came before,
And left behind an open door.
Now I’m lost on this path you chose,
So as I go, you’ll hear it close.

I’m not who I was, with this hurt inside
But I am who I am, and I never lied.
The painful carving of deliberate words
Your eyes could be such pretty swords.

To catch their flash in a glimpse of time
When I told myself, that you were mine.
I held you close, and close you dreamed
Of things so far away it seemed.

I close my eyes, my ears, my heart
Release your hand, and then depart.
Wake up Dulcinea, wherever you are,
Find your way home, before you dream too far.

A kiss that toppled the world

Out in the surly seas,

a tidal wave toppled out of the sky

conjured by the secret teamwork of  moon and sun,

from a once a gentle ripple,

And that, stirred by a wondering kiss

that broke the benign surface of time. White.

There in the perpetual midnight

souls surface and submerge

in the violent wake of love

Which lays out its victims

And then lifts them up

Drowning and reviving them all at once.  Black.

Like a deep red rose petal

gliding softly along a shining silk sheet,

rippling sinuously

In concert with an ocean breeze

careening through sheer blinds

in an unfastened window – Blue.

Waves lunge and finally collapse,

and roll up the thirsting sand, gleaming.

And the two, sand and water, slide back to sea

In a chorus of never ending crashing wave on wave,

The exhalation of sea foam, and the muffled chimes

Of churning shards of broken shells.  Yellow.

Other than sunlight and ocean air

Softening edges in the sea side room,

It is empty and thick with anticipation

My companion, until you come back.

For now, footprints on the beach

Only pass by.