2nd Annual

My second book of poems! This one is titled Dryline Boundary.

Only 6 days from order to door. Blurb is sure fast!

Such Remorse

She does not see the deep, wide ocean
beneath her feet, full of savage things
that nip at heels and turn her wide eyes
into pools of memory amidst
the seaweed locks of hair her skin
has grown.

It is this untamed wilderness
that entreats the soul to break free
of the unending barbed wire fences
of which our minds are so fond.

Every discover is, really,
How do I make myself free?
repeated again and again and again.

No wonder we cry with such remorse
when we knit ourselves into
bone and skin once more.

The unknown into being

What do you know, my friend,
of ancient texts and sacred signs?
That the whole of life was known
and lost again
in these white deserts and mountain climbs.

This holy flower knows naught else
but the pattern of the universe
set into motion from our dreams.

Dream well.
Dream large.
Dream the unknown into being.

Convoys

There is a path between these blades
lined with watchfulness and quiet wonder
through which I will journey back to myself
in ever increasing infinities.

Even as my steps move me away from you,
you are the fabric that has bound these feet,
wet and sodden from the day's humility
and limitless joy.

Thank you for these teachings, these brave
convoys of unerring love.

Ruby

I dreamt of you last night -
14, beautiful,
Your face your mother’s.
And not.
Some mother face we’ve never met
but bright and full of love.

You knew I would come,
announced it with a smile.
And all those in between years
when we didn’t meet
were forgotten in that look you gave –
all encompassing,
joy.

You Think Just So

I don't usually preface any of my poems, but I thought I might say a small word about this one. That word is: Ambien. I sometimes write after the Ambien has kicked in. This is the weird kind of stuff that popped out the other night.
************************************************

Sometimes it is magical to be suspended in someone’s mind
like a cobweb forgotten in the dusting,
still taking notes on the day to day.

Day 26: “She still sets her glass on the edge of the sink
I think she hopes it will fall and shatter, the pieces
Some mess of an abstract artists brush
Insinuating that a thought went into the destruction.”

But really, the more authentic tale
is that their minds are just tangles and warring traumas
fighting for release and shockingly absent of any documentation.
No numbering systems for the blind behaviors which, after awhile,
are tedious and dull.

Shall I tell them, “You are free! You are free!
No longer required to brush your hair just so,
or react just so,
or think just so.

"The whole world of thought and connection await you!
Whatever colors you want may go together,
there is no one here who
will tell you different."

Most minds are these tangles.
But some, these ones I live for,
are great symphonies of light energy and flow -
passages of thought as beautiful as wild African sunsets,
endangered just so, too.

There are elegant strings of light
that move thought and emotion and body all at once.

But we cannot stay for long in these places,
they are only for the wild wild owner to wield.

Fine Sands

These things we thought were holding us together:

strong backs, bone and nerve, tendons and cartilage,

naked need, blood and vessel - they carry us only so far.

Two million beats, that's all we get.

It's a strange sympathy

broken down by weight and sun,

born into a new light

by eclipses and precious seconds of dark.

Run headlong and strong, my love!

Run into the waves on the edges of us

where we are battered into fine sands

and stripped down to nothing more than the bright,

burning essence of what we always were -

two million beats to start again.

Into the Folds of Me

This place
this place that burns me
with a name,
the quiet sigh of golden field
and pale lilac sunset clouds.

All these hills do
is climb gently into the folds of me,
ripples that span lifetimes
and bloom gently
when pressed by trodden foot
into crop circles
and tilled earth.

Stalks askew,
I leave paths for you to find.
Through time you must puzzle
us together again.

I do my part,
limited as this flesh has left me
in these burning hills,
to rip a veil from the space between us,
from this separation I have imagined.

How cruel,
in the face of this beauty,
that absence is what
our minds would birth.

Solar Flare

These things we push away from us
dirty, scarred, ripped and torn
are half shells of truth
stripped down to the bone,
their wings now debt.

These learned, sidestepped paths
that took me down to those hollow veins
and shone in a grimy light
the ways in which I was
Not.

Not this.
Not this.
Or that or this,
knocking every one down with splintered bats
from sidewinder curves
and misses
and outs.

These will not be soul-breaking labors.

The births that mark time on this strange tree
have no power to make me less,
only more true
more true
and more true.

Every revelation
a solar flare of deeper law
that brings me home.

Hafiz, again

This

Sky

Where we live

Is no place to lose your wings

So love, love

Love.

Watch this, too. So, so beautiful.

Holding Form

There are seams in the drywall
and dimpled, popped-out nails
resentful of holding things together,
straining against their purpose.

And then there is me -
succumbing with every stuttered beat,
every line of light.

Everything holds form around me
in divine recognition.

It is the most joyous work
I have ever done.

An Abiding Yes

It is a deep sinking into the earth
it is energy, raw and primal
you cannot dip your toes, only dive

so you must be ready
as ready as you can be.

There are hands to hold
and ways to find
but this bottomless grasp,
this symbiotic link

it cannot be forged.

It is an abiding yes,
pure intent.

More Than Either Or

the truth is
there are more than these two choices
more than either/or

branches upon branches,
thousands of doors
leading back to the one way.
every word I write takes me there

and you -
you bring me there, too.
every meeting a new lesson
in the ways of myself.

thank you, my teachers.

The Great Pulse of the World

I think maybe the path
and the trees and the leaves
know me better than man.

They have no business to worry
no advertising save pollen
set free in spring's breeze.

I do not compete here
in this cacophony of woods.
The brook and stone
and moss covered floor
let me take of their green
and ivy'd shores
even as I bleed for them
and share my warmth.

There is no contract writ
between our beating hearts,
only the great pulse
of the world
to rule our breath.

Everything Shines

I spend days
trying to dig out
some semblance of a beautiful thought
excavate it like an emerald
smuggled thoroughly
hidden safely
in a dark pocket.

I'm seeing it all wrong.
all wrong.
I only have to look at it
to make it shine.

attention.
This must be the key.

everything shines
when it is truly seen.

There Is a Sleep That Rests In Our Bones

There is a sleep that rests in our bones,
independent of time,
waking only when the fullness of life
has brightened our door.

It is the demon we learn to love,
the spectre and weight of the price for this flesh,
the patient of grief who claims us all in our turn,
the knowledge that sorrow can't stay.

Anchor Stone

I can already feel myself
tethered down to you,
this strong anchor stone
in my shifting sands.

How do you navigate me,
as solid as you are,
when I am changing thus:
everyday new?

Maybe you are the blade
that catches my tempest,
transforming movement
into the stored energy of us.

I do not have to name it
only claim you as mine,
this weighted
solid
anchor of love.

Walt

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward . . . and nothing collapses

***

I swear I see now that every thing has an eternal soul!
The trees have, rooted in the ground. . .the weeds of the sea have. . .the animals.

I swear I think there is nothing but immortality!

-Walt Whitman, excerpts from Leaves of Grass

The Great North Road

Where did I begin?
From some Great North Road,
through the womb?
That is the place from which I come.

And here.
Here.
Here there is light in every direction
an undulating river of light that plots my course.
There are stone walls to guide the sun and
the Great Arrow
that leads me home.

But who am I?
I am a builder of clay
some boulder of time
who erodes so slowly,
so carefully.
Every intent gets woven
into this vitreous stone
which,
upon breaking,
has made the proper sacrifice
so that I may begin again.

The Ledge

We all rest
on this ledge
believing a lie
of brokenness

How long until
we do not forget
that we are whole
we are one
we are free

Hafiz

Just sit there right now
Don't do a thing
Just rest.

For your separation from God,
From love,

Is the hardest work
In this World.

(excerpt from "A Cushion for Your Head", The Gift by Hafiz)

Fulgerite

In this haze, this
morning of loss,
what would you have me surrender?
When faced with
this road
and that
do I choose this lightning struck trail,
so seemingly ruined?

Do I place
one
searing
footstep
into the burning house
and let it consume me,
rid me of all passion,
all suffering?

I say,
if sorrow is the price I must pay
to see flames of stone
built into this heated land,
I will walk plainly
through fog bank and rain
and let only my knowing
bring me to this House of Fire.

Consumption is a god's task.
I surrender the burden easily.

This Body of Time

This body of time
that moves outside of me,
a great flowing ocean
of adamant possibility -
tighter I clasp
white-knuckled and grasping
like holding on to air
without wing or lung.

It is all beautiful
immortal
precious.
Nothing will escape,
least of all
me.

Light at Last

This cairn that buried me
these thousand years
is cracking,
freedom, inescapable
and fearsome,
bites at my heels.
An angel archaeologist
chips silently away at
petrified bits,
flesh and bone made
stone
and precious gem -
a shining prism
turned to light at last.

A Stronger Heart

There are waves
that touch me in this emptiness,
great forms of light
and meaning.
I struggle to sort ill intention
from blindness
and to accept that consequence
disregards them both.

I fight to learn how
to take joy as it comes,
to travel that lemon yellow
stream of light
to a source I know as myself.

I would not
that I had less Sight
but stronger feet,
a stronger Heart
to witness the blindness of men.

"Go out into your heart. . . "

Summer was like your house: you knew
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.
Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.

-Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke's Book of Hours
(Translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

Parent Arms

Comfort comes in such strange languages -
the arch of a pendulum's swing,
the faces of forgotten gods,
the gentle sway of smoke in this stranger home.

But,
it comes because I ask,
my reach short as a child's -
the Universe unable to do nothing less
than respond with parent arms,
gather me close
and whisper love in my ear.

Dryline Boundary

In the woods of my heart
I wait for you.
It's some promise I made
many lives past
echoing through valleys
and broken streams
over cracked crags
crossing my dryline boundary.

You are the squall line of tempest
that hems me in,
the strong hand that shutters other storms
who might swallow me whole.

Together we are the earth and sky
the wind and the scrying rain.
All you are settles into me,
even from this distance.

You are the coming love,
my gravity wave.

An Unexpected Grace

I am far out to sea,
newly wrought from when I had you last.
I have been reborn, reshaped
and set to sail into new currents
yet
I mourn you still.

My phantom pains are sneaker waves,
the past colliding with the matter I have now become.

1600 days since you were taken and torn
but in your place
(that emptiness where you once lived)
filaments of the sun have been strung,
mapping out a blueprint of sorts,
a new topography that lights the core of me.

It is an unexpected grace.

What could not grow in your waters,
what I could not birth then
now escapes through my skin in finely stranded echoes of light,
an indirect labor
in the harbors of these new lands.

No Coda

Your name is my prayer.
Surely gods tire of this
single syllable I speak.
It is the only refrain I afford,
no coda,
nothing repeats -
just the thousands of ways
I can speak your name.

Terminus

There is a quiet, dense
secret
forming inside me.

It is the key to all hidden things.

Somehow, mysteries
now shimmer faintly for me
at the edge of sight -
a world of shadowed,
irridescent, gossamer threads.

Ostensibly, there is some door I pushed,
not knowing its destination,
whose threshold has, not wrongly,
brought me to myself.

She is a flawed, grasping,
Divine thing
called forth from fevered nights.

Mystery no longer, she is Known.

She is who has been beneath my skin
all this time.

The Line You Drew

I am the water that covers the line you drew,
a puddle that overflows
to become stream and river
and in my time I make a divide,
a separation you must cross
to find me again.

The Curfews of Man

Confess me,
fallen as you are,
all waxen limbs
and feather thoughts.
Together we are
the pure brilliance of youth
dying a knowing death.

On planted cords
your absolution overflows me.
Oppression releases in torrents
and new seas are made
in the hour.

Our merging hearts
become the new light,
a new world bound bright
whose boundaries
reach further
than the curfews of man
can contain.

Nothing But the River

(for Jena)

Nothing can stay in this place you made
for we are all larger,
in thought,
in quark and motion,
than space could ever hold.

Nothing can live in this sameness
where breath is stopped
and change is choked back,
for every particle of us
moves
and becomes.

What was, what is, what comes
is not more or better,
is not lesser or dead.

See the water of your hands.
The truth is that.
There is nothing but the river
the rocks
the water
the white capped rapids
the seemingly placid depths.
They all travel
from this place to that place:
stream to sky,
rain to bush,
back again,
but never still.

Entrainment

I know of a silence
between hearth and wood.

It is tacit agreement
in the compounding math
that is the movement
between you and me.

The threshold cradles
5,000 acre cuts
of russet shade,
a creeping, liminal breath
and newly birthed facets
of ever-expanding matter.

It is the belly of stone. Mother.
It is that series of eternal moments
between heat
and ignition
in which rest the whole of our existence.

It is choice.
It is entrainment,
a willing burn,
contained
and radiant
inside fragile thought.

A Paid Genealogy

As the hazy dusk of twilight falls
and folds
into cathedral corners
of wing and bone,
all that you rend from me
is a pittance,
a paid genealogy.

The winter asks much more than dues
with its inching fingers
and sharp bites.
The call of the geese from the field,
the path to family
and away,
all these exact a more punishing price
than the memory of you
does
anymore.

And I do not know how to worship
that revelation
more than in this moment.

This Liminal Place

I do not know
what it was that shattered me so,
errant breath
whose will would overtake my own,
only that I closed
as morning glory in full night
when Seeing
should have saved me so.

The world gave name to him,
the one who sawed the chord I would sing,
and instead silence was the price I paid,
a score of years
without breath to become
that which ether and submission
had borne.

In silence, then,
it is not surprising to note,
is release undertaken once again.
A stillness in which no weight is carried hence.
This liminal place
in ever-stretching hands
holds every damaged salve
in conflict no more.

Ever Turning

There are spheres in the world
that contain the whole of who we are:
the womb that carries us,
the sky of night by which loving voices
sing to us,
the cup of palm,
the grace of skull
and forming bone,
the round tone of voice which paints
such heartbreak of love,
the wheel of time,
the curve of ripened fruit
that lets us imbibe unbroken summers.

These will twist and turn us,
heating all sides
until we are encompassed by fire
in a wave of creation to which
we are born
ever perfect
ever turning
never ending.

Burned Blue

Every one of our words were burned -
flame-ignited, smoke and ash,
not a single syllable to be seen.

Only heat remained,
inexorable
curling licks of it
passing through our hands.

And finally,
when the world would let us stand
for each other,
naught but burning remained,
our words whisked away in smoke
again,
into a witnessed fire
that burned blue at the edges.

I have a book!

Blurb.com is awesome. I now have my own little book! It's called Starling Barge.

Super Nova

I am feeling sick in my cocoon.
It is fever hot
and painful to the touch.
There is nothing
save movement,
everything becoming.
I
myself
me
I am the same,
at one with the walls that hold me.
But the wings are forming.
The soon intolerant touch
of the earth
holds sway no longer.
I transform into delicacy
and flight.
Every incarnation on my way
is torment, though.
Molecular super novas
burn clouds of sight
from old eyes.

The gravity of light
now holds my life
captive
and free.

The Mire and the Field

It is not about
escaping the mire
in which you find yourself.

It's about squishing your toes
deeper into the mud,
grasping the reeds,
letting the panic of constriction
shorten your breath
and quicken your heart -

and finding peace
within that sunken stance,
finding Spirit there with you -

that which teaches us
not only that the mire and you
are One
but that there is dry ground
and wide field
and that
you are One with them, too.

Crucible

The world is what winnows me away.
I come in to you,
burned by the outside.
I come in to you
reduced to my elements,
a shining Truth.
I come in to you
and hope you are not blind today.

Mariner

I do not ask the light to come,
this force that breathes life
and beauty
into this moment
but arrives with quiet progression.

It carries the house of joy
and a key to unlock the rooms
of distant oceans.

I cannot say where the light takes me,
where I sail on these seas,
only that you are my destination.

The light brings me to you
and offers me up
in this time that runs short.

Our shrinking minutes
are shaped by your grace,
descending like motes on the sun's last rays.

And in the end -
my journey's maps,
my carrier waves?
They are vast
but hold nothing
when measured against you.

You are my end,
my joy,
my oceans,
my golden hour.

To See Such Light

Beneath the light
that turns me daily towards home,
a strange crucible has formed.

Between tire
and pavement
a collection of fall has consorted
and consents in time
to a mortar and pestle of sorts -
an end which brings
such heartbreaking memory to mind
that I drive not home
but deeper into
remembrance of love's first light
a decade past.

The smell and stain of tannin
has left me marked with you.

I breathe you in again
and out again
and see such light
as the leaves may bring.

Build Me a Sentence of Myself

I know this language.
I know these words.

They shape the curve of your lips
the arching brow
the rough nape of your neck
where the hairs are short
and tickle my palm.

The syllables fall like water drops
rolling easily along your hot skin.
I am lost in the language of you,
my native tongue
the pulsing recognition
of neurons
that never forget
the syntax
and pace
of your worried hush.

Build me a sentence
of myself
that we may unite
together
songs
of devastating love.
Our voice will still the ocean.

El Corazon Amarillo

I found a gold balloon
tucked safely in
your book of words.

You speak of yellow hearts
and foreign lands
and returning from the sea.

I know none of these things
but through your eyes.
Indeed,
I know very little.
I am still on shore
and wondering
what use I am.

I left this life once, you see -
a chance given,
my soul took its flight.
But still,
I linger, tethered
and no reason remains.

I am compacted ash
waiting for the rains
and wind
to make sense of me again.

Nameless Suns

There is a time
that is about stripping away
all from your life
that does not make you live.

There is a time
that is about paring down
and turning around
and down and back again
until all you have is a
worn circle of dirt
beneath bare feet.

There is a time
of peeling back your skin
and standing pink
under a burning sky
of falling friends
and ashes for homes.

There is a time
for all of this,
but it is
not
now.
Now is the building time,
now is the mending time,
now is the learning time.

Now is a slow creation
with skilled breaths
and cheated hearts that still love
and rusty voices
that never forget
how to weave matter
and thought
into nameless suns.

Misplaced

I have been
misplacing my pens
lately.

Or maybe I place them
and then move my self
to more empty locations.

Words are pouring in
like the sickness that came
in the night
but it doesn't get better.
They only beget more.

I hold them close,
the only children I will bear.
Though they are neither disease
nor child, truth be told.

They are Spirit.
They are Divine,
they are Neruda, Oliver, Rilke
following me home
in slim volumes
that sleep with me
on blankets of down.

They jostle as I reach
for the pen I cannot place
and whisper,
"More."

The Devil's Hand

It feels like the devil's hand
all fire and want
bubbling up from damned places.

All there is to do
is let it burn me down,
and find that silver flame,
the thin kite string back to me
and follow it out
of the dowsing waters.

And on the other side
I blink the ashes free
and find I am not lost,
just pink skin
and tired mind
but not destroyed at all.