You must not press forward into,
but draw back into abstraction.
With rest enough in its odd burrow
its wild beat will carry you your way.

A Skeptics Joyful Taste

It would take a formidable force
To keep you from being a good man.

We, us two, have come a long way;
Extended lengths of silence
For me to realize
We cannot truly be divided.

Yours is a voice that agrees with my existence;
It echoes well - through me.
Like a skeptics joyful taste of truth.

So now I remain humble - as I see
More clearly beyond you -
Understanding better your Master.


To Dad
2007

How we prop up the foolish - despite the evidence before us
and bury the ignorant - prior to investigation.

Adapted

Oh,
how I’ve adapted to my optimism
willing to accept life’s grander lessons
humble enough to recognize my own blessings
so to my pen I offer my present confession.

Oh,
how I’ve relied on my false stability
came to be convinced of my ‘honesty’
relying on a chemical support system, chronically
and now freed, thus far, into peaceful irony.


2003

I Am

I.
I am not everything I pretend to be. For
my heart wants me a Romeo, my soul
wishes me a poet, and my thoughts are
fooled, thinking me a god. This world
wants me to be tomorrow’s fallen angel;
to soak in its sorrow.

II.
Yesterday has insisted I carry its burdens,
as today is confused about where I dwell;
I myself, am closing my eyes with the
hope I shall sleep in peace, forever. I am
not everything I pretend to be.


1994

Still, Perfected

I can still write love poems.
Not just silhouettes and their assigned words.

I can still put you in the middle
After all the mechanical failures in our (connected) souls.
I can still offer you truth, on paper
Because I know something else of your existence;
I know where it glows -

I’ve seen better days, when the sparkle in your eyes
Makes for a formidable challenge -
To the twinkle of champagne.
I taste its sweetness with my heart
And bear it’s lightness on my tongue.

How these days of an unbroken chain, turned -
To cracked porcelain; sometimes we hurt.

Still, how I would take the broken pieces over the world.

Because the faith I find in my mortality - in us
Allows for simplicity. Even hidden -
This is why I can still write love poems.
For inside the words is where I find you, perfected.


To Heather
Circa 2002

A Poet

A poet is someone who speaks of ordinary things with tempting eloquence. Always trying to convince you that these things are greater or lesser than your senses say they are; much of it may be nonsense, simply wrapped well.

For you it will not make much sense. The purpose is the poets alone. For him it serves as therapy for a mind moving too quickly and a hand that moves twice that. He claims no obligation.

But still how beautifully the music of the soul accompanies - as the poet hijacks the written word and leaves behind his peace.

What is left - but a residue: Glints of silver dust. He calls it poetry; we take his word for it. And somehow, in the end, we are all fine with that.

I Come

I come with words.
They have guided me here .

Take them in and protect them -
Even if I am not given the esteem of your order.
Disregard the bareness of my actions.
Forgive me the plainness of my mortality.

I come with words.
Take them in and protect them.

A Stranger. A Pilgrim.

“Death has a thousand doors to let out life: I shall find one.”
- Massinger

I am a stranger.
I keep my legs crossed
And my eyes shut lightly.
I sit in a dark room -
A familiar spot, every moon;
Fully aware of my abeyance
And content with it’s “third person draw.”
I have been here before
Mingling with my other lives -
Staring at myself in full three dimension
And laughing at my careless humanity.

I can’t speak the language I once could
But -- I remember well the words.
They were strong and high order, cachet and poetic.
And how they arranged them to please my wit -
And how they tumbled from my pen on command.

But where now, I ask, is that friction that sparks this prose?
Where is that sudden storm that thrusts me into myself - now?

I must have been a strange creature - this one;
Whipping forward a good word
While on pilgrimage, go I, into the nothingness.

June 21, 2008

Substitutions and compensations
Connect the words for me today.
How I have searched for the original voice, lately;
Fear and aloofness have retained the best of me.

As if time was mine to compromise -
Hoping my posterity may forgive me as I fall short.

Resistance or My Feet

I hope my own creative resistance
Sparks a bit of civil mischief
While I hide in the shadows
And keep a safe distance.

I'll come to steal a finer word
From others it comes so sweet
Then I'll take to the air and get a birds eye view
Before I’ve mastered my feet.

Meditation: June 5, 2006

Once your wings danced with the sky
like the cursive poetry as a butterfly.
You sang in your silence
about destiny,
now you have landed to see it through.
Divinely appointed to this great moment
shall you carry your will or let the wind carry you?


The very direction you move, now
mandates hope in your journey.
There will be joy in the way you tread.
But ease begets ease; remember this.
Your soul will challenge you for the better.

It is your broken heart
which must be emptied
before the miracle of Truth fills you.
So resist not the tokens of this chosen realm
whether they come polished...
or they come tarnished.


To Dina

Meditation: May 3, 2006

When the monsoons come
in a great blinding curtain of dust
to paint the valley
my poetry will find it can fly;
like broken leaves
who have made an alliance with the wind
to be carried over and beyond,
content to travel with whatever life
remains in them.

Clatter

My lesser self comes
with a clatter,
heavy steps purposely -
aimed to shake the attention
of the rest of me.
Like a state of drunkenness -
sleep walking, blindfolded;
cursing under its foal breath.

How it loves to throw its weight around;
looking to take command
of the day.
How hasty it makes my senses react;
allied with impatience and selfishness.

Mine, mine, mine -
my lesser self comes.

Jesus, Buddha and Bill Wilson

Deliberate contributors.

Actors
of both love and self-preservation.

Architects of the divine;
connecting moments with then to the now.
Ones to move along,
infusing
each generation behind the previous one
with great hope.

Prophets.
Anticipating the time when the world would wake;
heed their call
one by one.

Transparent servants;
laboring in a myriad of paradox.

Philosophers of The Original Thought;
ones to press forward
the ripples of perpetual Stillness.

Professors of the One Truth;
forwarding, through the madness
a message of joy,
of fulfillment.

Crowned princes of wholeness;
being the ties that bind
or the binds that free.

Wizards
ones to light the torch of man.

Masters
of their still, divided cause.


February 2006

I, Humbly, Peeked

A parcel of light
hewn down
from the highest heights.
One to touch my hard-baked soul
even to pierce my parched, empty spirit.

Contingent on my will to open ‘mine eyes’
so to welcome a polished glow
for my being;
eyes from which I humbly peek.

To learn just enough;
to hear the sound of a distant whisper.
Yes, to feel the cadence of a marching force.

To yearn enough;
to lie by the wayside the self pity of
‘mine own’ maladies.
Yes, to compel my senses to soften themselves
so to be permeable to
a parcel of light.

Whisper of Babylon

I frolicked too many days
with the whisper of Babylon
over my shoulder; envious
of the peace I turned my back to.
With the pompous nobility I mustered up
I called it valid - for
my Father had forsaken me.

Oh, my despair - how you
bound me - assured me
in my sickened moments,
all was well in the temple,
the madness was outside the gates;
‘t would be err’ to
excuse the guards
so then to threaten my ‘truths’
under the whisper of Babylon.

In The Sunshine

I lie out best I can - my ways to happiness;
left my footprints in the sunshine.
The paths that found their ways through the shadows
are tucked away from you.
There is a course that reels out of me, from my torso
connected to my fibers;
extended lengths of my nerves.
I’ll leave signs to better you. Read them please
for I lie out, best I can - my ways to happiness.


April 24, 2004
To Bailey and London

notes (In My Pen)

I stretch out my soul to keep peace in my mind;
To find the cosmos are alive within me.
The universe is contained in me.

My mind keeps me busy at this juncture.
It holds me close to the residue I call memories,
It gets me from A to B.
It equates for me, common sense and reason.
It rarely fails me unless I infect it;

When it fails me it is slow to notify me.

Must has been said. So Little by me.
So I know there is still much therapy in me pen.

Outside, Orion

Outside my front door
Stands Orion.
Points - shadowing a great warrior,
Mounting the darkness.
One to guard the sky,
To rule the night,
To keep an eye on my better interests.
While I turn a cheek to my regrets -
I stand, fully erect
And halfway aware;
Motionless atop nature’s green shag carpet,
speaking to Orion