Your Star

I see it
I see your star
Mirroring the universe
Eyes to eyes
Moment to moment
And I can feel its heat rising
On this dark windy shore
Against my naked skin
It draws a sinewy cord
It erases the ambiguity
Redirecting
Reconnecting.

 

Finding Anger

It pisses me off
That I cannot find my way to anger
You know, screaming and cursing
Throwing and blowing
Off steam and venting a bit of loathing,
Found in all its familiar forms,
And that instead my default mode
Is forgiveness and understanding ala mode,
Not that these don’t have their place
In civilized society
But I’m not sure this is where this game
Is being played today.
 
And isn’t anger a wholly owned subsidiary
Of pain?
It’s listed on the misfortune 500…
And pain I have
Holy Jebus
Which by the way also pissing me off
Mainly because I am taking the blame
For bringing it upon myself
The sins of the my world,
When sometimes isn’t it your turn to step up
Take your cuts
And walk back to life’s dugout head hanging
Strike three, you’re out?

"We have to talk...

“We have to talk”
Is often the prelude to unpleasantness
The kind that will lurch inside
Splashing about in some gut level wave of adrenaline
With a chaser of dread
A whirlpool feeling that might have kept our ancestors alive
Girded them against assault by flesh and blood monsters
But now squeezes the lungs so tight
Throttling the breath
Gyrating the mind…
 
The phrase itself is enough
And the message beyond is
Not likely even a talk
But more like a declaration with no real chance
For a Q and A…
 
And so is bad news in small doses a superior
End, a slow poison, the thousand cuts
Or is it better to stand with no way to brace against
The unsuspected blow
A wall of words slamming me?

I am underwater
And wishing for the fire next time.

Free for the Taking

I will do what I can and maybe a bit more
To take care of this world that I am a strand of
To give and respect and return and pass on.
I have found this way in the wisdom that it offers
And it seems that I have been created to know some of it
And be part of it
Free for the taking.

Part of this wisdom is that we have each other
To give to in compassion
To respect in justice
To return to in kindness and love
To pass on to in our every day
By spreading a handful of seeds
And holding a handful of each other.

May Rain

It has rained over the past day
Gentle then hard then gentle
And in joyous gratitude
The grass and orchids and ferns
Have drunk in these delirious draughts
While riding on the waves
From a nearby star
High over head
Mid-May.
Life leaps in this green orgy
Embracing itself
Unembarrassed.
It’s what it does.
 
The wet yellow dog
Stops to share a pet
Showing scars about her eye
Lessons she has likely forgotten
Being of the big-hearted short-memoried bred
Long on grace and beauty and play
But not so much on dog-social intelligence
Someday she will be bitten again
As we cheer her spirit and
Pity it too.
 
These things we share
On this day of spats and dogs.

 

 

 

C.O.

You did not live long enough David
To see today’s fog
It flew in on gust off the ocean,
Nor did you see much of anything after 1967
You died as a marine in a foreign war
Doing your duty to God and country
Like we were raised back home
Back then.
I lived on; even to see this fog tempest
Because something (someone)
Spoke to me
Differently
Was it Mom, Jesus, or innate common sense
That it made no sense, that war
Any war?
So people helped me, fortunately
They knew that my sense of morality
Was valid, as important as any god or country
And I resisted in my own way
Did not go
Did not kill
Did not come home
Damaged…
I lived to find
A peaceful way.

Sixty

The broom lies against the chair
Standing upright, slender with a short straw skirt
Waiting as if there would be a dance
And though there was music
No one swept her off of her feet last night.

It is said that he was a mother’s day present
Arriving a day early

And now sixty on this damp morning after
He lingers and reviews.
It is a sweet emptiness when friends come and
Celebrate and then depart
Leaving their detritus of empty bottles
And failing balloons.



It rained on the party, not a sad thing here
But we have been lulled into a dry spell
And so somewhat surprised it came and
Now quenched all with a heavy shower
That made pink frosting slump
And strangers stand close together.
If they had lingered
They too would be poking at the morning after coals
Of the fire
Still smoldering.

Rain Water

Rain water fills the barrels
Thank you, it’s a nice system
Bodies are softly washed
From those barrels,
And later dishes.

A honey bee comes by the dishpan
Droning in for a drink
And when satiated
She flies about a bit
In expanding loops
Saluting her good fortune too.

The Nudge

The cat needed a double-nudge
But he eventually moved out of
My spot.
I am the Beta brother here
So I get a good seat
Which is fine,
The cat is somewhat further down the alphabet
He left me with a warn spot to sit on a cool morning…
I am grateful for these creature comforts.
The chair itself looks to be on the downside of passing through
Nothing new
We are all on temporary assignment
Sometimes at a port in the storm
Sometimes as a portal upon wonder.
It is advised to change speeds occasionally;
Slow down to see the micro-verse
Before speeding on into the cosmos
Journeying onward with all our brethren
To a different place
Alpha and Omega.

The Box

You put me in your box
And so here I am.
I will not call it living
For life is hope and I have none.
If I care to, which is seldom,
I can trace back the events that
Put me here
A chain of events forged in war,
At which I am at the end.
It can be a short length or long
A simple link or two
Wrought of greed, and fear,
Perhaps there is a strong link of hatred...
Yes, these are strong bonds and common
That imprison both you and me,
Although today and at this moment
I am on the inside
And you do hold a key.
 
You control my day
With food and light and heat
Noise and water and words
Which are blessings from god
That have become the terrible tools of man,
Used to make me fear
And hate
And abandon hope.
 
And so on this day when
I can no longer hate
Or hope,
The last morsel of will
That I control
Chooses to die,
And so I become the last gift
To my self
Wrapped in this terrible box.

Plastic

My head-brain is not idle
I play with it daily
Hoping to keep that silly putty
Plastic
Stretching and kneading it
Like the grey flesh matters
Reading, thinking, writing
Digging, hauling, dancing
As if I could say to it,
“What do you think of that?!
Try to make sense of this…
Check this out…”
The world of reality offers endless possibilities
Challenges to juggle
Balls bouncing plates spinning
And on many days I choose to play
So I try not to slough it off.
I’m in the game, because it’s fun
And I don’t want to lose my
Way
To become undone
So I am always amazed at the misfires
In my cluttered cortex
Like writing my return address on an envelop
Where I no longer reside
Ooppps!
Does it mean that I am at the
Top of the slide?
Because it seem that the
Only place where I am really home
The keys are hung within my head
And I sleep upon this body bed.

The Compass of the Heart

We are not so different
You and I.
We have come the same way
Sometimes soaring
To cloud crowned heights
Sometimes staggering
To the low-down depths.
And when our stories
Are passed down
Through the ages,
Both tales of caution
And parables of triumph,
The compasses of our hearts
Will surely have pointed
In the direction of what
We genuinely learned.

One More Thing

And  just  one more thing…
Isn’t that what we all are hoping for
One more thing?
Not a life’s worth
Or a career, or a long term this or that
Just one more whoop-de-doo
One more lick of that chocolate ice cream cone…
Or a good beer and a burp or
A laugh out loud, 
I’ll take one of those…
Or maybe a tender tussle
With a soft sweet lady?
 

So today, I walked and crawled a bit
Through a lava tube cave
A few thousand feet in the dark
Seeing the intestines of the volcano
Now cooled, but so different
So foreign, so sweet.
And I turned off the flashlight
And slowly counted to 60
In darkness like before the Big Bang
Darkness that makes me want to
Celebrate
The light in your eyes
And mine.