now that my tongue knows no blue
5 Feba salty song
around my shoulders
wraps me in a harmony
of thirds.
Love like the wind
needs no introduction,
no permission from my parents
to bow on a knee
with a ring.
I’m sniffing yellow
bursts of instant knowing.
I can be entered by the sun
in penetrating ways –
the passing through of each photon
registers on my richter spine
of sway – I offer my belly for a rub.
Hear this felt truth — I know no bounds.
What enters me
is entered by me
as it passes on,
an exchange without end.
Ever echoes the fervored beat
I dance
eternity
for now
a textured shadow on my retina
curve
later thinning out on the curve
of expansion
among other all-
perceiving BEings
returning
to our agreed
upon spot
no one
need know
but love.
somewhere along the way
1 Febinstead of keeping on
with the human interaction experiment,
I started saying no
and dropping out of the game.
It was so gradual,
I didn’t notice when self-care
turned into hiding.
Separate became a theme song,
playing on repeat
on the radio in my head.
Prone felt better than upright,
cozy felt better than cold,
alone felt better than awkward,
and predictable became a slow slide.
The blood began to thicken.
I told myself that I was refusing
to be food for the energy suckers.
What’s new?
I’m ankle deep at the surf’s edge
where
the water is cold,
the air is worse,
but the alternative is only for the bears,
and only in one season.
Spring seasons return,
and probably will again,
but I won’t wait
for it to come to me.
Motion is required
for the body,
but more so, for the mysterious heart,
which can’t be met
until I show up.
glowing on
24 Jan
Joy arrives in the smallest corners
without a script to find it.
Think a bird tilting its head to you in curiosity,
a cat curled up in your pine straw, allowing you close,
a deer pausing mid-munch to size you up
before bounding its fluff tail bum deeper into the woods.
Agenda toward joy can look alright to start with
but it soon becomes a grocery store cake in the mouth,
leaving you wondering how to spit it out with grace.
Grasping at joy is revolting, a fake laugh, an insinuation,
a glomping on – vicarious to the actual fleeting glimpses
we are gifted without neediness.
Don’t grab the kitty by the tail,
try not to join in when you haven’t heard the joke,
allow your own joy to arrive outside the attainment of others,
without needing to announce it to the imagined view of the world.
The original intention that you came here with
is still flickering – and it will not go out until you are gone,
even if you are in jail, or cast out, or inebriated
on the most common drugs of: figuring things out,
escaping your pain, making yourself important,
making yourself small, just
getting through the day, busy, busy, busy…
you know them all.
Even here, joy still visits, and fans your fractal candle.
Thank God, it is one of those trick candles, so blow away,
test it out; it will be here as long as you – waiting to light you
from within – and your inferno will be all your own.
My bonfire on a distant hill
connects the dots toward yours,
making the view overhead of all these fires a truer map
of who is down here,
remembering joy,
no matter where.
sea scape dream scape
14 Jansome times
on land, reality is fine edged and crisp,
but on an impulse to go on out to the beach
on a warm winter day,
I enter a mystery
of mist rising up from the sea
hovering over the land
reaching down from the sky
making the smallest
difference in color and shade
between land, air, sand, sea, and sky indistinguishable.
I have dreamed of this place.
Now I think I am walking
alone in the day on wet sand,
the sea as far out as it can go,
I will dream of this place again
at night.
I may be dreaming now.
Is sinew the only difference between
our walking waking and our haunted dreaming?
I am in a place of longing and regret-
a wide beach, those.
Boats clang and moan behind the curtain of mist
so close I could touch them;
a dog bounds up to me out of the cloud and pounces me
its lover,
I remember joy, pup; you know that me!
This life, so short, so lush,
so impersonal as to remind me
that my recurring hurtful thought of late
can be wound again and again
playing a song I don’t want to hear
until the fog, the sand, the fin skimming the line
between water and sand,
the light skimming the line
between dusk and night,
my mind skimming the line
between awake and dream
between alive and dead
between a life of thought
and a life of senses,
wakes me to know which to choose
even when I don’t know how.
none of this is pretty
2 JanWhen you can’t tell the difference
between what should stay or go, and
discomfort has you puppeting yourself
frantically false,
get the largest knife
from the kitchen drawer and
cut down that which has propped itself on you.
Get the long matches for the bar-b-que
and set on fire that which still can burn.
Don’t mess about forever asking questions
and making demands with your hands on your hips.
Cut it loose, already.
But if you do not,
the thousand cut route will;
for a thousand years, you will spout nonsense
and spin in your own confusion.
Do you want to wait that long?
If you are swift, have asked for no mercy, wisely,
it will come in the form of bleeding out
or burning down.
Have courage – remain. remain,
though you will feel wretched
and ashamed,
sitting in the ash and bones.
When the dust settles, the flesh rots,
remain remain and quietly,
see what is left.
Does it need a name?
how I spent my vacation
1 JanMay you share my actual dream of a thousand birds released,
ten thousand balloons out from my grip,
going into the sky
without environmental impact.
My gripping hands have eased
and opened once again
into release and flight, oh my.
Watch out your window so not to miss it.
No story about it, but if there were one,
it would be about the body
where hidden spots of thought had turned muscles
into prisons.
Breath has gone there and released what was too familiar
and practiced as to not be seen.
Breath reaches into what feels like a knots, holding,
control, and eases what namelessly cripples
the entire body machine.
Simple and senseless is grace, thank you.
Visceral can extend where intelligence has no sway.
Breath goes into atrophy and life begins again,
with this body a vessel, yes, but also a map
with roads of scars and light.
Who helps light
the outed bridges
when our own blindness will not let us see?
Who offers their own shining scars
when whole sections go out and bring us down?
Is there a difference between a friend, a tree, a spider web, the chilly morning,
or breath? Use it all, as offered, to light the way.
Even Air, she in her soft hat authority can go every where.
May you find any and every where
the breath is not reaching
with help from the love mirrored here
reflecting back to you
in and from every corner
of our rounded body shells
of mystery–
separate yet shared and free.