What The Rain Can Do

Some people don’t’ take me very seriously. I can’t help that. As an adolescent, I nearly died of it though. I was an emotional cripple, unable to grow up, desperate. I knew something was way wrong and had no idea even what question to ask. I went through changes that cost me but saved my life. Part of that process involved no longer caring that some people would sooner pick on me than bother to get to know me. I am just too strange for some. Adult society is far more civil than adolescence though, at least it is if you stay out of bars and jails, stay away from 1% bikers and related users of violence. That too has helped. I spent too long in the pressure of illness and ostracism though. I am convinced it is a message of destiny, formative for a reason, revealing a personal truth. I take these kinds of things seriously and my childhood and adolescence is first among such equals. I was isolated by illness in certain critical parts of my childhood and ostracized by some in high school, especially in the first two years. When I took up drugs it was with great relief, nothing short of salvation. The drugs saved my life in very real ways. That was also the cost.

I love the rain, still. I never complain that there is too much of it, even though I am in the temperate rains of the Pacific Northwest. I especially love the storms that approach hurricane force. Once in East Pakistan the monsoon pattern brought in a storm of sufficient force that a tornado touched down on the other side of Dhaka (then it was Dacca). This storm put joy in my heart even while it broke the young papaya tree in our back yard in half. Just before that storm broke, the clear sky overhead had turned chartreuse colored. I have never seen anything like that since. It lifted the hairs on my back and neck.

For years after I returned to the States in my twenties and early thirties I would say of myself that I would sit on the roof sipping brandy watching the monsoon storms pass nearby. I never actually did that, but I still love the image today. I also said I did the same watching the revolution. There was one. We left East Pakistan not long before the successful break with West Pak. that made East Pakistan Bangladesh. That bit of roof sitting never happened either, but what a satisfactory image this is.

What The Rain Can Do

I live so lightly
on the planet that stepping
into dreams is just
what I do. I breathe
and go somewhere else where rain
turns into mirrors
reflecting the truth,
calling me out of myself.
I become a mage.

March 29, 2009 12:20 PM

Human Nature

Here is something that is really true. In music, sad is a bunch of things and one of them is slow. This means that anyone learning to really play actual credible music will tend to develop sad songs first. This does not mean that sad songs are simpler in general, but that up tempo adds a whole tier of difficulty in this one way: up tempo music happens too fast for the mind to guide things in any conscious way. Up tempo music requires the complete training of the body mind. This is especially true when a musician adds the lyrics and voice which will often be similar to rubbing your belly and patting your head.

There's another piece...sad is the minor keys. It is easier in the minor keys to stumble around and accidentally make music-like sounds as long as you stay in key. The rules are more rigid in the brighter major keys. Here again the structure of things favors sad music because young musicians like the grace of making mistakes that don't sound like mistakes. The sad keys are in this way easier to play. It is even easier to play in the major keys but in the minor modes.

So want to sound like you are a musician? It is much easier to play slower in the minor keys. I know this from experience. :)

Poets have the same experience. You can write a sad poem that has credibility and feels real far easier than the happy poems. Writing happy and avoiding sappy is just not that easy.

Why is this??

Human Nature

If I thought, only
me, the only one who feels
empty just like this,
it would be too hard
to live even one more day.
That's when you write me
a few short lines that
show me I am not even
remotely alone.

Have you ever thought,
wondered why it is so much
easier to write
the empty sad songs
than the brightly wrought dances?
I truly wonder.

March 29, 2009 9:18 AM

What I Do

Things get a little weird out my way. Here is a little story that illustrates how it is…

"Once Huangbo and another monk were on pilgrimage. They came to a wide stream, almost a river, and planted their staffs, standing on the bank silently, watching the water go by. Finally the monk hiked up the skirts of his robe and walked across, gliding on top of the water like a sailboat.
Huangbo muttered in disgust, "If I'd have known you were like this I'd have never agreed to go with you!" and he turned around and went on his own way."
- Norman Fischer

Recently time has come up, as in not enough. We know that the very fabric of space/time is expanding, that things are getting farther apart on the largest scales because this is so. It is said that no matter where in the universe you stand, if you measure things you will get the same result, that everything is moving away at the largest scales. Not only that, the farther things are away, the faster they go. Even worse, for the math and science to work, there had to be an inflation in this process, where things moved much faster, then slowed down. That happened early on. Now it appears that the rate is stable. Things farther away appear to be going faster because every location in space/time is expanding. The rate everywhere seems constant. What is behind this is what is called dark energy and it is a very large portion of all that is. The reason that things farther away are going faster is that we see these things through longer expanding space/time distances. Farther away equals more expansion equals higher apparent velocities. These velocities are so high that light is shifted toward the red. That means that a significant percentage of the speed of light is involved in the velocities of the farther objects. There are no blue shifted objects except for those within our local galactic cluster.

There are people who speak of time these days and suggest that time is speeding up. This might be related. However there are others who suggest that we are heading down a funnel of some sort and time is being compressed. Something like that. They say that 2012 is the smallest part of the throat and then time will start easing off and we will find the pressure come off us a little, maybe a lot, if we survive.

Here is another way I know to not have time. Things get a little weird out my way.

What I Do

If I had the time
I would give you such complete
love you would lift off
the ground just amazed
at the lightness in the air
and the glow of me
as I hold you up.
But I don't have any time
nor any money,
nor do I have breath
since I smoke so much, and drink
and get thrown in jail.

March 28, 2009 2:21 PM

Finding Comfort, Finding Salvation

Adam Zagajewski...I never heard of him but ran across this quote. In this quote he refers to the writing of one of the French existentialists who said, "Hell is other people" in one of his works. I quick perusal of Google, Zagajewski is an internationally renowned Polish poet. I didn't have time with my slow Slow SLOW system to learn more tonight.


We find comfort only in
another beauty, in others'
music, in the poetry of others.
Salvation lies with others,
though solitude may taste like
opium. Other people aren't hell
if you glimpse them at dawn, when
their brows are clean, rinsed by dreams.
- Adam Zagajewski


The way he puts it, that's the reason I am not a monk. I see you guys this way too. I know this life makes it hard in precisely the sense that I wrote the other day...it is hard to remember your original intention when the alligators start biting. I have that challenge every day in my project work in corporate-land. But it is a general lesson. Here is the basic form. You have to catch us all in the special moments, the brief ones, to see the holy beauty without confusion.

Most of the spiritual walks on the planet ultimately demand community even when they claim that the highest path requires relinquishment in the end. I won't argue all that, just want to wish you all, "May you be rinsed clean by your dreams, over and over again."

The Evergreen

This poem is about a tall evergreen that grows on the property line, probably more my tree than my neighbors'. His house is just about minimum distance to the line as is my garage. This line is defined in the front and side by a fence buried in ivy and overgrown with a stand of bamboo. Then toward the back, this tree towers over everything nearby. It has dropped branches occasionally, sometimes on my neighbor’s house and once in the yard between us, more or less on the bamboo. So far it has not dropped a branch to my side. This may be because I am to the southwest of the tree, the side that gets more sun. Perhaps this extra light makes healthier branches.

Oh yes. I did dump the next poem as I said I might. This is the one after.

The Evergreen

I fret. The tree is
too close and it has twice now
dropped branches safely.

Someday it will drop
a dark arrow through my roof.
I can cut it down,
save my property,
but that squarely puts the dart
deep into my heart.

You told me real
fearlessness is the product
of a tender heart.

March 27, 2009 12:37 PM

Returning To Work

I rejected three poems in a row, not suitable and the next one is marginal in my eyes tonight. I think I am not okay with my own work right now. I think I am right on those three poems, which lacked heart, or coherence. The first one had a good theme but the poem was garbled and I don't have the time or heart to fix it. Maybe someday. My pile of rejects might be salvageable. I so rarely go back over territory I have already crossed, though. That is one thing about me that I know very well. I don't go back.

I return to work tomorrow from four months off. I had to take medical leave and then I had a bad car accident which added another month on. More medical leave. I am okay now, I hope.

At The Zoo

Here's my take on that old Simon and Garfunkel song. I don't think animals are very happy unless you give them the stuff they like to do. That stuff is hard wired, at least a great deal of it. The big cats are supposed to hunt. There are many other examples of that. I imagine most of the animals are disgruntled.

At The Zoo

Peering through steel bars,
grasping hold, shaking them with
sweaty hands, gave up,
no way out of here.

I'm all twisted up with it.
If my face looks strange
and my fur all wild
I suggest you go look at
someone else, okay?

March 24, 2009 12:14 PM

The Truth Tonight

I am not sure what this poem means. I guess it is true enough, that I think you women are more courageous than men when you get your shit together. I think you are more pain tolerant too. On the other hand, I also think you get a built in connection to the planet that lies deeper than we men get. I don't think you live longer on average than men because of your grit, but because of the connection. This alignment of woman and earth is on display when you give birth as the umbilical chord. When it is severed the woman child can find it again within, but the man child has lost something and he seeks it the rest of his life.

He will project it and invent patriarchal religion. Women tend to keep the mysteries when freed of patriarchal societies. But just as gay society shows now, there are men with enough woman in them that they don't fit the mold. I am not gay, but I do have enough feminine in me that I do not fit the mold. Somewhere in my twenties I stopped caring about that.

What I do care about, the yearning that I am left with ever since they snipped the chord and my foreskin, has bedeviled me, forced me to make up all sorts of crazy shit. At least I have gotten good at it and write a pretty good poem now.

Oh by the way, you women are not exempt. But if you yearn like me, that means you have enough man in you. :D

The Truth Tonight

If I had courage
I would have been born female.
I bargained carefully
and came out a male
in this timezone, for this work.
If I had more grace
I would honor you
with crimson flowers to match
your deep warm red blood.

March 23, 2009 8:33 PM

Bad Cess

Here is a disgruntled poem. Where I came from, bewildered rebel driven by spirit, sure how wounded, how wrong it all must be, hoping the awakening was true enough to actually mean something, from this stance on the board, I've been scudding before the wave of mortal terror, hanging ten in defiance, hoping to make a difference somehow, calling us all back home.

One of my musical mentors is Bruce Cockburn who has figured out how to make music from the disfigured visions of war.

This is too big for anger.
It’s too big for blame.
We stumble through history
so humanly lame.

So I bow down my head,
say a prayer for us all
that we don’t fear the spirit
when it comes to call.

That’s the chorus from “Postcards From Cambodia”. Jesus.

Pray for Michelle, my Australian friend. She has had to say farewell to her mother. I weep.



Bad Cess

Not original
sin, is not original
blessing either, no.
It's original
sanity that drives me on.
This yearning within
me is wanting worlds
that match my earliest sight.
Since that sure won't fly
I trim me away
until I fit what they say's real.
This gives me bad cess.

Now I feel crazy.

March 23, 2009 11:23 AM

Another Song For Spring

Now this is just spooky. Here comes a linguistic poem. After all this linguistic writing here comes an irregular verb. *Spring* is both a verb and a noun. It is one of those words. It is very old and mostly unchanged in its form.

As a noun, it reaches back to *gispring*, Old High German for a spring, probably as in a flowing spring of water, as in melted, as in not winter. As a verb it reaches back to Old Norse as *springa* meaning spring in the sense of to jump.

Then in this context the linguists draw in a Greek related word (this is a not at all the same language group but also comes from the ancestor language, showing that *spr* is the ancestor root of the idea of *to jump*. To anchor this, the *spr* connection to *jump* is also found in Sanskrit (the ancient language of India) as the thought behind what we desire. Jump is behind what we desire in the sense of how we are drawn to what we desire and may jump toward it or across something to get it. Thus movement demonstrates and stands as proof of the presence of desire.

The word has been around a really long time, and linguists will tell you that this means to jump is a core concept, so important that our cultural memory keeps the word basically intact. Spring jumps forth from winter. The earth desires the return of life and melts the ice to this end, and the spring flows. This means that the parent Indo-European language of over five thousand years ago or longer comes out of sharply seasonal annual cycles, connected to the ice melt. I just love this stuff. *Spring* is what you would call a conserved word, which is why it is now an irregular verb.

*Spring* is so old that it has a very large number of usages and meanings now. It takes a full dictionary page plus another full column and a third (my dictionary has three columns of very small print per page) to deal with every form and context of spring. I need a magnifying glass to read these words.

I swear to you guys, I did not plan this.

As for towhead, I was born a blonde, with straight hair. It turned brown and sharply waved and almost curly as I approached puberty. Then it slowly lost the wave as I aged. I had lost the wave by the age of 38. Now it is thinning but at 64 still a full head of straight brown (no red in it, not auburn) hair with only a few gray hairs. However my beard is almost completely gray. Never mind about the rest.

Another Song For Spring

On the trampoline
as if I could do these things
now, now, now, no more,
far too gone (said right
don't quibble with it, nor with
springs springing, sprang sprung)

In the sun like that,
like the child I once really
was, a true towhead.

March 22, 2009 9:47 PM

That's The Fact

Er…I don’t really have to say much about this one, do I?

That's The Fact

I am getting old-
that's the fact, Jack. I shall say
my piece, write my words
and watch things grow like
spring's best work headed toward
grand orgasmic bliss
and let you know how
I remember what that is
Oh YES I really
DO!

March 22, 2009 8:07 PM

I've Kept My Feet

Here is another whimsy. There is an underlying truth. I don’t really like being practical. I don’t have the instinct for it at all. My astrological natal chart places everything in all the signs but the earth signs. I of course was born to a Taurus woman with the same birthday in May that I have in November. She was my earth. I do have good logic and math. I reason my way through the practical things, and that is why I can survive in engineering. But I truly don’t have the instinct for it and so I am a terrible mechanic.

On thing I heard in the AA meetings a long time ago: My head is out to kill me and doesn’t worry about it because it is absolutely certain that it will survive the death of my body. That is the kind of thing an alcoholic thinks. I got sober, came back down to earth. Still don’t like it.

I've Kept My Feet

I write poems about
floating, flying, might as well
be footless, rootless.
I was getting to
just chopping my feet clean off,
dead weight, not needed.
Then you said this book
would change my life, maybe has.
I laid down my axe.

But I still hate socks.

March 22, 2009 9:20 AM

Something Happened

I have no idea what this is about. What a difference a day makes. Yesterday’s poem was so, well, limpid. Today’s poem is anything but. I think it’s about anger and fear. Or illusion. Possibly this is humorous. Humor is another great word, a word in transition, I think from the old meanings to the new. A humor is a fluid? Not any more. Or is it that laughter which arises from one’s sense of humor is a moistening of the dry heart? That feels right to me. Humor used to be black bile (that which colors shit), yellow bile (that which colors piss), blood and phlegm. How the hell did it get to mean a matter of character? One had a sanguine character (bloody…sang is French for blood) or a phlegmatic character, for examples. How did it go from there to comedy? This poem then could be humorous but not comedic. Jesus. I do go on.

Something Happened

Whenever you stare
at me with eyes slid back to
the sides and your hair
all strange and bubbled,
when your color gets cartoonish
and your nose severe,
that's when I get wired
myself, electrified, head
straight for the front door.

March 22, 2009 9:02 AM

The Limpid Path

Here comes a complex post. You guys speak of favorites among my poems. I have my own of course. This poem is one of them.

This word Limpid is one of my favorite words. I also love the etymological thread of the word limpid. Limpid is related to lymph and through lymph to nymph and to nuptial. Limpid means clear and serene as in a limpid pool, but also as in a limpid style of writing. Lymph once meant pure and clear water, and then the sap in plants, and now the colorless off white fluid similar to the plasma of blood but filled with the substances and the white cells of the immune system.

Nuptial is related to wedding and to the primary point of wedding which is procreation, and thus as a fluid would be the potent sexual fluids. To say Nuptial Fluids might be unusual but would be obvious. This is a bonding of light as in how it passes best through transparency and sex. The sexual light might be an unusually clear light that can penetrate deeply and change things.

This word complex also demonstrates several linguistic substitution rules. The L of limpid is similar to the N of nuptial. Notice in sounding the L and the N, that the position of the tongue in the mouth demonstrates this similarity. The I and the Y and the U are related this way too. The MP in Limpid is the MPH in Lymph and Nymph, is the PTI (pch) in Nuptial. The MP takes the closed lips of M and adds the plosive of P. This is transformed to the fricative F in MPH. Finally the M is dropped, leaving the plosive P joined with the soft CH sound spelled ti in Nuptial. These transforms are all "legal" and commonly used in linguistics to trace the evolution of a language.

Finally, while Limpid comes through French from Latin, Limpa or Lumpa (water), alternatively Lympha, all of this is a modification of earlier Greek Nymphe. A nymph is a semi divine figure evoking the rise of life fluids in men and women both and also meant bride. Nymph is also connected to feminine sexual parts, the labia minora, which are also called the nymphae, nymph in plural latin form. The labia minora are the inner lips of the vulva.

Wow. It is this kind of connection which reveals the wisdom inherent in language, why it is there is magic in words, even when you don’t know it. This is one rich example of the interconnections, clarity with light and with water and with life fluids and with sexual bonding, and the very gate of love. Using limpid brings this all to the sentence, to the poem.

Before getting to the poem itself, I want to add something written by Natalie Goldberg.

The Importance of Illusions

In the beginning, our illusions are important. In some ways, those illusions bring us to practice. Hopefully, in the process of practicing, we wake up to how things really are. But it's not bad to have some dreams at the beginning. When I started writing, I didn't know what it was to be a writer. I didn't know what basic hard work it is. But my dream to be a writer brought me along, and then I met the task.

In betrayal and in failure, there are some real jewels. But wouldn't we much rather have a relationship in which we mature slowly? For instance, isn't it better to have a relationship with your parents in which you grow up and move away from them in a natural and beautiful way? Unfortunately, that doesn't always happen. And in spiritual communities, it doesn't always happen, either. So what do we do? We take what is in front of us and wake up from it.

- Natalie Goldberg from "Beyond Betrayal", Tricycle, The Buddhist Review (Spring, 2005)

The word Limpid evokes the kind of clarity Natalie writes about.

The Limpid Path

At a loss for words
about the broken winged
bird who flew away
except to say one
small word of true love above
all others set free
to fly after her
along the limpid path still
high above her pain.

March 21, 2009 9:33 PM

Draining The Swamp

In AA we say, avoid then the deliberate manufacture of misery. Remember that God didn’t do it. If trouble comes, cheerfully capitalize on it…

That is not so easy to do, for guys like me, anyway. It is neither easy to avoid self created disasters, nor to cheerfully navigate my troubles. I would feel especially miserable about this except I know I am not the only one, not even close, not even among the worst of them by a long shot. Staying alert is part of the solution. Defusing the inner turmoil is also part of the solution.

However, I am leery of outright positive thinking. I am not sure I am qualified to take it on, fairly sure that I am too susceptible to fantasy for the positive attitude stuff. I used to be sure positive thinking was just wrong, but I have watched it work for others and so have come to the conclusion that it is my quirky challenge. Positive thinking when it works is a tremendous tool. I guess it doesn’t work for everyone. Nothing does. So I am left with how imperative it is that I know myself and what works for me. It is my survival that is at stake.

I am not sure about the rest of you. I know about people like me. We never get far from mortal risks and are in the business of remaining alert to the unkind and implacable parts of staying alive. People like me seem to lack the capacity to distance themselves from the territory close to outright disaster. I admit it is a little more exciting to live near alligators. Lacking that capacity to achieve sensible distance away from alligators is not really that serious, certainly not hopeless, but it does sober one up.

Draining The Swamp

I keep forgetting
and this is no joke
when alligators lurking
are just inside me
waiting to burst out
through my freaking skin and turn
snapping at something
precious I might hate
to lose - need to stay alert.

March 22, 2009 9:14 PM

I'm Stuck With You

Not much to say tonight. This poem might not be about what you think, though.

I'm Stuck With You

I thought that was you
touching me so deep. No one
else could, not like that.
You warn me I'm stuck
with you. Oh boy. This is sweet.
If you expect me
to try to scrape you
off me by diving into
the dirt, think again.

March 20, 2009 2:45 PM

No Tattoo

Vietnam is the legacy of my generation. When I graduated from high school I had somewhere to go. I had received a Congressional appointment to West Point, the United States Military Academy (Army). Immediately after graduation, my family took off for a vacation, traveled across country from the west coast (the left coast I hear it called these days) to the east coast. There were stops along the way. They left me at West Point, just a little ways up the Hudson River. West Point was established early in our nation’s history. Generals on both sides of the the Civil War were graduates of West Point. I marveled at the little things, like the marble stair treads worn out by the feet of those who had been there.

I failed at West Point. I was too young. I survived the summer and the first month of the first semester and then couldn’t do another day. This was 1963. I left in October, at the very last moment and got into Santa Clara University to finish the semester. I nearly flunked out of there too, but continued to the end of that school year. I had been assigned to a signal company in the army reserve. In the summer of 1964 I went to boot camp. Just before graduation I fell to the meningitis epidemic that was alive at Fort Ord in California. After a month in hospital, I was assigned as a supply clerk to that same signal company.

I went to meetings and summer camp until 1966. In the fall of 1966, I found drugs and quit the army. Heh. There is of course no such thing, but if you stop going to meetings they don’t hunt you down, or they didn’t then. For that matter I quit everything, let my money run out, and started living on the street. I went from 185 pounds down to 148. My mother came back and masterminded a way to keep me out of jail. She stuck me in a mental institution. Then she pointed out that I suffered from brain damage due to the high fever of the meningitis in 1964. She finagled that argument into a way to get the charges against me for desertion not filed. This was a difficult thing to do. It took the four months that I was in the institution, probably no coincidence of timing, that I got out after the case was settled.

Then we went overseas in 1967 right after I was released from the hospital. I spent the next two years in East Pakistan. In the summer of 1969 as I was returning home to the States, I received my Honorable Discharge from the army upon completion of my six year military obligation.

That’s my military history. It has taken me most of my life to get it that when my mom stuck me in a mental institution, I actually qualified for it. But I still think my mom was “God with skin on” on this one. That’s what I thought then. What a remarkable skate. When I quit the army I knew what I was doing. I said to myself, I don’t care if I spend the rest of my life in Leavenworth. It was really literally beyond me to keep going to those god damned meetings.

Decades later in AA, I ran into the walking wounded still fighting the war in Vietnam. This poem is about me coming home intact. On the way to Bangkok from Hong Kong, I found out that we flew a route directly over Danang. That put me at 35,000 feet above the war. That is not very far. I marveled that everyone on the plane didn’t seem to care. This poem is also about one of the walking wounded. It is very hard still to keep them sober.

No Tattoo

I thought I escaped
the war when I came home whole,
intact, no tattoo.

I thought you came home
with me but I see you there
still among paddies
and pain, the click of
Bettys, nowhere to go now,
or the bamboo pits'
pointy shit smeared stakes.

How can I get you away?
I am too far gone.

March 20, 2009 9:29 PM

The Fountain Of Youth

I read a book recently about the experiences of the early European visitors to the New World. There is quite a bit to it. Especially the Spanish had quite a time trying to get a handle on the expanse of things. Coronado made it all the way to southern Kansas. That surprised me. De Leon’s expedition started in Florida and made it all the way to Texas. This was all happening before colonies were established in North America.

They were chasing gold. There were other fantasies driving the chase. Because the Spanish had already found two really civilized and rich Native American groups, it was easy for them to expect another just over the next hill. I wrote this poem months before I read the book.

The Fountain Of Youth

My eyeballs are fried
over hard and my head aches
from all this watching.
I'm asleep on feet
not made for all this standing
around the fountain
of youth as they say,
waiting for it to bubble
up, waiting to drink.

March 20, 2009 12:55 PM

I Replied

This moment goes back to the few days before everything changed for me. It is the heart of what actually happened in the afternoon of a fall day, in November of 1966. The setting is the living room of my downstairs bachelor one bedroom apartment in a fourplex upstairs/downstairs southwest of San Jose State. This was before the state system upgraded the college to a state university. The setting is in contrast also a golden fog lit with inner light, a place with no definite edges, corners, walls, or floor and a consciousness that was bodiless and singular. There was no one else, nothing else in that nowhere place. There was no thought, no narrative, no self, just awareness. My return to my living room holds this memory of awareness as clear as the room is. This is what Bruce did and said. This is what I said.

I Replied

When I came awake,
flat on my back with sore head,
you were laying there
on our ratty couch
laughing hard, hysterically.
Your freckles glowed red.
Your eyes flamed ice blue.
You asked, Did you get the point?
I replied, I died.

March 20, 2009 12:24 PM

Erotic Certainty

For I am old now...

There is nothing to say. I was a lover but now no longer equal to that task, no longer on the quest for dragons, no longer willing to stand my ground and hold the dark at bay. What I do, I do in story and fable and poem, do with cleverness and delegation. I give way to the young bucks who know everything and then I watch how it turns out. It is ever thus, always this way. I fell short of independence. I do not have enough. I am in the position of the elderly who go out on the ice to save the tribe the burden. This is nothing to grieve, not in the best of worlds, just what is. Most days I am okay with it.

While this is still a story at this moment, it is really there in my near future. That is the point. This is not far away for me. It is easily right next door. If I pretend otherwise I begin to be pathetic in my denial. I watched a dear friend who tried desperately to deny his mortality while it trimmed his edges piece by piece. I vowed I would not let myself be in that position. I have carried death on my shoulder for decades, ever since Don Juan Matus (Casteneda) made that spiritual gesture so obviously right for me to do. Now I am reaping the benefit.

Erotic Certainty

You have given me
words, ruby flames rising
higher than I can
for I am old now
and you hold the true arrow
of the time to come.
Still we both know words
with erotic certainty
given as we love.

March 19, 2009 8:14 AM

A Redpoll Meditation

This one I believe is a result of pictures posted on Lucy’s Box Elder, or Jozien’s KEEPER OF WILD PLACES. There are no redpolls around here. I liked the name of these rather plain little birds. I took a quick look and think there could be redpolls nearby. They like birch trees. There are birch stands in Oregon, I think. I like finches best. That’s what I get here the most, House Finches and Goldfinches.

A Redpoll Meditation

I sit on my branch
amused at the two-footed
all bundled below.
She, yes I know it,
is unable to ruffle
feathers with all that
stuff on. I wonder
how she can scratch her itches
with her mittened hands.

March 18, 2009 8:26 PM

Embroidery Art

This is a true story about a lover who knew how to draw using embroidery art. She created a remarkable lion’s head on my tee shirt. I did feel just like this. I would have married that woman. How God pried me free of her is one of the primary stories of my life. Why do I have to nearly die to do the right thing?

Heh.

I am a hard head. The truth, it wasn’t only her, not even by half, but a whole lifestyle and livelihood that expelled me violently, projectile vomit. That was when I stopped being an outlaw and got a day job. I got another girl friend, a new town to live in, eventually a move to Oregon, a career and a wife. When that woman visited me in Oregon, one time, just passing through, I saw her very differently, but my own heart was still torqued sideways. It was only two years passed.

Embroidery Art

I watched stitch by stitch
as you built the lion's head
in many colors
over my true heart,
embroidered on my black tee
just as if I earned
this special warm care
from you, as if you knighted
me into love's realm.

March 18, 2009 11:47 AM

The Oil Spill

Sometimes help comes in unacceptable packages.

I have been tricked into accepting help before. Worse, I have been the recipient of intervention. Once I was basically kidnapped. I was given an ultimatum one time, and it was a very close thing whether I would accept the help or not. In each case I accepted the help but I had to go against my instinct to do it. I still preach against the “kidnapping” (I was 21 at the time). I would never do that, even though it worked in my case, even though the one needing the help might die without it. It didn’t work that well, not from my side of things. My part in that one, I could have walked away any time in the next four months.

The alternatives at the time would have been possibly starving to death, military prison, some other kind of jail, perhaps help in some other form a little later down the road. As the dust settled, I knew enough about my situation to know these things, so I stayed in sanctuary.

I have been the one who had the oil cleaned off my body. You would have to trap the gull, kidnap it essentially. The other choice, wait for the gull to be so ill that it might be too late. That was the dilemma my mother faced with me, when she kidnapped her 21 year old son. I would be unable to do that. Even though it worked, it should not have. Most times it doesn’t, not with us humans, and not with gulls either.

It is, however, a choice the rescuer makes. I spent ten years in Alanon over the pressure of a drunk and dying wife. I learned in the fire. I discovered that intervening is a matter of doing for me about someone I love, not doing for them. Since the intervention almost never actually works, then the motivation must be mine about me. I intervene because I must or else lose my integrity if I leave the situation alone. That’s where it actually landed with my wife. I would not let her die on my watch, not if I could help it. At that point I didn’t care any more whether Annie wanted to live (about half the time she did). I was dialing 911 to save my soul. That’s what the 1990s were about for me.

The Oil Spill

In the sand a gull
struggles with the goo that coats
her and now the sand
coats her too. Tarry
oil from the damaged tanker
going south has killed
her, is killing me.
I try to help but she runs
fighting for her life.

March 18, 2009 12:30 PM

A Downstream Guy

This is a troublesome poem. My old hippie sense says you go with the flow. That seems so self evident to me. Back in the day we wrote songs about that. It was a goal. Don’t strive, don’t push the river. Then I got sober and there has been a challenge from that direction. It is all packaged in the thing so many of us in AA will say, “My best thinking got me to AA.” That is not a really great thing. It means my best thinking is out to kill me, and in an effort to save my life I was driven into AA. So what seems easy to me is probably not very trustworthy. Going with the flow will mean getting drunk. Not good.

I want to just drift downstream, just like the Beatles sang of it.

Even so, I have lived the upstream life for nearly 27 years now. I have gone against the current. I have chosen to believe that the current eventually leads back to some kind of addiction. I cannot afford that.

A Downstream Guy

You tell me to swim
upstream against the current.
I am not so sure.
You say swimming down
the stream I'll stay unaware
of the way currents
control my pathway.
I hope I'm more sensitive
than that. I hope all
I need is to tack
side to side a little bit
to tell the currents.

I'm a downstream guy.

March 18, 2009 11:04 AM

Rejoice And Rejoice

Love is lost, love is found again. Love is lost again. I believe it is fundamental to living well that I master this beginning and ending of love. I have learned that I am passionate and want to be. I do not wish to learn to use the sanding tool of experience on my highs just to avoid my lows. I want the highs. I want to play the music.

I must be born into love and die out. My love thrusts in two directions, Eros, and Theos. There is sometimes no distance between them. Other times passion becomes the basis of the world and I can all but forget God. Once in my life passion became the basis of God and I all but forgot the world. It was made plain that would not be my walk.

Remnants remain in my dream, my music, my poetry, my magic.

The Hindu story of the world says that the beginning was a song. Really, the beginning was a chord, an arrangement of uncounted pure sounds in a divine and infinite harmony that formed the whole of all possibilities. It is this sustained chord that holds us up right now. And God Said, Let There BE SOUND. And it was good. They claim that our speech is the most sacred thing we have, especially when we speak spirit, when we sing our hearts. That is why certain syllables are sacred, and chanting is one form of effective prayer.

*************
The Moola Mantra

Om sat chit ananda
para Brahma
purushothama param Atma
Om sri bhagavati sametha
sri bhagavate namaha.
Hari Om tat sat.
**************

Rejoice And Rejoice

I remember that.
I remember the goddess.
I was saved by her,
Though it did not last.
In the ending a sound ripped
through me and beyond
to the farthest reach.
In the beginning was sound,
so also the end.
I was born in sound.
So I also died, and lived
again, loved again.
I will not predict,
cannot but hold you up now,
rejoice and rejoice.

March 17, 2009 8:31 PM

Why Snakes Have No Hands

I was talking to Brother Snake last year and I asked this question. I asked what was going to happen to us. He didn’t say but he told me this story. It soured my lunch. He slithered off and I swear his scales whistled.

Why Snakes Have No Hands

Snakes once had two hands
but didn't want the burden,
so they gave their hands
to children of men
so we could shoulder the blame
for the end of things.

In fact they gave us shoulders
also. We thought this a boon.

March 17, 2009 12:33 PM

The Mage Of Winds

If you don’t like the poem so much the way it is written, then try reversing the voices. Don’t say, “You are a wizard”, say “I am a wizard.” And so on. It is easily done and works just fine until right at the end. But I am not the Mage of Winds. I am the Man of the Northern Wall. This Mage was my first teacher.

The Mage Of Winds

You are a wizard,
a mage of winds, of the wand.
When you stand upright
your bones are revealed
as dark emerald. You warned
me I would see this
before you stood up.
Now you tell me fire blooms in
a cave in the air
behind you, secret,
not available to any
but you and the wind.
You say poets might
know what you mean when you say
such things. I wonder.

March 17, 2009 11:18 AM

Just How It Is

I don’t think I have to say much about this one. I think this is really common among those of us who have gone through it. It seems to me that women can let go of men easier than men can let go of women when you sieve out the game players and only talk of the ones who really try for love. That has been my experience. So maybe this poem is more for men in the aftermath than it is for women. This is serious stuff. Sometimes we men die of it.

Just How It Is

I have let you go
again, again, and again.
There is still a thread
of you left in me
that will not depart even
though that bit of you
that extends beyond
me hooks, catches on odd things
and tears holes in me
as I pass on through,
minding my own path without
you. This is just how
it is.

March 17, 2009 8:56 AM

Bone And Dust

Here are the edges. All the rest is filler. Here is the cross. Here is the viewpoint of all the rest, in the center of the cross.

Bone And Dust

The cross of life, deep
and true, birth begins and death
ends, crossed by lovers
and adoration
of the heart of god reaching
beyond sense and sight,
the fourfold nature,
the edges of our journey,
it is here I watch
you crumble to bits
of bone and dust, you having
gone ahead of me.

March 17, 2009 7:41 AM

Life Eats Life

I have a complaint about predator/prey relationships because I too easily can identify with the prey. I suspect there is not wholehearted agreement among the prey as to the manner and timing of turning from a living being into a food source. I suspect they might feel interrupted and preempted. I cannot imagine feeling less free, less in charge of my own life. I just can’t help taking this a little personally.

As a child I hunted as little boys do. I have watched creatures die at my hand. Even darker, I have toyed with them, as cats will. There is more; so many of us have these experiences with killing and more. I have not been to war myself, only through the experiences of my close friends. Killing and eating are very close together. Farming is the harvesting of life. It is so completely necessary. At the heart of so many kinds of farming is a death moment imposed on another life form, a living being is turned in that moment into a food source. Those that have the power kill, those that don’t are killed.

I have no solution. When I enjoy a steak (and I really like a good steak) I try not to think in this way. I appreciate that I don’t have to butcher my own meat. But I have been here in this mood eating most things, and it troubles me that I have no solution. I believe it puts me at a disadvantage spiritually when I want to think of myself as all pure and ascended that I participate in killing many creatures so regularly and so often, creatures who would surely refuse me if they could. I don’t think there is a way to live as a human without this loose end.

It is one facet of humility to know that I live at the price of other life. Others have to die so that I can live.

Life Eats Life

I know it is hard,
that life does eat life.
It is expected of us.
All we get is choice,
what life shall we eat today?

Why should my orange
be okay with my
hands stripping its skin, pulling
wedges, little squirts
of juice, cast away
seeds that were meant for planting.
Why not grieve that?

March 16, 2009 12:52 PM

The Royal Path

Ocasionally (like yesterday) I find something so intriguing that I jump the queue and bring something out that is fresh. I have touched on the idea of Royalty before, because it figures in my stories. I say I was once a mage to a queen. I don't know if I have ever shared this:

My mother used to wonder how I came by certain traits. One of them was my displayed sense of "to the manor born". She divorced my father when I was two. Already some characteristics of his were mine. More appeared in me as time went on. She marveled at how aspects of my character seemed genetic since my father was nowhere around to drive them. This drove her crazy, since some of these characteristics were the ones she didn't care for in my father. Oh well. Some of my character seemed to skip generations too.

My paternal grandmother came from the south, from a line that included landed gentry, plantation owners. She herself was not rich, not land rich even but she had certain Southern attitudes. Robert de Bruce of Scotland (remember the movie Braveheart? That movie about William Wallace is fractured history but history nonetheless, and Robert is the son of the ailing and devastated king of Scotland, a large part of that story as told in the movie) is a reputed relation in my grandmother's line.

My mother thought there was a genetic thread carrying this sense of inheritance that seems to always have informed certain parts of my character coming up through this lineage. We were university student, post depression poor in my early years, me a child of a single mother, and I was raised up in the liberal and egalitarian leftist politics of the post war forties, nearly socialist. Yet here I was a scion of the realm even so. I carry royal blood and in certain ways, not all fortunate, I act like it.
***********

The true person is an active participant, engaged in her environment while remaining unoppressed by it. Although all phenomena are going through the various appearances of birth, abiding, changing, and dying, the true person doesn't become a victim of sadness, happiness, love, or hate. She lives in awareness as an ordinary person, whether standing, walking, lying down, or sitting. She doesn't act a part, even the part of a great Zen master. This is what Master Linji means by "being sovereign wherever you are and using that place as your seat of awakening."
--Thich Nhat Hanh, “Simply Stop,” Fall, 2007 Tricycle


The Royal Path

You tell me I am.
You say I am sovereign
anywhere I am,
anywhere I go.
You say I can use myself
as the throne you left
me, the legacy
of my gracious royal birth,
the seat of my loft,
my awakening,
my victorious return.

January 5, 2010 2:16 AM

Here Are Stones

My friend, Liz, is fond of stones. She is teaching me to think of them, cherish them, let them appear in my words. She says words are stones. Her stones are not cold inert things, not like a heart of stone. They are not to be thought of darkly. They are the bones of the world. The bones of life. When we eat, we eat stones leavened with solar energy and lunar gravity.

The oldest stones in the world are in Australia and on the Canadian shield. Australia is the most stable surface on the planet, and that’s why the stones are so old there. The Canadian shield has been scoured by the ice. Newer stone has been scraped away. I think that is how it goes. I believe that geologists claim that the entire surface has turned over at least once, that there is no stone that reaches back to the beginnings of the earth. The earth was molten for a long time, once enough of it coalesced.

Then as many scientists claim, something major happened. The History Channel explained it. I believe it’s the right story. A Mars sized body hit the early earth more or less head on.

The iron core in that Mars sized body sank into the center and so the earth has a bigger iron core than would be normal. The reflective bounce back put a large amount of material into orbit. That’s where the moon came from. The rest of the material settled down, all molten and so forming a spheroid with no wound in it, with the iron at the center because it is so heavy. The extra large core also includes heavier radioactive elements that heat it, creating currents that continue to this day.

They say that radioactive heat and the way the moon worked the planet through gravity is what started plate tectonics, and plate tectonics is a recirculation device that has played a major role in making life possible by renewing the surface periodically with fresh minerals. This is evident by observing how life loves the ejecta of volcanoes and returns in profusion to volcanic slopes in remarkably short time frames.

The moon has played as well the primary role in stabilizing the earth’s rotation, also making life possible by slowing down the planetary climatic and geologic changes to a time frame that evolution can handle. Thus the old astrological vision of Father Sun and Mother Moon is fundamentally correct. No life is possible without the energy of Sun and the stabilizing recirculation of Moon.

To know stones are holy as the source of all nutrients, all food, is as basic as worship of Sun and Moon. This is not an error, not at all. It is the wisdom of the ancients. Scientists are telling this story in new ways, but the human soul already knew long ago. It is our soulful heritage.

Here Are Stones

I have kneeled in front
of you and placed myself on
an altar of hope
amidst the garden
that perfumes the fact of love.
There as well I have
placed three stones, each old,
older than time I suspect,
so smooth, and each is
different, and so
I've offered a trinity
to mirror the world.

March 16, 2009 11:58 AM

A Quality Of The Heart

Holy cow! Down on the Feedjit widget I track in a broad way who visits this site. Today is a red letter day. Africa showed up for the first time. Welcome, Africa.

Lost love really hurts. We all know that pain. Some of it is true loss. Much of it is tangled up in other spheres of mental and emotional anguish. I can’t help knowing many things related to my lost love, stories of how it has come to be. There are always at least three stories. There are often many more.

When I love you, if I am truly mature, some of it will really be aimed at you. If I am truly mature then enough of my love will really be given to you rather than to some vision I have of you. Even then what that really means, if you are really mature, then the “really you” I know matches up with the most mature vision of the “really you” that you hold these days.

When we lose these tangled knots there is a genuine chaos of pain but much of our loss is less than real, more than real. Look closely. Some of it may be hurt false pride. How much? I only bring this up because a hurt to false pride requires one kind of healing and genuine grief quite another.

If we didn’t desperately need these connections, then we wouldn’t do this. It is much too complicated.

A Quality Of The Heart

I thought I lost love
when you left me here alone,
moving on, you said,
time to go roaming
with the boy you found next door.
Such a cliche, that.
Why couldn't you choose
someone more interesting
to run away with?
I thought I lost love
but found it wasn't in you,
my love, but in me.

March 14, 2009 9:37 PM

Out In The Night

I have had to run before. I have had to get out of town, leave the state and stay away awhile. To my recollection, I have never run as far as this poem says in this lifetime. In general I have been taught that I should be careful with the tool of geographical change, or extra-galactic change for that matter because I need to be clear where the real threat lies. No matter where I go, there I am. I take the vultures in my head with me.

As this poem suggests, it is better to run to something than from something.

Out In The Night

I left this place in
a hurry, aimed at open
space, at the old dust
found outside clusters,
outside galaxies where dark
matter stirs to tunes
emitted by dark
energy, out in the night
where stars are so sparse,
where solitude is.

I have gone there to weave spells,
to sing the old songs.

March 14, 2009 8:59 PM

Sun Stealing

I was born in California, in the Bay Area as they call it, across the bay from San Francisco. I am used to the seasons as they happen there and further south. It turns out that I am used to that all the way to my bones. I am still surprised by how dark it gets here in Portland in the winter, still amazed to have snow as we do at least once each winter. We would have snow in the Bay Area maybe once a decade. The surprise I feel at the seasons in Portland remains despite the fact that I moved here in 1973.

I have friends who live much further north than I do. I imagine what that must be like. One friend remarked not long ago that the sun set around 3:30. It wasn’t the winter solstice yet. I try to get that, what it must be like to live in the dark. For that matter, what is it like to live in the light of the long summer day? How about the winter cold? Last spring, it was still winter up north.

Sun Stealing

It's just five below
zero centigrade, nearly
shirtsleeve weather, hey?
Pioneer spirit
by God. I'll lay myself down
on this black cleaned off
trampoline, gaze at
the sky, at the dark ravens
while I take the sun
and run off with it
in my wandering fine mind.

The ravens speak out,
have something to say,
consider my sun stealing
inconvenient.

March 13, 2009 8:31 PM

Take That Tall Bush Out

This is a true story of the evergreen that was at the corner of our porch when we bought the house in 1981. In 1993, Annie was desperate for changes. Among them, she said she needed light on our porch, and needed our porch to seem more welcoming to visitors. It was a symbolic gesture. I tried to get her to change her mind but she wouldn’t and so I cut this straggly bush down. It was the sort of evergreen you can’t prune. It would not have grown back.

She was exactly right about what it did. It hid and darkened our porch. Through the years I pruned it to keep it in check. In the end I couldn’t get over the fact that a living being was losing its life for no reason other than esthetics. I killed that bush to her order. I cried through the whole thing.

Happy New Year, my friends and readers. Jesus, especially you. I hope you are well.

Take That Tall Bush Out

That evergreen bush
at the corner of our porch,
you said, "Take it out."
It lived long right there
and I trimmed it every
year so carefully,
but you wanted light,
daylight at the door. When I
took the first hard cut

I started to cry.

March 13, 2009 3:11 PM

Where The Cougars Live

Not everything is revealed. Look in the golden eyes of the big cat. Pick up the scent of the territorial markings. Watch the moon rise in the late afternoon. Find the right spot and right time. Inhale. Howl.

Where The Cougars Live

I have something here
but nothing to show for it,
nothing but clean air
this high in mountains
where cougars live, where vision
questers might set up
to pass the crystal
night centered in God's long sight,
nothing but my heart
punching my old chest.

I have something here, value
added by stars, cold
light warbling among
the aspen giving shadows
life and me secrets.

March 13, 2009 12:33 PM

Says The Student

The Taoists insist that the sages look exactly like tramps. They live lives of voluntary poverty, in the forests and when you come upon them the last thing you would think is to revere creatures who live so rough on the planet. It turns out that the Wise Ones are invested in the main in not looking so wise. You might think this is a feature of the Occult, to remain hidden. You might think this is a display of humility. You might think how this reminds you of Christ born in a stable among the beasts. It is actually a manifestation of balance. It is a posture of power.

This poem asks a question. I bet you know the answer. Don’t say it. Instead live with the question. Then go and make love.

Says The Student

It is said, Master,
that you are a heartfelt man
but all I see is
clumsy.

It is said also
that you contain the wisdom
I require.
All I know, you're daft.

Clumsy and daft one,
teach me if you dare,
give me the power to rise.
I want your voice.

I want better though.
I want stature and good grace.
I want shiny things.
Is this a problem?

March 12, 2009 12:44 PM

Probably

This is in its own way a true story. I just hate it when I’m the source of these things in my own life. Like when I lost that job one time, got so fired. You couldn’t get more fired. I still don’t really understand how that all went down but that only shows how over my head that job was. It was just like an avalanche catching up with me. I was ten years sober and ten years with the company that gave me that assignment. They thought I should be able to handle it. I was building a crew around me just like the bosses wanted. The crew survived. I did not.

Oh well.

Probably

I'm pushing myself,
hot dogging it down the slope,
my skis so well waxed.
I look behind me
and see a huge avalanche
bearing down on me,
wonder if it's me
that started this mass rolling
by my hot dog style.

March 12, 2009 12:16 PM

Now I'm To Be A Witness

This poem is about timing. It is about making big changes, and why. It is about letting go of the past, of my identity. I generally don’t do changes of this magnitude that well. My friend Vivian, sober for a long time now, the banker bitch by day, crankster gangster at night, she says it’s really hard to save your ass and your face at the same time. Her whole self marks that saying since she has perfect hair and a nearly perfect face most times. What if you were told you had to leave behind your whole reason for living and switch it for some other way? Who would actually be able to tell you such a thing? Maybe not even God.

Now I'm To Be A Witness

You told me my job.
My hot sweated brow furrowed
at the thought of it.
Used to building things
like fences and walls, bolted
shut doors, with my hands,
now you say I am
to use my dim eyes, brighten
them right up. Oh man,
I hate thinking this,
I'm to use my eyes much more
and my hands will lose
all the old calluses
as I open my doors up,
tear down my high walls.

March 11, 2009 12:59 PM

Touch And Go

I spent my Christmas with my family of choice. We ate well, feeding each other. We did not fight. No one got drunk. Not one of us got drunk, thank You, God. There were several places to go throughout the day. I did not get one present. I did not miss that except to acknowledge that the gifts are not tangible gifts any more. Now I am sitting here amongst you who read and comment, and as well the ones who only read. It is good and right that I am here as well.

My day started last night when I went upstairs from the AA meeting and joined the candlelight service the church was holding. This is a Unitarian Universalist congregation. I spent ten years among them trying a religious cloak on for size. It did not in the end work, though I still can return under certain self imposed future conditions. I sat there among them. There were many greetings and well wishes given to me. What was especially good, I ran into a friend I didn’t expect to see, a man who also went upstairs. I joined him, sat beside him in the service.

This is probably a Buddhist poem.

Touch And Go

I shall stand so still
I become light, a feather
in the holy wind
and each passing thought
shall not burst as I
touch, then let it go.

You said thoughts are delicate
bubbles drifting through
my mind, that I should
not break them open lest they
catch me up, away.

March 11, 2009 9:23 AM

To All My Loves, This Season

I wrote this in December, 2003 and gave it away to those who were in my heart at that time in celebration of Christmas. I wrote recalling the heights, recalling Maire and the story of the queen I once loved lifetimes ago. I posted this poem first on Nov. 17, 2008. Now I repeat this offering on Christmas Eve, 2009.
*********

Dec. 24, 2003
In the spirit of the season, in the spirit of the world's yearning, in the deep places in between all conflicts that persist even though we all know better - here is a musing that surprised me today, as love often surprises those who yearn for the beautiful, the true. Because I have loved this woman, I can love many women. Because I love women, I can also love men. Because I love men and women, I can also love God. Because I love God, I can live today.


To All My Loves, This Season

Ever in my heart, I am grateful for what has happened between us.
It is a piece of the soul's story, a flowering of the Beloved, eternal.
When you take me in, even a little, the present tense of the Infinite
Returns and lifts me into Beauty. Truly you are the Best One -

Truly not you as you struggle here and now, no not you like that -
Truly you as you cascade through all time and space, as we all do.
Maid of the Deepest Moon, you shine, you light a symphony of love -
And me, the Man of the Northern Wall, alight for all time through this.

This is what you have given me, what survives chaos and all pain.
This is what I celebrate in my best moments far beyond our dream.
As I travel on, when I can remember, I choose to sing the moon
And stars and the perfume of you lingers near my heart, calling me.

I shall never be lost again, not as I once was. Now I dance
To songs I know to sing. My heart stays open for you and beyond
To others as I must, following the call bigger than you or me
Until we meet at the other end of this time and claim our true home.

(This is why I pray I do not depart ever in the chaos of lost love,
but if depart we must, I pray to keep the truth of love alive.)


Merry Christmas. May there be much joy in the coming year for you and yours.
Christopher

A Small Bird

There is not really very much to say about this one. It’s inspiration was my visit to a website or a blog, I forget which one and this poem is the truth as it is. What I would add, the stories I know are true as well. If this life is all there is then this is what it is. But once I was a mage, the man of the northern wall, liege to a queen who was murdered through my fault, my failed protection. Once I was in an argument with God, so powerful that I was granted permission for this life. These two are as surely me as the man I am now unadorned. There are more stories of me, but I do not know them. These two I know.

This posting is for the 24th of December, a day that is the eve of a Christian holiday. I am not much for holidays but do my best to get along. I like better the nearness of this holiday to the winter solstice. It is said that the Dec. 25 date was the old Roman solstice marked because it is the first day that is an obvious increase in light. There have been other arguments that link the date with Mithra and Sol Invictus, but that seems now doubtful. The Saturnalia ended on Dec. 23. So the day seems to be returned to Christ as the ninth month marker beyond the Feast of the Anunciation on March 25, the traditional day of Christ’s conception. The earliest recorded celebration of the birth of Christ on Dec. 25 is 243 AD.

I personally favor scholarship that points to Jeshua’s actual birth as a spring event, Christ as Aries or Taurus. Christ as Sagittarius or especially Capricorn seems odd to me.

A Small Bird

This is what my life
is like without the stories
I must tell myself
in order to live.
This is what my life is like.
It is a small room
with open windows
and a small bird flies through it,
in one window, out
the other.

March 10, 2009 2:06 PM

Obstinate Wizened Fool

Just like you all do, I have many sides to me. These are two of my sides. I am either voice in this poem. Heh. This poem also reminds me of something else, someone else.

By the way, I really do wear store bought glasses, now at the strongest lens I can get in this certain kind, sold at Costco, a warehouse store that sells merchandise in lots. These glasses are sold with the claim of aspheric lenses and are sold in packs of three at a time for under $20. They are the only magnifiers that I know work for me and do not give me a headache.

If I get prescription glasses, I promptly lose or break them. I don’t like the astigmatism correction either, can’t see much improvement, certainly not worth the headache that astigmatism correction gives me.

Obstinate Wizened Fool

You say get glasses,
new ones, with built in wide views,
show me what's what.
I say my store boughts
are just fine for me. I'll paste
pictures on for views.
You say what a dork,
what a backward wizened fool,
and obstinate too.
You'd hurt my feeling
(I only have one) if I
let you in my head.

March 10, 2009 2:32 PM


"What would it be like to welcome yourself home, to welcome home your whole body and mind? To make it all right to be here? No more worry about not being good enough, no more worry about not being perfect. Welcome home. What would it be like? What kind of mind would you be willing to feel vulnerable with?"
- Ed Brown


What would it be like to welcome yourself home even with an attitude like that obstinate wizened fool, or his judge? Why is it I believe I have to go somewhere else to find home?

The Wandering Jew

I did not die. I tried and did not die. It is my doom to wander the world. I watch. Sometimes I speak. When I speak I do not say who I am, where I have been, how long I have been on this journey, where I will go. When I speak I tell other secrets. They have told stories about me, that I am the victim of a curse. This is not true but the stories persist. Shalom Aleichem.

Heeding The Call

At every age
it is the same call but not
the same responding
because the hopes change
and the body will also
and time does speed up
and more stuff repeats.

It gets more urgent
and more relaxed. Both ways show
truth in my passing.
I have no time left
but I have all eternity.
What is still hottest?
That I show you how I love
and see you wake up.

March 10, 2009 11:49 AM

Caring For Each Other, Northern Goddess

Here is one of the better visions of compassion and one world view that supports it.

Caring for Each Other

The Buddha has suggested that we are without a mother and father to take care of things for us. Mother Earth, once thought to be all-forgiving and capable of absorbing any abuse we could heap upon her, is not the infinitely benevolent resource we thought she was. As we learn of our own mothers at a certain point of maturity, Mother Earth can and does get worn down by giving and forgiving in the face of our persistent demands. And our Father who is in heaven, though perhaps immensely old and lord over a host of devas (as the Buddhists view him), is nevertheless subject to the laws of karma and is not sufficiently omnipotent to make it all work out for us in the end.

If we do not care for one another, who else will care for us? Who among us has the right to say of another, "He is of no use to us?" For better or worse, whether we like it or not, we are all in this together. Learning how to care for one another is a central part of the path and of the practice.

- Andrew Olendzki, Ph.D., "Medicine for the World," from the Summer 2008 Tricycle.

I feel deep accord with Andrew, though I would add that Father God takes his less than sufficiently powerful position by agreement with us and with the planet, with Mother Earth as well. He could clean this up but He won't, because He promised not to. That is why this is God's Permitted World, not God's World.

I take the position that the primary Trinity is the Taoist one, Heaven, Earth, Man and that we are equally pivotal through the point of soul, co-creators of our destiny in ourselves and on the planet. This is by the deeper collective agreement that upholds the thematic personal agreements that we keep or break in individual lifetimes.

But I am too smitten to leave it at that. I require by my erotic nature that Mother Earth take another aspect. I need a lover. I need not only the triune aspect of the world's co-creation and the quaternity of my crucifixion here and yours, I need as well the duality of communion and the orgasmic nature of encounter with holiness within this lifetime, with Goddess and with you.

Northern Goddess

Your heart is thunder
and you stand so lightning struck
with your smoky hair,
a goddess, true north
for the creatures of the dry
found south of your lines.

March 10, 2009 7:34 AM

What It Is

I have changed worlds more than once. At least twice. This is not my home. :}

What It Is

I'm just overwhelmed.
This place takes my breath away.
I can't quite make out
the reality
here. The colors are too bright
to be real, too red
reds, too green, and smells
and sounds beyond bearing, so
sweet, so true. So harsh.
It's savage, and you,
you are savage, and your love's
a savage love. Lord
I don't know if I
can take this life very long.

I know it began
in mystery and it will
end just the same way.

March 9, 2009 7:40 PM

Spiritual Judo

How to stay in love with nearly anyone, that’s a good question. I had a nearly five year committed relationship. Now she calls herself Francesca. She reads this blog sometimes. Hello Frances, I love you.

This poem comes from that relationship. I know this is what she did in her way as well with me. I am not that easy to take sometimes. This is how to stay in love, at least one way. We did separate. She emigrated to Canada. We have stayed in love. I know it’s true for her too. She’s still looking after my welfare just as she always has.

Spiritual Judo

When you give me looks
like that, I know you are just
about to tell me
what's good for me, what's
right by God, if I'll listen
to you this one time.
I long ago learned
how to use your force to throw
you past me, to give
you to God, saying
You deal with her, my Brother,
she's too much for me.

March 9, 2009 7:23 PM

Like Dylan, What He Said

As I have said before, I am an old dope dealer, 69-71. How that ended, what I call hitting bottom for the second time, is directly related to this poem. The Dylan in the title is not Bob Dylan. It’s the other Dylan, Mr. Thomas, the Welshman (correction by YogaforCynics after checking) who wrote these lines

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Like Dylan, What He Said

And right here I want
to rebel against it all,
rebel against you
who created me,
you who will take me so soon
that even now I
feel the coming dark
in the pains of joints, dimming
sight, the loss of love,
leaking confidence.
I want to stand up straight, shake
my fist in your face.
I'll stand my ground, force
the fire to consume me right
in front of you here.

March 9, 2009 3:54 PM

I followed his advice. My second bottom involved betrayal of friendship, lying, a sting operation, a set trap that somehow didn’t spring, a girlfriend who couldn’t measure up, who I had to leave, the destruction, but carefully of my entire life, leaving town, going from California to Arizona for a couple weeks, coming back to town and after that living a completely different life.

How that worked, when I realized I was in deep shit, my body took over, moved my conscious mind aside, said in effect I had neither the experience nor the intelligence to do what had to be done next. It was a weird ride. I was not in charge, not at all, just sitting back and watching all of it unfold. The things that happened next were like a play, perfectly staged. First I completely evaded the trap, several hours of nighttime driving over roads I did not know, had never been on in order to get back home, totally freaked out, knowing I had to do this perfect at both the buy end and my arrival home. Over several days I cleaned up, demonstrated the uselessness of trying to leverage me for the crime that I actually did not commit (though they had me on others that I did commit, but it wasn’t me they were after), and then carefully leaving town, leaving false trails as I did. I found out that my will to live was only partially in my control. For lack of a better way to say it, my body took over, was determined to neither go to jail nor die without a goddamn good fight. What terrified me, I was not built right for the pressure the narcs could exert. I feared they would make me snitch and then I would simply have to kill myself. I am still convinced I would have killed myself in that condition.

That didn’t happen. I was never even picked up, never charged, nor was the guy I was protecting. The last I heard of him he had made his nut, bought a boat and retired to the South Seas, all from skills and philosophy he built fighting the NVA in Viet Nam. He was a decent man, just thoroughly counter culture and pissed off about the war. He was doing his subversive bit, ripping the system off directly and helping others to do the same. That's how we saw things in those days. He was one of the main suppliers of weed for Hot Tuna. Hot Tuna was a spin off band from the Jefferson Airplane. When they split, that's when the Airplane became the Starship. His smuggling partner had been my roommate in San Jose before my roommate moved to Oregon, bought property and built his house. I loved that man, my roommate, fiercely. I loved my life in those days too. When I had to tear down my life to save myself, it nearly killed me losing so much. My body made that happen, a completely different kind of consciousness. I could not have done it. There is no question I was raging against the dying of the light.

Instead I met my future wife, moved to Oregon with her in a year, and got a career three months after that. I found a continuing education course, signed up and was hooked up with a mentor and best friend who changed my life over the next six years to boot.

Bless My Return

It was not so long ago that as a culture we blessed each other or pointed out to each other that God does. The old biblical stories tell of a father who blesses his son, of a son who knows that he is in trouble without his father’s blessing. This blessing thing is a power transaction. A blessing lifts the one blessed into a raised position of privilege. Here is another example of magic so many of us have left behind.

I notice the email chains are often attempts to reclaim blessings and to pass them around. I think they would work if the people who sent them had a clue what they are really doing. They would look very different from the way they look, though, most of them. Sometimes I get one of those blessing chain emails that lifts the hackles on the back of my neck. Not very often.

I hope my poems go out as blessings sometimes. I don’t write this to get you to tell me they do. I write this to express that giving blessings is square in the Bodhisattva ideal to which I devote my life in the magical world where I can do such things.

One key is, though, the blessing is nearly always singular. You can’t bless large groups in any way which invokes power. Of course you can bless a group. You just don’t have enough power to gift that many at once. Throw the blessing out to the many. One of them catches it. He or she may never tell you, perhaps never even know. This way of blessing people is thankless, reminiscent of the aphorism about doing a good turn in secret.

Bless My Return

I climbed to the edge
of the world, to the tree
completely covered
with snow, ice, and light
found only there, at the edge,
about to fall off.
And me, I'm slipping
a little, resting, getting
my breath. I want you
to bless my return.
I'm afraid I'll lose myself
without your blessing.

March 9, 2009 3:21 PM

Taking Winged Shape

I want to be angelic. Here is a really good reason. I am nearly 100% certain that angel relationships are so much simpler. Sometimes the negotiations of relationship make me really tired. I know why at least some of us fail at relationships. We just get too tired. It shouldn’t be this hard, what my bones and sinews say. Music gives me the same trouble. It just shouldn’t be that hard to master the whole thing. Calculus, I couldn’t even start, even though I am supposed to be really smart, but calculus scared the shit out of me. I want to be angelic because I sense they don’t even have to try. I really, really want to not have to try.

I think I have heard this, that I am not making it up. Angels are complete and perfect creatures, limited in only one direction. They only possess a smidgen of free will, not the main meal that is ours but just a dash, a splash of it, like a good spice. Enough to make rebellion possible, but so rare that only a few have tried it and only one mustered enough to fall into rebellion completely and take some of the others with him.

Man on the other hand is required by his nature to rebel.

God loves Man best. Sometimes angels find that difficult, knowing that. It is said that is why Lucifer fell. God's love for man may be merciful but is not just from the angelic point of view. Lucifer fell for justice.

But Man’s work is the thing. It is so fucking hard.

Taking Winged Shape

That I should want this
thing with more than I ever
could gather from hills,
the grassy long sweep
of wind washed blades and flowers,
white starred stalks among
the green green old hills
of the far planet behind
my flight. That I should
want so much from this
sky into which I now go,
why I learned to fly.

March 9, 2009 1:41 PM

I Was Feeling Blue

Here’s a little slice of life, how love is not license.

I Was Feeling Blue

Then that gal came by
and began to tell me how
I should feel as if
I didn't have someone
inside me telling me that
all the fricken time!

But I love you so
is all the reason she could
give to invade me.

March 8, 2009 8:03 PM

In The Hole

Here’s a shapeshifting poem. I wrote it in third person. The thing about shifting into a gopher – that’s too far down the food chain. If you shift in, you better leave behind a trail of clarity so you can shift back out by rote. Otherwise you are stuck for the duration. Granted a gopher life is not a long one, but the dying is generally not pleasant. Once in a gopher soul you can’t marshall enough to inaugurate a shapeshift back out, so your out has to be there already formed.

Granted, I don’t know why someone would actually want to be a gopher. But here’s another issue with shapeshifting: it is easy enough to slip sideways if you don’t keep discipline. You can end up a gopher by accident. That’s what I did. Shit.

In The Hole

The gopher digging
his way past the tangled roots
of the rose above,
wondering what's next
and why he should encounter
the hint of fragrance,
the sign of sharp thorns.
It's dark in his hole, but life
glows, lights his dim thought.

March 6, 2009 8:50 PM

I Keep Losing Things

I love the play of things in a world of magic and love. I am firm in my belief that the spirit world has a power dimension. I believe that the power issue was primary in the oldest forms of the spiritual walk, that the earliest human groups needed to get the world to cooperate, the prey to come to them, the storms to hold off at critical times, and similar issues, on pain of death. This was no joke. I believe the need for spirit power produced in certain locations a “science of spirit” over generations that in a certain sense could be handed down from master to apprentice.

After literally millions of years the institutions in place were tribal, forms of shamanism. In China, Tibet, and Southeast Asia this was brought forward and institutionalized in aspects of Taoism in China and other local forms elsewhere. These traditional forms of shamanism were deeply transformed by the advent of agriculture but in essence were unbroken.

The shamanic roots of Taoism remain in place still today, why Taoist thinking is overtly alchemical in many areas. Elsewhere on the planet, especially in the near East, India, Egypt and through that influence in Europe, the advent of agriculture broke shamanism and replaced it with priesthood religions that match the political power structures of empire. The shamanic traditions had to go underground, because spirit power could not be allowed to be that democratic.

I love the play of things in a world of magic and love. I am shaman at heart. I have taken my own spirit journeys. I believe music, art, poetry can be alchemical in nature, transformative in ways difficult to fathom without intimacy, magic, love. And with coyote, I say, “you better be able to take a joke along the way.” There is pithy bar talk for that sentiment, because drunks are sky pilots too.

I have a growing relationship with a practicing Homeopath. I know he is certain that spirit power is essential to healing, that the problem with mainstream western medicine is that it has divorced from spirit power in favor of “science”, as if western science is the only kind. This of course ignores literally at least 50,000 years of wisdom. It assumes the ancients were rubes and boobs, buried under ignorance. It is clear the ancients were at least as intelligent as we are all the way along. It is also certain they were highly motivated by their uncertain life to achieve success in marshalling spiritual power. Why would it be surprising that they achieved spirit power along the way?

Here is a poem that comes from another world strangely like this one.

I Keep Losing Things

I see you coming
my way out of the forest,
that place that the moons
of this world visit,
nestling in the trees.
You hold a basket of rose
petals and I know
you are going to
give me a shower of them,
expecting that I
hold the golden key.
I'm sorry, but I lost that
key two lives ago.

March 6, 2009 11:58 AM

You Have Found Your Way

It's always a dialog. I know that too. Even in the alone moments, even if only talking to myself, it is always dialog that makes a difference. The space between, the distance, is required. That is why for me God cannot only be within, and the experience of God's presence cannot only be an inner knowing, and also why this whole thing does not make sense for me without God. It's always dialog and the distance that permits dialog.

I am making no claim for ultimate reality. I am making the claim for the reality of my own spiritual walk, the level of spirit appropriate to my destiny, to the agreement that has me on the planet. I will never really make a good Buddhist. I need someone to wrestle with. Buddhists will tell you God may or may not be there, but He is not necessary. I can only reply, that is not this lifetime for me.

Likewise I really need all of you. I need the distance and the dialog. I need the love. Love is the distance. There is a myth, I think, that claims for soul mates a union like the embrace implied in many wedding ceremonies, that the two shall be as one. No. Love is the distance and the tension and the resolution and the high of very temporary orgasmic union (whether sexual or not, it subsides).

Years ago I had experiences like that on LSD and realized I was seeing the truth for real. I still think so. I tried very hard to stay there and my life told me in no uncertain terms it was not going to happen that way because love is the distances and the tension.

Love is the power that joins polarities.

You Have Found Your Way

The world love creates
possesses all the magic
clothed in white feathers,
able to lift us,
to provide powerful wings,
to provide the space
we need to begin
our own weaving of white light.

When you tell me this
I know you have found
your way into the magic,
into my sore heart.

March 5, 2009 11:50 AM

As She Touches Me

Vinisha pointed something out. If I may paraphrase it, “Is there no solitary path?”

I think I will sit with this for a few days. I know that what has moved me most are the relationships that have engaged me, and I believe that is the spiritual walk of most of us, in and through intimacy with family, friends, even strangers. I also know as I wrote not long ago that the great price of being self taught is a too heavy passage through the material, that the burden of the self taught is very heavy. It is too much responsibility. Yet I also know that God meets us right where we are at. That means a solitary call comes to some of us. There is no question of that. I think that is all I shall say, though I should add this: some of the most erotic love poems to God come from solitary contemplatives. That is a fact. Vinisha, remind me in a while. I am letting it sink down now into the deep of me. What I mean is, Vinisha, that I took your question to mean a practice of some kind not in the monastic setting or in vows. That is the direct answer of course. There are monastic orders designed to accommodate a solitary path.

As She Touches Me

She contains power
collected from the craggy
outcrops, from the cones
of the northern trees,
from the cries of the osprey
building atop poles
set by men for them
though men thought for their own use.

She gives of that force
let out carefully in small
measure, gentle, sweet
as she touches me
in the sore spots and they melt
lost, fallen in love.

March 5, 2009 10:47 AM

Walk On

In my last post we got around to how we need each other to traverse the spiritual distance between worlds. But maybe not this much.

There is a line in this one that points to a piece of my pie. "you were laughing with/all of me..."

I am convinced I am not all here, cannot be contained in finitude that way. That's what the line refers to, that the pratfalls I take are probably funny to me too from the celestial point of view. However, you don't see me laughing all that often down here in finite-land.

I am here because I am not all there. :) But I am there because I am not all here.

Walk On

I tried to lean on
your strength, your lead - slippery
slope that. All I got
was a muddy face
and you laughing. Then you said
you were laughing with
all of me about
my dependent need, how I'm
holding foolish hope
when all I have to
do is walk on down the lines
of my own great soul.

March 4, 2009 4:03 PM

Looking For Answers

Imagine looking for answers like Galileo did, aware as he must have been that there were people in the world so sure of the answers they had already that they were not looking for more. Imagine looking for answers in a place and time when if you find answers, others will refuse you and your effort. They will condemn you if you actually find enough leverage somehow and refuse to go away. They may kill you for your answers, should you actually find them. Imagine this is such a time. Trust me, this is such a time, if you seek answers in the wrong places, just like always.

Looking For Answers

You all say today
I know nothing, that's the start.
I look for other
opinions, maybe
I can know something, but that's
just my vanity.

I'm just a small stump
in the forest, timidly
putting out a shoot,
looking for answers
in the gray grassy daylight
of my tiny glade.

March 4, 2009 8:54 AM

No Separation

Who has the courage to reach love's peak? The easiest way is of course sex, but it is not the only way. And of course most sex doesn't reach love's peak. I am only talking to the women here from the distance of being a man. I will leave it to some woman to talk to the men. My mother was an award winning (in college) Dramatist, an English teacher, and in yet another career, a minister and then a teacher of ministers. She told me it takes a man to really get a woman, and vice versa, at least in writing, because there has to be distance and tension for this. She said the best men in literature were written by women, while the best women, by men.

Intimacy changes things. Love's peak cannot happen without intimacy and trust and faith because there is always a cliff and always jumping off the cliff. At the critical moment of decision no one can help. The best lovers learn to halt all encouragement just before. The leap must be freely taken, unhindered by promises and visions.

No Separation

In the deep of you
is a gate that love can reach
and reaching open.
I tell you surely
that you display the divine
the moment the gate
opens and the light
flames forth into the warm lamp
of your holy heart.

At love's peak I see
no separation between
the goddess and you.

March 3, 2009 12:45 PM

Too Damn Hot

I don’t know if you people love the poetry that tells you a real story as much as me but a master at it, you can find here at The Buffaloe Pen. She tells gritty stories of the South. Her site will lead you to really cool sites too, not only other blogs but as well quarterlies and other master poets. She wrote a great story poem involving a mule and so I wrote one too. I would highly recommend her archives. She publishes in many places, so she doesn’t post on her blog as frequently as I would wish. She will tell you where to find her poetry though.

Too Damn Hot

I sit, flick my long
brown ears at the flies, sit here
in this row all done
and I would laugh at
that skinny-two-legs plowing
without me, braying
out a long, long laugh
but she already bit me
once right on one ear
and I don't know what
she'll do next if I laugh now
but I ain't plowing,

not one more row here,
not today, it's too damn hot
and I'm too lazy.

March 2, 2009 2:56 PM

We Once Loved

This might be too preachy, but dammit, it’s the truth.

There was a T-shirt a while back that said, “He who dies with the most toys wins.” It’s time to say it again…He who dies with the most love wins. I am pretty sure you understand my point. I am far from in the running for the most sex. I have some grand male friends with whom I share a special love. I am sure you know by now, reading my work, that I am not gay. I could have been with one man, many years ago. I loved him that much. I could have made love with him, but only if he asked it of me, because I am not gay. Neither was he.

Any of my love poems are to women, or to God, or the Goddess.

We Once Loved

I am not here long,
not long at all, nor are you.

We are called to love
in the moment as
we can, as if we had all
the time in the world,
as if it could last,
as if someone else would care
that we were once here
and that we once loved
like the ancient mountains grew,
slowly wearing down.

March 2, 2009 2:28 PM

The Shoes You Threw Up There

My house is situated in an older part of the town of Gladstone, a totally residential neighborhood, a mix of older and newer lower value houses and on my street at least duplexes. This neighborhood is only a couple blocks from Gladstone’s main streets, Dartmouth and Portland Avenue, which splits the town into east and west. I am a duplex of sorts too, taxed a little unfairly because the other domicile is really a studio apartment though it is in a stand alone building. I cannot rent it for a price fair to the taxes. Nearby there are apartments where once there were only houses, some older and some newer. Some of the older householders here lament how the neighborhood has gone downhill. Really though, I think it’s a pretty good neighborhood, and I am friends with the neighbors next door to the left and across from them. The neighbor across and to my right is caring for my old cat now and my cat gets to be much warmer there in the laundry room instead of here in my garage. I have taken to feeding Hellboy on my porch. He’s the feral cat who lives on that neighbor’s porch. It’s only fair.

It has gotten colder. With a nod to my friends in Whitehorse and Mendenhall, it gets dark at 5:30, not 3:30, and by colder I mean above freezing still. The goldfinches have regained their bright yellow breasts for some reason. They flock around my feeder still, and the Canada geese herds are still mining the grassy verges on the road. A hundred or so gather sometimes, with two or three on watch while the rest dig for food. I love the geese from a distance. They do not love us, but they do trust we will stay in our cars.

There is a school, Gladstone High School not far to the northeast. Due east three blocks is an elementary school and behind it Gladstone’s main park where every year the city fair is held. We have a parade, you know, just as we did in the Willamette neighborhood where I lived before. On the high wires of a couple nearby intersections are one tied pair of sneakers each, dangling there for years now. I watch them slowly degrade in the seasons. They have held up quite well.

There. I hardly allowed any sentence fragments in this post. That better, Mom? This is her house I live in. She bought it to be near me in her last years, since Lees Summit, near Kansas City, Missouri where my sister still lives because Mom lived there once turned out to be mean streets for her.

The Shoes You Threw Up There

I couldn't throw them
today, not if I tried, not
to save my old life.

Shoes across the wire
take shoulders that swing easy
to toss them high up
and over to stay.

My shoulders complain often
now, and so the rest
as well, twinges that
speak clearly of the sometime
journey I will take.

March 02, 2009 2:15 PM