Fiat Lux

(Let There Be Light)

Struck again by lightening
like there was no beginning,
no sending of a message,
no sublime presser of <Enter>.

Green is true and ever was
to imbue the shadows
where the hungry wait
to seal the fate of the choiceless.

The voiceless won’t be ever so:
things do grow — we’ve seen it now –
how time bestows ‘I am’ and sows
the seeds for was and will be.

It moves me, watching from the cusp,
this stammer-lisp of sea change,
to derange the old assumption,
gather gumption, and press on.

Only movement can be steered
by multi-tiered emotion
and children of the mindful wave
to save creative chaos.

We see loss when we venture near.
Things dear to us are tested,
vanities arrested in the tide
as pride subsides — is bested
by new visions for our verities,
new measures, marks, and similes,
new hopes, and dreams, and canopies
to shelter luminosities.

June 2008

Object of Obstacle

I am become your trouble.
You can no longer think you are
what you thought you were.

I am the thorn in your side,
the faithful wound of a friend,
the itch that persists.

I am the bee in your bonnet,
the sand in your oyster,
the hitch in your get-along.
I am the stone in your path.

I am the discomfort,
the disequilibrium,
the burning question,
and the limitation.

Yet you are always dependent on me!
Without me you would not know cooperation,
collaboration,
learning,
or love.

In desperation you personify me
you demonize me,
you ignore me.
But all such efforts are mirrored back to you
and your own unfinished business.

You must ultimately love me, too –
far beyond mere sympathy for your devils.

 

April 2008

Chrysalis

We’ve eaten almost everything.
Our skin is tight and itchy.
We’re crowded in our minds.

The fruit of frantic foraging,
the silken threads of distilled discovery,
we carefully grasp and arrange,
covering our nakedness
so recently confessed
as so larval.

Compelled, we exude our crucible cocoon
of knowledge, words, and appetite.
Twisting and jerking,
we prove our enclosure
then rest and wait

and wait.

What we shall become we cannot say.
We have never done this before.
This is chrysalis faith.

(Feb. 2008)

Bardic Aperspective

1
The mouth is opened.
You can see the labor camp inside
working on the words to end all words,
at least for a while,
at least to hint an end exists,
pressing the strategic geometry of influence
to restate the circumstantial evidence
into metaphors of the ineffable,

something,

to eclipse both the final say and sayer.

The feet that bring that good news
matched only by the
beautiful belly buttons of better bards,
the omphalos of humanity.

2
A cloud is rising beyond the trees.
It’s in the air, you know.
We breathe it.
The birds know this substance well.

Full of thought and being,
ghosts live there, you know.
We breathe it.
Spirits know this substance well.

Inhaling all the common memes
we hold our breath and dive in search of life.
Exhaling speaks the blue-green mantra,
Stokes the fire, affirms the strife.

Each thought we breathe informs a story:
we see now how they spin their glory.
Word-weary we wait…
we breathe.
We fan the flame and wonder.
What gods have put together
Let no one put asunder.

3
Vital vapors reach a verity of height and heat,
cool into words and descend.
The best neither fogs a friend
nor floods a foe,

but infuses life with life.

4
So many sentient poets now
afloat beyond belief
to challenge all pat answers
and ever seek relief
from arrivals on the scaffolding
still weary from their climb
who want to set up housekeeping
and corner every rhyme.

“This is not it! We are not done!”
The fervent mouths will shout,
“Rest and then arise again
and work the inward out!”

5
It sounds so simple when you say so.
The air sparkles with largesse
and I fly before I think to flap.

It’s the itchy dreams that form us, you know.

These dance
when, at last,
they hear the music.

But never because they
know they know
they know

the steps.

Contraction Timing

You were born yesterday,
and again this morning,
and again we hope tomorrow.

Why, I asked,
are babies born so naked,
with their water flowing to ground, and
their fire flowing to sky
so perfectly — so automatically?

It creates currents that form
the multi-vortical human mindscape
where every spin the now-ist sees
as yesterday’s pre-reality.

You can’t take the same sacred snapshot twice:
no matter how terminally indignant
the weekly pattern-monger’s habit,
Love remains the fulcrum and
always moves above a still.

It’s a fragile eternity that yields
an allergy to urgency,
no appetite for the Bantu fractal or
the circumdancing flower of homo-spiritus,
or the growing rampant glory of identity
taming the local lizard.

But we can see the buds on gravid branches
all watching in their special ways
to be the stone, the bird, the tree,
the proactive jazz blossoms,
the spin-bombs of living Logos
bringing on more contractions…

First published at vox poetica.

Art

Yes, to genius capture
the instant precious
open flowing contours of
the image righteous
in mirrored words protected
from the lefteous flood
descending – the sparkle moment
that changes things
where only blind ones
glimpse the subtle path
where birds have flown above.

The Art of Smoke

Arrives again the garden oracle
With her branchy appetite,
Free to be true –

Yet cursed by lack of words
and automatic writing
and little courage to say what’s meant,

Like harlequins hurled high into the fungal field
For global fruiting.
Imagine
The memetic sabotage!
There’s no magic in prostitution.

Yet bud to blossom,
She’s here to stay
For the honor in post-lingual thinking.
The man-eating metaphor weeds
Are NOT her doing.
She is NOT the one robbing sentience of pertinence.

We yield our trabeated thinking.

What Time Is It?

Today I kissed the leaves of two Oaks
One Ash, and one Redbud.

It was all in perfect glory.

So… we’re calling this “2010″ …
Do you know where your Mother is?

Scraps of the Indivisible

This unity
and its seamlessness,

The impunity
of our squeamishness,

Just listen to us
Scream like fish.

Near Miss

Perpetual near miss,
Histories of near mysteries,
Inner treaties where needies
Share fleeting notions of the ocean
And the waves that nearly missed them.

Sudden dust devils
Struggle down streets
To meet new particles,
New glue:
Breezy memes that seem
Too hungry for more -
Too hungry for me.

You walk up streets
Through some devils.
They unravel,
Fall apart into precious souls
Re-awaking on the ground,
Again.

The feared dark chaos,
Is the sweet white noise
Of fresh canvas,
A tabula rasa
A clean start
You thought you had
Nearly missed.

Beings Talk

Beings talk o’er tea in my backyard,
(An axe-free zone, you know.)
Without a care we can share our heart
In the yard where beanstalks grow.

Rest assured there was a row
When I first did the deed:
Trading up our holy cow
For the ugliest of seed.

But I would not exchange my lot
For a herd of fat bovine,
While communing in my yard, I got,
And is what I hold divine.

In here
We defy the demons
Of the strangled world
Out there.
We trade in cryptic currencies
And give time a little air.

The calculus of becoming
Is how we count our blessings
And inspirations aren’t exhaled,
But shout, “Credendo Vides!”

Beings talk o’er tea in my backyard,
(It’s an axe-free zone, you know.)
Without fear, here we share our heart
In the yard where the beanstalks grow.

Nut Tree

A buried nut, I found
it was not me
but for you
I would pursue
a tree.

Meaning

Standing rigid
in the sparkling river
he grips his cup downside up.

Dry and thirsty
he gathers his resolve
and curses cups.

Right it, please, I urge him,
but the message flows off the rim
into to the sparkling river.

Faith in Becoming

The songs we sing crawling
are not our walking songs,
which are not our swimming songs,
which are not our flying songs.

Crawling songs will stand up,
the walking songs will dive in,
and swimming songs will take wing
and sing
the songs of being
and the joy of crawling
until walking
until swimming
until flying,

and sing
the love that flies
at eye level
to any crawler, walker, swimmer, flier,
and that dances to all the songs
while imparting the faith in becoming.