…it is not another grey morning, I promise you…

To want to taste…is to reach for a sensation, to furtively search, late at night, or maybe in the morning….shadow bugs moving on walls as light comes in announcing all you’ll really be able to have is an expectation that things are changing…

The morning is grey not because of a depression or a lack of moral fiber, but as an admission that any mist must make to the rising of a spectacular sun, that it is and always will be submissive to heat, to evaporation, to particulation, to dispersal…

And though a dispersed mist may become rebellious enough to regather itself into a wind, and rain for forty days and forty nights – the sun knows, as does any idea whose time has come, that passion trumps subjugation, and makes any day new again….

(Another 10 Minute Poem)

a fence is no way to contain a soul

They are getting better at building  fences…to box you in. Soon, you’ll have only one place to go…where they directed you. You won’t care though because of the candy they gave you…to eat while pacing their infirmaries.

What you want, is it what you want, or what it has been suggested to you to want? I used to like chocolate, but lately for some reason I’ve a hankering for vanilla, not sure how that happened, or if I ever really liked chocolate…

What the westward ho people liked so much about the west was that they got to build fences there…contain according to their own plans….what was wild and heathen. They thought this was what freemen did…while on vacation.

(A 10 Minute Poem)

the hand, that flys…goes where?

The maiden firmly grasped the handle of the fly away umbrella forgetting that she had ever been afraid of heights…in this way she flew into the blizzard…to the somewhere else that there was to go…

Let the peasants be in charge of parade bunting…paupers the rain, and the char woman the ingredients for how to clean up the mess…left by our drunk for power but ultimately still at core, lazy fathers

I can imagine this poem with or without me in it. I am both here, by that I mean here in the poem, and over there with you in your room staring at your screen, wondering what I might write next…about what either of us might do.

Knock on a mediums table until uncle billy or aunt marge knocks back; “the treasure, the one I buried” – Yes, I am listening, but that connection like it always does in a dream before you reach the something you wanted…fades.

(A 10 Minute Poem)

(Image Came From Here: Natura Picta)

Life is Not a Coffee Table Book

the talent to stand tall, look important, and in fact be important
is not for the stubby little baby briefcase boys without the talent
or the strength to bring buckets of emotional water to the fire of
their incapacities…no

a moment of lull is not when you sing of the one time or another
in the past that you saved a child from burning in the ancient tar
paper building, not then, in that interlude, you might better
consider resigning your position…yes

but you won’t, too fond you’ll say, of the past days of your wants
pasted in albums and casually, yes too casually, displayed on your
coffee table like a book of pretty and inviting garden pictures, but
everybody knows you did not grow those…no

(another 10 minute poem)

a prayer in three acts

(after a period of fasting)

a desert hard ground cracked couldn’t
care less about rain anymore, and gave
the task of praying over to a spiny
tip cactus…who

instead tells a memory toad once
seen sitting by the mirage shore
to hop on over to the very edge of
worry and wake the giant…who

although he wished to stay sleeping
opened one eye and peered skyward
without a hint of meekness and said,
rain god rain, shower us with…pity

(another 10 minute poem)

The Prayer

…Prayer…

By the long light, the sigh of whispers…a tip of prayer forms a wind of sound and though there be furies and the despair of journeys they abate for a moment…for a time, your time, to be with what you call a creator.

The time intentful, like shadows reaching through windows; the breaths of passion; no anxiety at being witnessed – held and soothed by that kind of warmth that is so comforting – as are the hands of good friends…

Then the mile and the mountain, the collapse not unforeseen – but neither anticipated to be taking place at the intersession of the holy; in the presence of the ineffable – wind on moon lakes, fish sleeping…

You, all the while you praying to become something other; more – better or greater – lovable and agreeable, but angels, if you want to name them this, wish only that they could trade places, to be as gods like you, breathing.

(For My Daughter Katherine)

…so sin…

Innocent?
the moon might state otherwise of your life and efforts…the daily – the twirls and eddies of your surface, though concisely unique and wet with promise, cannot hide the dry facts of fate…that you are average in every way including the way you hope.

Pure?
at the beginning of your time the sun might have agreed, and the king of light did bath you in the star streams of his blood, and you did walk from no where into the great and present here, but only to be forgetful of what has past or the true meaning of your name.

Clean?
an old woman can be sought through the peril of your mistakes, and when found at the bottom of a hill, will tell you that beliefs are questionable and mythological: that purity should it exist, is nothing without the dirt of effort – that sin comes only to those who try.