Prayer tonight, I'm happy today
I have a wicker table
with two unmatching wicker chairs.

I bought a wonderful woven turquoise place mat
for my cats so they won't be quite as messy.
I bought my boyfriend a cheap wicker Fedora.

My son spoke with another Jew
and met someone from my people.

Today was blessedly hot, thank God!
I only worked a little.

Tonight is quiet, and my family is close,
My prayer tonight is happy,
So be it.

The war was everywhere,
          not just in the desert      
          where we expected it to be.          
One night I heard the war in the wall
          behind my head—
          an animal with thick skin-wings
beating another toothy beast,
         claws hitting fur, wood, flesh.
         I asked my neighbor later
what it had been like to be alive
         before a time of war,
         and he said it was funny we even
have a word for it, because
         everything that’s alive
         stays that way by tearing
heat from another’s belly.

by Hannah Gamble

Dead expectations are grinding away at my heart. The only consolation is that I won him at a game of chess. But the end is in sight. How long can it last when he runs into the arms of another?

Our front porch is covered in chairs
waiting for visitors
We offer you hot tea or cold
Yoga at ten
and prayer flags if you need.

Far Away there are Yogis standing in
Mountain Pose...
Where is my peace guru?

My path is riddled without a person
holding my hand or
offering me an invitation
to pray the way I want to pray.

I can only imagine the room
hot and charged with mantras
and faith where followers
devote their hours to adherence.  

There lives are busy
moments of honesty,
contentment,
fervent compassion,
sweat, and balance.

Here we sit drinking,
waiting in our chairs,
while our posture
is a hope rather than
a deed.

today hasn't been special,
crescendo stilled or spent
in a farther landscape.

today I teetered on heavy sighs,
convinced myself to become more
dignified.

today I wished to wash away
the thoughts of a man in a distant land
laughing freely.

today I think I'll buckle up,
tighten my pack, walk a thousand miles
through thick jungle.

today I'll strip down naked,
wear gypsy spangled slippers,
dance wildly amongst a million strangers.

today I'll wonder If I can alter my life,
add a pound of flesh, and find
what I've been looking for all these years.

Poetry sings humanity's tale of living.

When pain upon pain
becomes the rhythm of the season,
the day of healing falls short of now.
When beauty in Jah becomes a greedy boat,
then my bitter white dress
I will pull up to above my ankles and excuse myself.  

Dancers jumpin’, rollin’ their thunder,
dippin’ their hips till the men start to rumble,
dancer woman watch that young girl toil;
gather in your jealous heart old woman,
she’s here to work.  

Make room old ladies, our daughters are a comin’,
you’re youth goes in the locker room;
your privies go in a flower box.  

October 16, 2010

Flowers bloom yearly
then die. We make beds
for beauty, sheeting them
to make love.  Lovers coil
wrapping skin, sweating to
make a future enshrined with
devotions to their own.
Damp ground tread on by
feet running to demand what
they want for themselves. Running
over flowers pinking towards the sun;
wild, growing without struggle, until
they are trampled.

Jan. 26, 2009

Foiled at every turn
some say this as cliche,
for me it is true.

Every love affair spoils,
each chance at wealth stolen,
any opportunity to get ahead blocked.

Flower petals fall when
the bee refuses it's kiss, or
light reserves its brilliance.

a 1. I drink coffee every morning
b 2. while teachers in the south, east, and north
c 3. rise, listening with held breath
d 4. to a rhythm to which they will follow
a 5. our future into allowing
b 6. chosen students, blessed, permitted to go forth
c 7. to determine our fate like a Seth,
d 8. bearing fruit we are forced to swallow.
a 9. Peaceful coffee, too rich for mourning,
b 10. traffic passes our house driving toward
c 11. a place I'll pass like an exile abandoning my quest.
d 12. Turning, turning like a dervish skirt's bravado
c 13. chiseling out my worshipers niche with my best
d 14. hand, lying in hot dirt, closing my eyes to learned sorrow.

I've given poetry readings where less than a handful of people were present. It's a humbling experience. It’s also a deeply familiar experience.

"Poetry is useless," poet Geoffrey ****** said in a 2013 interview, "but it is useless the way the soul is useless—it is unnecessary, but we would not be what we are without it."

I was raised a Roman Catholic, and though I don’t go to Mass regularly anymore, I still remember early mornings during Advent when I went to liturgies at my parochial school. It was part of my offering—the sacrifice I made to honor the impending birth of the Savior—along with giving up candy at Lent. So few people attended at that hour that the priest turned on only a few lights near the altar. Approaching the front of the church, my plastic book bag rustling against my winter coat, I felt as if I were nearing the seashore at sunrise: the silhouettes of old widows on their kneelers at low tide, waiting for the priest to come in, starting the ritual in plain, unsung vernacular. No organist to blast us into reverence. No procession.

Every day, all over the world, these sparsely attended ceremonies still happen. Masses are said. Poetry is read. Poems are written on screens and scraps of paper. When I retire for the day, I move into a meditative, solitary, poetic space. These are the central filaments burning through my life, and the longer I live, the more they seem to be fused together.

Poetry is marginal, thankless, untethered from fame and fortune; it's also gut level, urgent, private yet yearning for connection. In all these ways, it's like prayer for me. I’m a not-quite-lapsed Catholic with Zen leanings, but I’ll always pray—and I’ll always write poems. Writing hasn’t brought me the Poetry Jackpot I once pursued, but it draws on the same inner wiring that flickers when I pray.        

• • •

In the 2012 collection A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith, nineteen contemporary American poets, from Buddhist to Wiccan to Christian, discuss how their artistic and spiritual lives inform one another. Kazim Ali, who was raised a Shia Muslim, observes in his essay “Doubt and Seeking”:

[Prayer is] speaking to someone you know is not going to be able to speak back, so you're allowed to be the most honest that you can be. In prayer you're allowed to be as purely selfish as you like. You can ask for something completely irrational. I have written that prayer is a form of panic, because in prayer you don't really think you're going to be answered. You'll either get what you want or you won't.

You could replace the word "prayer" with "poetry" with little or no loss of meaning. I'd even go so far as to say that submitting my work to a journal often feels like this, too. Sometimes, when I get an answer in the form of an acceptance, I'm stunned.

"I never think of a possible God reading my poems, although the gods used to love the arts,” writes ***** Howe in her essay "Footsteps over Ground." She adds:

Poetry could be spoken into a well, of course, and drop like a penny into the black water. Sometimes I think that there is a heaven for poems and novels and music and dance and paintings, but they might only be hard-worked sparks off a great mill, which may add up to a whole-cloth in the infinite.

And here, you could easily replace the word "poetry" with "prayer." The penny falling to the bottom of a well is more often what we experience. But both poetry and prayer are things humans have learned to do in order to go on. Doubt is a given, but we do get to choose what it is we doubt.

A God in the House Book Cover
Quite a few authors in A God in the House (Howe, Gerald Stern, Jane Hirschfield, Christian Wiman) invoke the spiritual writing of Simone Weil, including her assertion that "absolutely unmixed attention is prayer." This sounds like the Zen concept of mindfulness. And it broadens the possibility for poetry as prayer, regardless of content, since writing poetry is an act of acute mindfulness. We mostly use words in the practical world to persuade or communicate, but prayers in various religious traditions can be lamentations of great sorrow. Help me, save me, take this pain away—I am in agony. In a church or a temple or a mosque, such prayerful lamentation is viewed as a form of expression for its own good, even when it doesn't lead immediately to a change of emotional state.

Perhaps the unmixed attention Weil wrote of is a unity of intention and utterance that’s far too rare in our own lives. We seldom match what we think or feel with what we actually say. When it happens spontaneously in poetry or prayer—Allen Ginsberg's "First thought, best thought" ideal —it feels like a miracle, as do all the moments when I manage to get out of my own way as a poet.

Many people who pray don’t envision a clear image of whom or what they’re praying to. But poets often have some sense of their potential readers. There are authorities whose approval I've tried to win or simply people I've tried to please: teachers, fellow writers, editors, contest judges—even my uncle, who actually reads my poems when they appear in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where he used to work.

And yet, my most immersed writing is not done with those real faces in mind. I write to the same general entity to which I pray. It's as if the dome of my skull extends to the ceiling of the room I'm in, then to the dome of the sky and outward. It’s like the musings I had as a child lying awake at night, when my imagination took me to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. But then I emerge from this wide-open state and begin thinking about possible readers—and the faces appear.

This might also be where the magic ends.

• • •

I write poetry because it’s what I do, just as frogs croak and mathematicians ponder numbers. Poetry draws on something in me that has persisted over time, even as I’ve distracted myself with other goals, demands, and purposes; even as I’ve been forced by circumstance to strip writing poetry of certain expectations.

"Life on a Lily Pad" © Michelle Tribe
"Life on a Lily Pad"
© Michelle Tribe
At 21, I was sure I’d publish my first book before I was 25. I’m past my forties now and have yet to find a publisher for a book-length collection, though I've published more than a hundred individual poems and two chapbooks. So, if a “real” book is the equivalent of receiving indisputable evidence that your prayers are being answered, I’m still waiting.

It hasn’t been easy to shed the bitter urgency I’ve felt on learning that one of my manuscripts was a finalist in this or that contest, but was not the winner. Writing in order to attain external success can be as tainted and brittle as saying a prayer that, in truth, is more like a command: (Please), God, let me get through this difficulty (or else)—

Or else what? It’s a false threat, if there’s little else left to do but pray. When my partner is in the ICU, his lungs full of fluid backed up from a defective aortic valve; when my nephew is deployed to Afghanistan; when an ex is drowning in his addiction; when I hit a dead end in my job and don’t think I can do it one more day—every effort to imagine that these things might be gotten through is a kind of prayer that helps me weather a life over which I have little control.

Repeated disappointment in my quest to hit the Poetry Jackpot has taught me to recast the jackpot in the lowercase—locating it not in the outcome but in the act of writing itself, sorting out the healthy from the unhealthy intentions for doing it. Of course, this shift in perspective was not as neat as the preceding sentence makes it seem. There were years of thrashing about, of turning over stones and even throwing them, then moments of exhaustion when I just barely heard the message from within:

This is too fragile and fraught to be something that guides your whole life.

I didn't hear those words, exactly—and this is important. For decades, I’ve made my living as a writer. But I can't manipulate or edit total gut realizations. I can throw words at them, but it would be like shaking a water bottle at a forest fire; at best, I can chase the feeling with metaphors: It's like this—no, like this—or like this.

So, odd as this sounds for a poet, I now seek wordlessness. When I meditate, I intercept hundreds of times the impulse to shape a perception into words. Reduced to basics, the challenge facing any writer is knowing what to say—and what not to.

• • •

To read or listen to poetry requires unmixed attention just as writing it does. And when a poem is read aloud, there's a communal, at times ritualistic, element that can make a reading feel like collective prayer, even if there are only a few listeners in the audience or I’m listening by myself.

"Allen Ginsberg" © MDCArchives
Allen Ginsberg
© MDCArchives
When I want to feel moved and enlarged, all I have to do is play Patti Smith's rendition of Ginsberg's "Footnote to Howl." His long list poem from 1955 gathers people, places, objects, and abstractions onto a single exuberant altar. It’s certainly a prayer, one that opens this way:

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and **** and hand and ******* holy!

Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!

Some parts of Ginsberg's list ("forgiveness! charity! faith! bodies! suffering! magnanimity!") belong in any conventional catalogue of what a prayer celebrates as sacred. Other profane elements ("the ***** of the grandfathers of Kansas!") gain admission because they are swept up into his ritualistic roll call.

I can easily parody Ginsberg's litany: Holy the Dairy Queen, holy the barns of the Amish where cheese is releasing its ambitious stench, holy the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Internet. But reading the poem aloud feels to me the way putting on ritual garments must to a shaman or rabbi or priest. Watching Patti Smith perform the poem (various versions are available on YouTube), I get shivers seeing how it transforms her, and it's clear why she titled her treatment of the poem "Spell."

A parody can't do that. It can't manifest as the palpable unity of intention and utterance. It can't do what Emily Dickinson famously said that poetry did to her:

If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only [ways] I know it. Is there any other way.

Like the process of prayer—to God, to a better and bigger self, to the atmosphere—writing can be a step toward unifying heart, mind, body, universe. Ginsberg's frenzied catalogue ends on "brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul"; Eliot's The Waste Land on "shantih," or "the peace that surpasseth understanding." Neither bang nor whimper, endings like these are at once humble and tenacious. They say "Amen" and step aside so that a greater wordlessness can work its magic.

The patterns
of rainfall and afforestation,
the veins of village streams—
I colored them in
as I saw fit.

My beloved spiders
wove a second pattern
on top,
which I approved
before leaving.





Günter Eich (1907–1972) was a noted German poet and radio dramatist who won the Georg Büchner Preis in 1959. His translator, Michael Hofmann, is a poet and German translator; his versions of Eich will be out soon in book form in Angina Days: Selected Poems of Günter Eich (Princeton).

Chad Abushanab
Halloween


For Halloween this year I’ll be a man.
I’ll work my hands to ****** rags and use
my fists to prove which truths I understand.

I’ll paint my face into a mask of bruise,
like coming home after a barroom fight.
A man should fight, my father said, and lose

sometimes—his beaten brow will mock the night.
I’ll swallow up the pint of Cutty Sark.
I’ll stumble home and fumble with the light.

He said the bottle barely leaves a mark
burning away the places where you’ve bled.
On Halloween, I’ll drink the autumn dark.

I’ll be a man the way my father said.
On Halloween, we’re closer to the dead.
His teeth were crooked and his hands were red.

↔

Chad Abushanab is a PhD student at Texas Tech University. His poems and essays have appeared in Raintown Review, Bayou Magazine, Jellyfish Magazine, and Colorado Review, among others. He is the managing editor of Arcadia.

I.

This is a poet of the river lands,
a lowdown man of the deepest
depth of the valley, where gravity gathers
the waters, the poisons, the trash,
where light comes late and leaves early.

From the window of his small room
the lowdown poet looks out. He watches
the river for ripples, flashes, signs
of beings rising in the undersurface dark,
or lightly swimming upon the flow,
or, for a minnow, descending the deeps
of the air to enter and shatter
forever their momentary reflections,
for the river is a place passing
through a passing place.

The poet, his window, and his poems
are creatures of the shore that the river
gnaws, dissolves, and carries away.
He is a tree of a sort, rooted
in the dark, aspiring to the light,
dependent on both. His poems
are leavings, sheddings, gathered
from the light, as it has come,
and offered to the dark, which he believes
must shine with sight,
with light, dark only to him.


II.

Times will come as they must,
by necessity or his wish, when he leaves
his enclosure and his window,
his homescape of house and garden,
barn and pasture, the incarnate life
of his desire, thought, and daily work.
His grazing animals look up
to watch in silence as he departs.
He sets out at times without even
a path or any guidance other than knowledge
of the place and himself as they were
in time already past. He goes among trees,
climbing again the one hill of his life.
With his hand full of words he goes
into the wordless, wording it barely
in time as he passes. One by one he places
words, balancing on each
as on a small stone in the swift flow
in his anxious patience until
the next arrives, until he has come
at last again into presentiment
of the Real, the wholly real in its grand
composure, for which as before
he knows no word. And here again
he must stop. Here by luck or grace he may
find rest, which he has been seeking
all along. Sometimes by the time’s flaws
and his own, he fails. And then
by luck or grace he will be given
another day to try again, to go maybe
yet farther before again he must stop.
He is a gatherer of fragments, a cobbler
of pieces. Piece by piece he tells
a story without end, for in the time
of this world no end can come.
It is the story of eternity’s shining,
much shadowed, much put off,
in time. And time, however long, falls short.







Wendell Berry's most recent books include It All Turns on Affection: The Jefferson Lecture and Other Essays, New Collected Poems, and A Place in Time, the newest volume in his Port William series.

Happy Valentine's Day to a Man I Will Always Love but Can Never Have:
I Still Love You Anyway!!!!


I think about you ever day
in every kind of way
your laughing eyes
your sensuous voice, deep, melodic, faithful

**** the girl who walks beside you
I wish it were me, but that will never be.

I won't stalk you,
I'll just obsess over you
in secret.
Writing poems about you
forever to people who
will never know you or know me.

In my heart you are always a valentine.

Mom...
I've wanted to tell you,
it hurt me when you threw me out.
I needed help
and
you turned your back on me and called the cops.  

That ******.

You were my mom.
I think about that on this day and wish I could forgive you.
I can't.
Happy Mother's Day.

Happy Father's Day

Dad, I know you were never there for me
for the past 18 years
and that hurt like hell.

Thinking of you always.
Happy Father's Day.

An apron, blueish, A line
Dress
Long grown, brunette, wave riddled
Locks
Cream fresh, egg shell, porcelain
Skin

When I am alone I can imagine a future for myself
I plan, It seems like there are possibilities again.
I might meet a stranger with potential
I might meet an outstanding lover.

If my room is empty of anything save my life
then I can fill it, empty it, fill it, empty it
as long as I am able to attract something to me.

I can rewrite my story time and time again.
Today I can be a drunk sleeping with slobs.
Tomorrow I can be vegan cooking with my earth friends.
Then I can be a writer and pick up some dangerous man
who will steal from me soul or property.

Walking through my life again, from begining till now.
I want to find my life again, and somehow keep what is gone.

Siren song
I’ll point you
Towards the gate
Holding my broken heart
Walking backwards
Leaving you in the garden
To enjoy the flavor.

I always have to say goodbye to those I love the most.
God wills them away on a higher flying cloud
and I shed those eventual tears
as they take flight above us.

Loss, my loss and my pain
watching them fly,
mixing with a flock so strong.
Them laughing, happy to be moving on,
not one sad note at losing me.

They fly and I wander,
they know and I search,
they find each other,
while I cry out into an emptiness.

Goodbye...why?

Don't leave out the wandering door,
sit and finish these spiraled nutted cookies,
Apple Hill Special from the twisting trees
aging in the generations old summer tilled acreages.

We can glide our right hips over our right thighs

Shut down that calling of faint voices,
chattering through their cocktail party smiles.
While they promise a wealthy life
of building the all the world's a  stage,
hammers fall one-two, one-two.

Rest here your child upon this wood plank floor,
see how he crawls swiftly, ambling upwards, notice his mobility?

Child's pose, rest here

The pocked market walls of this tatty room enshrine him,
he has laid his foot falls down, see,
Resounding, forever to re-sound.

Breath in, breathing out

Wait You!
Before you leave,
turn towards the rising horizon,
this foothill sun has still to set.
The day draws on so we can listen, the fiddler,
have you seen him yet? In town? No?
Then you shall not leave until his strings are spent.

I am sitting here, or lying there, yes, across this bed, penning in my diary as the tropical winds off the Argentinian jungles
breeze through my curls and a whisper tickles up my thighs.

I have left the din of sorrowland,
I have taken flight into the drifting clouds,
I sit atop a cottony cumulus, bouncing surrounded by delight,
for I have found love.

when I am old will I swing in a hammock reading stories of ancient times
or small stories of the travels and trials of humanity?
Will I need to bother myself with any of these collected thoughts,
or will I be contented to enjoy the sunwarmth on my resting skin?

This is a new day so they tell me,
hello new day, I want to thank you
for what you have given me.
A chance to become myself again
to be true to myself,
to love myself,
to not sacrifice myself,
to not compromise myself,
to find hope again,
to just love this one more new day,
and see what amazing moments you contain.

Hello Poets,
my only friends
those who understand
why we sing into night.

Life is terrible, I can finally
say that now. Love, love,
It bludgeoned me twice.
Men, men, shiver at my song
sung to them while laughing.

Never did I intend to wound.
I hurt, with the sheer honesty
of my ignorance.

Age, Age coming near.
I am begging you for a home,
where I can be humble, earthbound,
dusty, and poor.
Where the heat of the sun is my only luxury
and wood on the fire means I am rich.

Life, life bring me back my youth,
just two years ago, when I thought the sky
was still open.

Crying today, I wish I'd done things otherwise,
I remember a day  when we walked down the lane,
I was more innocent then,
you had been the one hurting me.

Just not smart enough
All your disguises
I knew from long ago
you were a black box
a blank canvas
a bored interloper
toying with all the rest of us.
Until one day, there will be a maiden fair
she will laugh, joke, cut, chop, hit,
powder you
until you can not resist.
Follow me some more,
I led you there, and here, and
wither and nither until
what happened?
An answer.

I will die in despair
from never having
held his hand
or even known him
as the other
real women
in his life
Held his face,
kissed his lips,
embraced him,
whispered shared pain,
gave him the blood of days together,
hours and minutes spent in time.

till death
will find me still
wanting your surrender
wanting you to want me to lay
with you.

Hot coffee on a rainy, rainy night
casts a spell,
soothing fright.

Gone away now,
he's gone away.
Ne'er to return now,
never you mind about me.

Foundation block holds solid,
single ladies put it in place,
so when the earth does it's shaken,
not one foot fall misses pace.

Scares come by day now,
breath means more to me.
One foot, two foot,
I'll tread the path through this hollow,
gripping tight to everything bolted down.

I accept this award for all the other writers who
weave stories through finer mesh with deeper complexity
and with a genius of the human psychology.
I feel as though someone may have bought this award for me.
Although, out of respect for the possibility that a phrase of mine
may have reached out to another,
I accept this on behalf of all of us who speak to one another
through words and characters that tell the hidden thoughts of our own lives. If any grouping of words I have written pierced into your core enough to stir your spirit giving you the feeling that you knew me and I knew you, that we were kin or kindred, then I accept the award in honor of that moment.

with grace I hope
fraught with wickedness
to my shame.
brought to madness
through lies and sin.
I forgive you if I am able.

Found and watching,
this is my singing place
simple and slow.

That is how I will fight.

All I know is what feels wrong at times feels right at times.
How long should I stand in this space?
Breaking human heart is never a fair game.
Will I destroy myself, what is a real feeling?

all the minutes in each day
ticked by with waking, working,
saying hello, tick, tick, tick,
according to plan.

until the explosion.

Rest, breath, let everything go,
hold on to the stable,
keep your job,
don't spend money,
take your time,
let the fire die.
Let the air blow by,
no need to move,
or build,
or go forward.
Stay quiet, stay still
sleep for a few days,
let the world walk by.

writing as an old lady 50
going extinct
white woman dying in a growing world of colors
perpetuate the species
raising my voice in the midst of 20 yr olds
I have to yell louder to get my experience heard
is there any wisdom in my story?
Or did I do it all wrong?

Why do we always bring up God and Satan or wisdom?
There are people who don't believe in that at all.
We talk about it as though it gives us depth,
but everyone talks about it like they have a secret knowledge of God,
Like their walk on the planet has opened hidden passageways
where they've found the answers to life.

It doesn't matter what the new, young people write or think,
they will only be repeating what has always been.
They think they have new thoughts or understandings,
and maybe they can know how to get to Mars when we didn't,
but they won't be doing anything different as humans when they get there.
They will still be human, doomed to feel, crave, want, hope dream for all the same things we have always wanted and come to the same realizations we have always reached.

I will die alone
closed eyes remembering
how it felt when he
chose me to be the
girl he called each night.

dying alone with the wind
blowing maybe.

A fire might burn and
I hope there is someone I know
holding my hand or wiping my brow.

I will die alone, all these days,
these faded blue jean years,
brown boots dirt. Music soothing,
I hear Noah Gundersen singing my death.
He sways the tunes of woe,
I hope my death sounds like his song.

I’ll write you a hello, an uncomplicated hello.  
If you want to read, and don’t know how,
I will write you a hello.

If you want to work and don’t know how,
I will write you a hello.  

You can do what you want to do,
if you work at it long enough.  
I will write you a hello.
Keep going.  


June 15, 2008

I will return to my own land
That sits lost between continents
And the countries of other people.

I’ll not look for a place to fit in,
Wanting acceptance and for them to fall in love.

Goodbye to following hopeless trails. Them always doing just as they please and me always dying over them to please.

Traveling solo.

Finding the world that opens its arms to me.

Not worried that they are lusting after something tastier.

nightfall
becomes my shroud
to hide my hunger for
impossible fruit growing far
away.

housed in the corner
i never see it change position,
its sensitivity to climate,
nuances of atmosphere,
as though i lived among subtle genius.
assuring the appropriateness of sleevelessness,
i recognize devotion.

There is something about the texture
of a thought meant to heal
over the thought that
tears open and destroys the mind.

Pushing an agenda that needs no pushing
only simple loving,
simple ethics,
time of waiting,
allowing all good to work
in it's own course.

When the pure squeezes
out from between the
grip of controversy,
breaking free,
making it through
to clean breath,
it was not your strife or challenges
that dealt that win,
just the quiet innocence of nature
in it's own course.

blossoms like cad fish lingering
beneath salten seas lost
yellowing days
desperate for remembrance.

creeping thyme crevicing
through sandstone
jumping gardens of
mist spray.

broken teeth alongside
coffee and news
old printed cities
chilled by traffic noise.

This is where your life begins
on a trip across a narrow channel
to an island outpost where twelve
students wait for class to start.

Our days are new, just building
our towers to support many children,
fantasy race cars, sojourns in war zones
so we can snap monumental geographic moments
of hidden earthly marvels where the sun blazes
against hot red rocks and we show how strange
and otherworldly our home can be.  
Our days are new...

Hope arrives in bulk and all we create
in our imaginations is available for us to believe in.
God still smiles upon us, it is before we turn our back on him.
Our mothers, fathers, teachers, friends root for us to win...

Every door we open becomes an adventure where
the unknown and impossible might come true.
We can become movie stars if we walk into the right cafe
on the right day in LA.
Now is when anything can happen.  

We still have a chance to mingle with learned scholars
who continue to seek out the beginning of their lives.  
If we are lucky, a conversation might bear fruit,
feeding us with treasures of study these schooled giants have uncovered
giving us material to put in our books, sending us on a path
through time reading other men's minds.  

Our days still are fresh, we wake like young peach roses,
wrapped naked in crisp sheets, our first apartment littered
with wine, sketches, and our lover...after we return from the island.

Smoldering with lustful ambition, refining our looks,
this is where our life begins.

Why does Christ behave the way he behaves
through his messengers on Earth?
To send out his call vibrations
Attracting those who fly into his light
sending away those who become irritated by the sound?

Can't I have my Aum and Christ in my bowl?
Can't I have what was before and after?
Or was all that Satan's pulling,
leave my life behind,
give up what feels right,
spend a life, in fact, with no feeling.
There again, I fly away from the sound.

Believing, I believe, with a question mark.
My people's origins are suspect,
Christ in the cradle, then they ran from God poor Churches.
Most have not returned.
We huddle together reaching back for God
in a way our souls can find him,
or are we lost and wrong?

Who do we listen for?
Shall we play follow the leader until they turn in for the night,
closing the door on our mass,
then leave us to sleep against their door until they rise in their shining?

I'll not follow them,
I will follow you,
and when you lead me astray,
I will turn us back around.

Will there ever be a time when fallen love
releases me from it's talonous grip?
Allowing me to flow into my own
pulse, like river water free?
Like freeing air blowing from the West,
Like the crack of dawn, all yesterdays forgotten?

Will I ever be reborn, will the night purify
my new day until I awaken and only  
warm arms to keep me
welcome me back to life?

Order I say, order.

There is no way to find happiness between us,
with the amount of suffering we have caused one another.

I’ll not cross your path again, and you should not cross mine.

Even though I long for what we had,
I know it will never be the same.

I lost myself in some cranny
as I moved west to east.

My blue jeans fell off
somewhere along the road
and I can't see myself clearly.

I was wearing dust along my skin
with a tan, raggedy hair, and a cat.

I sang loudly with the radio
opened the window to let in the heat
let the wind dry my lips
and made plans, always making plans.

I had hope, and spirit, I let the worries of the world
roll off the hood of my car.
I followed the sacred om to the edge of the desert
and tried to heal.

I lost her somewhere in the din of the fat.
I have to find her again,
I have to shed the weight.

I'll find her again,
As soon as I am alone.

Because no one else will.
Grace and mercy,
How can you live
On when your soul is dead?

“You should be ashamed of yourself”
That is what he said
A woman my age
How dare you behave
With such violence
Towards someone
You cared about!

Old ladies shrieking
Screaming at people.

“I would never treat
The person I cared about like that.”
No, you would just think
That we don’t know what we are talking about,
that you are better than all
The rest of us, treating us
Like morons, like we didn’t know what we are talking about,
so I yelled at you, and you refused to have that in your life.
I need to forgive myself and stay away
from people who drive me to screaming.
I do care about people,
And I do care about myself,
And I don’t know why I get so crazy,
But I need to forgive myself.

You are better now, sleeping with your money in a clean bed waiting for the next beautiful girl to ****** and enjoy. You are rid of my old hag life. Happiness and laughter are right outside your door, knocking, waiting to come in.

I was not like this here. This was not how I wanted to be here. This behavior was not part of my new life here. I have to forgive myself and forget everything that happened here.

on the dating site I subscribe to
poor like I am, but full of quality
content to never be perverse
thrilled you found me
like the boys I used to run with down the railroad tracks
free, unimpaired, undefined
open to change, open to evolving slowly
discovering me
cutting wood or planting a garden
listening to soft music
keeping time to my footsteps.

My grandmother was a beautiful woman
like a movie star beautiful,
even Jewish, beautiful.

My grandfather loved her
beyond measure. She held his
eyes for so long, he could never
look away.

Chosen as an act of owning,
keeping, knowing what he wanted.
Never regretting or changing his choice.

Staying, playing house, for years
despite the tragedy, the bad day,
the undiscovered dreams you threw away,
the changes in opportunities, changes in mind, out growth.

Two children, barely grown, till death.