You do not have to be good
Be gratefully abhorent
A jubilant banjo of colors
Bleeding together into song
With crackled verse sung
Proud melodies whipped
Choruses bent forward
Into screaming chasms of hope
Until the voice is its own
Kind of weeping reality
Where the energies lie within
The centers of us all

You do not have to be good
If you hear the whispers
Faint in the hallways
of your own heart
You have already heard
that there is no good
Only that which your
lips ache for
In pangs bowels deep
Where flesh raises at
the thought of ends
where poorest judgement
Lies awake with torment
It is the very breath of our disaster.

The ridges of flesh
under your voice's blade rise
To penetrate consciousness,
to feel so alive
Yet the blood of our vows,
The meat of our methods
Consecrates our bonds
It is the lines that I love
Not the smooth tenderness
of your holy innocent
The calloused notches of your
vanity caught between thus
Where the real blade lies to us all
The wet release of our sins
Across skin, across skin
Until, again,
and again
You give in

To the rise of our breath
and the fall of our cuts
In the middle of days
Murderous justice
the collusion of cells
cold calculated severance
in karmic conscious rebellion
Is where we will collide

Don't forego the innocence of creation
We weep the same salty tears as our mother's
The same clearing air fills our lungs with song
The bristled brush strokes and black pencil marks
Have seen the same hallowed curve through time
Let us fall into our place on the arc of our story
We forget our truths in each mornings rise
Rejecting the lines that just yesterday we drew
Until each day it is written anew.  By you.
Or else rejected as trite, an artifact of life
Rejected by years and years of tribalism
There can be nothing new under the sun
So scratch and awl the patterns and patches
Or remember the innocence, the open patch
Between the trees where sun breathes life
Into your skin and eyes and mouth.
Where breezes set the color of your mind
and Your tune buzzes beneath the countenance of your love.

Let's get on our knees
Put our hands together
Press our faces into the sunlight
Feel the cool air in nostrils flared
Let our mind wander with the wind
Into our loves and yearnings
Until they become part of the morning
A wave in the tidal pool of living
Until we rise parched
Lips dried from our breath
And we have found ourselves
In the sway of our elms
In the dancing songs of our robins
And in the crunching snow.

Stillness

Fight the good fight
Don't fight
Lean in
Just be
But not you
Do your best
Not their best
Keeping moving
One Day
At a Time
We can only
Change ourselves
Our best for today
Just play
Don't listen
That brain is a liar.

You do not have to be good.
All of your poems about hurt
Your lines of love and loss
Need to flow out of your core
Trapped they fester like maggots
Feeding on the root of your mind
Press it out and quickly
Into lines of code
Brush strokes of sanitation
Let it flow from you like sewage
Flushed from your center
Then realize that this waste
Wanes your foolishness
Cloaked in your innocence
Not less, but more knowing
A mine of parsimony
That needs to be cleared
So that the true depths of love blossom.