a poetic rain,
in small print,
fills the white sky page
...and leaves it pregnant with a frontier glowing brighter
than the prime moved space attuned to matter's birth
--all the freedom still, and more... continues growing heedless of the dark surround

and as a bright lotus conjures flight from murky soils--
heavy, sinking, rooted into nether darks--
you digest even drivel as you read, and leap beyond,
celebrating its inherent scope, tendril values spanning all potentiality;
i squint to see you silhouetted there: silent poet flying in between the signs,
to re-sign brilliance on that plane,
and voice the silence intertwining muse and verbal ruse

producing in an everpresent rain the giving-rise to words,
the meaning prior and pretend, and signaled apprehension past intent:
deluge inspiration in the rents of earth, carry dust into the rainbow clouds, and see the shaking world alight in lovingkindness without end

speaking now in arts reversed,
in playing poems and writing at a pitch to sweeten tongues with memories relived...
speaking in the ripple-visage looking back at skys beneath a surface weight we bear,
and shed in holding breath in waves, and squinting tight
the urge to love a universes' birth, conceive
the poem that generates progenesis of stellar forms
each...day
words to twist the vital helix of all oneness beings into being fair
chiasmi of the night alive to sing expanse, to sing alive galactic seas alight
into the pan-flute of the gods re-tuned to shakuhachi tones,
tabla moans and pops of ancient memories reborn
make verbal love within raags beloved rivers smooth at sitar drone
... within the theater your poetic home enfolds

Blinded by love,* can a lotus grow?
through this, beyond chance, to realize...kinship with a chameleon?
with an ant in unexplored territory?
mysteries hiding
revealing deeper mysteries, the hues of Kerala regrown
unknown cloud of "known"-unknown rising...
unknown cloud of possible-knowns to be...
being past, unknown cloud to wash the earth...
allowing all other clouds, dharma-megha cloud returning to that ocean..
--what limits of versatility attain here in my underwater tears?

we can be A dog and a cat transfixed by a sun set
lizards versus spiders crawling for our meals
the dance and dancer one
and we can tend the gardens all our lovers left
or tend the Goddess Night in daring shadow walks with her to inner, spiraled light
that inner vined garden of her truth forever singing you are me
tat twam asi in hues dark maidenhood restrokes
euphoric agony contains a clue
where negatives dream each other through and through
in a subtle exchange self with self before a mirror that eats all reflections









*)O(

about aboutness thematizing themes
flowers need not say, marching into war--
enraptured gaze their petals open far
to seek horizons conjured from a dream.
they grow to measure limits of all selves,
become the symbol-meaning recombined
--plucked to toss an emblem for the mind--
humming under captured sun, ecliptic quell
paper cups of burning blood becoming sky
bolster or efface the heart before its fate,
poetic flare leaves hunger unappeased--
the ruthless earth imbibes its digest dry
as interspiral helicals of age
assume finality's supernal ease

they told me
                      “poetry is dead”
in hope that when I found it I might leave it in the grave
in hope that a journey might not begin
in hope that I was

and, dying, I found poetry between
where the azalea knots its white crown and drops
between a hole in sunlight and the moon, where
between the living and the dead
a broken vase of its ashes sift

When first light breaks, the drapes
guard themselves
like wounded children,
whispering

There is no visible end
on which to latch.

Hatred shares
a wall with me,
shares
a callous countenance,
shares
a small, collapsing tear.

Much love to the one who wants it least;
they need it more than most.

Like rosaries
chanted
in an empty church,
I sing an impression of hope.

Leaves of grass, my chest, is to your chest, as; gently soft and pressed of light. And though a thousand tiny green, one root only beats at their center. One root red. One root pushing of difficult life stuff, out, out. Pushing and pushing. To lip and finger equally difficult.

(I watch the streetlights as they pass over my hand while driving in the dark Bellingham feels beneath me big and sleeping in almost spring I put my fingers through its mouth and I cough a star)

when that hopefully ecofriendly R.I.P becomes my final home
whether bios urn
or spirit seed
or any trendy tree from corpse to copse,
from dust to leaves
or better than
a crematorial commode --for fresher air and fuel for brighter flames
transplanted into other selves
redressed in mushroom spore-suit
seeded with the genes of generations hence and past,
piercing veils to fruit above again,
a mycophile to the last--
i will have lived with growth in mind,
that firm amorphous
ground opining green
to kindly live and die in kind
foment another view,
encompass monumental evanesce
supernal tablets branching neo-dolmen ethernexusnets beyond the r00ts
barking technoshaman psychic rings about a fiberoptic rosey,
perhaps a sappier refrain for finer silica domains
to sing along and echo Dryads doting long ago,
in threaded tones the make-remaking fold
of earthenborn rekindled kin of stars
decided to invent to cater otherworldly themes

Death was a word
   I thought of when my first dog
   died. It was a thing I held when young
   and dumb, smashing grasshoppers
   with a bottle in the yard.
   It rested in coffins I never saw,
   grew an atmosphere around the weathered.

I touched it once.

But now I know
   it lives in a midnight phone call
   under pouring rain in a parking lot
   where a man paces with the thought
of never being able to love a voice he hears.

The Shepherds**
 
There’s a lot of standing about
and shouting at dogs.
Meg and I tried it once
with ****, young and impetuous,
though trained since a puppy.
 
December
in the pale sunshine of
Carrig’s fields,
One shepherd, two dogs,
sort and partition
their multi-coloured flock.
 
**** can’t help himself.
He knows his role
and plays it way back
in the outfield.
Deep extra cover.