The river drank gallons of ripened water-the color of aging bananas
mouth gaping wider, fishing for more of a glass half full
tired of the filthy laundry piling beneath the surface
waiting to sketch deeper into the canyon and discover
a cure for boredom

sunset: gazing at the back of the horizon
easy to notice the tiny spit of pointillism
which gave focus to the clouds
maybe there are more finer details
than a ragged pair of sneakers and
eye lashes that tickle ears

hoping that the crisp iced air would help
remind tall lagging legs that the unexpected action
would be to keep 3 extra soft layers waiting for
the dirt encrusted pink toe nails to feel the promise of
making a right choice

thinking perhaps that writing down little
snip-its of the way curls only twist closer to
each other in heat will keep the electricity in busy brains
buzzing just long enough to avoid the bills
but only if someone describes touching lace

thinking even more that there
are better ways for you and I to figure out the word
                                  we
if by midnight strawberry swirls don't melt down my arm

My blue jay
Eats pumpkin pie
And dances with
Escargo
That’s why
The moonlight
Tries to swallow him
alive.

Furrowing deep with claws blood-stained,
into dirt, a heap of heavy ashes,
too depressed to flow with the wind,
or dance with breezes sprung from heels clicking past,
I sink.

These ashes reside
from my burnt body.
Wrinkled edges, dim, clotted blood,
a heart suffocated by the flame
of victimization.

Take a scalpel to my remains,
mutilate my body, my Self, all that remains,
stitch on male genitalia,
or chop my hair off,
none can remain, none can remain.
Gorge out my fat, reveal
gaping white bones;
none can remain.

An emergency room
(a yew)
A home with quiet time at 2:00
(an ever-green)
A place with after-meal support
(a willow)
A pile of *****
(a palm)
A fresh crimson cut
(a pine)


I met you.
(before it was too late)


You ****** me into the arms of a God
And you placed a Bible underneath my bare feet.
I stumbled and cut my heel on its edges
and watched the blood seep into the welcome mat.

When you first gently unlaced my blouse
flashes, images, screeching memories flew back in
shattering porcelain glass.
But a look in your eyes
soothed the tempest
and I drifted along with your rhythmic tides.

I once said I wanted to be a tree.
(Nothing more than still wood.)
I once felt like a million dollars wasted.
Swallowing the moon and the stars so bright.

Now I say
overlooking shy tulips, so young, so young,
Humanity is a house abandoned
and in you and Him have I found
the warmth that tiptoes across my chest,
like the pit of a peach radiating sweet, sweet nectar.

Sometimes,
When the sun goes down,
But does not take with it the weight of daily life,
I find my eyes looking up
To the lights that share their wisdom with my troubled mind.

Most days,
My mind finds times when it acquiesces to the struggle
Of the pressures that the world thrusts upon it,
But still it finds refuge in the stars
That shelter from the ever-shifting flow
Of the illusions that press on me to change.

Every night
When my eyes travel the infinity above my head,
I am freed from careless thoughts that drift aimlessly in my mind:
The openness of space greets me with its silent embrace.

Send me adrift around the stars,
Past the endless nebulas, planets and their suns!
Orbit me around the galaxies that stand indifferent to our human time:
A blink of an eye that's quickly forgotten in the infinite.
Up there I find myself as the calm that permeates the emptiness
As I feel all those careless boundaries peel away...

Sitting at a café
Over the smell of coffee
Scents of car fumes, ***** and ****
Worm their way into your nose.

The men, women, children
Pass you by without a glance
Each one on their own way
As uncaring feet pound pavement.

Indifferent people in expensive suits
Walk by tourists objectifying with cameras
Who accidently capture in their frames
The cold and the old slouching through the streets.

Even relaxing at the table
You feel caught up in the streaming crowds
As if you were being swept away
By these forces fighting for control.

As you sit as idle observer
To the worried pace of the city streets
You can sense the blind and frantic power
Of those who feed off our illusion.

(This illusion lies in each of us
When we close our eyes to the waking world
And believe that we could be happy
In our isolation from reality)

You can see it in the passers-by
Whose eyes focus intently ahead:
Afraid to look at other faces
As if they feared the connection.

Many imprison themselves in aesthetics
Of glass steel towers looking down on the earth
And drive isolation’s grim repetition
In a hopeless effort to make their own world.

Our illusion puts them there
When we do not question the surrounding order
Whose existence allows us to live in comfort
Insulating our delusions.

Our ignorance demands their ignorance
Which caters to our selfishness
And divides the passing days
With the rhythm of their control.

Their thoughts structure steel geography
That dreams that it could scrape the sky
And make its mark on the heavens
By countermanding nature’s will.

But nature stands indifferent to
Man’s attempt to supersede
Its will that gives to him his arrogance
That leads him towards his own destruction.

But I call you from this nature now
To return with me to where I stand:
On this mountain with the trees
Who beckon with their open branches:

Do not fight against nature’s rhythm
That springs the flowers from the ground
As it wills the sun to set upon us
And gives us the food to carry on.

I see myself as this reality
As feet take care to tread on soil
To avoid crushing the delicate petals
That smile upward towards the sun.

Time provides the future harvest,
But of its success, time will tell.
So I stand here with my garden ***
In loving silence, tilling the land.

To breath the air the sky provides
Takes me from my restlessness:
Watching the ground provide the future,
Submitting myself to nature’s pulse.

But the scenery of planned geometry
Which covers soil with concrete slabs,
As if embarrassed by earthly origins,
Tries to move to a different rhythm:

The glare of halogen eyes that stare
In unquiet nights in impatient lines
Find their way towards distant houses
That protect their owners from working lives.

This world screams out from its distortion
Of nature’s will that lies ignored:
It lays the path of its own destruction
As it claims its own power to endure.

But nature’s spirit will always triumph,
Whether through man’s self-inflicted end
At the hands of his selfish illusion,
Or through his careful heeding of the truth:

This world that’s lost its quite places  Demands we become its place of quiet;
To silence the thoughts that construct man’s world,
So that we absorb ourselves in nature’s will:

The heart that beats inside you now
Beats not for the one in whom it dwells,
But allows nature a fleeting glimpse
Of itself through conscious human eyes.

This truth whispers even now
From the deafening world of the city streets
That hurries towards its ignorant end
As it attempts to escape its fate.

Do not forsake the earth in waking life,
And wait for death to pull you into the soil
To meld with nature’s majestic cadence
And be one with your reality.

Peaks reach up with puckered lips
dying to kiss the sky
Hills not lush, but green with envy
at the rain, lucky to dwell on high
but the peaks cannot fathom
why the rain would fall to the tree and the sea
when the sky is what they want so very desperately
such is the nature of desire
all seems greener on divergent pastures

I can see trees
Unfold with stubborn insistence around the empty field
Where breezes pool in lively airs that dance from sky to ground,
Only to plod into the branches that close them to the stars.  

Lost in the pathways leading nowhere,
The wind forgets from where it came
As branches ****** away its vitality
Dissipated into the quiet weeping of the leaves.

But skimming along the canopy ceiling
Above my head: winds rustle trees,
Enveloping me in the mocking absence
Of the quiet freedom of the open air.

Now wind gently greets me at the edge
Where trees sculpt the field’s subtle form
Which gives the openness its place
And gives pause to a restless mind.  

And now I realize the forest’s trees
Which unfold in their ordered grace,
Allow the freedom of the open to possess
The meaning that I longed to seek.

Piercing the shrouded sky
They fight against surrounding black:
Like flowers breaking through sidewalk cracks,
The light seeps through the darkness.
Between the leaves
The stars reach for the eyes…

But now thought reaches away:
I escape myself through abstraction
As the past violently asserts itself:
Remembrance induced by a careless focus
On a memory flowing from a present vision:
The tree
now
Clothed in leaves
Beckons forth remembrance:

Autumn leaves,
Trundling into legs only to move past
As they ride the restless winds
Whispering their own poems
Of meaning only experience could collect…
They rush
Through fallow ditches
And enclosing brush which
Form a pattern around
The tree that beckons forth
- With disrobed branches glistening
White under stars,
Dampened by the still-settling dew-
A Self-realization that obliterates all boundaries
And encompasses no thoughts,
but the One
which gives them:
The One which gives a breath
Held together by the moments
Which trail the first puff of white
that joins the airs that wrap themselves
around the tree reaching up to the stars
which do not reflect the one who sees them
but give the light
towards which thought now reaches.

All these memories induce
The longing to feel the openness
No words could possibly posses
As slowly the months fade
Into the dissolving moments it takes
For the eyes to reach up to the light.