in your poetic journey
you may meet poets
who are taller
and seem mysterious
and you may not understand
their magic.

their words
may be taller
than you can reach.

go back to them.

if they are worth
their salt,
they will take your hand
and walk you through
their lines.

you will grow.

the best poetry
carries our essence
out to greet the world.

the best poems
are conversation.

just a leaf left
on the pillow next to me
now, a whisper of smoke
vapor tracing your path

out the door
going back to the
limb I stole you from,
the place you must return

I rake my bed for more,
try to make
a place
for you to fall

again, next time.

his words take my breath away
his stars are not my stars
and there are worlds in-between

so i come back and i sit
and trace all the letters
slow, slow

i let my heart wander
just far enough
to feel the mountain air

singing feels like flying
from the pines
on the mountain

his words take my breath away
and i don't mind much

You tried rearranging
all of the puzzle pieces.
It didn't turn out so well.
There were holes, gaping.
There were never pleases,
there was my tell.
I should have stopped you,
I would have had to yell.
This was something you felt
you truly needed to do.
So, I watched over the puzzle.
In search of a way to cope,
I only kept hanging onto hope.
Hope that one day you'd see,
the puzzle pieces were always right.
I did not need rearranging,
after all.

Then let them point my every tear,
  And let them mock and moan;
Another week, another year,
  And I'll be with my own

Who slumber now by night and day
  In fields of level brown;
Whose hearts within their ******* were clay
  Before they laid them down.

The Peace of Wild Things By Wendell Berry


When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

i learned how
to diagnose myself
somewhere
along the way

trauma
dissociation
abuse
depression

so many words
to describe
who i may be

words i don't talk about

i worry about
drowning
in waters
no one can see
but me