Ethereal and Base a harmony so diametric a solid.
Wisdom's forgiveness lands to the unyielding new,
white spray on black lava, merging
elemental minerals in salt water.
Life the mediator, yearns for compromise
algea harvests sunlight at the hard shore, grows into plants
fish munch coral creating sand washing up, a tree's foothold creating soil...  
can rock become Earth any other way?

Mother's beauty, an unknowable generous smile
and confident grace from the sun.
Ages
sitting wrinkled and depleted to her waist,
beauty transforms
into unknowable generous laughter alighting graciously from wise eyes,
like a flock of Heaven's doves so close to home
stirred by her running children: daughter and son.
All the while all the yearning is unrequited.

For her children, Beauty is vertigo,
painful reality rooted to the shore.
Eyes long for the horizon, Vision Country
between sky holding its breath and water measuring out patience,
The heart spills out futile on the crystalline sea,
but Sadness, belonging to clear water,
lightly buoys lonely Ecstasy,
Completes the voyage.

The Vision pairs selfless love with unmet desire,
opposites' harmony the firmament,
but the sound breaks from tension and the echoes fade,
and the senses footing gives way;
vertigo with dove's wings tied shut.
Descending minuscule between dissipation
falling through molecules of bliss,
and diffusing atoms of despair,
to the last remaining positive and negative
and the tension's silver thin wire between.

It cuts tied wings free,
slingshots the dove's soul back up,
at the last second, the tension's iridescent thread tangles loosely on her foot.
She hurtles back up through the scales of size:
Microns, amoeba, minnows, birds, primates, people,
over trees, looking down at cities, mountains, yet higher
borderless nations, green and sand continents,
and again all the crystalline blue seas.
The silver filament draws taut, holds the dove's ascent,
wings slowing in awe as she views Mother Gaea
her intensely brilliant sphere accompanied by vivid tiny stars.
in a cold cold soundless night...
Grandmother teaching her children to fly;
Beauty's yearning realized complete.

It's those deep-thought induced conversations that bring forth realizations
As to what we're about. and why we're here.  
There can be clarity for some, while many have yet to see it clear-ly.
What's charity for some, in others may produce fear.
If you can hear me, you may know that I've been embedded in a web of silk thread.  
We all are, just labeled differently, accustomed to the various personalities under which we're bred.  
Don't let it mess with your head, but we've been mislead, about what is the vital pulse of this existence.  
You can realize what's toxic, and what's pure in the matter of an instance.  

Before you spew out your sentence,
Make sure you thought it through, and drew out a map of where you intend it to lead.  
No one single person walks into a fight expecting to bleed. 
They've been deceived by a culture based on immediate reaction,
Forming a faction of those who never grow to fully develop their souls to gain full control,
Over their lives.  
Simple words, some that should be left unheard, can hurt worse than knives.  
Thoughtlessly responding to actions is just like ingesting an unknown, and jagged little pill.  
You know nothing of the repercussions, but as the grains of sand pile up, you soon will.  
Believe it or not you can get to your mental destination faster once you learn to sit still.  
So, respond by applying conscious thought to your will,
Ultimately creating a new canvas in which your creativity can spill.  

Perfection is an eyedea,
And forever happened yesterday.
We're the perceived seeds of Gaea,
Equal composers of this magnificent screenplay.

This plane gives us no manual, and no time to rehearse.  
I spent a long time in the lions den, only to find that I must tame me first.  
When I would sting everything, it poisoned my own insides.  
Held on too tight with my claws when I should've just paused, to gain some insight.  
Instinctively we have adopted the means of fight or flight.  
Just make sure actions taken will be those that lead away from spite.  

In your beating *****, the tempo will eventually cease.  
Listen to it's wisdom in order to unwind, release,
Be at peace and defeat the foolish person that sometimes controls your mind.  
It's in this moment that we take off the shades that have kept us blind.  
When your days grow into night, you alone can be the light that shines,
And reminds the world that there are things far more important.
Even measuring the probability of being alive leaves us more than fortunate.  

Warming yourself radiates across what can be known as a cold planet.  
Every single moment I believe, happens for a reason,
Even though it may not be as you planned it.  
A person's karma is what you're presented with, while yours is your response.  
Slowly we're intertwining and aligning; now let's raise a new-age renaissance!
It's up to us to detox ourselves of all of the mind's pollution.  
Close your eyes and ascend to the skies for the Consciousness Revolution.

I watched the water rise. Creeping down the muddy street. As if a divine force was attempting a stealthy act of insurrection. I didn't have the heart to fight it. Had I only known.

I watched Hell's Half Acre silently succumb to the whimsical (however so pleasantly devastating) path of Gaea. Through this empowering incident I felt redemption like I never had before.

I jumped down from the platform of the livestock pen to personally welcome the satisfying force of nature's purification. The water lashed out and grabbed my leg. At that moment my jubilate spirit spoiled to uncontaminated terror. It was not a redemptive Spirit winding its way through the rail tracks but the serpent Lucifer. Had I only known.

And so in the West Bottoms Tavern I found myself under the ***** shoe of The Machine. A wayward phantom rising from our precarious Kansas River. It drifts through the sweet Midwest like the coal black locomotive smoke that paints a suffocating thick haze above the Stockyards.

A welcome slate of provision. A shelter covering us from the racial tension and poverty smothering the outside world. To those in the Bottoms with unruly desires, a saviour. To those at City Hall with loose morals, the messiah.

And it was at 1908, I nervously pulled the covers over my vulnerable body and sealed Satan's foul kiss with a diabolical red scrawl. We skipped hand in hand through the freshly paved streets of our "wide open" town. I always tried my best to look the other way but I knew full well that I travelled with a gang of thieves.

Nonetheless, everyone votes in our town. A brutal party whip keeps the Jackson County Democrats in line and "Charlie the ***" prevents any Rabbits from multiplying.

But I've been working from within the belly of a "whale" for years and I fear we've now run out of ocean. Our arranged marriage has robbed my capacity for faithful navigation. I'm seeking a radical divorce from The Beast, the cost has become inconsequential to me.

So I found genuine redemption. Finally. I closed the driver side door to my sedan and walked out to the edge of the bridge. The water below seemed whimsical (and so pleasantly devastating) in nature, much the same as it had 36 years ago. I pinned this note to the window, and with a Ready-Mixed Concrete block tied around my waist I watched the water rise.

Find sanctuaries under other people’s rib cages.
Count all their heartbeats, each exhale,
Wipe down dusty lungs and old notebook pages.
Bite down on bones and fingernails.
Whisper to yourself, “I will prevail.”
Peek out from behind the diaphragm and skin.
The world is foggy through this veil;
This is how familiarity begins.

Old highways only lead you to stages,
ravine edges and steep drops with no rail,
where wanderers have pilgrimed for ages.
You hesitate to fly; you fear you will fail,
unable to follow wanderlust’s trail.
You’re weighed down by all your past sins
and the mountains you turn to scale.
This is how familiarity begins.

In someone else’s heart, a hurricane rages,
sleet and thunder and head-sized hail.
Memory lane’s speed limit has no gauges.
The mountain drops angry avalanches of shale,
So close your eyes and determine to prevail.
There’s no way to count your wins;
The sun is rising and the sky turns pale.
This is how familiarity begins.

Curious, how feelings are so frail
under mountains and ribs, the outs and ins.
Veins and dirt roads trace the trail:
You’ll start to see how familiarity begins.

Home.
Three.
Two.
One.
Ignition;
We ascend.
Faster now;
Ground control:
Are you there?
Systems functional.
Slip past gravity,
Escape velocity;
Break Gaea's bonds.
Fuel tanks go.
One.
Two.
Past Luna,
Towards Zeus.
Aphrodite's horizon.
Sol's pull,
Too close,
My wings burn.
Faster now;
Cronos looms;
Rings shimmering.
Faster still.
To Caelus,
Beyond the sky.
To Poseidon,
Past sea's shore.
With Hermes,
The gates of Hades.
Edge of home,
Losing touch.
No longer domestic.
Three.
Two.
One.
Gone.

The yucca plant from my mother’s garden sits
unattended and on the verge of death next to her
eldest rose bush, now wildly overgrown and lightly
blushing in the cosset of the midmourning sun.  Its
withered rosettes droop down to its bed of maroon-stained stones
in crisp, harum-scarum patterns as if the plant is spending its life
like currency trying to touch its toes.  I oftentimes
find myself wondering if the reason behind this
slow rotting of mother dearest’s garden is hidden within her
five-year absence.  If I didn’t know any better, I’d say
her nursery missed the d
                                              i
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                                                     g
                                                        i
     ­                                                       n
        ­                                                        g
of her weathered hands.

She was the biosphere of my world; I suppose that
it only makes sense for the earth to match my thirst.  We
sit side by side, that yucca plant and I, as we struggle to
nod our heads towards daylight while we rise on
the side of the house that is more or less
cloaked in shadow; the side that she would sunbathe
on during scorching late afternoons.  Perhaps without her
body giving shelter, all her garden is doomed to
atrophy like muscle in the sunlight.

I find irony in the way that my mother’s favored plant
was the “ghost in the graveyard;” a perverted parallel
to the game that she never wanted us to play.  I think it to be
sort of sardonic that her pride swallowed the possibility of
a cure being found within that ****** plant’s roots. She,
a third generation American girl,
had blood as muddled as the mud
that buried that yucca’s heart.
The boundary line between Mother and
nature coalesces into one:
                                               Gaea
                                               six feet under
                                               melting into soil
                                               I hope she becomes seawater.

your skyscrapers are just overgrown hairs
gaea has neglected to shave.