Next year in Jerusalem,
Closed and enclosed within myself,
The bridegroom of blood.
Books dream, while bones sing
Of barbed wire blossoms,
And hearts crushed in the olive press.
Song of the Word, agony of the Vine,
Baskets of visions, Blood in the wine.
The Gates are locked
And Sarah is dead,
But my Lamb is pure.

Every thing, every where is here now
Here is no where
There is only here, now.
Every thing or person you interact with
Is merely a version of you.
No body but you exist.
You are god
There is no space, no matter
No where, not even nothing.
Even is
Is not.
Dreams.

Life is incandescent milliseconds
Burning to flee from the trial of shadows

We have to forget everything

And descend here to know nothing,

So that we can remember,

all over again,

And again.

Light crashing through drawn shades,

Rachel is dying.

Ben-oni,

Son of my sorrow,

Giant of death is coming for me,

Feasting on regret,

Gorging on disaster,

slinking in the hall,

Breathing homicide.

Stars above the freeway

Twist slowly around Polaris,

While small-hour silence

Floods our thoughts with stillness.

And in little box houses drifting in darkness,

We wander sleep's labyrinth with third eyes wide-open,

Traveling through blooms of knowing,

Through looms of love,

Until at last our twin eyes flutter open

On this side of the veil,

That separates us from home.

Fog wreathed street lights reach deep into pavement.

Ticks of the hall clock create silence.

Wood and wallpaper sigh.

Rain soaked fallen leaves conspire

with tobacco hanging in the barn

To blend with scent of soil and smoke

And drift up the hollow in curtains of misting rain.

flames in the grate snap,

So I settle into my feather bed

And wander the streets of dreams,

Warm and protected under generations of quilts

And the prayers sewn into them.

I’m dropping

Into that deeper darkness

That knows no end.

Pain is the name we all wear,

Seeking that pulse

And familiar touch of warmth,

The only comfort

In this wreath of shadows, our hearts.

Light cascades through arteries and veins

Illuminating our lonesome fumbling

Through this wilderness of sunsets

We wear like a cloak of heart attacks.

This light is nothing,

It enters and reflects.

I am many separate creatures,

None of whom can save me.

Winter in my blood,  

Easter everywhere.

Fragile birds flutter from windows in the lake,

My mother is calling me.

I’m falling or flying again,

I just don’t know.

The end is wrapped around my breath

And emptiness adds up my spine.

The answer is in my DNA.

All I know is what I feel,

And can’t be certain of that.

After it's over,

I'll just be photons creating shadows, stenciling snow.

When I'm no longer baptized in breath,

Weeping rage, waging time,

Forever a traveler, eternal, formless,

Finding my way back home.

After it's over,

And emptiness is everything,

I'll fade into the vast,

Every cell in my brain sinking like a sunset

Into that deeper mystery that knows my name

And inoculates light with grace,

Innocence and love.

As my face evaporates into that light

In search of nothingness and finding it,

In the face of nothing more to say,

Of nothing left to say,

I'll listen to the collapse of silence,

As the Monarch butterfly sighs.

We begin our earthly sojourn

Between **** and ****

And to **** and **** we return.

And so it goes...

From this envelope of dusk and pulse

Into that deeper darkness

That reveals our dawn of brilliance,

Where within that light of lights

Freedom to be and breathe in the heart of God,

Then descend again between **** and ****

Struggling to breathe, speak, and love.

Doorways in the dawn,

Windows in the dark,

Reveal quantum in my mind.

And beneath the gentle warming sun,

Chaos of fire exhaling light,

Brocading whispers from threads of silence,

Cascade through me, a simple lens.

Life is only light, just photons

Passing through this ground glass, my mind,

And all distortions revealed therein

Are of my own design.

I read her lips,

Speaking to the wind cold off the lake.

Words of remorse

Sagged from her trembling mouth,

In that grimace we all recognise,

Moments away from tears.

There is no disguise to bless the shadow of truth.

It was in her touch, that absence...

A weary recognition of destitution.

Even my cunning tongue was paralyzed.

That deepest night,

Those eternal seconds of 3 AM,

The cat hour, shadows collapsed, wandering dreams

Too drunk on hope to find their way home,

Wherever that might be...and those of us

Winnowing darkness to find the light,

Our scalded sight and deafened fingers fumbling for the switch

That wakes us up

Or shuts it all off.

Mornings in the dark,

Afternoons in the dark, the squeaking crunch of snow.

But winter lost it's forever today

When daffodils ignited the sun beneath a budding apple tree.

All my windows open, curtains chasing shadows,

Entire unexplored continents of oxygen

Whispering fragrance, rippling the shiny green grass of March.

Even the bees, legs heavy with pollen, flew erratically as if drunk

On Spring’s first liquor

From Pear tree’s gossamer blossoms,

Endless meadows of clover flowers,

Cherry blossoms heralding Dogwoods’ noble passion.

And now Robin’s teasing chirps,

Raindrops, Hyacinths and curious squirrels.

Doorways in the fog,

Winter widows stumble and gasp,

Stabbing their hearts with sighs.

Echoes dancing on the graves

Surface from every shadow.

Winter light tattoos the pavement

With leaning night of monuments.

Winds swirl leaves and dust

to skid across beige grass.

Time dims, memory shatters,

Hearing and sight burn to embers.

Dreams disassemble, bare branches scrape and rattle.

In ragged nests, birds gasp and moan.

Into that darker darkness

That is the color of my blood

As I bleed out on the floor.

Claiming Jesus, claiming nothing,

Wanting to waltz with my father one last time,

Holding onto his quiet strength,

As he held me in my diapered innocence,

Beneath the kitchen's yellowed light.

His love was too much for me to accept,

Him and Jesus,

Me and the cold linoleum.

And she played the piano,

The stars were crying gentle sounds.

I thought I was dreaming, and flying in my sleep,

Lilac was breathing through the window.

Others have moved into that house,

Their sounds, their dreams now.

Sometimes when I wake up alone on the floor, anywhere,

Where doesn’t matter to me anymore.

I know the emptiness of water now,

The weight of air.

Outer darkness and inner darkness hide in me,

But step out briefly,

When I bury a friend or hear a distant train…

And in that outer, inner darkness,

I yield to my losses, my lies.

Then drift like rain into that wilderness, my name,

To lust for my weightless dance, awkward flight

Off the parapet into the velvet night…

But ending is not beginning,

And fragrance of Being is flowering light.

Only the sound and light of God in this dimension

Of vagueness and yearning, desperate as moonlight,

In which a life disappears,

And then reappears as someone else.

Like ravines in the landscape of the heart,

Where a sob can lose its way through the rapids of sorrow.

Yes, there are five trees in paradise,

And from each one we derive that particular sense that becomes us.

Thus, we must prepare for our sojourn of soul

In this tenement of flesh.

From radiant and eternal,

We are cast down into shadows.

All the people I know are versions of me,

Infinite realities,

Never endings, only beginnings,

For a little while.

Degrading experiences became commonplace,
Pancha was slender with grey eyes like a rattlesnake.
Girls over ten went to work in the mine,
Pancha carried rocks to the surface in pigskin bags.
When Pancha was fifteen,
Someone was smoking too close to the dynamite.
Because pieces of flesh and bone were sprayed
All over the walls of the cavern,
They couldn’t separate one from another
So picked up what they could in a sack and buried them together.
The suvivors taught her daughters ownership.
These women believed their mothers’ deaths
Were a sacrifice for their children.
Now candles are lit, and members of families ask forgiveness
Of one another,
Then organize their demands,
For better wages and working conditions.

Headlong,

More and more lonely,

From behind the stars,

We plummet into our bodies.

Henceforth, dependent on this edgeless existence,

From the money to the love

Of love, thoroughly convinced of the somewhere

Beyond the somewhen,

Departureless, like the constellations

On the insides of our eyelids,

We inconsolably search for the perfect celebration:

That inbreathing of light

That becomes us.

The deep, dark, resistant dream of death

Is birth: life of oblivion,

This pulse, this earth.

And uncoiling up to the blue, incessant sky,

These kites of flesh on silver cords

We try to raise aloft,

Our bodies stretched tight over our wooden cross.

We surf the wind,

Toss, dive, and surge,

Praying for the perfect wind

To carry us up

And back again.

Nebulous tomorrow,

Away from a G_D arousing downpour of brimstone.

Wailing in a wilderness, abyss of my blood.

Brink of the unseen, like a storefront

Converted into a Synagogue,

And again abandoned.

Translucent language, slumbering mist,

Immersed in flame,

Embraced by darkness, shadow

Of shadows, Hebrew.

No one will console us, exquisite

Agony of being, overgrown with annexes

Of an echo.

At my mother’s house, two empty armchairs on the porch.

Again, I hear her: ‘Tell yourself you’re in love with who you are.’

Head bent speaking to the fabric as she sews, she reminds me

She owns three burial plots, I own two.   I hear my father sighing

From other rooms: ‘Be quick, hard and silent.’

The dead don’t die, they’re not under there,

that trench of scars.   Ah, father,

You looked so real on white satin,  

It was kinder than hospital sheets.

Museum of suffering, the doctors succeeded in delaying release,

a stumbling in your chest.   Nights in the hallway of my bed

I hear the pulse sweeps and know my breath lease will come due.

But that’s implied in any rhythm, pauses in a conversation,

The silence, after sounding of a wind chime,

To begin again, the same measure,

Different octave.

A deeper darkness

Cascades into silence.

Just systems of patterns,

Arrangements of quantum, swirling

Through a wilderness of shadows,

Like gardenia fragrance

in drifting rain.

And even though I long to be nothing,

The glittering dead light of stars

Blesses me with breath,

And I know it.

Next year in Jerusalem,

Closed and enclosed within myself,

The bridegroom of blood.

Books dream, while bones sing

Of barbed wire blossoms,

Florets of human pain

And hearts crushed in the olive press.

Song of the word, agony of the fire,

Baskets of visions, blood in the wine,

The gates are locked

And Sarah is dead,

But my lamb is pure.

During a pick-up game,

Men stagger away from touch.

Afterward, they lounge behind locked doors

In their body smudged rooms.

Hall carpets have a path,

It’s ending right now

At the doors of some rooms.

Graceful young men with eyes that arrest,

Gray-haired men with penetrating stares;

All these men

And that smell,

Salt of life.

Heart embittered by understanding:

Living or dying is neither living nor dying,

White is black, up is down, everything is one.

The bitterest sorrow is aimless grief.

Saw grass and palmetto murmur,

Locking emptiness.

Joy in fragments, grief in fragments.

Cherish the empty, the pure,

The color of cold,

The salt of age.

Soar above the sun of your senses,

Listen to your heart’s speech.

Deep as the past is far, Immediate as the past is ever-present,

Dark as the past is future,

The end is never beginning.

I remember sleeping in church,

My dream webbed head on my father’s thigh,

Both of my hands cradled one of his.

His sun stained, large veined, work battered hands

Empowered and protected me.

So, I nodded my agreement and slipped away.

Our pastor’s passionate pleas,

His shouts of ‘Glory!’ and ecstatic jig,

Eyes shut tight and hands uplifted,

He danced in the spirit on the edge of that stage,

Weeping for joy and shouting in ‘Tongues’

While I slept through Hallelujahs and Amens.

When startled awake from dreams that frightened,

My father cradled me until the terrors fled.

My *** stains still darken the wood grain of that pew.

When you were born, the days grew short
And Autumn afternoons dismantled into dark.  
While northern winds scarred the windows with frost,
Your body warmed our shadowed house.    
When I first saw you startle in awe at seeing horses gallop past,
I knew you were blessed with discernment and grace,
And saw within your eyes the joy of life I had missed.  
Yet even then I knew we would part,
And that distance would be a judgement on my life.  
There are few things I can tell you: seek serenity, demand dignity, And never close your heart.  
I remember your infant's breath, not yet soured by meat or words,
And am forever haunted by Your small hands’ grasp.  
Yesterday I was cutting wood and paused  
To catch my breath: I thought of how your hands braided
the simple air as I held you.  
Standing alone on the ***** of that hill,
I was lost in the body awhile.  
Then as I felt my sweat begin to chill,
I balanced my axe on one shoulder and struggled up
Through stands of Juniper and Pine.  
Feeling the pressure in my chest,
Through the distance of my steps,
I wanted you there.  
I realized then that distance of longing
And distance of the body are not the same.  
I remembered how your mother would show you a mirror
To hush your crying, how you stared into its depth...  
A mirror is merely light,
Replumbed and reversed,
Like when we grow old,
Stumbling through fog of judgement,
Into a landscape of compassion.

Silent silver dawn descending,

April branches black and dripping.

Flower buds and leaves extending,

Children slumber, drifting, drifting,

Their lives laid out like clothing.

Sleepless robins singing, singing,

Counting eggs,

Recounting.

Descending into silence,

afternoons proliferate shadows.

Children’s squeals and giggles

Fade like this winter light.

Beyond my uncurtained window

Black branches embrace the sky.

Symphonies of birds swarm into dusk;

Later, I surface from interrupted sleep

And wander these haunted halls.

The dispossessed, silent, watching through doors;

Blind hands feeling the walls.

From illusions to departures,

Memories and rotting wreaths,

We all wait for God.

All my friends are dead now,

Clocks are running down.

Forever is the flower of belief,

Light is the fragrance of being,

The end is never beginning,

This hall unfurls forever.

When I get down to loneliness,

Poetry is warmth in that freezing cold.

Reduced to the arithmetic of the insomniac’s tally,

I stand at my door staring up at the distant lights.

But ice has formed around my body

Like a frozen fish pulled from the depths,

My eyes appear stunned,

As if still staring up at the other side.

And like that fish,

There was a time when I thought I almost understood,

Standing in my darkness, counting the stars.

I lingered there too long.

All these atonal shadows,

My cacophonic blood.

Only off the parapet,

Fleeing through atmosphere,

Home to pavement,

A doorway in the fog.

Decoding darkness,

That wilderness of dissonance and writhing shadows.

My heart, a whirlwind of longing,

Engine of desperation.

So, I walk the gusting balustrade,

Distant traffic below,

Empty windows beyond.

Balanced between falling and flying,

Velvet night on my scalded skin,

Every cell in my body calling me,

Ringing, ringing…

Alone for Christmas again, I decided to sleep at the office,

No ghosts there, Just poinsettias and Christmas cards

From Banks and Mortgage companies.

The way you spoke my name in bed was simple and not folded in half.

Rain worries its way down glass,

The afternoon accumulates, husks of daydreams.

Headlights reach deep into concrete, I can hear the tires sigh.

Lovers beneath umbrellas walk slowly,

Eager not to arrive.

I can’t forget Cincinnati,

And us walking that freezing bridge in winter.

We’d always stop midway to stare

At shore lights deep in the river,

Holding onto each other,

As if for dear life.

Predawn stillness and frozen flowers,

Whispering sleet on monuments.

Names of the lost chiseled in granite,

Cherry buds glisten on dripping black boughs.

Stoplights deep in the rain-wet pavement,

Statues slumber,

Eternal flame flutters;

Dead soldiers speak in unknown tongues.

This light is nothing,

It enters and reflects.

I am many separate creatures,

None of whom can save me.

Winter in my blood,  

Easter everywhere.

Fragile birds flutter from windows in the lake,

My mother is calling me.

I’m falling or flying again,

I just don’t know.

The end is wrapped around my breath

And emptiness adds up my spine.

The answer is in my DNA.

All I know is what I feel,

And can’t be certain of that.

Not for the ease of giving up,
The frozen rage of iron
Is mollified by rust.
Dew plays its tiny harp,
arpeggio of mist.  
We can’t forget, we’re obsessed,
But transmute so slowly, never certain we’re different.   Certainly, Your anger felt like gravel,
Churning into cement.  
You brailed the air with gestures, closing on emptiness: Where
Are the gentle
Men, who aren’t afraid to love like women?  
When your husband left
With your insides,
Left you with a new human to nurture alone,
Did you hear the hive of your heart
Swarm irresolutely away?  
Perhaps you placed your clock face down
And did your solitary dance.    
Did you yearn to turn over in bed and embrace nonfiction?
I believe you found your mirror wanting
Somebody beside you.    
Mornings at your easel
You lean in silver shadow,
Violet Wandering Jew cascading by your throat.
The thick white paint of solitude is all over you.    
But thin-soled saviors haunt Steamed over taverns,
Crying for one more beer
Before their apocalypse of self,  when their lover moans
For the other,
The one with the immaculate burning calendar.
But the remembered weight of words evaporates,
And birds are groaning in their ragged nests
Again.

Whippoorwill chants a final song.

Feathers of dusk drift to the ground.

Mist emerges from the lawn, Saturniid moths cling to screens and walls.

Ella tells me the dead never leave, we abandon them.

For us who have buried, heard men tamp the hollow ground,

Memories deconstruct us.

Hands feeling the walls,

Ella hunts her dead husband to call him to supper.

Windows simmer in the grease of stars

And I turn away, within myself.

Even as the dead glide through doors and walls,

I know their silent beckoning,

This indifferent light.

Autumn cold creates an opalescent mist,

Black oaks line the disappearing road

Into the amphitheater of solitude.

Beneath mountains of time

Past and future conspire.

Night must be sewn with the dawn,

The fragrance of fallen leaves sighs.

November skies, cold and raining,

Like a dream encounter,

Drizzling evening.

Yearning ends so often in vagueness,

That barren numbness possessed by shadows.

All things are far and near,

Nowhere does the circle close.

It was a dark time in the house.

The forecast was snow flurries by sunrise

But sunrise never came,

Instead, this armada of sleet.

Electric lines fell, and mirrors fogged inwardly.

The water froze,

Then it was me, back and forth from the creek.

Aunt Rose and Ella, both toddling, diabetic and over eighty

Were fragrant with fear and gratitude.

That afternoon under the house,

Banging pipes and cursing,

I relaxed suddenly, too tired to continue.

I could hear their fragile steps above,

The wind, the house settling,

As I drifted, I thought someone whispered my name,

Not to waken, but turn away

Within.

April song of sibilant rain,

Frogs chant in the creek.

Startled from a dream,

I imagine falling petals.

Fragrance of Lilacs sighs,

Outside my open window, rain drips and splashes,

Draped in a gown of fog.

Reluctant light clings to my candle flame,

Fluttering, as if waving goodbye.

Spirit mists drift through walls and doors,

Dressed in silence and light,

welcoming me.

It’s raining again,

Rattling on the windows and drumming on the roof.

Damp men wander in from the dark,

Into the dark, then fumble their way to the pale pole dancers.

One exhausted stripper clings to her brass pole

As she trails her top across the scuffed tile floor.

I think she makes believe

She’s listening to the rain in bed at home

With the one who never showed up.

It’s raining again,

And the little blue boat with the torn white sail

Struggles through waves,

In the picture on the wall

Behind the crowded bar,

And it won’t stop.

I’m sorry I committed suicide

In your womb.

I Watched you weep

The day I drained out.

I recall looking down

At the scarlet sheets,

Regretting it.

You didn’t get to hold me,

And long for that perfect pressure.

But I couldn’t make myself forget

My anger,

Our lies.

The window in the river is open, curtains fluttering.

Halfway between flowering and fading,

Sense and illusion become one.

Everything is a vision, life is not life here.

If the word “exist” is to have any meaning,

Tears must seep from the stem of silence,

Insoluble gestures from the throats of mothers

From whom children have been taken.

I hear the stone becoming soil,

Slumbering beneath these fallen leaves.

We are each other

And all the people you know are you.

Trying to get high but can’t anymore,

The moon on the floor, and all my doves

Fluttering out of my heart.

I’ve never been a hero,

Now, this,

All these lies.

Wrens rachet in their stemmy nests

And understanding, like a cloak of heart attacks

Adds up my spine.

The ineluctable songbird of hell sits on my shoulder

And whispers about numbness and solitude.

I am ashamed of my life,

Not for what I didn’t achieve,

For what I didn’t want.

Another roundness wedged within.

My husband shoves his stubbled face

Rasping and bad breathing my *******.

I pull away before he wakes.

My body has a new smell;

My hands and feet are walls mortared with ice.

I don’t need to move my lips

To speak to my unborn.

I feel and hear him,

Restless like an old man,

Misplacing books and forgetting to turn out the light.

A woman’s body is a man’s house.

They throw their clothes everywhere,

Slamming the door when they leave.

He wants you

To turn him, adjust his mirrors,

And hold him.    He loves to see the other boys run

Past his window.   He likes to watch the video

Of his little dog, he always slept with,

But who had to go to Jesus,

After his parents bought the machine.

She was getting too old anyway, his mother soothed

Across the sheets of his dining room bed,

Just after the ****** and darkness.

Dawn,
Slow silver silence.
Crows squawk acceptance.  
Frost feathers windows, water, earth.
Remaining leaves rattle,
Release,
Then spiral away.
I know my breath is a wish,
Cloaked in flesh
And after I’m finished breathing, I’ll be myself,
Again a traveler longing for home,
Progressing into love,
Forgetting in the womb.
Out of my constant longing,
Into my constant departure.