"geologic" poems
Born naked from volcanic hands
clothed then by emerging plants
new songs carried on wings
ocean currents pull DNA strings
Evolvin in geologic dreams
island mother lays asleep
Ode to the Allopatric King
Jul 19, 2014
Jul 19, 2014 at 12:07 AM UTC
Seeing the volcano from below
just another mountain
but this mountain
speaks of the earth disgorging
its molten guts
of lightning arcing
in ten zillion volt flashes
of God's terrifying grace
of geologic upheaval
that happened before anyone knew
anything about God
that happened before anyone knew anything
We were kids on a
long weekend
decrepit jeep pickup
camper shell over the bed
we stopped for an old Indian woman
and her son
hitchhiking
I remember the strange musky smell
of her
sitting by me
on the truck's bench seat
like food I'd never eaten
or a hand-me-down blanket
from the last century
We camped at Green Lake
and green it was
set out the next day
fully unprepared for our climb
But our young limbs
carried us to a precarious summit
the South Sister
nothing but sky all around
and dreams
distant peaks
the sleeping volcanoes
of the Cascade Range
stretching into the vastness
of north and south
Such peace
And here
now
I drown in
a deep web of tangled memories
Vistas I once surveyed
live and breathe in my mind
people I once knew
still whisper in my ear
though they are long dead
How do they live on?
Who tends these grass-grown graves?
Who speaks for these dead?
And where do these memories go
when we die?
Jun 3, 2016
Jun 3, 2016 at 8:19 PM UTC
The universe is a cavern inside our minds
A piece from our lives
A point that defines our dreams
Lost inside of geologic seams
Jut a late night movie
Or a scifi magazine
It's just you and me
Asteroid blues and a Moon beam
Jan 7, 2014
Jan 7, 2014 at 1:16 PM UTC
inspired by a short story from the man from Snake River
<>
no alarm clocks heard expiring,
unrequired and unrequited,
we,
those, self-employed by the
nocturnal repetitive recounting
of sins of omission and worse,
those commissioned in
anger and haste, that breed only
more anger and lay further waste
from humans to
humans,
awaken with an
irregular precision
and bad disorder,
demanding chances,
expiation, restitution, amendment,
but time erodes
possibilities for the
impossible,
foreign forgiveness
knock-you-down rushing currents
of water erodes Snake River boulders,
them oldsters just like the litany of our
malfeasances, indestructible in nature
geologic,
and in
human nature
illogic,
terms, such as time measurements,
irreverent and irredeemable,
for our sins
live far longer than
our owned memories,
in those harmed, who
cannot in the unlimited timeless quantity of
ever ever,
understand
your wry smile,
your why cries,
audibles you’ve
play called, go
unheard, unseen,
even and odd
Bach Orchestral Suites,
Beethoven Sonatas
more mock than soothe
trapped between industrial carpet
and flat unpainted Armstrong ceiling tiles,
you
in a hell of your own creation, forgot to include,
a Sabbath day extant, of rest for weary creators,
ever ever,
or planned in a world you’ve designed,
so the best you
can do
is write
another and another
confession ever ever
watching and listening to
the alarm clock that neither
requires setting, for
it’s audible ticking is
alarm-ing curse
enough ever ever
that always never
rings
Dec 5, 2023
Dec 5, 2023 at 8:50 AM UTC
I want to see you sleeping after
tick-tocking like a wind-up clock all day,
falling like a taut of rope to the bottom of
a canyon to thud down into a pensive pile,
spreading your energy out as a silent spirit
across the dry river bed, the wind of you
whipping up sediments in the vast valleys beneath.
I want to bear witness to you catching my eye
from across the room cautiously,
covering the communion in cadmium lemonade tape,
tasty and afraid of being caught at the crime scene.
I'll throw you a line and you can come up gasping,
glorious and shining in the adolescent sun,
pulling in air where water should come.
I want to watch you write that paper you're working on.
I want to spot you screaming into oblivion,
washing over wonder with waxy fingers,
grabbing at the truth like five year olds ****** fireflies
out of a fleshy, dusk-dipped night
with mothers calling out "Come inside!" in loving, eager fright.
I want your eyes to glimmer something back at me,
meeting me in the cosmos to make the moon,
Mercury slinging stardust over his shoulder,
flirting with Venus and fighting her smolder,
meteorites crashing into each other,
creating solar systems in their wake.
I want to contemplate you on a flat plane,
feeling a frenzy of agitated hands
and fluctuating heart rate,
fault lines moving crazy,
crashing through geologic time
to make earthquakes feel human.
I want to stare at you saying things
that would color me crimson in broad daylight
as we breathe out heavy to the ancient incantations
of an early umber evening.
I want to see you
without a pocket mirror attached to my wrist,
cutting into my skin,
blood purple like lavender iced tea in the summer
and veins an undulating blue.
Mar 10, 2015
Mar 10, 2015 at 11:54 PM UTC
step one: you must realize that
villains are the protagonists of their own stories;
ergo, everything does revolve around you.
you really are not worthless.
why should you care
what the people trying to overthrow you think?
step two: use your anger to create.
step three: or use it to destroy.
step four: allow yourself to feel.
allow yourself to
hide.
you are not wrong for shining in the light or for shying from it.
step five: you must realize that
this too shall pass.
in one thousand years louisiana will be underwater
and new landmasses will rise from the sea like individual venuses.
geologic time will march on, inescapably slowly, on clocks you cannot read,
regardless of you.
we are still only in the holocene era.
the universe doesn't care how many times you try;
the universe doesn't care if you try; but
someone has to, and i believe it should be you.
on the word-a-day desk calendar of existence,
humans only arrived on earth on
the last minute of december thirty-first:
whatever pain you're feeling is temporary.
Jul 4, 2014
Jul 4, 2014 at 10:17 PM UTC
In from the mist of our material plain
Out far in the East lay a trail by the sea
Dotted with wells and the sounds of quails
Crusted jets of shined Earthen fits
Rubbed down from its shear as a mountain
Played out by the watery, rusted brass section
The Cliffs rise and fall on the water
And the Cliffs sit and wait on the water
Slowly lowing pours of passes,
Brooks and weathered ravines showing
Tracing inwards, out to pasture
Winds the coastline to these towers
Birds of Dover hover, soundless
Mixing air gusts line the pipers
Where Cliffs rise and fall on the water
And the Cliffs right down to the bottom
So may a beetle missing wing
Come eventually reach the sea
Gull by way or ever scaling
Geologic clock come sailing
Scoring drums the cheer of tides
Into when years are fossilized
As Cliffs rise and fall on the water
So Cliffs sit and be on the water
And all that stone bore out of time, styled
Dark and plinthed come moored day round
Ornate platters, restful gravel,
Granite or a painting gathers
Art and sky are matched as one, within
Centered over sunset blazing on
And the Cliffs rise and fall on the water
And the Cliffs soar beauty mined on the shores
Oct 14, 2018
Oct 14, 2018 at 5:01 PM UTC
We’re tying our shoes-- as we think about the day's gifts
Holding strings-- curling ribbons with latent sweat
"I’'ve heard they’ll pull us through-- we tie around each box
eyelets, through tunnels and catacombs."-- a shimmering luster abetting
beyond the sky.
Today we mourn those drained sausage-limbs at noon-time
--(Sallow-cheeked mistresses and fortunes abounding
for those who have time for such things.)
With tears
--hiding the feelings of those who have none
slapping the ground.
We see
every unfurling light
combine with blots of pity
to fortify prairie grass.
And I remember an old gravel highway that separates my family and church from geologic
build-up which the wind is slowly chewing.
I can't be with them-- like the western, sandy steppes of Nebraska,
I can't hold water, and their loving nourishment sinks through me.
My arms won't be like ribbons, in an embrace of the
dead’s remitting tendrils.
As I lay outstretched on the Sand Hills, shielding my belly from the desert sun;
boring water trapped in caverns under neatly wound sweat-bows and boxes
I, one day, too, cry emaciated tears.
Surely, we are tethered firmly to the spool, dangling with
tensity on the tines of breath, shimmering, aloft-- but also, don’t forget:
We are fastened by a knot above our leather casing
holding the body in-piece and being manipulated at once.
We decorate the boxes, in which we are to lie
with wet, green ribbon, pulled through rocky soil by course, chapped hands.
Mar 1, 2012
Mar 1, 2012 at 2:16 AM UTC
Oh that I could tower the words
Or send them powering underground
To feel the warmth of deeper worlds
And find the geologic power
Of you.
Then I should see and know your goodly earth
That concrete, brief and money serving prose
So slyly veils, betrays so sickly from me
Every day.
I want you in the coldly marbled glory of
A soaring place of awe for dreams -
A monument valley where the trivial has no place.
I want you in the moment of a glance -
A quiet corner of a room
Where plots for good
May hatch.
I want you in the tears and smiles
And curious nothings
Of all the many miles
To come.
Nov 18, 2010
Nov 18, 2010 at 9:48 PM UTC
I read that The Colorado River
is pinned down like a snake
used to be that
(before the one-armed-man was king)[1]
the feet of the river
would pick up and move
across the Sonoran dessert
they’d trample laundry lines
and capitalist enterprise
now the snake is still
breathes still it is captive
under 15 concrete collars
the next time it sheds its skin
is geologic time. beyond generational
in geological time the flooding
of the Glen Canyon is a frame
skip, but a ski boat’s wake is forever.
a vast inland sea, even
castles in the sky need moats.
impenetrable as the air
the whole shebang un-erodes,
it becomes nothing
squeezed between ghosts
and immaculate parking lots
Mar 22, 2021
Mar 22, 2021 at 3:25 PM UTC
9/20/18
9:26 am
The people I meet in dreams don't remember who I am. I knew you back then, I say. You know me. But I think about the ways I am different from then, how fear made me shift in ways I can't describe.
There isn't enough time to tell the stories of my becoming,
as I am still becoming.
Winter is my season. No stranger is the cold, dry air to my nostrils. The wind whips my face, lashes for every breath taken for granted.
Ice awakens ancestral knowledge,
not of human origin but geologic time.
When did we become vessels for truth? For the words on my lips crawl from a well of pain, fragments bubble to the surface.
Pieces to a puzzle only I can solve.
I wonder, does the core of our planet feel the way we do? Does she writhe in pain the way we do? Is she lonely, like me? Does she feel alive when the sun beats across her face, and does she dance across space to feel alive, like I do?
Earth wept when we plotted her demise, victim to the narrative of a civilized society. Human progress is nothing but power and glory.
How have I been so complicit in your suffering, I ask.
The Earth remains silent.
Sep 20, 2018
Sep 20, 2018 at 9:48 AM UTC
mop handle doldrums
staring through space
into universe
drooling goon doodling cartoon
caricatures of lost loves
silt accumulates
at the corners of his fleshy mouth
soft movements of incoherent mumblings
give rise to spit lines stretching
and contracting
green bodied fly occasionally drawing ire
if not attention
the world seems out of focus though the grime coated glass
passersby unaware of the squalor of a man possessed
frantic scribbling by a chewed up #2
held in scarred and stained paws
webbed by genetics
battered by an uncaring world
unflinching girl
frozen grimace
geologic
Apr 18, 2014
Apr 18, 2014 at 2:08 PM UTC
moldy socks stuck to the grime covered floor
hold my attention momentarily
lost in thought, scrambled
I wander from room to room
looking for misplaced memories
pictures of you in the sun –
retaliation against the bloodbath
leaves the young admonished
sent before the tribunal
judged by skin tone
and pronunciation of hard vowels sounds –
enraged caged beasts cease peace
fleeced pieces of feces resist change
instead hardening and shedding color
petrified putridity permeates the ponderosa
floating on a sea of geologic waste
the sandy shoreline smiles at the scene –
endgame fascists brooding over equality talk
sit Indian style, calling it “criss-cross”
so as not to offened
wait for the moment in which they are able to **** indiscriminate
those deemed less or inferior
pancake batter dried to the edge of fine china
dog hair gracing Chanel handbags
**** in frocks frolic in the farm fresh
air
for pennies –
***** jokes dot the comic strip
leaving children confused and aroused
immorality gains traction
with its studded tires and studly physique
sturdy in its placement
stable in the den –
awash with idealism
indigents scrap infected scabs
looking under for answers
finding only diseased blood –
Dec 29, 2014
Dec 29, 2014 at 3:48 PM UTC
I saw a mountain today
But it wasn't real
And I found myself picturing
What it would feel like
If I ever saw them
Forgetting that there are mountains
That I have seen
But some were small
Stuck on an island in the Mediterranean sea
Others taller, overgrown by trees
Meandering a war torn landscape
Like irregular forested pyramids
In between which poverty, anonymity and frailness
Are woven in with the fabric of lost days
Azure dreams of getting away
And viridian primitive, haunting aftershocks
Of history lived by the thousands
Expelled in an endless summer breeze
But more like daze, rippling slowly outwards
All part of an endless wave
Rolling on and on folding us, our histories
Inside its arm
Once I saw mountains
Little stacked triangles of geologic history
Twice I saw mountains
Wishing these were the places that I would always see
Thrice I saw mountains
Now a mountain
Is what I'll be
Sep 1, 2016
Sep 1, 2016 at 1:49 PM UTC
another rotation around the massive burning ball of gas
that gave a random rock ball countless forms of life and
a history
like no other in all the known and unknown universe.
22. not much to show for it, but no time at all
in the geologic scheme of things.
we are born between two unimaginably hot bodies:
the immobile sphere of the sun
and the flowing magma below.
here we are between two inhospitable environments
blooming like flowers.
and between us and each body, another between:
a silent infinite void
and the shifting crust booming with eruptions at the edges.
all this indifference to life paramount to its existence.
i like to think i've learnt a thing or two, but
i could be wrong.
for instance i said the sun is immobile and that the void
is silent. but the sun is at the edges of a galaxy
orbiting its centre, and the galaxy itself is on course
to collide with andromeda
to form a new galaxy altogether,
and celestial bodies have their songs,
you can even hear the rings of saturn singing.
so i could be wrong, it is a tradition of our species.
indeed i think this was the first thing i ever really learned:
*how wrong you are, how there will always be more
to this world than what you know.*
the next thing i really learned:
*you do not know what a body can do, you do not know
how good a body can feel, not yet, but you will.*
something i was taught, in passing:
*no one moment is unendurable if you abide in the now.
all that is unendurable comes from letting the mind scout ahead
and letting it bring back a report of what is to come, and like
an idiot, listening to that report and believing the mind knows
what it is talking about. the mind is an idiot. listen to the body,
here, with you, not going anywhere. build a wall around each day,
each hour, each second if you have to. do not look over it, ahead or
behind, do not count. abide.*
and last, but not least, something i am just now beginning to learn:
*god is not what you think, like, at all,
and that's okay.*
i've heard it said that love is just a word,
but nothing is just anything.
there are more planets than stars
but most of them have never been and will never be
touched by light or life.
all these statements are not wholly unrelated, as with
all things.
a wise monk will tell you that children of fire
seek after fire
whatever that means.
May 8, 2017
May 8, 2017 at 7:35 AM UTC
It has been ages,
Whole geologic stratos of time arrayed by color and not by year,
Since I have breathed deeply and loved warmly and felt that a fire was burning for me in someone's bedroom window.
But I feel the moment approaching,
And though scared and unsure I may be,
I ache in wait for the inconsolable events about to hit,
Knowing that there is new life during and after it has come.
Aug 28, 2016
Aug 28, 2016 at 7:03 PM UTC
How long is history made
20,000 years or three hundred?
The dedham cracked, releasing as it calved the chip on its shoulder
A glacial erratic
A plutonic catastrophe
Or a geologic pilgrim
Which we call Plymouth Rock.
When we landed on the chip,
It broke once, twice, and its demolition continues as tourists whittle down the stone to its smallest of meanings
A sedimentary token of mistaken intention.
I wonder how long we shall be here.
I think the truth is found in the dwindling stone.
Nov 22, 2018
Nov 22, 2018 at 10:03 AM UTC