Why is it sad
that you don't have a purpose?
What is the true
definition of worthless?

Stop looking
start seeing
Stop doing
start being
Stop searching
start finding
what use is rewinding?

All I ask
is for you to make sure
that you know what you know

No flowers
in the December
cement cracks,
but still the multicolored tatters
of plastic reflect the sun.

No usual haunts
in the city
of my grandfather.
Alone with so
many faces
of those I will
likely never know.

Flame unburning,
ever bright,
turn the darkness
into light!

Eyes uncovered,
sacred sight,
turn the day time
into night.

Lover mine,
   give no worry our parting.
In few moons
        with the Earth's spinning
   steady will I hold you again.

Lover mine,
     I see your trick to the eyes
   side line look, a surprise to
catch me in the act          laughing.

That flash, your face
******* in a gasp,
   Lover mine.

Two smiles makes a circle of us.
Me chasing you chasing,
catching we & clasp to the breathing.

                        Quickened,  heaving   Sea
                             oh we...

     This I will not miss,
for I will see it in the warm
sleeping, feel in the waiting
     visions of memory,
       keeping company
               in secret.

I will be
      ever on the other side of
       your thinking,
              your wakeful burning urges,
           pressed against them
                 until next time,
                             Lover mine.

waking up

the sojourn
is a return to who we truly are

if the universe is a love song
let us go on singing

if the universe is a story
may we listen, laugh and cry
and at the end
may we all
go to sleep

you get mad at me often
because we don't speak the same language
or because as much as i listen to your
boy-hood fantasies
i still only here the voice of someone
scared
to just be a woman.
It's difficult for someone
who just wants to be a man.

you call me a hypocrite.
walking around with a mirror for a face
while I scream at everything else for having
the same face
or closed-mouth laugh
or the tongue in between her teeth.

you get mad at me because
i tell you to be direct
but i can't never seem to tell you what i mean
by "I love you"
or "I don't know".

As I breathe
the music on my shoulder is  kicking it's legs
and sighing
with bells on its shoes
and freezing cold finger tips

As I listen
the breathe in my head is speaking
in the lowest tones
of the brightest colors
and I keep reminding myself for some reason
that they're just words.

aren't they?

I don't know.

I love you.

you're voice
carried away with waves
and there's not a trace that stays

come now, let's play

In a slow motion haze I look out over the grey Philadelphia in a fog bank. The tops of the buildings obscured. Floor after floor continuing into space for all I know. Sitting here watching the faint movement of the odd tree, leafless in December. Opening to a world with which I am yet familiar, the window. Outside cars in a constant stream. Always the places-to-be calling louder than any horn or crash of impact, louder than any amount of glass shatter. People on the freeway, on the city streets, and in between in the alleys and narrowed roads going (they say) no where. Somehow we all find time to extract some value from this moment. Some sort of consolation for being. As if love weren’t enough that we had to go around printing in on paper and digging it out of the ground in gleaming golden handfuls. Then again, perhaps it’s not. Or perhaps there’s some sort of figuring out we’ve left to do. Some more Earth to be moved aside to find the treasures there. Dig deep enough and it’s all molten. All a liquid swishing heat. Why do we put such pressure on ourselves? From where comes this burning desire to have in our hands and to know without a doubt what it is we are made of? Have we not seen that death is inevitable? Still the reaching continues, down and out into the dregs. Soon we’ll find it. Soon. The gem must be there beneath this last scrap of **** and ripped bits of newspaper. Beneath these stones overgrown in moss. Still further beneath the metals collecting and pooling in toxic natural vats of too much nutrient. Into the solid iron core of the Earth under pressure. There we’ll find another absence. Another outer space waiting for the claiming. Yet in all our grasping we will never hold a fistful of love. True love, true happiness. Serotonin wash water over the coils is never enough to cool the white flame of need. Even if artificial and limping on the last prosthetic legs made from the long dead detritus plastics, the flame rages. It will not be sated by the material and forever the eating will continue. Finding silence in the storm is the true gem. The hollow in your heart is what beats your blood thru your body, what walks your legs and chews your food. To find respect for a lack of satisfaction is what will save us if ever we need it. Sated with hunger, patient with pain. "What is to give light must endure burning."

No job today. Sitting alone in the living room I sip a beer bought with my dwindling supply of cash. I guess I’m not trying hard enough. Rain comes down in wispping sheets outside. The peaks of the tallest buildings downtown are cloaked in grey. There’s a crawling sense of urgency deep within me but it stirs little. It’s overlaid with a knowing of my self that secures me, a certainty that none of this time is being wasted. I've always known who I am in an other than obvious sort of way. I was born and continue to be a watcher, a passive observer of the drifting seconds. As the rain falls in a steady stream of droplets my beer glass is slowly emptied. Thoughts, like the seconds, float by, like flies landing and then buzzing off to a more succulent  morsel. I like it this way. Unattached, solitary. It’s a freedom no hero can grant you. It’s a way of looking at the world like the weather. Rain today, not tomorrow. Sun tomorrow, the next day may be snow. Although I do get hungry from time to time (for relationships and food). Sitting and waiting for my baby girl to fly out to meet me in Philly. How I miss her skin! Maybe a job wouldn't be such a bad idea after all. It would pass the time at least and give me another vantage point from which to conduct my observations of this fading world. Maybe pay for my sweet potatoes. I finish my beer and step into the grey.

river trail;
a breeze in every tributary
bend

river trail;
a breeze
(in every tributary bend)

here
in between the day-dream filaments
and textured passings of seconds
the immovable you, shining  
a rendezvous for blinking thoughts
and shadow-bubbles of sensation
slow-floating filters
shifting by

a curtained room
the weaving of sheets
a meeting unattended
and waiting
you were there all along

when light is bended
it changes color,
when it breaks it becomes them all.
it's all right to stay unmended,
embrace your weight
than let it fall.

We don't want to be machines,
it's in our programming.

warning.

i may or may not know what it is
that i'm talking about,
and
if I do, it is uncertain whether or not
i understand.

Be also aware,
that you,
although gifted with hearing well enough,
may or may not know what it is
that i'm talking about,
and
when it comes to understanding,
one may only paint a picture
with the palate provided.

love,
I'm still thinking of a question that doesn't fit
when I should be listening

I wish for not but to unwind,
to slip into a cyclic time,
to let the river at its flow,
to know there's nothing left to find.

"I've been enlightened!"
"When?" I asked the smiling monk.
"The whole time!" he said.

The end comes suddenly;
there you are
standing in it.

burning the candle
from both ends makes twice the flame
and twice the shadow

I should have told her bout the colors that I saw before.
The onces they fell out from my eyes
and spilt across the floor.

I should have told her when she asked me, dared me to explore
the reaching roots of time and sooth;
the seed, the growth, the spore.

There is fear in the allure.

The moon is on the rise;

no near for far, i'm sure

Looping, arching
solar storm bridges,
out into dark,
from one pole to another,
of the same sun stuff.

Magnetic pressure builds to
giving.
Another place,
pressure-less,
accepting, empty hands, bowls
to be filled
& filled until
breaking & letting go
to the
ground
into outer space, sharing.

A circle in a circle.
Concentric stage,
matter/motion actor
playing both parts.

Should a poem be measured by letter
or rather, shall we read it aloud?

Though I cannot recall exact scenes,
I know oft are you subject of my dreams,
and through my sweet sleep I have seen,
it's not the ends that justify, but the means.

The pyres in our eyes
are the sparks that light the other's.
Like paralleled mirrors
we are infinite.

That which goes cannot know
the thing you need, like trees, to grow.
The mushroom knows and so the willow,
but that which goes,
which moves cannot.
The grooves they choose
what is to fill them,
and the roots they loose none but the lightest stones,
for they know their home is close
and that their is no need to reach,
for the stars from so far still teach
the thing you need, like trees, to grow.

Slow down,
and that which once was out of grasp
clasps itself to you.

there's a jazz bone in my body
it moves with muscles taught to loose
and pull back on reaction
fueld by juice and passion
cooled and smoothd to prove
that what lasts is
momentary
and on the
spot

caught
in
passivity is not
to be mistaken for
sloth

i'll see you at three
the deal's not off

I got a jazz bone
I gotta pick whichyou
I don't know which one
don't know how to choose
If love's a gun
and happiness blue
than *** is a number
and 2 is a hue...

******* hands
keeping things
from being free
let them be

shut up
there's enough already
to listen for six days steady

maybe sleep
is more realistic than I think it is
maybe
i'm already there

wake up
there's no more in dreams
than what you've already seen

go forth

All my testament to this,
that there is not a greater bliss
than that which comes of sweet release
as I step outside to ****.

ten million lines
make up your beautiful face;

they are not your face.

without what's inside,
lines are equivalent to lies;

they are not your face.

the exact same lines
that are in you are in me,

but I am not you.

nobody can know
what isn't already there.

what more can there be?

we are made of lines,
the lines are not made of us;

they are not your face.

your screams were your letters
unaddressed
your dreams are your betters
unimpressed

http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/taote-v3.html

Love
Lips
Skies
Why?s
Seas
Now
Trees
Tao

these are we
blessed be

Death is the celebrity we all know
(just not personally).

flesh rubbed raw
under a heavy coat of rime,
painted on by the night
with wind, her paint brush.

the blush
of vermilion hue
undone the next day by the sun.
he releases the red,
and the earth takes
what was always hers.

it's not a matter of give and take
when we share the same hands;
and when they shake
there are no demands,
only miles
and miles of sand.

no flowers here,
only the sun,
and then only the moon,
and only the sand stretching
in heavy sheets across rock.
the sleeping beast beneath
is unlocked.

let it eat me alive.
I am survived,
and it's killing me.

What is to be done?
The day's continually the next,
and birth.

I remember
Walking up the river
on green, smoothed stone;
leaning forward so as not to fall.

To be still
in this current,
but I don’t want to say
that there is
the impossible.

She can be free,
She can be fine,
but selfish ol' me
wants her to be mine.

i want to write myself down
put myself into the paper under my eyes
to be a grain amongst so many
i'll write away my tears
and draw my breaths deep
i'll shade my eyes and spell out my mouth
i won't rest
until i'm 2D

I used to say
what I meant to say,
and it would take your breath away.

Now I don't know
what I mean to say,
but you've no breath left to loose anyway.

golf green peace
evening doves
hushed by sprinklers