flowers wilting
over days, seasons ---
.                                a bear leaps past
.
.
.
.
*the barn porch
with its many snow shovels~
cat's paws in the snow

my kindness has now been commodified
whereas before it triggered hate
--seen as weakness, as cruelty's plaything--
still, i saturate to what extent i can
my daily happy-dance with honest friendship,
compassion's ease, delight and pet-store equipoise.
yet my sincerity is sloganed, emptied of its worth:
trained to say 'rewards program' in stead of 'membership, account';
'guests' in stead of 'customers'
'team-players' in stead of 'employees'
'long-term relationships' as first and foremost mission statement's goal--
slither-scripted to promote a highest bottom line
as language euphemizes baby mice as 'pinkies,
fuzzies, hoppers': 'feeders' for a petted multitude
of scaly, fang-ed maws.

pre-thanksgiving christmas-trees
on either side of automatic double-doors--
styro-snowflakes hung
by wrapping-papered end-cap shelves on sale
to swipe our plastics to a higher debt--
to tinsel out the shame of maybe giving less?
reminding 'gift-time soon' and 'this could be a gift'
to ward off never having given childhood its due?
or of being less than cheerful
at incessant jingled tunes?

november fifth--decorations up;
guy fawkes night of trick-or-treater-candies
tweeting hallowed flu-shots
as my manager in elf-cap-antlers squeals in glee:
says she starts promoting christmas back in august.
i tell her that's appropriate!
given jesus was perhaps born in august.
says she didn't memorize the bible.
i tell her that part was left out anyway--
i don't mention the holiday's titular meaning;
or the waiting gnostic manger,
royal transhistoric camels,
mary on her donkey, joseph's wind-blown face
las posadas... the loneliness of exile
O mary... in her starlit tears of unknown pain and joy--
the unremitting love for barnfloor bodyheat,
todos santos
nonhominin humanity...
earthling rights day
a stranger's kindnesses
of yule-tide warmth and evergreen,
solstice-fulcrum festivals of lights
veteran's day's existential loss
and bureaucratic selfhoods shelved;
gurpurb at a gurdwara
the martyrdom of guru tegh bahadur
the garifuna settlement day
the tazaungdaing festival
fasting over christian as well as buddhist lent
the five days of deepawali, diwali:
bodhi day
découverte d'haïti and vertières
jamhuri day
chalica
zamenhof day
sadeh
pancha ganapati
malkh
soyal
mithras day
osiris, adonis and dionysus day (all dec. 25th)
humanlight
--republic day! national day! and proclamation day!
in the maldives, brazil, northern cyprus, chad, yugoslavia;
in the central african republic, burkina faso, kenya, malta, kazakhstan, niger, south sudan...
chahrshanbeh soori
modraniht
the dongzhì festival
the saturnalia of pagans (lit. "country dwellers"; "those of the heath")
dies natalis solis invicti
newtonmas
kwanzaa
watch night
hanukkah
boxing day
malanka
the day of goodwill
wren's day
quaid-e-azam's day
yeni il
guru govind singh jayanti
international solidarity day of azerbaijanis
fête du vodoun
hogmanay
Iemanjá
darwin day
milad-un-nabi
lohri
pesach
chocolate-egg-laying fertile-bunny-day-- or ishtar day
butter week, crepe week, or cheesefare week-- or maslenitsa

Ramayana lines
fire arrows at my soul >
                                        palm leaves fall in milk















.

my new guide asks,
where(fore)'s the water?
they point, she points














.

sundogs past the vale --
late Spring's changing wind atop
the same, sturdy tent


bald mountain rains--
the worms retreat
with every step



'

sunset river-bat~
i stand deaf on the loud shore,
with star and crescent moon


'

Spring-summer fronts ~
tornado siren, trains;
owls on the edge


the French Broad's roar
doesn't drown the bass across--
campsites decay

pristine pristineness~
comparing filth with (to less) filth,
unnatural taste

'
individual--
tree, then mycelial port,
ants, woodpecker feast.
earth, life, openness;
a walking-staff's thud.

~


water's tone
over three leaves~
a steady stream



~

mountain spring of Spring--
a higher note is struck
in flowing free

shady water source--
salamander audience
of fullness' ease

mountain nooks in bloom--
univied cradles pause,
contact deeper breath

~

almost summer--
a level ridge
stretches our backs

~
growls in the Spring dark--
a large rodent returns home
to unwelcome guests.



Spring lushness--
mountain sunrays glide north
as we climb




woodpecker echoes ~
the empty forest vibrates
my growing hunger


~

today i die and far away winds may blow, lifting kites children hold while running.

On the sand.













.

barkless willow,
bedding a dry stream--
fox graves curled


















.

Red bark, weeping--
Fox prints in mist bridge
a Spring stream.
Is the Turtle's snap a game?
Is the Turtle's snap a game?

‐---------------------

.
comprehending it for the first time, struck
numb and wretched. uncomprehending
shivers rib joy with age--
agendas churn
even as a salty dryness barely clears--
eyes contort in livid forms of love

vacant carols fail to mute calamity,
though once a bluebird sang at snow
abstracted from the core-- fly away
from a season's playlist monoculture,
reinvent this home, audacious now
to be a courage happiness
for youthful eyes no longer simply young

my thoughts, so potent just before--
like fresh-pressed olive drops
that lingered, lipping from the fragrant spout--
now pass, diffuse atop an ocean vast.

i imagine willing it to be a pond,
not for its lesser size alone
but mostly for its calm,
reflective height; yet
these waves are
distort ruthlessness
of liquid dust
by slapping, tower-high
the central ocean rip-whirl tide:
and gone--
as Homer's heroes screaming as they drown,
deaf as oars but for their final gasps
of yearned-for clarity:
of nameless pride's Ithacan king
abrading lustful wrists
restrained to blind a god's son's single eye
by tentacles of twisting, tactful fate.

by threaded loom rethreaded
soon i see my salty self in suit
of sameness, tricking time
by indolence or theft--
from truth, from others' hearths--
the difference winks in bubbles on the cosmic shore...
foam so clean i grin to call it spume,
grin to brace the seabed to my algaed chest
in salinating crush of sand, of blood-sharp shell and rock,
in sungreen warmth of blue and life
in crashing sinus wince
i grit aegean nereids in my sneeze,
splay their formless sexing into pelvic scrapes
of quickened starbursts anciently reborn,
squeezed in pleasure tears and laughing drops--
as all pelagic ***** must
within the pressure of a world,
its breathing darkness spotted with transmuted sun,
expel itself in sensate gusts--
as octopodal spurting flings
in liquid ****** of purpose forth,
(or backwards, sideways, in and out)--
so too i think
and thinking, drown my ink
instead of drowning thinking in my ink














.

onus of science, or dream, to all explain;
the inexplicable remains dismissed:
being here or there: exactly arranged
and no one yearns to know of nothingness
between the emptiness of meanings each
with labeled names, boxes tightly-packed--
towers darkly lined, well beyond the reach
of but a few, lost, scattered minds...
xe shouted through hir lungs a greener hue
that we could live beyond the concrete grey
die in love despite our evil ignorance,
our rainbow cutouts crying for the sun
  --posthumous teleologies begun
  in kinder dreamers, earthly songs enhanced.

on the way
to return sociology
to the library
i couldn't read the parking signs
so ended blocks away
at a salvation army

the kind with no books for sale
but an elevator shaft
running up, down
behind a drum-set altar
and a stage i didn't buy.

half-expecting 'the war room' ads
posted here as well
i let a stranger lead me to my muse
saying none would mind

Chuck asked me if i 'needed to pray this morning'
before unlocking -
i said, 'every day'  but thought
  not in his way
- i'm just begging him to play.

i read a psalm and kneel to test hypocrisy.
lotus palms connote release from suffering
wellness for all beings

and then  
i am here now
at the keyboard again
playing music i will never forget
even when my chainsaw body stiffens  creaks
the keys a saving home still  though shy
they hammer heart strings
broken, born -again again again.

praeludium, goldberg, well-tempered
minuets conjure Bach
in his stone church
and i cry for lost souls
my own lostness found
though convinced there is no static single 'self'
no 'soul'-rewarded other-life to justify our own
no 'god'- or science-demolished mystery
no metaphysic causa sui to separate
contempus mundi from the mundi...
no tidy verbal 'beyond beyond'
but that of Thales  Sappho  Gautama  
Laotse  Yeshua
Nagarjuna  Shankara
Duns Scotus  Hume  
Blake  Whitman  Darwin
Nietzsche  Du Bois
Tolkien  Stein  Merleau-Ponty  Sagan  Jong

but i will say we've sung the music of the spheres
in host-guest handshakes
stranger  xenophilic tunes
my earthling family hums my heart anew
as i begin  again
to sing my being into fingertips

skyward breath to lid-closed harmonies of hell redeemed
in Peter's vacuuming
request for 'Dixieland'
and Stacy's parting thanks
for 'we three kings'
Ruth's morning-making compliments and invitation back
my wish to share with them the love i feel
- from them, Gaskell's book
from deep within where no words win
authentic ownmost ocean depth of
less contingent love
historically embracing love
of errancy and freedom in our different loves
an atheist in love with vacuums
saucha and the music of human kindness
receiving gifts in giving thanks








.

when i write a love sonnet
i want it to be about love
and not just ancient alcoves metered to a tailored rhyme
stirring depths of who we aren't.
i want so much to see your hate
transform, in flicks of pleasure
rise to meet entwined
our loving of each other's source of love
seeded even in a waste
remake the vital bloom
display what meaning pours
the vision: this is it
another meaning we can live for
sing for







.

i would cry out, give voice my wild rage
if that would loose the bonds, arrest her plight
but cowardice sustains a safer silence
long imbued complacency of guilt
--ensconced escapist narthex ease and shade--
i do not speak the secret all avoid
when speaking it condemns me to a pretense
loathe of self the ears that hear and do not hear
deep cloister  of a falsely sacred quest
to give into the hands encompassing us all
which hand it down again, below a conscience
as above removed, vacant as her eyes

gull at sunset --
streak of pink
across a sickle moon.






'

'                          reflected flight:
heron's wings curve, touch
                           in autumn's kiss










'

breathe when steps up the climb redden.
see deep true endlessness forming waves.  
many abjurations will cloud alone,
to never green again.
taste dust sometimes,
enjoy sneezing--
cry.
play the moon;
know selfish worlds darkly,
grow flying genders into acts
sensing beneath ground live stars resting:
freely read to recall ancient ways to poem...
hidden wisdom gone stale speaks past
as poetic forests fall wilting.

moon ripples
cast away the journey's edge--
neon kiss-patterns

steam-roller log-pipe and blackberry moonshine, granny-apple moonshine--straight-potato-thwack... three firelit mason-jars of lighter-fluid fire, balanced on a railing; our Rumpelstiltskin host at length shouts, "Hide it! Hide the shine!" as headlights dim the moon, "Cops" is mumbled each to each; but no, wait--it's his buddy and his wife, come to sell some ginseng weeks before the violent umbel-berry date, a pretty $50,000 supplement to living, breathing mountain dirt

sharing all seasons -
international home of
earthling family.

this is life lost -
deaths of brothers and sisters
cut me, raging tears

rage of tears at dawn
--how are you?
my beloved strangers...
earthlinghood revised,
blogospheric species-hope.

first day
adless surfing -
wet my pants.
the old concentration back,
i breathe relieving sighs.

infotainment age -
authentic journalism
revised and found

#riseupoctober -
"The Souls of Black Folk," asks Du Bois,
do you have a *soul?

my white-washed education
didn't give me one; love did.

Trent Lott's lot:
a segregationist, blogged
into mississippi's mud.

Coltrane's music
fire in my chest, supreme
love-train of Cornel West

Chimamanda sings
inclusion and awareness -
what do you sing?

untimely autumn
frost, grinding into duff
a bigot's words.






.

phasical circumlocutions of basic, embodied life..

i am an infant still  i teethe and moan in lonely darknesses

solar revolutions
         earthling orbits and spheroid whirls
                                  an axis of worlds
                                  adulterated limbs
my adulthood limns an architecture's disconnections
       thin, the layers undulate
                      of elbow's sway and kneecap right

i am an adult still  i teethe and moan alone in darkness, light

O muse and counter-muse; Mother-muse, protector muse--
i am sold.
i agree  again.

gloried ****** sung to grey-orange, setting Suns;
dusk of human brains
                 ticking to the clockwork
                     deaths of Cultures passing.

the due-dates of a paper-legal
              monocultured crop:
cropped
                        to quarter-halves
                                   mcworlding
                                        grins of bottom-lines.

...entire countries checked,
a people's lives and deaths
are filed into off-shore savings banks
reduced to anti-trust...
what wonder at a child's warrior-role,
with only armies holding out their hands.

upon an ancient Shield:
peoples drowned in fear,
seas of understanding, wild
                  as the darkened myth-clouds playing coy
                                 to hidden waves of lucid thought.

symbol-caves, lingual-wombs of families yet in tune,
--shadow-crowded politicians shade us huddled there
                 while Mother-Thetis marks the moment
of our forking fate.

brimstone burns again!?
death as entertainment and a ruse...
i huddle with you there, my Family
                       formed of Stranger-tongues
and linnet's wings..

i've savored distance from the storm,
settled in communal cowardice,
forcing smiles slowly into numbing real...

but only choice revealed is truly real.
when done with hiding here
the other's ripe for overcoming fear.







.

my self-hood couldn't be...
my self-hood always has...
your self-hood also shining in the same reflected flickering of light.
what light i think i am is cauldroned in a background shade...
a primest shade of gasmic cosmos bursting forth
the light a simple consequence of hither-sided space
and freedom-ceilings in between.

inside siding outward warding off the sides i cannot center in
--outside siding inward warding off the sides i live within--
twining two in where i stay,
while choosing neutral non-act act,
on moving trains i shade as other than i am
complacent as the cog
that clicks the same in hatred-climes
as when it clips the love-me-nots of Spring

being the "sum of what the world 'thinks' I am"
is written, smeared in blood across the cave i've come to love
and leave behind but only in an understanding:
selfhood carries with it all we lack.
it carries on its seas the diatomic algae fruiting slowly back
it carries on each ladder-rung the selves that other's see,
the lovers' feelings felt,
the mailman's kindness kept--
a stranger's instant siblinghood in eye-flash recognition wept.

my heart is tattered there, and rebuilt here;
i could not be the beating love-train joyful as the sorrows,
the pain and lonely misery, the mind-split cosmic surd of this
that Jenkins must have felt, before her captors left hir dead...
--a bullet in hir back, a simple heart-stop pellet placed--
i could not be the beating love-train joyful as the sorrows,
without your words, your rich, kind thoughts of me
that others do not know they have,
that Kiesha could have known.

again your words garner tears
i am fought from within
between wretched smiles aching with the shame of words i've shared
listened to, copied, written, "shared"
and yet never truly shared

those doors are gone: i have shared
and one has listened, shining love as hot to bear as sun...
refracted in my tears the warmth
is as a solar flare of unexpected love--
distrusts flung of self for undeserving care,
i waver-wallow, sing another cracking grasp,
slurp my sniffle-ramen soup to comfort ten-year wounds
all open now, shining, wincing in the sun.

i would bare my bones, it seems,
in urgent need to stamp the world an honest love.

what have i waited for? better words to come and scare us into final sum?
a final balance done, as if a math could send us there?

where? where has the daylight gone and come?
how old this starlight sinking from
i try to laugh and fail,

giving fame another final finger-flipping off
as that one girl said once, long forgotten, "cradling
her last fledgling flying ****,
and kissing it on to fated final flight"

yes. discovered now by one, i heal in single sun
i beg from those in shade or hurting from my blindest words a balm
a balm of knowing deep i seek to undiscover harm...
a balm of knowing deep the wholesome love of self that overflows to all...
Mokume told me, "love them" as i struggled with their hate,
he asked my love as to her love for me,
he asked me of my love i held for her--and which was more,
the love of self or love of her
and so i wavered in the meanings love has come to bear
while he taught stridently the meaning of Yoruba masks,
the bowl atop the symbol-studded head
the brims so overfull they shower all who look,
or dare to touch its bursting river-majesty

compassion, goodness
found in everyone we know--
and don't know.

lack of education -- void of understanding
non-empathy meets profusion of imagery:
*** swallowed by power and violence.
"the victim is wrong, the victim needs to change."
--------------------
child psychology, family and school lessons, coercive screenings inoculating submission
one religion, only
in a rife flora of symbol-shifting goodness willing
prune the rest,
deny the human family
dialogue, beauty shared through ancient lines-- bombed
nothing in the shards of modern hatred born reborn uncounted

a metaphor for a metaphor:
a mirrored mirror.

the pulmonary hackers whoop
as engine screes of social-
media roar by in caps

and i am left with my own noise;
i've internalized it now,
real traffic beyond my upstairs office walls,
my mother's fading garden,
my epson printer humming like a tomb

Spring tepals
sepals ripe with sticky dew ~
only inner calyx thorn
   or some star-corymb splay
like sonar-notes across the diver's head
   portray the meaning of another's thought

exploration's prescient surge
   ;  the rise and fall of summit senses...
   ;  all perspectives breathe

projective geometry used to get me *****
all those positions

,palmately pink and ever green
breathing vasts of void my dark heart laughs in gulping wholes
moaning plenums, hooded over boundless venus-vim

now i'm tired of infinite lines
too many shapes to fit in
too wide, too tight, sharp or empty

,too many ways to come

this was meant to be a disclaimer before a collection of poems

,a way to unclutter
                angst of public  
                              lexicality,
years  after  ­ 'explaining'
                  Samir's 'polygonal me'
                                                to only-me-myself-i-was,
to then indulge this analogic soundlessness...
             
        as i disengage

i can't write without planning on it
i can't write about  writing  without feeling like a fool
                                                            ­                 (,Lear is the only one
that saves me now
                       as now i am the Fool,
                                                 dividing hearts along
in storm-***-love-like railway-*****
                                 steaming full of fiberoptic nooks,
chaining spectra-cogs of a good-will-spirit-****:
                                       concatenated hard-ons every word
each thought a pulsate vulval dream awake,
                                                redichotom­izing lives
                         of shining mons my Athene forehead
                                                      forging fountain thought,
                          urethral letting-beings-be...
freely, my chubby comes back to me
                                         prone before the prostate god)

,in other words
              the same,
                     i cannot write as other than a fool
for
why should i repeat the abject horror of the world?
isn't despair a bit.. overdone at this point?!
and why should i write just the happy!? i'm not in denial, am i?
or am i in denial
about insisting on being in denial absolutely?
--like mind-only schools...
(O the uselessness of words, dismissing patriarchal vigor with yet another wave, the 'brine-milk' ends unending,
forever Femen liberating us of words,
replaced with Fragilaria,
wasting diatomic seas and waterways,
depleted algae gone, extinct: metaphysiCalListo-craticality aborted on a broken Amazonic spear,
our bodies, bodied-hearts, finally won as ours, across Alternaqueeria, fully lucid human-species spanned
i blink my tears and blur my gaze at weeping Pleides

the plan was this: painful poem, pleasure poem, painful poem, happy poem... **** poem, sterile poem, carnal poem, priggish poem, punk poem, open poem, confessing poem, eros poem, **** poem, 'obscene-attractive' poem...
to cleanse inverted mainstreams of my steady-rhythmed pratitpaksha-bhavanams; not "poem, poem, poem, poem..."
but a taut poeming in and out of poems of poemed poiesis prosing poets free to **** again in Issa's snow, or *** on Chiera's cumaholic Shards.

pendulum left, pendulum right; then two pendulums, then none; then one that swings right and left at the same time; then one that spins all the way around, but only clockwise; then one counter-clockwise; then one both clockwise and counterclockwise; then one timeless, then one imaginary one... full of infinite little ones... to represent all the pendulata in the universe as experienced through minor parts of self.. itself as universal part-whole-parcel self-hood spanning star-births yet to come...
,
,
,but it's time to eat a 'square' meal
take off my job-search tie, my peddled lies
                   forget the sunrise vestibules we sipped from,
                                           sleeping by commoding cows

and pretend i'm not dicking myself over
                                                          by­ retreating
into cryptic spectionism-voids again
                                               all seagull-divert-adverts, play
of frozen youth abstrused,
                      self-referred referring loosed
                                          staggered worse than marginalia
no single species 'seagull' singing here

intolerant at--
at words that don't work
and hating these

that cover just enough--
words revealed as shade

started the day hearing jokes about clitorectomies and other female bodyparts being mutilated. at lunch i learned that the bible predicts that a 'dark-skinned leader' signals the end times. the other morning i was the shouted subject of various ****** accusations while i went to **** in the woods, and called a "******* hippie-tree-hugger-******"... as a joke, .. test.. target of overspilling hate and ignorance.. i think.  i've witnessed extreme homophobia combined with a disarmingly authentic homosexual playacting --a moment of hand-holding or flirtatious banter that almost convinces one of a sincere, sensitive fondness or even a vulnerable sexuality beneath the surface of these men..  yet alongside such blatant racism to drain the hope in humanity from any listener: "Ferguson hasn't made people crazy--it's made black people crazy... And people wonder why there are stereotypes... IT'S BECAUSE THEY'RE TRUE!!!" and comments like, "it's all about the Jews..." and "I think Obama is a ****" randomly dot the conversational landscape of each day

and wins, uncounted,
fall
crystallineated

egos flaking from the broken, crusted snow

i have lost my founded plenum's fill--
in chainsaw bite and vibrate
powerlining chill of poemed demise

love's warrior-chiming focus pill--
the rhyming will,
the will to unrhyme real aesthetic abject thrill--
alliteration's dulling pull
beneath all competition's rising low.

smashbook wasn't nearly as offensive
with its objectifying koan-click--
on and on, smash after smash

you sit here, and here, and here
angry soldier, oversexed boxer,
underpaid, overworked mexican

what will my face look like once i am born?

the bigotry in me
proclaims you bigot-this-or-that
a silent death forgone before be met

the unapparent--yet habitual--whole you are
prereduced in pornographic quips
or tongue-slips given over to a politician's herd

remains in static symmetry's conclusive wan
sinks in double-speech's soft caress:
single, oceanic oil spillage shrug
,the value dancing buzz--
atop sommellier ****

sh
they said it sarcastically to twist the lump in a throat sideways
another throat
i won't whine about mine
it's in the beak of freedom
refracting azure skylight's promise into pain

bitter silence wins the immigration race
acceptance in the dark
i vacuum floors too deep for walls
or ceilings
or actual bars we could talk about

1st hiker sees
the red buzzing length,
real inhuman clay

old plastic bottle
serves to spear and toss

you cried my arms a perfect dough
like foreign pastries
scratch atonement for the tongue

i love it when you say i should
i shouldn't this or that
as if the stars had tabletted your mind
with what was pleasured best
and sparks in mine were best left dim
until the frosted world commanded fuel from two..
it eggs the burning fibers -- gaze
release  be somewhat more across the gaps
our bouncing would incurr

untimely spring  my step
become a kneecap brace
of hanging here
in reinverted sight
my laughing arms outstretched
both reaching for the earth
in giddy disbelief

you could mean anything
...the higher i fly i see that now
of split horizons into sun again

my screaming holds the jointed sweets
of vanity undone, remade in other grins
of wincing where the tissue does not hold
clawing bark to finger
weight away

our nylon bed aluminum
ringing stars
in squeezing eyes
suspended over dancing leaves
so many stillness-ecstasies aloft
our rhythms seasoned
thinly darkened to the house
where whispered creaks could drift
ignite another blush
to faintly mirror
heated gasps we recreate the meaning of

wishing all happiness

new flush of life
    it's been so long
now, i die

how joke about racial slurs? about ****? how does one chuckle and say, pointing at a kiln at a summer camp, "hey look, a Jew-oven?" or at a bungalow attached to a lodge, and call it a "****-shack?" how does it come to be, that hate can be ejected at random, toward unknowing strangers, inside a company vehicle, and for 4 other so-called professional men to let it go unhindered? ..that a comradeship in hate can develop, such that one can call a little girl, age 7, maybe 8 or 9, a "pre-****,"and actually get chuckles in response, and even a comment--"yeah, hey look, a free child"? how is it that i've come to witness a resurgence of hate speech in 2015?

my new-found "faith in humanity" is yet again becoming encumbered.. my mind whirls, repeating the slurs i heard, now silent, but increasingly visceral... i burn on an imaginal but no less real stake each time i hear the word "******" used as an insult.. the burning is an anger, a promise of action.. a promise of consciousness

i have holidays off at my new job.
no vacation for a year
or insurance
for six months.
i think
the work is fulfilling.
but if i get hurt, it'll be my fault, according to company policy.
i mean, i make it fulfilling
--to deal with the continuous,
hateful
and aggressive abjection--
punctuated
by climaxes
of
celebratory
prejudice.
political correctness  or explicit signs of empathy
are seen as the enemy. as problems.
anything organized or tidy is
"****** up."
i mean, my boss told me the other day,
"...like if I call you a ***, and you happen to be one,
you could just sue me! People are so sensitive nowadays...
My wife calls me a chauvinist, but I say i'm just old-fashioned."
young girls we pass in our company vehicle are called,
"Pre-*****."
East Asia is called
"Wonton";
and stereotypes are considered truisms.
ethnic slurs are the norm.
**** is a common,everyday
source of humor:
maple trees are called "Raples";
grapes are called "'g'-Rapes"
and small houses are called "****-Shacks."
a large kiln oven is called a "Jew-Oven."
glorifications of violence are welcomed with a smile
and the N-word is spoken with gleeful abandon.
if something is fixed poorly, it's "******-rigged" . . .
...they say they're not racist,
but perpetuate hate speech like it's a responsibility.
how am i growing to enjoy the company of such people?
to see any aspect of value here whatsoever?
what the **** kind of coward am i?
to allow this to pass without immediate and uncompromising opposition...
i must be dead inside
to trust my safety to such people
i say
i want to ***** my heart
and show them
how wrong and terrifying,
how hurtful their words are...
how i burn, impaled on stakes with each pronunciation of the word, "******."
rage shakes me awake at night
...though less and less...
as i understand the hate and fear,
the pain these men have lived with and seem unable to restrain
from spilling out;
as i begin to understand their conditioning
the origins of this inexcusable, ancient behavior
(or as i too become somewhat desensitized i fear)

but if i can see the potential for change in these earthlings,
i will go on hoping,
live happily amid hate
measuring with wide eyes the subtle shiftings
holding the intention of healing
of understanding
of presenting alternatives
of tolerance
compassion
and honest truths of self suffering
of other suffering
of self healing
and other healing
of self love
and other love

threadhung
worded in our double-weighted net:
relationship
the stung looking said
the sweet hearing seen
1000 metaphors to trivialize the living web
unsensed
numbed and scentless dinner

but tasting unHomeric baths of guests
unknown
unwanted, to be known

pejorative memes remade unwise,
the natural artifice of slang;
and the mnemo-linguistic "advantages" of being called a ******...*

arbitrary signs..

chosen  reasoned    signs.

i don't remember history, living it as
predetermined amens sinking blind
profane in sacred incense dogmas polished
                 elemental airs of azure old allure
named aesthetics new and purely false
    unlike a snakeback break
    they realm of fear indulged--
placate artistries of loving touch to numb;
with medieval noose, blade;
          scald of iron pen and human metaphors for *******
    sent to human metaphors for hell before their deaths
to burn as scapegoats for immortal xenophobic herds
remade

this is a word's weight
  now,
  for all unhearing yet apologistic legend-churners earthling-bound:
one witchhunt grin and phrase
--legend or not, urban or pagan--
    will burn me here
    to face imaginal apotheosic
   dawn
   of bigotry complete
.
in long-yearned laughter, musics
     yet unleased to propagandist aims:
empty prayers undone as selfish grims
  i do without
  as any fairy might
        with dusty wave of hand
my wings are spillful everjoys
    of momentary vasts
          of ancient youths; of loves of
    glittered rainbow in the hush of sunfall snow--
escapes of real dismissed
   all
    real
       fiction-true truths
                                bearing living worlds of love
and labyrinthine strands? and twisted more, ripe!
      for shock and awe filled fuel
      sierra-cut at ranges incomplete as Tolkien Silmarils
                                i brace the let of leavings-be
sever severed links in inner chains of links
    to remake ****** moonbeam skirt
    of spectra cloud and starry breath
---the window opens maths of savor
        (apsaras! tulpas!)
        surveyed in the tones of healing buildings
        shaped of love

huddled shapes of perfect friends
                   all craning necks to common interstellar home

i could be clear and disagreement wright
but i am here to feel ineffables of ******* felt
fall  up    from anger
        into union's many-petaled rifting veils
and in a citrus spray of scattered mists unshared
a stillness swim of happily amused
    awake a zombie-language only Borges knew
        to burn a mark of joy on history's flesh
a hidden question-heart of sensuistic quest whose end is known
    and yet exclaimed unknown
    as glories only moving rainbows know
hang-glide words to shadow-stripe the eyes
                       and dash Mneumosyne another arching voice

i am not a man
--conventionally, one considers me as one;
for many purposes
i am a man--
at long last as a 'compliment'
; as a stoic ideal
; or as pejorative
; as body.
but i am not conventional:
i am not a man

it felt good to leave the tourists behind
---with their cast-iron grated stairs
and photo-flashing-falls,
question-comments cookie-cut---
embrace the woods:
soaking wet approach,
brinks of shivers in the dripping wind,
an old, broken filter
   slurping bubbles from a cardboard tired puddle;
whisperlite stove finally working,
the first cous-cous dinner warms our little white dog
   dreaming on my rising falling chest
   pressed by sleeping bag and snort and sigh;
we sleep our psoas sore--
unknowing we have just begun...
haven't yet begun!
yet bodied abject pain to shock our senseless raw
   with scoured glimmer-vasts of love beneath
a frozen fly on Frosty Mountain
zippered hail in midnight breath,
i *** in numbness gusts--
i bite my smile ice,
whoop the sleeting world for we are here at last.

sunset, sunrise hikes ~
Trillium on Blood mountain ~
true love song blooms


yogasutra song
hiking appalachee trails
with two i love


Rhodedendrons clap,
lush applause to Springer's call--
water in the sky



a tuskless walrus
   chases me up the ladder--
crowds smile through glass*








.

before i even write the title,
i set it to draft
selected as unworthy before it's born

i tell myself i might not want to write about writing
because of something someone said sometime
about mistakes

then if i remember right
i edit my memory:
after editing this poem
i am seeing clearly:
a censored Mnemosyne
raging from her shaded, titanic head

music may be involved.
or film,
or living well
or finding myself unable to speak out against bigotry
or those who'd impose their choice on another's body

the chills.
inseparable sensate emotions.
often they spread over the left side of my back, neck and head
.usually they feel good.
i think they may always feel good
like tears
and the urge to sing alone
or the sharp yearning:
i must tell this someone something soon

like
'the ocean overspills imaginal seas
and yet is less than what i want it to mean'