Poem. Requiem.

There is no destruction like this, none
other than this. I hear the mom call, the
mother talk, the feather tongue of her ink
the swirl of water in the canal
black as blood of newborn
birth, she is talking, she is
harvesting the sky
she is the wind. GO from here, I tell

you. I tell you again. I will never see you again.
Be brave. I wish you this as you set off
in to the wind. You are all I see, all I
can ever see. And to the me that sees
this: that I see me seeing only you is Thou,
the holy You, the me and him we were was silly
even if eloquently we lingered and called on it
love. We were religulous, born to the city
the excess of brick and wealth that bore the filth
and stink, the poached poverty death-rot out back
of alleys, the ruined food in garbage cans.
We were religulous, raised by rigorous, godly hands.
The eyeless infants in the streets, in the alley ways,
dripping fetid meat in their fat skeleton hands.
We were rigored infants, stinking as they come.

She is working it out, she is working at this.
I am working hard, always, to get away. I don’t
have to work at you, you come no matter what
you humm you sing stink I smell you in the sky.
You were Him once; and true this is yours to you,
man that smelled of smoke and cold clean, of black
and flesh of salt and sounded bare as the wounds I thought
were only mine. You are Him now, man that
on his knees worshiped at the liquid gates of me.
You will be every Him that ever is and yet will
never make a difference.
The mother takes Mary’s hand.
Mary’s hand is brave I tell her this and so she
sinks too when finally she comes. She listens
the mother tongue
is feather in your hands. The feathers are gone
the angel wings, I talked sullen, I talked gently
I spoke again and again. I gave you my crazy
I gave you my opus tongue, you were fit
you were fitted to me, you were fitted for me
fitted by me, around me. You laid down for my death
I never forgot that, drew you to my chest, even now
as though you cant find breath or don’t have
or don’t want, I feather you
antique grave sacred as archetype
of falling diva diving in exile sky
the matter you create, the placenta you
left behind. When did this start? It started way back
when we were twins. Twin towers I gave
you, mother’s love, mother’s knowledge
mother’s hands. What you do, what you found
to do with it since then I can hardly blame you
for you are only man. She is one, I other.
We were holy, twins, twin cities
flames shooting mother hopes
between the funny flecks of skyborn
invisible eyes. Your eyes, you were you
you planned on it, this is what you do
to die. I cant help that. I chant. This
these chants. Anyway. This be my birth.
She is my twin,
my partner now. We helplessly flail
in these spiral voids we try to temper
and leave ever-created.
City streets rubble at the sound of first breath.
I take up shovel. I will dig again.
I will pray and take shelter in the prayer
words I know you still and always will sing.

2/2011 op md

prayer

make mine a heaven of boardwalks and smiles o inner cascade of relief where silence dwells,
people who roam and wander nothing owned but their own hell look pure-faced people looks in the neon flash of lights not of fright, but this, o ecstasy, o sweet, o common common, life

cotton candy on the tongue or vinegar pucker. and sweat along the hair line that gets wiped away, like tears. i know i am hard to please. o simple dog of life, simple all there is, grain of sand between the toe, how it feels to see the sea. man who's loves as rich as me

o, make mine a moonlit light greased food greased shoulders a shirtless back the endless sea. loud music and all those screams. vanilla ice cream colors so much smiles children clapping fatted hands and make-out kids with the metal sticking out, tornado of merciless love make mine stopless make all this as all this is, as all there is to see, to gain

Cuz it's my favorite kind of meditation & it reminds me of Sammy G

First Day of the Hunt

The schools always close,
knowing we're so country
all our boys will skip anyway,

and the valley rises together before dawn—

daughters pulling wool caps
past fathers' ears, reciting the profound
and elemental list:

rifle, rounds, knife, rope,

only to send each heavy man to the woods
where he'll slump the day in drifts
of solitude and prayer

while most deer stay down, evading
the unlucky, the night spent

visiting cousins: stroking curves
of antler, lengths of blood-stiffened fur.

Every year it's the same
soft and deliberate snow prints,
the waiting—

as if mine could emerge from his last hiding
place and walk the evening,
empty-handed, to me.

poem for the day by Paula Bohince

Seriously, if you've never tried:
let's posit that meditation is simply a means of going within
or, let's not posit, let's visit dictionary.com:
meditate
verb, -tat⋅ed, -tat⋅ing.
–verb (used without object)
1.
to engage in thought or contemplation; reflect.
2.
to engage in transcendental meditation, devout religious contemplation, or quiescent spiritual introspection.

okay, so if that's the case, reflecting or contemplating, even devoutly religious or quiescent
(-adjective 1.being at rest; quiet; still; inactive or motionless: a quiescent mind. ) or spiritual introspection that involves the mind. well. i am obsessed with this experience, maybe, naw likely because as a teenager and thus when my identity schisms were being chemically cemented by way of the all mighty hormone, i was early engaged in conscious-changing experiments that always involved substances of some sort. so now, sans-substance of course, i really dig on what can still take me to more open, or heightened, or even Still levels of being from within.

try reading a poem, really connecting the movement of it to your inner state. as means of quiescent introspection. join me in the tribe of the holy yogic creatix: from ecopoetshaman gary snyder "The yogin is an experimenter. He experiments on himself. Yoga, from the root Yuj (related to the English \yoke") means to be at work, engaged." join me in this fabulous dance of self-creating, supplication, sublimation on into beginning and beginning all over again....

p.s. also, if you read this far. the poem above reminds me of my friend sam. who i want to mention bc i dig him so much, too. brandon told me last nite he was headed to sammy's for some of the overflow of venison he's got this season. it made me so full of longing for hard, cold earth days that you walk through gingerly but assured purely by the warmth of your friends. the pond out back of the corn pokes and over the hill at sam and tim's. the goose blinds there that always mildly disturbed me, til the nite same cooked us goose soaked in oj in the black cast iron top of his wood stove. how it chokes me to look back on those times. growing up together: knowing sam as this goofy lanky dude that one time was already up in a tree that i suddenly needed to climb. or the night, last january time of Cold moon and god was it cold, and we walked through the woods at anngar the air with its bluehue that reminds you of the ghosts there in the body and bones of the ancient old land--and we were so cold that all at once bran and sam and me looked at one another and ran, under the full moon with cold cheeks and air that burnt our runny noses, all the way back to the farm house, and scraped together a meal of what sam had brought--oodles of noodles, and what was left of ours--some veggies and a little cheese.

how this time of cold calls for warmth. for friends. or good poems. or surrendering, at rest, quiet, still, to within.

love

ZERO
By Diane diPrima

a blessing on your velvet shoes
and on your hair so free
and may the wind that bore you here
soon take you away from me

for you are the Fool, the holy man
who wanders ceaselessly
and the star you follow does not stop
for my door and my company

a blessing on your coat so green
all worked with magic signs
and on the light in your bright eyes
unlike the light in mine

for joy is calling in the wind
and the white sun beats down
and at the end of your long, bright path
Puck polishes your crown

he holds it out on the Ace of Swords
no easy gift gives he
and the Fool becomes the Hanged Man
for that bright company

so may your wallet e’er be full
with goodly bread and meat
and the white dog who follows you
dance lightly at your feet

and may you mate with faerie girls
all in their robes of white
your long hands pluck anemones
late in the purple night

you shall drink wine form the jeweled Cup
and be drunk eternally
and wash your face in the silver foam
thrown by the pale grey sea

and the crown you gather will not fade
though my tears will drop like leaves
and the wine you drink shall keep you warm
while all the northland grieves

for you are the Fool, and the Hanged Man
whose light shines endlessly
and that cruel wind that bore you here

bears you on eternally

"god bless you

real good "

On Poetics and Diane diPrima

I'm working obscene amounts of double shifts lately. obscene. so yesterday i forced myself in to the obligatory doing absolutely nothing. the night before the prospects of no plans no calls no errands no nada to have to do seemed great, but actually going through with it was a little tough. made me feel less than worthwhile. have always been in to identifying the mean teeth of doubt in my consciousness, the terms of which like a tape looping i or one plays over again throughout the head without really separating out from and seeing, and so take for granted. so i'm programmed to think that taking time off is lazy or gluttonous. go figure--of course i am.

anyhow hell yeah let's hear it for 8 episodes of the first season of SexintheCity woooohooo and also Knocked Up and the very stupid Walk Hard. and front porch time and, oh yes, an hour and a half lazed in bed w my new Vogue and a cup of hot mint tea. got my rest, got my soul full again, got my juices flowing--which was necessary if i want to get a blog in before today's 12 hour shift...

***

So the afternoon before last Laura Walsh and I drove to Newark to U Del to check out the original manuscripts (oh god my heart beats faster and the water tingles in my mouth whenever i say that) of Diane diPrima's Freddie Poems. What is of interest to me here is a fine, exact example of my take on poetics. Firstly, her Freddie Poems, far as I'm concerned, is one of diPrima's clear transitions, visible within the poems themselves, into her experience of poetry as an alchemical function. Thus we witness her own self-transition and initiation, in the alchemical tradition, of go-between if you will, of she who transmutes self and journeys between the outer and inner worlds, or between the levels of consciousness. Secondly, in the exact tradition of this and in a very personal and real way, this piece of diPrima's work specifically impacted my own life many years later. This is a prime function of poet-(or artist)-as-shaman, as Gary Snyder explains in his Real Work interview with Paul Geneson of the Ohio Review (Fall 1977): "For the poet in particular, a sense of the need to look at the key archetypes image and symbol blocks and see if the blocks are working. Poetry effects change by getting at the archetypes and getting at people's dreams about a century before it actually effects historical change..."

You see, diPrima wrote this collection while in the midst of grieving the loss of her close friend to suicide. This was nearly fifty years ago. I discovered the existence of the Freddie Poems when reading her memoirs in the Fall of 03. At that time I too was in the midst of grieving the suicide of a close friend, and keeping a journal to him which would eventually become my first complete collection of poetry. I was actually calling that project the Mike Journal then! And likewise, the experience of chronicling my process of grief and understanding was my induction in to the tradition of poet as journeyer through other forms of consciousness by mere means of creation.

Wow, I am so wholly took by this concept of poetry, or any art for that matter, as means of transcending our ordinary incidences in life by penetrating to a more intuitive and in-depth, in-bliss experience. Seeing the Freddie Poems for the first time, and in their original form! was so powerful for me. I still do not, and likely will never, have words to give justice to how rich an opportunity this was. What I can do, rather, is defer to Snyder again. Reading those poems, finding the eternal echos of archetype and symbology that diPrima encountered, and nodding in recognition that I too found those same rhythms, themes and postures in my own poetry to Mike was a home-coming of the purest sense. It was affirmation of the the most primal patterns of our humanity, of the never ending cycles of lifedeathlife, and it made me beam with love to have this opportunity to exist. It was acknowledgement in my own soul, a deep-breathed sigh of comfort and relief, and mostly of pure elated satisfaction and awe.

From Snyder:

As a poet, I hold the most archaic values on earth. They go back to the late Paleolithic; the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth; the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. Whatever is or was in any other culture can be reconstructed from the unconscious through meditation…the coming revolution will close the circle and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past.

Poetry

Reminder
To Me from Me

Can you read a man’s poetry
can you reconcile the difference
play conscientious objector
in your own life?
The art, the nature or our own innate draw
the silly coward way of human nurture
The nature of art is the grand scheme
marshaled by the merits
of awareness
Life is the great art
the grand operatic not how you choose but if you choose to sing

Poetry is the option not the objective
Greatness is a technique based on a quality
of courage
& simultaneous fury-feeling abruptivness of sudden

Action
1.20.08 op,md
*

Little bit of a poem for the day
from Octavio Paz's Sun stone

I search where I come face to face with daylight,
search without finding, I search for a moment,
for a face of lightening-flash and thunderstorm
running among the enormous trees of night,
face of all rain in a garden of shadows,
insistent water that flows along my side,

I search without finding, and I write alone,
No one is here, and the day ends, the year ends,
I have gone down with the moment, all the way down,
The road is invisible over all these mirrors,
They repeat the days, the moments pave this roadway,
I step upon the thinking of my shadow,
I pace my shadow in search of my one moment,

I seek the day live as a live bird....

*
Thank you Octavio. Getting ready to go to Maine on Wednesday. Ahhhh quite whisper of tall pine trees....

The Second Half

My Vogue came on Wednesday—it was waiting for me in the mailbox when I arrived home from the beach. Before I got home that morning, I sat in the waiting room of the Nissan dealer while the mechanic looked over my squeaking brakes. I read Spin magazine and soaked up new music like I had just discovered rhythm and tone. Then I got home, unpacked, got my Vogue and repacked to come over here to Queen Anne’s County and house sit for three days.

Yesterday at work I took my Vogue and a copy of Saveur that belongs to the man I’m housesitting for. Savuer is a magazine of “authentic cuisine” and this months articles include incredible succulent recipes involving pineapples and also some Mexican dishes that make me salivate to think of them. Here’s the deal, it’s the second half of my cycle—and I’m receptive, in a scope of mood I call juicy. I’m mellow and relaxed from two days on the beach and now my natural pulse of energy is to soak in soul savory information: good music, good food, and ohhhhhhh shaky insides, amazing clothing, colors and couture, shoes and travel-spots and culture on the pages of Vogue. That is me, my soul music calling to me. If you don’t know your second half—try learning it…I go by the moon and chart my energies—and it has become such a way to really get to know—and therefore coincidingly—become myself.

The other thing that happens during my second half is my spontaneous download, it’s like a sea the way the deep song comes out of me—I keep a book handy for when the words like a fluttering cloak in my consciousness start to move and arrive—here are some examples from over the past few months…

Got to run, off to work….

*
5.15.08

And I asleep out here
on a dying river
on a larkspur’s diamond
on a feast
made of gold
I asleep where
the dragon bit my toe
un even, un ready
too scared to fire
or to go
come come with me now
come with me dawn
say my name
speak my
golden broken reflection
speak my disastrous
rank-boned game

2
my belly’s a fool

a secret scratched white

lit by the dove
of fire

in the clear, plain day
I am no use
No more use to this

I take my own grace

3
I want more, I don’t like
Myself
For this
This filth
You gave me
This mess this filth
I am meant
I am made to disappear
Fire come to take me
Queen is done
Or seems to be
W me
For now

*
Have now for yourself
a good life
propagate the species for you may you
go on and on at nights first light, this delight this hand
this way you have of going down
this way you don’t ever want
to say goodbye
this backwards glance grin
this way this way we give merit this way we lie this way we tell ourselves:
It is all okay. Have now for yourself—the good life

May you go & on w
this madness. A brave thing it is to acknowledge, to accept, to deem true and bless
this humanity craze, this madmax flash this absurd human’s dance.

Or is it natural—to sublimate?
Thereby negating—it?

Which? Which is it? Look, look at you. Which is it

Which You?

4.3.08

*
There is a place where I go to hide from the street behind the trees—where I can watch the farmer’s pass on the country road next to our farm but they can not see me. Sometimes I get naked & they don’t know it. Sometimes, like today, I go there to blot out the numbness—and I think about him. I sit in the sun& feel close as I can to real. The sky is blue like when you can’t tell if it stops at all, anywhere, infinite blue blue lens stretching on in to forever far enough to reach out to someone else somewhere who’s maybe also a lot like me. The edges or what makes for the edge of the sky from here which is the trees are more pale like a gray blue or pink hue and this is it, summertime, I, the sky and the edges above the trees. And it is bright out and hot sort of and here I am, hiding from farmers, perhaps missing my life.
6.2.08

God in Truth is Lies

I have faith in God. But ugghhghg, even as I write that it seems so lame. I have faith in God—in every lasting miracle of life of which life itself is a breathing example of —look outside, just look beyond your nose, or else stop a while, feel the air at the bottom of your nose, the way the dryness passes among the hairs there in their little rows. Look out past wherever you are this moment, this gaping fillhole of experience that calls to you: look at the air between the you and the other, look at the candle in the holder on the counter the bronzed statue of the roman on his knees melted wax dried dripping down his back, the toy poodle on the beige throw rug at your feet the way his head cocked to one side looks confused like trying to figure out why you are looking down at him, the crumpled tissues next to your laptop on your desk, the pot of coffee across the room gone cold. I have faith in life, see—in the very miracle—wondrous, mysterious, of existence going on about me, and I do not shy away from calling that my own reasonable belief in god, which to me is all things.

The god of my understanding—tho I suppose it isn’t “a” god at all. It is funny to me the way people—myself included, I often do it—cast judgments based on our own perceptions or ideas or applications of a word. I do it all the time, that word, God, it still makes me cringe. With an eye roll I’ll look on, incredulous inside myself if someone I don’t know well brings that up that word and starts going on. Like the funny looks I get from people who don’t know me too well when I talk about going home and needing to pray! I don’t know about this god-head thing: I struggle with my own old trapping of a god-head, of some figment out there in the midst looking over at me, silent-talking and creepily laughing at all I say and claim and think and do. These old Catholic remnants of my childhood come up and all the mores of society that wordlessly perpetuate such norms. But if I am going to lay claim to this belief in a godhead that I struggle with than at least I will be strong enough to make it my own—because it is in fact, my own internalized belief, my own rigid system of self-judgment and denial. I’m too intellectual to believe fully in such a framework, but my intellectualism is so counter-alloof it perpetuates it: what I mean is the idea of a god-head is so complex, so deep down in me and well a part of me that I unknowingly function in the preexistent framework of it all the same, no matter what I do. So I find myself walking around with the judge in my head, always in some varying degree of verdict and blame placed on myself and my own drama of trying to think my way out of it.

It’s not as awful as it sounds. But it is the dictate of a stronger that normal conscience because admittedly I am a woman of extremes. My real belief, in the oneness of things, informs me that it is just me doing the judging and the blaming, hauling the call of guilt all around. Just me and my perfectionism, busy creating god in an image, judgmental, of the darker shadow sides of me!! When my fear is great I am too blind to be in my bliss, I get strung-up and stuck in my head and stop listening to my own myth and stop following my own heart. I stop trusting in the lightness and life of this current moment. And when I stop trusting, when I stop having faith in my own current, working conception of what God experientially has proven to be in my own life, then I pick up my old God, my old tortured systems of belief and being.

Ughghg, god bless this sacred neurosis! This funny human way I have of being.

Anyhow, my faith is with me today, along with my laughter. It feels good. It’s nice to look around with joy in this moment, to look around with faith enough simply to be still…..

Poem today (involving neurosis…)
for Josh

"Little Joke" or
"My Ways"
or "Digressions are how I get there"

I’m sorry,
I’m sorry for my drama. These funny witchy ways
About me. These ways of making consequence
against me
of
It always comes back to me &
Figuring things out. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for my ways.
I truly Am
I feel like-- for a thousand years I’ve tried
to tell you this.

But? That’s just me again, Drama? The self-inflicted (get it?
Self—that’s
My Way
making
little joke

my eyebrow notch, bravery or
mockery
whatever me my way
reckoning—recognizing
myself (oooops there I go again
truth is not true
My Self—joke again))

drama of art is my Nature These energy swirls I get caught in—avoid? And then I think—about me—it can’t be true again? Guilt, fuck fuck guilt again?
Then there’s

Avoid the dance? Me? I’m sorry—

Never. It is new moon, I am
Wiling against myself again—
You are on the run.
(you are. check—)

I am home, moon
Moonface, dark gun. Or
dark, sweet fruit dripping down the sides like Rum
Or No thing Nothing, the blank stretch
of this misery, how it tastes so sweet
fun
to those in love
like me, how much we LOVE
the ride! The ride is what
the blank stretch the whole of life presence blank, unfestered or even recognized
unto its self...the ride is what? (Monogamy is pointless we all know that.
Has nothing to do w that.)
we come here for some kind of reckoning w
Our Power. Our lies being told. Not meant to be mean
just me eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee ahhhhhhhhhh

**
I am sorry. I am sorry for this
For this, for my ways, for lasagna. Tastes so good
On my farm, in my garden. Read Diprima about me
Take action, ride a bike, plant a garden
Watch tv or buy a god. Find god. It will still
All be the same and I will be sorry
Feasting a while, always to come back come back again
(circle [spiral circle] Circle) spiral
--The light is like gold --
and I will come back again always to this gold, golden grain
--there is knowledge in this,
alchemical let it inform You
(we are smarter than
our selves)—
in this pain, the most mild
& gentle elixir

I will be chief among these to go. I will always be. And
I am sorry—
I will always take you with me. Even to death
& beyond. A thousand seas have bent before me
a million clouded skies. This is our Code. I have it

broke before

your eyes

Sorry I AM for this

**

But not really

Poem for Today, for Mike, cuz my friends save my ass w out even knowing it...

“We don’t live for ourselves; we are interconnected. We live for the earth, for Texas, for the chicken we ate last night that gave us its life, for our mother, for the highway, and the ceiling and the trees. We have a responsibility to treat ourselves kindly; then we will treat the world in the same way.” Natalie Goldberg


Amen. And god bless, goddess bless, Namasté. These are sentiments I would, do, did, mutter to myself when I read this, or anything like it. Such words are my way of acknowledging the little present flutter of joy that moves in my heart naturally as means of saying yes, yes, I get that, too! I live for such feeling, such acknowledgment. It’s been stuck in my throat lately, though. That’s what happens when I, as an artist, feel that little flow or aha and stop my natural progression of opening to it. It takes so damn much of my energy to do so, to halt that flow and not allow it to come posturing out in the form of a poem or writing or in a simple lightness of being that I end up feeling numb. Then the shame—self-judgment—comes. And then I really rally against myself. What are you doing with your life, where are you going, what’s the point, why why why? And then I don’t, I haven’t, gotten a damn thing done.

Initially this started when I paused in my writing and blogging to have a friend help me with building a website. I gave myself an excuse: oh I’ll just quit writing til we’re done, til we get my blog fed in to my website. Of course this led to me spending far more time day by day in my head, trying to control and manage all my little life details up there. My energy, transfixed before I knew it, stuck on creating life how I want it. My heart doomed with the terrible sucking feeling in the morning because nothing at all is happening for me and yikes, the great paradox being that indeed nothing was happening because I was so drained by all my energy focused on nothing happening! And maybe this is what I hate the most, what I’ve learned the most in the 9 months since I quit teaching to focus on writing: it requires that I write. And for this artist, writing requires discipline. Which sometimes looks like drudgery: sweatpants and dirty hair and forcing myself to sit in this hardback chair drinking acidic coffee and stopping to have to get the damn laundry done. Which is the exact opposite of my vision of the ecstatic moonbeam worshipping sultry sleeky earth-goddess dark diva zipping and lala laughing and loving her way easily through life and love and art with a magic touch and a Done!! No, discipline is not an easy task for me, but one worth the hard long fight. And actually, I like the way the warm sun feels on my stretched-out arms, the yearn in my heart as I weight the clothes-line with the heavy wet towel or my work uniform knowing my work is upstairs waiting mid-sentence for me. The sound of the cows in the distance. The hum of my computer. My cat on her back spread out legs hanging off the chair she’s cozied up in, funny look on her face like I’m the strange one. All the empty coffee mugs and tears of paper on my desk. The yearn in my heart for this all. Discipline takes me back to these things, to my life. Back to my art, to the nature of things.

In recovery from alcoholism you learn about that funny little twist of mental obsession and how it dominates you and sucks you lonely and bedraggled through your day. You learn it is part of the disease of alcoholism. Chief among the disease is the ego and its Napoleaonic governing and how it confuses you with delusions of how much you actually think is in your control. The ego uses its loud chatter to accomplish this, the ways it has of talking at you, and you at it. You drink to relieve this mental strain, this burden of the mentally anxious always obnoxious wrestling match in your own brain. This time it will be different and so on…Thus drinking isn’t actually the problem as much as it is the solution. But I think that this tendency towards mental looping and strain isn’t limited at all to alcoholics. I am convinced that it is simply the human condition. Sick and stuck on our fears and our own ambitious beliefs in the common little wart we all share, our dastardly egos. My shaman fried says the ego can not exist in the present moment, it can only be activated by our worries about what the future will amount to or by our judgment of our past. So our judgments or speculating in any given moment amount to the sum total of joy we are experiencing Right Now. In other words, if you can be present, in the present, Conscious of the moment and your breathing nose or mouth, your beating heart, your blinking eyes, the way the tree leaves move the wind across the street or the field, how the light blinks off the grocery cart wheel or how that little child looks right now with chocolate smeared across her fat cheek…in this way you can love, you can be the moment connected not in mind but in Being with all else. You can live the ecstatic ordinary and this is all there is…

So that’s why I write. Got that Kelly? To capture this, this sacred moment, to experience in-union, to dance together as the words come rushing out, to feel the spark, that joy flutter, to share what lay in my heart and in doing so, to lay down what matters upon your own.

Poem for Today

My friend Mike’s birthday was last week, so was Leah’s. These are fantastic, original people who inspire me to live the same way writing does. They are farm people—Mike by birth, right here in Kennedyville not two miles from Anngar Farm, with the dust and manure, the cow droppings and moans outside on the wind making up his everydays. The dry corn husks fluttering across his playground, brought down every season by the fall. Leah came to this life, to this type of farm life, with her pensive esoteric Christian punk rock husband, who I unknowingly grew up with in the suburb complexes of counties stretched out between Baldamore and DC at the same punk rock shows in the same firehalls with sticky bathroom stalls and black gum stains on the floor and stale grease smells in the dark halls. Fugazi. Nope. Mustard Seed Magic….Her and her husband now in a strung together farm house in Queen Anne’s county held up by her baubles and scrumpy cats and their love. I still owe her a flowered crown for her birthday….We have potlucks together, celebrate birthdays and the passings of seasons and the moon. Leah and her husband and the rest of our hodgepodge band of pop-culture-gone-rural country crew. Mike doesn’t come to these gatherings because he lives in Manhattan now but steamed crabs, in Maryland, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore where he’s from outback that old farmhouse of his in Kennedyville, is how he’ll celebrate his birthday this week, how he celebrates it every year. Details. The classic details of our miniscule existences, how we humans are gifted with the power to transform every living day in to our own kind of tiny miracle.


Happy Belated Birthday friends.

Amen.

Long poem for
Mc Ades

What is this madness? I only seem
to Know. I only claim.
My only.

The beauty of this world.
The beating & the fueling
the fucking
of all things
keeps us Alive.

The beating wings of that animal flap
The thrashing of those others in the garden
The associations we draw forward
from that
to that

This is ALL pure, man.

The light
The light there, in your eyes
is in mine.
Transfixed gleam.
( )

The city tops, the city steps
Where you sleep
Where your gun falls down
Where you drop
to your knees
Where, on some leveled street labeled Paradise
your queen, your vicious vicious Queen
returns & you
you Masquerade
torrents of beauty dance
you spin & turn what beauty in this dance
what madness this Quest ahhhh all this confounded
Wondering. Wonder-Ing ahhhh hhh Wonder
Your Soul the Clown, friend
Your soul on which the fire breathes.

White heat red flame transfigures, white ash. Transfixed heat. Transcends.
The Beauty. The Simple marvel Beauty. Of this.

¨

On this farm, this form
which you gave Me.
You are always in my backyard?
Which means when we turn we are the same
within. You’re on my land, I am on yours, this
Great consequence of Life only means a thing if we
Garner Nothing To It. I Know.
The fire, the fires Burn Bright
Chinese Elm out back. Great Fire Barrel Sam procured.

The choking back, the choking on, the delicious smoke.

The dust I brought, you brought
Home. How you rejuvenate reinvent Cleanse.

How you Bath Yourself. To be made Clean.

The dust settles. Great cities of Paradise yearn in you again.
Long car ride, home.

I’ll share a cigarette with you,
anytime my friend.

*