Thought of the Day

When all the right things are too soft
and the worse things are hard—
when you touch your life
and it gives too easily,
like an eaten-out peach
that should be thrown from the barrel—
when you’re a fire waiting to blaze
but can’t find the kindling—
the world is okay.
Even when the tight muscle of sky
relaxes
and hail hails all over—
who could have guessed there’s so much
hardness in the air?—
the world is still okay.

—B. J. Ward, lines to “Something You Haven’t Found” from Landing in New Jersey With Soft Hands (North Atlantic Books, 1994)

On Writing The Poem

                                  each night she comes to me like music

before the moon

if I drink at her sky
sweetness

and parallel light

signs

branchless trees on the horizon

an entry wound

the speed of each dream leaves a little of my heart

full of nostalgia and hunger

not for love

but a way of surviving

no one knows

no one could ever know

I lift her up within her cage

before the landscape becomes dangerous

I see her picture perfect

her thin gift pierced on a thorn

I rest only when her shrine has been built

Thought of the Day

“It was a joy! Words weren’t dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.”



― Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

Things Invented and Sung

Wonder
whisper the mystery
of your most beautiful sin
you are like the dust
of a monk-swept mandala
thrown on the fire
golden river that runs
through me
heartline to paradise
harmonic flux everywhere
one hundred secret portals
wonder… wonder of mine!
feel it desperately
apocalyptic metamorphosis
open!
like infant fingers rising
out of clean, white rice

Thought of the Day

I think there is a general misconception that you write poems because you ‘have something to say.’ I think, actually, that you write poems because you have something echoing around in the bone-dome of your skull that you cannot say. Poetry allows us to hold many related tangential notions in very close orbit around each other at the same time. The ‘unsayable’ thing at the center of the poem becomes visible to the poet and reader in the same way that dark matter becomes visible to the astrophysicist. You can’t see it, but by measure of its effect on the visible, it can become so precise a silhouette you can almost know it.

—Rebecca Lindenberg

Living in the Motel

The poem is

an imaginary motel room

in my daydream

The echo of my words 

is the ripe sound in the room

The pure promise of everything twists

through my body like a snake

And no one else sees whose wings
come in the night when I call

Thought of the Day

“There are three good things in this world. One is to read poetry, another is to write poetry, and the best of all is to live poetry.”







—Rupert Brooke

Expanse Infallible

Let infinity be infinity and now now
Enough of head space
Whitebark pine and stinging nettle
Softness has a price
Intense life needs intense language
And any fool
Can smile for candy
And alcohol and drugs and intensity
And the kingdom of the sky
And the saddle view from the top of New York trail
Or fantastical dreams
And the poet who is drunk on the stars
Of some other frequency


Let infinity be infinity and now now
snowmelt water
Yet eternal thirst
That is to say:
I have knocked the guts out of myself
Turkey vultures circling my love
I have stared long at the deadly nightshade
The turkey vultures are not really vultures
I’ve ignited myself
The vultures were devouring my beloved
I’ve traveled without maps over the hot sand
I’ve invoked the muse
I’ve conjured a curse
I’ve dreamt of my daughters
I’ve consorted with magpies
I've died with my shame and I’m alive
When my prayers went unanswered
I howled with the hounds
There was glory in my glance
I was born unenlightened
I awoke to the flapping flight of the great blue heron
I spoke the language that did not say
We were only two on the earth
But we were one on the earth


Marvelous insights were shattered into pieces
Words
Visions

Thought of the Day

"Many of us spend our whole lives running from feeling with the mistaken belief that we cannot bear the pain. But you have already borne the pain. What you have not done is feel all you are beyond the pain."



- Saint Bartholomew

Found Between The Lines

Breathe in the sky, breathe in the sky which is more than one eternity
clouds rush like wanderers, like fine wind of hopeless hope, or lost bodies
dissolving into wings, so why should he dream of flying someplace better
someway to occupy his mind, time, so often the loss or what keeps him from her
a hole in his atmosphere, a tiny wisp of poem, a kind of reunion


for the time it takes to give heaven a name
for the time it takes to call her name
for the time it takes to breathe a breath beneath the flesh


love takes away

Song of the Day

Thought of the Day

Cease trembling and shaking and gasping
and cursing and find again your core which I am.
Rest from twistedness, distortion, deformations.
For an hour you will be me; that is, the other
half of yourself. The half you lost.
What you burnt, broke, and tore is still
in my hands: I am the keeper of fragile things
and I have kept of you what is indissoluble.


–Anais Nin

And So The Blood



The man is a burning sky of red and orange flames

a dream guides him through hunger

hints of lovely her who shines in his land and

he laughs as walls crumble you can’t understand

things change from red blood sowed

something that gives up mystery behind the silence

this is the moment he feels her breathing

making suns rise within a lost meadow

silver vowels and earth’s blue ballet today

and tomorrow grace and everywhere sweet inspiration

she becomes a purer light their pretty child and grows.

Thought of the Day

"Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire."



- Jorge Luis Borges