Charged With The Glory

The sky is my language.
I translate my raw wounds
into the bluest heights.


Once these clouds were lonely people,
lovers who left themselves behind,
poets who abandoned their words
to return to safety.
Only perpetual partings remain here,
and letting go to dust.

I don’t argue with the blue,
color of loss.
I yield to falling.


I create another space
beyond all the twistings
of the heart,
a flaming, piercing,
language of wings.

Thought of the Day

“Loving, like prayer, is a power as well as a process. It’s curative. It is creative.”


—Zona Gale

Through the Meadow

I know a place where paradox
is like the touch of a lover
flesh upon flesh moans softly
as if weeping


sometimes
essences interchange there, spiral, intersect
flow from an inward chamber


on a glittered road
to some other place
there is a shadow of a cloud, wet
swollen lips

But, In Truth

at night

I bathe in memories

of evolving

in methylene blue skies

with you

secretly

traversing the borderlands

over uneven wounds

through tears

from all that remains of flowered altars

to magic

o magic of deep greens, spring sweet

meadow grasses

of grace

Thought of the Day

"Do you want a sign that you're asleep? Here it is: you're suffering. Suffering is a sign that you're out of touch with the truth. Suffering is given to you that you might open your eyes to the truth, that you might understand that there's falsehood somewhere, just as physical pain is given to you so you will understand that there is disease or illness somewhere. Suffering occurs when you clash with reality. When your illusions clash with reality, when your falsehoods clash with truth, then you have suffering. Otherwise there is no suffering."



- Anthony De Mello
running the asylum

For Which There Is No Name

come closer

it’s been long enough

a secret voice

it whispers

your face in the wind, heads touching

an oracle of hands

skin tingling

speaks in my mind, searching

for the hidden the healing

it is not possible

for you to hide from

the sky

this emptiness, emptiness

I want to be aflame

burning each night

at the boundaries of your wilderness

Song of the Day

Thought of the Day

There is no salvation for the soul
But to fall in Love.
It has to creep and crawl
Among the Lovers first.


Only Lovers can escape
From these two worlds.
This was written in creation.


Only from the Heart
Can you reach the sky.
The rose of Glory
Can only be raised in the Heart.


–Rumi

Each Moment Rises

Inspired to the point of unreasonable ecstasy

inventing what becomes food

losing everything each day

raw wind against my heart

thankful for mercy

breath, sky, traversing forth

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

All Sighing

So dreamful

is dawn’s divinity

soft-shaped hills

against blue canvas sky

soothing the red rock cliffs

so sky-tuned

I move deeper and deeper

inside

mythical sunspins

penetrate my mind

as if the last man left on earth

                                                                                                                  

Thought of the Day

“We must travel across lonely and rugged terrain, through isolation and silence, to reach the magic zone where we can dance an awkward dance or sing a melancholy song.”



—Pablo Neruda

That Place

      At least my flowers, at least my songs!

from Cantos de Huexotzingo

piecing it all together

Tibetan monk banana-sun hats

the sharper focus

the unpainted gourd of the present

predawn redwing vocal warm ups

original essence of the fog-layered landscape

magic of the eternal scene

all things being visions

ranging

large enough to embrace

all my sweet imaginings

and integrated impressions

at the edge of the heart of the sun

Song of the Day

Thought of the Day

"All life is a simply dream-like dance of appearance and disappearance of all phenomena. But unless you know this directly, from your own experience, it can seem like pretty cold comfort - especially when times are hard. As Buddhist wisdom for hard times, my Zen teacher, Kobun Chino Roshi, used to say, "Falling apart, falling apart, all together falling apart, it can't be helped." What a relief to know that this isn't a bad dream, it's the nature of everything and everyone - coming together and falling apart, like the elements of a dream."



- Trudy Goodman

Oh, Eyes

the hero tends to return
now to question the loss with a spirit of healing
and his soul is surely a crow of sorrow
alongside a freshly plowed field
wing shaped trees
cowboy boots
spider bite welts on his hips
and red beans and rice in his bowl


there is so much failure
his joy is big
a squished muley in the ditch along the lonely highway
the milk boy cannot sleep: potted geraniums
under the porch wait to be planted
and he hums
help: I need somebody
help: not just anybody
he longs for her edges and milky sanctuaries
he fills the opening with a howl


and once in a while he smiles with new eyes

Thought of the Day

Don’t leave me alone with self-
knowledge and these rich, fruitless, unspoken words.


—Dan Albergotti, from “Bad Language” (via straif)

Video Song of the Day

Unlit

So many ways ways of touching the springpopping, spectral
colors at the sun's gate.
So many ways of self-quenching inside a dream.
So many ways flesh nurtures its inner name:


                                                          blood and breath.

Thought of the Day

Take me to the other side of this night,
where I am you, we are us,
the kingdom where pronouns are intertwined
… and the sea sang with the murmur of light.

—Octavio Paz, from Sunstone (via sleepinginthesnow)

All His Spectrums

He lives in dreams
eyes wide open
celebrates his words
turns his love to burning heat
then turns it back to something else
pure and clean
a blue life worth everything
Now

Thought of the Day

Our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being. —Rainer Maria Rilke

Something I Can Do For You

Here's the naked twitches of my vagrant fears;
you can refer to them when you want to know 
exactly how I ache 
over the sublime ordinary.

Thought of the Day

You are the universe, expressing itself as a human for a little while. —Eckhart Tolle (via senshuk)

So Many Worlds To Add

The words bright rising
on the altar of the page.
This page one wave
where I fly undistracted
with the chance to be a new world.
Such is the prize:
my words as if a puzzle of blossoms,
the form of a sacred heart.

Thought of the Day

“Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you.”


― Jim Morrison, The Doors

On the Inside

I saw us whole at last
with the honesty of death.

We were a golden bridge,
a form of prayer beyond the naked sky,

Colorado summer blue, not mechanical.
Words I didn't know resembling some kind of daily heaven.

Thought of the Day

Unlike riding a bike, with poetry, you never quite know how. —Phoebe Millikin

And It's Okay

Immersed in the blues
something dark
or even more
naked 
underneath the shadows

Thought of the Day

The question of love is one that cannot be evaded. Whether or not you claim to be interested in it, from the moment you are alive you are bound to be concerned with love, because love is not just something that happens to you: It is a certain special way of being alive. Love is, in fact, an intensification of life, a completeness, a fullness, a wholeness of life. —Thomas Merton (via fyeahphilosophy)

What's Underneath

Within is so abundant with things that belong in the sky.
Pierced, undraped, hung out in the sun to be dried,
I can't believe these spacious misplacements.
What about you?
Is a cold wind rising in these ten thousand glacial miles for you too?

Thought of the Day

"The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream." — Jorge Luis Borges, from “The Circular Ruins” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley

Memphis, May10, 2012

Already
between the Mississippi dawn and downtown Memphis
a world is half-fulfilled,
crackheads smokin,
crickets singing blues
on shadow occupied, inner city grass.  
When the wind rises before daybreak it takes me back,
turns me over like an hourglass.

Thought of the Day

The Lord of Love is before and behind. He extends to the right and to the left. He extends above; he extends below. There is no one here but the Lord of Love. He alone is; in truth, he alone is. ~ excerpt from The Mundaka Upanishad translated by Eknath Easwaran

Fragment of the True Cross

The high clouds
of your dream horizon
flow into my backstreet language
and I never come back here.


My heaven begins.

The 33rd Blues Music Awards will be Thursday May 10, 2012 at the Cook Convention Center in Memphis, Tennessee.
The 2012 show will follow the format of the critically-acclaimed shows of recent years. Close to 100 nominees attend and the night is filled with their appearances and performances in a cabaret/dinner setting in the Convention Center's ballroom.
The event brings together Blues performers, industry representatives and fans from all over the world to celebrate the best in Blues recordings and performances from the previous year. Each year, the Foundation presents The Blues Music Awards to the artists selected by its members. They are universally recognized as the highest honor given to Blues artists. As always, a pre-party will immediately precede the Awards.

Thought of the Day

"To look this way is to see. To see is to have vision. To have vision is to understand. To understand is to know. To know is to become. To become is to live fully. To live fully is to matter. And to matter is to become light. And to become light is to be loved. And to be loved is to burn. And to burn is to exist. Off and on."



- Robert Fulghum

Like a Million Suns (thanks to the Beetles and Barbara Dills)

Nothing’s gonna change my world
The trouble’s not the spell of a poem
The trouble’s a ferocious fear of light
And mind surrounded by mirrors
And flesh with its own shallow eyes

Everyone has a wall made of words
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Lost dancing in lies
Lost dancing
Lost

Trauma and mystery like a holy communion
Inside the room of love
Nothing’s gonna change my world
Inside the room of thorns
My answers are pure

A riot of riffs outside of the storm
Time is forever before we were born
Everything’s a radiance high on a hill
Something’s gonna change my world


And inside my failures my lover’s lunar pool face

Thought of the Day

“Often people attempt to live their lives backward; they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then, do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.”



—Margaret Young

A Blind Eye

We turned into whatever we ignored
Into the hunger inside, sometimes morning light, sometimes a blue day

We shined on the mountains, sometimes we slept in
In the morning we didn't think, in the evening didn't understand

Disregarded our tears, discounted our losses
Overlooked people, left salmon in the fridge too long

We didn't take medicine, sometimes it was crucial
We got sick, sometimes didn't care if we died

We fell in love, became milk of the earth
We turned into grace, turned into fire, we didn't care

We awoke, everywhere in the sky
A garden of feelings, pure and so clear
In the midst of the passion

We failed to take notice

Thought of the Day

At times poetry is the vertigo of bodies and the vertigo of speech
and the vertigo of death …
the flute solo on the terrace of memory and the dance of flames in the cave of thought;
the migrations of millions of verbs, wings and claws, seeds and hands;
the nouns, bony and full of roots, planted on the waves of language;
the love unseen and the love unheard and the love unsaid: the love in love.

—Octavio Paz, lines from “Proem,” originally published in A Tree Within: 1976-1987, taken from The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz: 1957-1987, edited by Eliot Weinberger (New Directions, 1987)

Dream Up





moving

from one road

to heaven

to the next

milky taste

on the tongue

chuckling throat

scent of roses in a darkened

room

inexhaustible touch

resting in

time

(angelic)

just dream, open

the door

this body speaks

a porous language

                                                                    

Thought of the Day

The Great Fires

Love is apart from all things.
Desire and excitement are nothing beside it.
It is not the body that finds love.
What leads us there is the body.
What is not love provokes it.
What is not love quenches it.
Love lays hold of everything we know.
The passions which are called love
also change everything to a newness
at first. Passion is clearly the path
but does not bring us to love.
It opens the castle of our spirit
so that we might find the love which is
a mystery hidden there.
Love is one of many great fires.
Passion is a fire made of many woods,
each of which gives off its special odor
so we can know the many kinds
that are not love. Passion is the paper
and twigs that kindle the flames
but cannot sustain them. Desire perishes
because it tries to be love.
Love is eaten away by appetite.
Love does not last, but it is different
from the passions that do not last.
\Love lasts by not lasting.
Isiah said each man walks in his own fire
for his sins. Love allows us to walk
in the sweet music of our particular heart.

—Jack Gilbert, from The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994)

Milk Within The Honeycomb

Be bright as the stars everybody, be bright
something connects you to move through
the glittering ordinary, your body easing all day
missing nothing releasing what you are holding
that makes you forget the wild one thousand things
everywhere in the beginningless ecstasy of high soulful
surprises that take away your pouty expectations
of the future so you can just be Suns of Eternalized Marvel
kicking back with a lot of unimaginable thoughts
and some really raucous laughter. Good luck everybody!

Thought of the Day

A conversation with Robert Kelly



Robert: I just got off the phone with a man who thinks he's finally "unpeeled," or, as we know it, parsed, a Frank O'Hara poem.


Me: Unpeeled. Do you think poems should be unpeeled?


Robert: Oh, of course not! Poems shouldn't be unpeeled. They should be eaten whole, peel and all. They should cause indigestion and nausea and heartache. None of this business about trying to find out what the poet really "meant." It's what the poem does to you.

Abrasion Through Transport

The fragile story
caught on her lips
crumbles empty
and hurts. Between her hard walls


a love scar deepens. Imagine a
a tattoo of hard facts. With her body
marked that’s not the end of it.


Here no language survives.
Nearby, sacred phenomena
are born in the silt
of smaller things, signs.


This story of her life grows slowly
from the grinding below: a bloody, earth
mythology pulls her toward
a blue center,


where fire is a dance.

Thought of the Day

What’s your road, man?- holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. IT’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?



—Jack Kerouac

Tangled On A Threshold

And then finding a way

when all the windows seem closed

to grace her in words, and you have no

virtual eyes to give her, no taste

of tongue, only a mythology of milk

to dream toward translucence, no

lifeline of comfort or flesh.

Thought for the Day

Sometimes I have to go away
So I come back here
Home is out there in the sky
It’s that place of pure consciousness
When chaos finally succumbs to order
In its ever exploding alignment of us all

—Michelle Dent, from “But Not Really,”

Wild Waves

Contradiction is my spectacle.

Sky the edge of time.

And the expression

Jewel of breathless blue.

We soak through each other.

Give prayer to.

Transmutation, intention

a gong soundwave between our bodies.

Thought for the Day

“Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become world, to become world for [one’s self] and for another’s sake; it is a great exacting claim upon him [or her], something that chooses him [or her] out and calls one to vast things.”



—Rainer Maria Rilke

Gospel of the Improbable

It is as if I had words instead of fingers or fingers at the ends of my words.
My language trembles with desire. Roland Barthes


As long as the words are from twilight
dreamspeak stays in the speech.


A crow searches through the unwanted
as a finger finds the correct strike on the keyboard.


In the front yard he collects broken hearts
with his deformed hand.


The man made of wood
gives off a smell of angry depression.


In the country of love I don’t know
if you’re hearing this right now.


The angelic voice speaks,
“Please, smile in your ruins.”


The moist eyes look away,
moved by desire.

Thought for the Day

I do not, however, hold myself responsible for the fact that man has, everywhere and always, spontaneously developed religious forms of expression, and that the human psyche from time immemorial has been shot through with religious feelings and ideas. Whoever cannot see this aspect of the human psyche is blind, and whoever chooses to explain it away, or to “enlighten” it away, has no sense of reality.


It is permissable for science to divide its field of enquiry and to set up limited hypotheses, for science must work in that way; but the human psyche may not be parcelled out. It is a whole which embraces consciousness, and is the mother of consciousness. Scientific thought, being only one of its functions, can never exhaust all the possibilities of life.

Carl Jung