River’s ache

You indulged my river hungry body
Extended arms along the park bench 
in symmetry 

Unwrapping regalos, 
Small expressions to commemorate us; 
What’s burgeoning  

Parting lips, 
Softest wisps sinking  
Warmth flushing 

With gentleness
Through my reluctant, fearful tension
Into spacious tenderness 

Patient and safe, 
Steady and fierce;
The longing deepens 

Embedded, permeating 
Under streetlights 
Denying impending flights 

Entering a fleeting 
Moment, so new and fluid and 
Glowing  

Ash leaves tinged with yellow 
Summer turning fallow 
This severing 

Or rather, elongating, of our connection,
May it lead to the fullness we’re 
Aching for.

No more distance

I love you,

And I’m going to keep loving you,

Until I can’t stand the separation anymore.

Then in fullness of days I’ll bring us together face to face. No more distance, full romance, an open door.

This vaporous life, 

this misty moment of strife 

For you, death is gain.

In the flickering of an eye, it will all be changed 

And all your wilted longings and weak attempts rearranged 

Made perfect and complete 

At my feet. 

And you’ll fully know me, even as you’ve been known

Forever, my very own.

Weaving stories

I can’t reciprocate, I don’t have a depth to disclose in the same way

But I hope I can hold your story with honor and reverence, acceptance and compassion 

I have a simple story, as the older prodigal I was invited to the party and by grace came in around 19. I found the party was for me, too, and have been trying to learn how to dance ever since, 

It’s been decades of lonely traveling, writing poems, painting dreams, pasting photos in albums, binding sketchbooks and capping bottles of tears 

And I hope you’ll let me share them with you, maybe not in a five hour coffee-turns-to-dinner-date, but slowly, day by day, weaving our lives together, a tapestry of lavish beauty and praise.

Unresolvable

What a job description, the crooning mantra,
"I must save him to save myself."

The false face of God.
The absence of a protector and provider.

The vacuum of orphan-hood.
The bitter angry tap root, 

Core so rotten
hope nullified,

Sad and tormented, the cloudless sky; the waterless mist,
here for awhile before vanishing.

Shaded spectacle, deflated,
procrastinating passivity purloining promises 

Worthless seeds
from a dead tree

All this anger, it's a shell of protection,
coated and fossilized

Never forgotten weights hanging off my eyes,
owed and sour gray skies. 

This is resolving the unresolvable
Some stories don't find redemption until the end.

Someday
I will see it worked for good.

On being human(e)

This inter-generational trauma;
Mother Mary, Father Joseph, you know, all parents do their best with varying degrees of drama.

Help me, Holy Spirit, I surrender.
Show me how to myself be tender.

Regression; like a child, but not my child.
A grown man with tantrums wild.

He was supposed to be the one playing father in family scenes,
but our roles collide and I'm throwing away shitty jeans. 

His addiction, it's pain relief.
I bring down the gavel in judgment and condescending belief. 

He just wants solace.
Even if it comes broken and lawless. 

If he's good,
I can be understood. 

How's that co-depency going?
It's suffocating, she says, sowing 

Thorns of self-contempt, strangling the seed.
How do we go from tormented humanity to being freed?

 

HT: Gabor Mate, in the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.

Plunge

It’s like I’m asking you to breathe underwater with me 

Nevermind our terrestrial boundaries 

While we sink beneath the surface and try to love a new way 

Practice to be

I practice dreams for my poetry 

I practice poetry for my dreams

All the digging has left a dreamless cavern and all the green is a wordless wasteland. The departure into the abundance of beauty silenced my yearning

Until the rain came and 

My fears broke down in

The hardened soul, pummeled by hours of thunder. I softened into the mud as a seed

To be born again, here.

I am not the same seed as when I left.

I am new.

But rootless and unbound I was blown between houses and homes and expectations and money. Who dreams for money? 

Am I a now a soulless Dreamer, bereft of poetry, dying because I’m buying bread. 

This won’t suffice.

Adjust the dream, clip your wings so you can be a safe well fed land bird. And write your poetry from the land.

Spend nothing but love.

Learn new languages to prove God is not for one nation. 

That towers crumble, always.

Poets May forget their dreams and dreamers may loose their poetry 

But remembrance and finding are found in un-bought bread. 

I take and eat.