Hello, strange angel.
What fire, what incessant iridescence
when I meant to keep cool
pretending to know you.
substance
of things unseen
Category: Wonder
a.m. notes
by river bed
Here it is again: you, falling
from another heaven at daybreak;
sob of thunder, waking, to play agin
against the dealer’s fixed chips.
You know you won’t get out of here
alive, but can’t keep yourself
from trying.
Meanwhile, outside leaves
pearl hot beads
of late-morning mist
alert and insistent––
long past the hour
when the last god slipped
from leaking basket
of a drowning heir to call
after one of the prophets
groaning another toothache
from too much gnashing of teeth
to make another now from the next
application of warm rum
to gums stayed through mornings
by sleep.
There is so much
more to do, and we with teeth
still in us, some keep on
keeping,
biding time.
flutter
beneath wing
What but hurt can teach
the proper handling
of injured parts?
Only lavish care,
abiding.
What can measure
what reaches beyond
reason? A single breath
may not be enough
to contain this volume,
and yet–––I cannot
while living keep
from the next.
Yes, come in.
Come in.
vine
and branch
Starlight scatters wound flint paths of old songs to remember scales in rain.
mist
mourn
after the melt,
what strange mold
creeps where blood
once ran, its sound
less pulse, more drum
vibrancy
life beyond ideas
What moves hand, root, tide, bud, breath––
is no abstraction, but the trembling in each
listening leaf.
lullaby: Time
By Tom Waits.
No words today. Heart wrung too raw with a week of accumulated griefs, yet ever committed to hope as a moral obligation. I have not held my guitar in years. Today I dusted it off to try to remember some things. Warmed up with this old favorite by the legendary Tom Waits. Forgive my faltering. I am no musician, only a seeker.
muse on fire
in the age of combustion
Nomos, look. Piles of human meat in the shadow of constant hunt. Camps across the landscape. Who is there? Strangers, while every other seeming friend is more estranged by the hour.
Killing is clean now. See its mechanical precision. How ignorance becomes power, bestowing freedom from the burden of care to anyone ready to get drunk on controlling the flow.
Truth becomes a willingness to collapse against the heat of the furnace from the Cyclops’ workshop where the official language is money, and it means to excise other tongues, as souvenirs.
Absence of connection now connective tissue. O body, hold me to remember against the age of endless exhibition––the face, how it felt before you saw it as looping mirrors screening its self-portrait funhouse for forgetting all form where the matter at hand is content and the hand need not apply.
What speaks is by number now but my beginning was the word and I mean to live inside that womb, becoming.
let
into voice
Incant a tongue inflamed at drought’s long deaths, to spit a song to spark the sky to weeping.
Cyanobacteria
Innovating breath
Although they, too, would later be lumped––by clumsy taxonomies and antimicrobial prejudice––into a category of creature commonly jeered as pestilence, these tiny pioneers had the chutzpah to dare to take into themselves what all others knew as poison and we now call breath, and life, and living. At the arrival of the great oxidation event, one might imagine the others on the planet lamenting the end. Meanwhile, these guys were like, and now. . . here’s green!