On the Holy

Where lies the holy in the modern world?
It lies in Blake’s world in a grain of sand –
It lies, and lies like the truth, in patterns
Like self-organized rings of rocks barren
Arctic fields create. It lies in the branch
Of every tree and species, leafing out
From the known into the unknown. It lies
In every song, painting and rhythmic verse.
We have looked at every leaf and petal,
At the bark and at the wood, every cell
And strand of DNA is now known –
And we have forgotten that all of this
Was once a tree that gave us shade and filled
The air with delicate sweetness and held
The grains of sand against its roots to hold
The ground in place, even as that ground moves
And changes in tiny ways we refuse
To see. In this we can see the holy.
This is where it lies, now and forever,
On the edge of order and wild chaos,
Where the infinite holds in the finite,
Where we, ourselves holy, have always lived.

Recycling

The burnt grass smolders.
On the tips the red embers
Glow bright in the sun.

The Tao of Existence

The
One
Becomes
The two and
The two becomes, with
A proper split, the three, which then
Becomes the many making up the universe. You
And each new complex form that was and is and will become the universe as it cools,
The poetry of all creation hiding in the seeming prose of ever-greater complexity of form and information as it
Emerges, making all that is and will become more beautiful and ethical as it continues with its healthy growth. The math cannot keep up, and ignorance can only grow as learning only makes more things more complex.
Oh, can you follow this exuberance, emergent flow of fluid crystal growth in negentropic entropy, complexifying necessary if it is to understand the vast complexities creating as we speak and think and act to make the world and make ourselves into such things of excellence, can but resist the pull of nihilism.

Time Evolves

Light, you see no time –
Everything happens at once.
You are becoming.

Quantum particles,
You live life uncertainly.
You are just likely.

Chemicals, crystals,
Things for you go either way.
You are determined.

Plants and animals,
All of life eats, breeds, and breathes.
What’re your intentions?

And now there is man,
A life of symbolic goals.
Are we most timeful?

Uncertain Heights

Look at the ant hill.
It is not a high mountain,
Top lost in the clouds.

Umwelts

We came into the darkened room of time
And recognized its change throughout its climb.

Web of Life

The
Ant
Is latched
Onto the
Caterpillar’s side.
Should I dare intervene? Why not?
An organism, I can intervene in nature.
The caterpillar curls up as I remove the ant determined to keep dinner.

21

We live when smoky solids fill the air,
Lifting into the sky – they are far lighter
Than all the air. So now our every care
Is lighter than the earth, our future brighter
Than the most intense laser, and far cooler
Than zero Kelvin. All we call our chances
More infinite than Cantor’s endless ruler
Of countable infinities. The slowest dances
Expanding out in Fibonacci spirals,
As slow as deep sea snails which slide away,
As ordered as amino acid chirals
In living proteins. Even, like sea spray.
What’s possible out in the universe
Reflects here in this song, music and verse.

The Allegory of the Cave

Way out in the swamp, way up in the light
An allegory lived, he was looking a fright
An armory of scales, long jaws made to bite
Long, powerful tail - he was ready to fight.

He looked from the glare, he look here and there
But he saw wherever he looked that nowhere
Did anyone anywhere seem to, well, care
To dare to slip into his watery lair.

He got so ahungered he went to a rave
And whipping his tail, produced quite a wave
And not quite realizing the recourse it gave
It came in back at him, washed him in a cave.

But the cave was not black as he looked all about
There was a light at both ends, yes, there wasn’t a doubt.
But this only confused him, so making him pout,
“I don't know which way to go in or get out.”

So going against that of most of our sense
He went through the cave, and downward went hence.
Then he saw all before him men shackled and tense
And up over about him a big stony fence.

A fire gave light, an eeriness glowed
And cast on the walls he saw vague and shadowed
Images of models, by the fence line they flowed
But behind the fence, footsteps, produced as men strode.

The allegory was nosy so upward he went
To learn of the footsteps his only intent
But on seeing men carrying the models, he bent
And began to realize what the shackled men meant.

He climbed o’er the fence and scaring them all,
He bit with his teeth and he tore with his claw
And slammed with his tail them against the wall
And he climbed back out into the cavern’s main hall.

Then the allegory sat while picking his jaw
And wondered a little at that which he saw.
Everything seemed to be from a great law
That had at its base a very great flaw.

Then he looked to the men, in the shackles they sat
They were all afraid, knew not where they’re at.
Their world had all vanished, eaten up - just like that
By a giant allegory, who'd left not a gnat.

Pity overtook the allegory for a while
So he thought and he thought, then his thought made him smile.
So he unchained all the men and lined them up single file
Figuring it was less frightening than laying them all in a pile.

The allegory could have brought the men into the light
To show all the men they’d been fooled by the night.
But instead he gave in to his stomach’s great might
And ate each of the blind men with one single bite.

Arthropods in Reverse

Arthropods are vertebrates in reverse.
Insect mouths mammalian anuses,
An interesting fact that sounds perverse,
Exoskeletons that act as trusses
To interior muscles and organs
Form different fulcrums to vertebrate
Skeletons, interior structures suns
Cannot shed light on before our end-fate.
Our social species are even different,
Especially in our altruisms –
Vertebrates became more independent,
Arthropods have suicidalisms.
Two opposite species practically
Aliens to each other, fatefully.

Candy Dance

Black and white go dancing by –
His arms are down beside her waist,
A black heart drips down to her thigh,
A split down to her turquoise candy – taste
The dance, the cape that opens, swirls
White, black, and blue, red, yellow furls –
Among the turquoise, dark blue eye
With red and yellow looking out,
These eyes of glass can’t see or cry,
The candy dance that makes us shout
And hang on bars in dark, thin red,
Each heartbeat brings us what we dread –
And swings from rings with red, green vines
Until the couple leaps up to the right,
Leaping in a sad embrace that lines
The man’s dark arm in dark blue bright –
The turquoise eyes stare: can the man
Know what this dancing candy-man can?

Cognition

The quick brown fox jumped over the old lazy log –

What did you expect?

To hear a dog?

Did your feedback conflict with what

Was feeding forward?

Where’s the mutt?

Ah! Loops that we expect will thrill – those we

Don’t frighten, jolt us free

Of the firm branch, the sacred tree

We sit upon, so safe from fear

In all we hear

Or see or smell or taste –

Oh, what a waste.

A Moonlit Night

A moon in floral print of blue and pink
Rests on the couch horizon at the end,
Reflection of the Concrete Blonde song, link

In lyrics to my Latin love. I bend
My eye toward the light that fills by night,
The lips, the love on which I so depend.

With fingers intertwined we both delight
In patterned sounds and hearts and ink,
Your sparkling eye a star, night's final sight.

Fit

He sweeps the kitchen floor and curls the dust
Into the air with every swinging beat.
He does it knowing he will soon repeat
The actions, that it never will be just
This one time for this one person, this one
Time that they have together, which unites
This work with happiness and decorates
Him with the peace of her fair presence, won
Through perseverance. His unhoped-for present
For her sits on the table. It’s a silver
Promise that he will, all his life, deliver
All that this ring will ever mean, agreement
That they will join together and adorn
Their lives with just the other, be reborn.

Complexity

The army marching over every field
Disturbs the insects hiding in the grass.
A whir of beating plastic wings will yield
Them up into the waiting beaks that pass
Along behind, in mobile feathered wait.
These brilliant colors make the army's flag
And in the solders' wake, they defecate
So boldly brilliant blue butterflies lag
And light among the flattened grass to lay
Their eggs upon it. Worms will one day hatch
To feed and grow, pupate, then fly away
To find an army in another patch.
A mobile ecosystem on the go,
Where both creation and destruction grow.

A New Home

I never thought I'd love these woods.
The tall, straight pines are unfamiliar, breaks
In boughs so open that the sun
Can break on through, the flowing gold which makes
A broadleaf canopy spread out
Here under skies of needles. Ground builds dark
And thick in leaves, but thicker still
In yellow needles, a lacework of bark
With stripes of tan in mottled spines
Of yellow brown. I thought the broadleaf trees
Were forests, were my home, a place
Of cozy darkness, shadows, and wide seas
Of leaves above and lying on
The forest floor, a second canopy
Of May-apples lay far below
The first. This forest is like Semele,
Is pregnant to burst into flame
At every lightning stroke. The old wet woods
Were full of well-known flowers, safe
As all the homes in my old neighborhood,
As all appearance seems to be.
But now I find these pine forests so new,
So different from what I have known –
These forests growing, dying with kudzu.

Bottom Up

You golden love, you organize yourself –
The best in life, you organize yourself.

The wealth of nations, lifting poor to warm,
Cool comfort, you but organize yourself.

The storyteller, poet, artist, musician,
In all your art, you organize yourself.

Each rainbow, red to violet, bursting from
The mists of heaven, organize yourself.

The peacock, every creeping cell, each tree
And orchid, evolve, organize yourself.

In classrooms, out of books, and wise men’s lips,
Each brain should grow – learn, organize yourself.

I fight the tyranny of ignorance:
Command myself, Troy, organize yourself.

Dithyramb

Wake up! Be alive! Have some fucking passion!
Why must we live a life where dead spirits are the fashion?
Where are the spirits that make us want to dance?
Why can’t we touch and kiss, make romance
A fiery and wanton thing
That makes us bellow out and sing
From our very visceral guts, buried down
So deep our very memories of it have been drowned?
There is no Dionysian – and Apollo’s not the rule –
And every scholar, every fool
Who claims to know the masked god’s revelry
Is shown a Pentheus without chivalry –
An infection of our lives and culture,
Lacking the taste of even a vulture.
There is no Dionysus in academic verse –
Throwing random words together so only the worst
Are raised to the heights of academia –
Creating at best a poetic bulemia.
So be gone, you culture killers, killers of the human soul,
You who have the vision of a naked mole
Rat digging through the desert sands,
Whose ignorant notions of freedom only tie the hands.
Be gone, you culture killers, let be reborn
Dionysus with his goring bullish horn –
Dionysus with great Apollo, his friend,
Making this dead culture bend
Until it breaks up into something new
(Which is also old, full of life and the true).
It is time to wake up! Hear the siren call
Us up out of our beds until we recall
To this new life our new-cherished memes –
All of the passion and life of our dreams.

From the Forest

The silent pines blocked out the morning light,
The floor of ivy tangled up the cones –
So I devised a thyrsus, made to fight
For light and dancing, melodies and tones.

In the Forests of Stone

Hills banded blues and black and reds and pinks –
No plants in sight under the searing sun
Except this wood of solid stone that links
Us to Triassic forests, solid ton
Or more of wood in jasper crystals, Fall’s
Reds, yellows and sky blues shine in the light
Of Arizona’s sun, the heat that calls
Moisture out of the land and skin, the bright
Sun darkens people milling round the trees
And banded hills, their cameras out and flashing,
Collecting for them the same memories
Each person has who have been through, all wishing
They could see something different, but they
Need far more knowledge for that dawning day.

If I Say So

This poem is about just sex or rhyme.
This poem is about just birds that sing.
This poem is about just love or time.
This poem is about not anything.
This poem does not have a repetition.
This poem does not have a single rhyme.
This poem does not have a heart, condition,
Or reason, rhythm, metaphor, or time.
Poetry has used up all of the forms.
There's no such thing as anything that's new.
I have rejected each one of the norms.
There's no such thing as Beauty or the True.
So this is not a sonnet or a poem--
It is a fragile hummingbird snow-golem.

Illusion

The mountain rises high into the sun –
The light that shines, it makes all things as one.

Jewels in Sunlight

I happened once upon a pool
Deep, deep within an open wood –
I knelt to feel the water’s cool –
My eyes caught shining in the light
Transparent movement, ever slight. 

 Looking closer, I strained my sight
To see some shrimp whose movements could
Be falsely taken for sunlight.
A pair were dancing cheek-to-cheek –
They’d found the one they’re meant to seek. 

Wisping gracefully round and round,
Each knows they’re with the one they should –
They’re happy with the one they found.
Embracing closely in a kiss –
Each had the one that they would miss. 

 I stood at last and looked around.
The warmth within my heart was good,
What better prize could I have found
As having witnessed such a jewel
As love affairs within a pool?

Lost Time

Why do we waste and lose the time we have?
What is the cost of all the time we’ve lost?
We pass the time and fill the time, and fail
To see it growing as a fractal frost.

We fear the flow of time, sublime in all
Its grand decay. We’re horrified we die
And turn our eyes away from all decline
And pine and cry, are horrified, and try

To falsify our lives, all to escape,
Deny, defy our certain, defined fate.
The grind of time reminds us that the vine
Of life will twine itself to our death gate.

Defiling time has been denied, maligned
Defied by poets hating rhythm, rhyme
Reminding them of what such lines enshrine:
The nullifying paradigm of time.

And yet, Proust searched for it, though we all know
That we cannot recover time. So why
Would we want to remember things that passed
And thus thereby supply what we’d deny?

Do we yet recognize that time’s a prize
Among the filler and the endless din
That makes and grows, complexifies the world
And to reject that beauty is a sin?

Yet time does beautify, makes more complex,
Diversifies the world. The endless strife
That’s driving time, is what designed, refined,
And intertwined to create mind and life.

Thus time does not just ossify, thereby
Solidifying into crystal death –
We are obliged to recognize the light
It brings to life, the certifying breath.

In the Jungle

Dendrobiums, dark pink blooms dangling down,
And gray-green mottled spoon-shaped leaves, roots, ground
Far from them; they grow on trees, rocks, forms found
All dancing daintily. They, drooping, drown
With droplets white, and fill with waking wonder
Each looking eye. The colors echo each
Bright combination; colors carry, catch
Threads threatening the three thousand thick thunder
Birds bringing orchids new, bluer blossoms
Around the new-found sounds the ants allow
Near nectar they protect, or nourish now
For fire-filled frenzies focusing those flotsams
That carry the crazed ants to crisply cool
Plants pushing flowers over a pure pool.

Pearl

You are a smooth and iridescent pearl
Within a purple oyster that's as rare
As the white gem, the white, rough purple shell.
Ah, what lovely things can arise when we
Are irritated by jagged things well
Enough to stimulate our nerves to make
A gem as lovely as a pearl – a gem
As lovely as diamonds, but made by life,
Not heat and pressure that would likely stem
From outside forces pressing down on us.
Instead, purple life brings into the light
A pearly white reflecting more than we
Can understand, our feelings, taste, and sight
Just not enough to let us come to know
How much we need pain to make beautiful
People, pale pearls, and paintings meant to grow.

Perspectives on the Setting Sun

I

The blue retreats into the dark –
The planet’s orbit makes the sun
Appear to disappear beyond
The edge of the earth until one
Last sliver slips from its blue bond
To the sky, the moon its one mark.

II

The lovers sit beside the lake
And watch the sun slip behind trees
That border the distant shore.
The colors dazzle them and please
Them into love – they each adore
The other – their hearts rise, awake.

III

The sun sets on the horizon,
The extra atmosphere the light
Must shine through now stretches and spreads
The light from white to shades of bright
Rose, spreading the sky in light reds,
Clouds in purples by the dozen.

IV

The sunset on our love today.
You left me before you left me,
I know you never had your heart
With mine. Why did you want to flee
From all I wanted to impart
To you? Why can’t we find a way?

V

The scattered sunlight shines too bright –
The setting sun is all I see
Through the windshield of my old car.
I cannot see for the bright glare
I clipped the runner at the knee –
Her blood was redder than the star
That killed her with my blinded sight.

VI

I fear the coming setting sun,
The darkness that it will herald
In, my darkest night, a new moon
That, on the other side, has pulled
Down my tides to their lowest tune –
The moon and sun eclipsed, as one.

VII

How do you skip from orange to blue?
The atmosphere’s not like a cloud –
The spectrum’s missing the middle.
An absent center’s been allowed
To make this evening a riddle
And a mirror of all that’s true.

VIII

Blessèd Ra once rose high above
The Nile flowing brown and green
Past the sphinx and the pyramids.
But Ra has set, too pale and lean,
As all the gods who lost their bids
To the hawk disguised as a dove.

IX

From the space station window I
Look out at the planet I love
Now that I see it from this place
We built to orbit high above
The rest of man, first foot in space –
The sun sets, a bright, sparkling eye.

Poediatry

I saw a poem once
Running on soft feet,
Climbing rocks away from me
To its own rhythmic beat.

And off it ran,
Threw off its shoes,
Released its tiny toes
And left a streak of reds and blues,
Traveling with the flows

Of words until
It settled down into a swirling eddy,
Where it was found that it would drown
Because its feet weren't ready.

Promise

Darkness, shadows fall about,
Permeating all throughout.
Within our souls, within our minds –
Look within, see what it finds. 

Looking close, a point of bright
Wondrous, glowing, shining light.
Small and tiny, growing slow
It comes for all the world to show. 

Where has it gone, what has it been?
It once was here, now gone again.
A bright and glowing priceless treasure –
Can it be now gone forever?

Manet the Cat

Her kitten quivers in my arms. His blue
Leash circles my hard hand so he won’t run –
But he sits on my arm, calm as a son
Reading his favorite book. While it is true
I cannot know all that this kitten means
To her who let me hold him, even she
Appreciates all of the history
Of feelings that holding this kitten gleans
From me as I sit, stroke his soft, black fur,
Rub ears and chin? Then, on a joking whim
I say she cannot have him back because,
“I love him,” which gets a reply from her,
“You do not know him, so you can’t love him.”
True and untrue. Love goes by other laws.

PÆan to God

I knew that I had God in me when I
Saw God in everyone and everything.
Before then, God could not appear in me
And my soul could not grow a single wing.
Before I saw the table full of guests
I could not feast, did not know what to bring –
Before I heard all the other voices
In the chorus, I could not even sing.

The emptiness which can destroy us all –
That is the absence of God. Let Him find
You – Beauty will enfold you in her arms,
And you will see that before and behind,
Eternity and time, many and one
All constitute the beauty of one mind –
This is the knowledge and wisdom we need
To become beautiful, just, fair, and kind.

And now I know that God is not out there,
An abstract force controlling from above,
But here, on earth, enwrapped in beauty. Here,
One with the lilies of the field, the dove
That brings us peace and transformation, life
Much more alive than any life, warm glove
That staves off chilly, cold, encroaching hate
By being, fair, the personhood of love.