Intention

It's time alone that rots and breaks all things
And dissipates all loves, relationships
Into mere piles of  memory which brings
On loneliness in cool entropic drips.

To simply keep things as they are you must
Maintain and pay attention, add the oil
To joints and surfaces and be a trust
To realize mere sameness in your toil.

But if you are to make things grow in health
And beauty, you need more than maintenance--
You need to feed your love with growing wealth,
Your actions need to always make, enhance.

Indifferent aimless boredom makes you die--
Your love, intention, beauty multiply.

This Autumn

I'm on a path I do not want to leave--
These frosty mornings killing chlorophyll
Exposing red, orange, yellow as the bill
We all must pay. This Autumn, just believe
Your goals are worthy, and you will not grieve.

The Poet's Task

I sing a goat-song -- Dionysus begs
Exploding swirls of singing out of me --
I have to lift my voice and lift my legs
To dance the golden out of muddy dregs
So that my music can make people free.

Time Flowers

Time crystal in violet erupts in violent
Enflowered patterns showing the deep rhyme
Of all the cosmos--nowhen it is silent
No matter where this growing fractal mime
Empatterns everyone with fuller time.

Birdwing

The soul is winged in scales of black and white--
Don't pluck your psyche's wings, but let them lift
You into floral flutters of delight--
You are a worm? You have the sacred gift
Of transformation--hatch and grow each wing
And let the people hear you laugh and sing!

Ladybird

The lady sits upon the seed that swells
With all the future--her children helped save
What feeds us all--the parasite that dwells
Among the leaves creates an early grave--
We ought to thank the lady for our bread
That keeps us wise and knowing and well-fed.

Nature

When we see only surfaces, we miss
The complex life below, which we deny--
But in our dives below, we should not miss
The patterned flocks that glisten in the sky.

Heart Rings

Perhaps I have a wooden heart--the light
Shines through it's sliced so thin, and every wind
Will wind the thread on which it hangs--the sight
Of you delights--never your heart rescind.

The Devil's Walking Stick

The Devil's walking stick is crowned in green
And growing in the woods---its thorns, tipped red,
Await their master's hand whose grasp, obscene
In every movement, prickles skin to dread.
An adversary to all touch, the stick
Resembles its dread master, adversary
To beauty, virtue, and the good, his trick
Is making you think he's these, unwary.
The shadows moving in the woods bring death---
The stream brings life and flows and darting fish
Beneath the surface---careful, catch your breath---
And careful that you don't get all you wish.
Go step into the forest's shading stream
Where you will find a land of dappled dream.

The Shirpa

Behold the god I froze in fractal time--
He now survives forever in my rhyme.

Messenger

Before you look at angels with delight
Remember Lucifer is one, named "Light."

By the Granite

Beloved, whose spirit is dancing at night,
You glitter and glisten and bring me delight--
You never have left me, you dance as a star,
A victim of hatred, a victim of war.

Humanity

We are an origami of space-time---
A massively complex enfolding held
In place by constant change---some think a crime
Committed by our presence---we're no weld
Of metal made inferior---we crown
The cosmos with our consciousness---our gold
Is pure and glistens---misanthropes can drown
Themselves to save our coinage from their mold---
There is no virtue in their hateful fold---
They only want to drag all beauty down
And do not know the preciousness we hold---
They stare down awe with their ironic frown---
It takes expansive love to see we meld
With all the cosmos with which we all rhyme---
You do not take the fairest, strongest, geld
It---nature absent us is but a mime.

Bone Dance

My feet are flipping up the bones that lie
Beneath---a wreath of ribs is spreading out
Beyond a pyramid of skulls that sigh
As western winds are winding through, about
The empty eyes and sinuses--the jaws
Are spreading teeth in fairy wings around
The metatarsals sprayed in spirals---laws
Of patterns penetrate the piles the ground
Is trying to absorb. The backbones bite
My soles---I slip upon a femur bone
And listen to the rattles with delight
As past my lips pass my last weary moan.
The bones have played me into sun-washed bones---
I dance around to all their twinkling tones. 

The Epic Monster

The hero stared into the monster's maw--
The darkness and meaningless emptiness
More terrifying than the purposed claw,
A comfort like a nihilist's caress,
Denial that we ever ought to try--
The woods were dark and  none would hear his cry.

The stench that poured from out the monster's breath--
Would this foul odor be his final sense?
The anxiousness of nothingness is death
Before you're dead--live only in past tense
And nothing lives in you--you only die
Before you learn that you have wings to fly.

Saliva glistens in the sudden moon
That breaks out from the clouds of ash that fall
As warm, gray snowflakes. Breezes drift a dune
Of ash along his feet, against the wall
Behind him, adding gray to granite gray--
The hero's certain he'll be dead by day.

And then the hero comes to understand
That he must slay himself to truly slay
The death of meaning his life will demand
Of him--remaking meaning, he'll betray
His past to make a future where he's slain
His monster, transformed joy from death and pain.

Hectic

Alarm and snooze, alarm and snooze, alarm.
The rush begins. The shower, breakfast, clothes
Thrown on, the kids awake and dressed, their teeth
Are brushed, their hair is brushed, their shoes are found
And lunches made and matched with backpacks, out
The door and off to school and off to work
Where all of the incompetence of school
Is magnified at work in everyone
You're working with--you think you must protect
Your job and their jobs, taking up the slack
They make, you are the wall protecting them
From their mistakes and the administration--
If you complain, then you're the ass--just work
Until the evening comes and then go home
And work some more surrounded by your kids
You see for dinner, doing homework, practice--
Piano or their sports--, to clubs and meetings,
Before they go to bed and in those few
Short blissful hours without them you ignore
Your spouse to work some more--and you're behind
On work and all the TV shows that you
And those you love would love to see and sleep
And relaxation, rest of any kind--
The doctor tells you you have diabetes
And high blood pressure, deep anxiety--
Your stomach hurts, your head is aching, pain
Fills every joint--you're angry at your kids,
You're angry at your spouse, you're angry at
Yourself, your job, your boss, your co-workers,
The morons on the road and everywhere--
This isn't life, and yet you chose this life,
Afraid to make a change as constant change
Accelerates around you, random rules
That contradict, your arbitrary bosses,
A stupid butterfly with brown and orange
And black and yellow patterns on your arm
That flits and folds its chevron wings and stares
A moment up at you, or so it seems,
Then flies away to taste a flower sweet
To smell and taste and see--it's judging you,
Or you are judging you, but you project
That judgment, hatred onto other people,
And who could blame you?--not the others who
Like you are driven off the cliff by fear,
By debts you owe so many in your life,
And by the madness that this culture makes,
A madness that is growing, you embrace. 

Abandoned Bicycle

A woman's bike in dusty rose appeared
One day right on the corner lot--it flaunts
Anachronistic bars slung low, a weird
Retention of a time of dresses haunts
Us as arational tradition bent
Across such time that reasoning is spent.

The bicycle is sitting by the road
For days--unmoved by owners (who are they?),
Unmoved by thieves--unsung but by this ode
Which seems the only thing that wants to play
With this pink bike beside the broken street
Absorbing the October summer heat.

Suppression

The rocks crunch beneath my soles as cruel black heat
Ascends, sharp against my calves--it won't defeat
My dull drive to wander--to my feet repeat
Their blue-black soul beat.

A thought tempts, but obligations gain the ground--
My walk waits, perhaps forever--life will bound
And bring back ambitions to harmonic sound
Which swell songs around.

To go slow and gather all I see and hear--
That goal grips me, trips me--down the road I fear
I will wander, will not dare to go nor steer
That far future near.

A breeze, balmy, blowing through my thinning hair--
A grim grackle calling from the ground, its stare
Demands more from me--the dandelions wear
My down, dancing fair.

Is this truly what I want, a homeless life--
The earth's girth my home, to live without the strife
Of hard human expectations?" That's the knife
To rend reeds a fife.

A Chinjikijilu

A poem is a crystal made of time
That's built out of the future, made in sounds.
Emerging out of the unsayable,
Where I have known all the unknowable
And proven all of the unprovable
And reasoned through all the irrational,
I brought to complex order all the chaos
And disconnected the connectedness
That disconnects the future where I'm from,
In all the beds and shadows where I sleep,
In all the coffee houses where I dream,
And after I've returned to you from death
I'll bring to you the undefined, defined
In lines of rhythm, rhyme and patterned time.
I come upon the river of the blood
Of all the ancestors that fill my mind
And wade across it, slip to be baptized
By all the echoes they make from the future
Where truth is all that's spoken, if in rhyme.
The rest is all prosaic lies. The ground
That rises brings me back to Athens, life
Here in the city where the sophists lie,
Deny the past and future, beauty, good,
Light and shadow, complexity, and love,
Are hostile to the makers of time crystals,
To anyone who brings dead back to life,
To anyone who triumphs over death,
Emerges pure and clarified and true.

Narcissus o Christos

The egomaniac declares he's "woke"--
Parading through the town to his own tune,
Impressed by his own narcissistic stroke--
He's certain all will see his Truth real soon--
He's certain that his every thought's a boon.

He wants to strip down every woman, man
And cut their hair to his, dress them like him
And make each one conform to his own plan--
A plan that's brilliant just because it's brim
With him--your difference his blades will trim.

He thinks the world and he must be the same--
They are the same, except the evil parts--
He'll cut the tall down--better they are lame
And following behind him in their carts
And worshiping his ego in their hearts.

He wants the world all "woke" like him, with eyes
Of adoration for the things he's done
For them--and who'll lay low and terrorize
Those who refuse to see that he's their sun--
Through him a brand new world has just begun.