Poetry / Poems

FurtherMore
~ for Thich Nhat Hanh and for Marie

Sans the exclamation marks
These cool blue waters of metta
Soothe its hungry red flame

Trembling allowed
Along with sweaty palms
There is time enough

And world enough
And mountain lakes
And years to come

Barefoot and hammock kisses
Sans the exclamation marks
Cooling Welcome kisses

Slow unhurried kisses
Compost and tree houses
And mountain streams

Nothing is too good
to be true


The gifts of snail and of turtle
Sans the exclamation marks
Leaving traces and trails

Reentering
Traces and trails
Walking pace

And sitting pace
Everything welcome
At the Table

Everyone joined in the Circle
Even with the exclamation marks
The fire and the water joined
 
Last edited:
Having Painted My Door Blue

Having painted my Door lapis-Blue
Some Summers ago
I dreamed of the Grizzly Bear
Outside the Threshold

Which was Water
Which was Silence
Which was Stillness
Which was Fulfillment

Thunder&Lightning
~Crack!~

Echos off nearby mountains

Half as big as an Oak Tree
He stood there looking Hungry
For James

So is it any Wonder
The Zafu and Zabuton
Are Lonely in the corner of this Room
With its Oak Floor
And me furiously typing,
Typing?
 
Last edited:
naked

the violet lovedrunk ribcage!
swimming steady silent
breathing
invisible
wine

notice it and it grows
attend to it and it blooms
stay with it and it awakens
it opens its barred door

the door flies from its hinges

there was never a door!
 
Last edited:
a pattern

the moon is up
and down
the tides are in
and out
the breath rises
and falls
the heart pulses
why was i then
afraid of falling?
what's all of this business
about rising all the time?
letting go is falling
didn't i always say
the burden of holding on
was too much?
 
What Great Thing Awaits?

What is patience if not being here, fully?
What is this game of searching but too-clever a refusal?
What Great Thing Awaits?
What if it were just this? This now? This itself?
What is this longing but its own fulfillment?
Might longing know itself as its own fulfillment?
May thirst and hunger itself be quenched and satiated desire?
What are we waiting for, if not this, itself?
Was Plato quite mistaken?

There is no cave wall, and no cave!
There is only home and home-coming!
No well and no image from its imaginary depths.

Narcissus? A flower!
 
General Tso's chicken

Her living room had all the ambiance of the salad bar portion in a Midwestern Chinese Buffet restaurant and I know that sounds unfair, but I could never shake the resemblance.

Her whole house had that quiet, unassuming air of the kind of establishment that signed a rental agreement in a strip mall, filling the gap between a shoe store and a chiropractor, a hole left by an unpopular Italian restaurant.

The fruit laden grape arbor still hangs over the hot bar, plastic vintage failing to even marginally understand the Mongolian beef, and the cheap wine-bottle wainscot wallpaper border smells like sweet and sour sauce when you get up close.

No, the residual décor is not happy at all.

The resulting atmosphere is tense.

You could cut it with a knife, but there are only chopsticks.

Outside on the window, written backwards in Italian with a bar of Irish Spring, there is hateful, antagonistic graffiti:

“General Tso’s chicken.”
 
Last edited:
She Sits and Waits

Longing to feel and thereby know
The clearing
The pattern that connects
The heart of the world
Something beneith 'appearances'
Radiant

I want to say, there is water in the water
The moon has so much moon in it
The breeze on your skin, honey!
Birds, clouds, even the mad traffic jam

I want her to feel our hearts
Touch
The dropping away
of the question
 
Bodhichitta

Wanting to nap
Hot, July, naked on the bed
Where is the deep rest?
I wonder to myself

Here I am
Says bodhichitta
Like a silent memory
Of a Greater Breath
A whisper
Drink me

~Alice in Wonderland?!~

And the cliche
No poet should touch!
The ubiquitous image
Of a water droplet falling
Into a rippling center
Pool

Drink me
I have become stars
Galaxies
Universes
I am weary
Alone
After this many millennia
Sleeping in my
Potential
Drink me
And find rest

Fall
Into
Me
 
Variation on the Word Sleep
Margaret Atwood

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.
 
Oooh, such lovely, lovely humanness!
 
Taking Rest

You get up from a park bench
And you walk away
And you stop
And look back
As if something -- what? --
Had been left behind

It was nothing
Just a bit of myself
As if I were a snail
Leaving a trail of myself behind

The day has opened
And my hand has opened
And the poem opens
Where the heart opens
The loss of the fear
Of falling

The falling away of death
The opening of death
The embrace of the dark
The hello to light
To shadow

This love is bigger than I am
It cannot go on carrying
Myself around
As if I knew myself at all
As if I need needed
The busy
Inward mirror
 
And now a song ...



Melody

Can you hear the melody
Arising from the fantasy
Arising from the common sense
And breaking down the self-defense?

You come to them with poetry
And listen to the mystery
They oblige sincerity
And offer up a yes indeed

Deeper still than garden seeds
Fuller than those garden weeds
Tending to your deepest needs
They know that you've been always free

And what if it's a dream bouquet?
They echo what you've always said
They know where you've been always dead
The palace living in your head

The world is just a dream machine
Or so it is on tv screens
The river flowing in your veins
The moment living still remains

And so you give them all you have
And pray the rhyme will be less bad
The way you dance across the floor
As if you're sure there's dancing more
 
.





"Words realize nothing, vivify nothing, unless you have suffered
in your own person the thing which the words try to describe"

- Mark Twain.









never mind

never mind all of this crap
about the heart being a pump
about the lungs being a bellows
about the soul being neurons
with sparks or chemicals
about the moon in your head
never mind all of that
time is short
metaphors are tall
tales
that weave together the
two worlds
of experience
and language
and one day science will agree
that the hummingbird
drinks
the pure nectar
in the center
of the chest

and all other gold
is fool's gold






.
 
Last edited:
Wolf Creek

Where a kiss is a mandala
Where the elements conspire against sleep
Where naked and clad and broken and together
Arms and hands and feet and legs reaching
Reaching toward the soil
Which is the skin
Which is the body
Which is the heart
Which is the sun
The rain
The blue of sky
And Grandmother Maple
Was that her name?
Holding us all
In breathing stillness
And illuminated kiss



Image: http://ezrasavage.deviantart.com/art/Grandmother-Maple-209051020
 
Last edited:
The image, as in a hexagram. - Lew Welch

The image, as in a Hexagram:

The hermit locks his door against the blizzard.
He keeps the cabin warm.

All winter long he sorts out all he has.
What was well started shall be finished.
What was not, should be thrown away.

In spring he emerges with one garment
and a single book.

The cabin is very clean.

Except for that, you'd never guess
anyone lived there.
 
center piece

perhaps harmonies are made of balances
as when we stand
and wobble
because all standing
is minute wobbles
when not big wobbles
even the earth herself wobbles a bit
and when a poem is set in motion
it is like a spinning top
which knows where it wants to go
and the poet can only follow
and wobble a bit
there is no real life that doesn't wobble
who gave us this notion of steadiness?
as if being steady were not a recipe for
collapse
only that which bends
avoids snapping
i used to prefer the word harmony
to balance
"because it is dynamic" i said
now all i see are words
sounds made with the mouth and
printed on the page
don't get me wrong
i love language
only i'm losing the trail
of the top
of the poem
which spins
always beyond
the shiver on the skin
and when i lean left i must therefore
lean right
and when my love becomes great longing
i must be with my love
even now
though she is so far away
and when i have tears
i have a smile
and when i am laughing
i am also sad
and sometimes
grieving
 
Last edited:
Another Love Poem

Thunder rolls slowly over the mountaintops
And echos
And today is cool and grey
Summer
And tonight the crickets will sing again
But right now I'm seeking the idea for this poem
Its center
This poem which writes my life
This poem which shivers my skin
This poem which shakes my foundations
This poem which startles my heart
Further
Awake
Always further
Into astonished peace and joy and wonder
Deeper in

Somebody in a dream came to me and gave me
Infinite wealth
And then asked
How will you spend this?

And I replied
Send me thunder that rolls slowly over mountaintops
And echos
Cool and grey
Summer days
And in the night bring crickets
For these cheap bits of golden disks
I'll take a single purple crocus
And instead of a big house and a fancy car and career
And a backyard swimming pool
I'll take my simple life
Just as it is
With so much love
 
Last edited:
I could have told you you would leave
But I did so hope you'd stay
I told what I could not do
But still, you went away
It's not the miles of ocean wide
That sit between you and me
It's the fickle nature of your heart
And my willingness to flee
 
Praise be for the pain of love!
The way the seed breaks open and flowers shortly.
The wash of flood!
The breaking finally free.
And still there is the pain of love.
Its growing pains.
Not so final, after all.
Praise for the pain of love.
For the joy and the pain of love.
 
If
by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!
 
Last edited:
Back
Top