Heard through the air

You've heard the song like your breathing

I don't know the words.

Shoulders brush the author,

Greetingless. 

Our rock hurtles farther every day

Like breathing, the melody is here. 

Each time our awe is lost

The tune becomes oceans and atmospheres,

Our breathing pauses, 

A silent space for song. 

You don't know the words 

Stubborn, not to say his name. 

He's the father who welcomed you in

The landscape you appear on. 

Say his name.

City

Everyone is dying in this complex

I won't speak what they do

I am young for an eternal 

I am with them every day.

They will beg the building to fall on us. 

They've never seen a king 

They like to scream we are all peers 

They like to scream we eat our peers. 

Let not this flame flicker 

When the black Fire comes

A growing healing

  A young healer went out early in the spring to walk in his garden.  As he strolled thoughtfully in the dormant rows he considered the patients he would have in the coming year.
 
  A number of the elderly in the nearby village had struggled with a debilitating infection of the lungs after a harsh winter.  As well there were a number of pregnant women who could need medications quickly as complications in pregnancy and with newborns can require immediate treatment.

  He looked intently at the dirt and gauged the resources of his beloved field.  He new he could plant all the living medicines necessary for treating the cherished elderly who were now suffering. Still, he saw a distinct lack of space for the flowering herbs he would need for the pregnant and those still on their way. He refused to feel discouraged or any frustration.  He looked longer at the land within the boundaries of his care.  He got closer to the earth and breathed deeply, closing his eyes. "We will grow." He let out with a firm smile. "We will grow together."

  He planted the living medicines first and in perfect season.  They would need direct sun to sprout and much care as they matured.  They blossomed as they wrestled through the layer above their seed then sprung into the air and the light.  They filled the garden and made it beautiful and full of life.

  The healer began an exhausting work.  He set his mind and his hands to cutting thousands of thin sturdy shoots of wood from the saplings and vines that grew next to a river a few miles away.  He brought these shoots back into his garden and began weaving.  He wove pillars, he wove baskets, he wove ropes and lattice.  After 30 days of his joyful toil watching the medicine in the ground grow along side his woven creations he watched the sun rise on his second garden of hanging baskets filled with varying specialized soils and seeds ready to sprout.
 
  The hanging garden grew and provided a nurturing shade for the more mature plants in the rich top soil.  Both gardens grew more richly for their being accompanied.  Both gave a vibrancy to eachother that had not been in the garden before.
 
  The young healer felt a deep peace and noticed that he had grown and his love had grown and multiplied those blessed to receive healing and care from the garden and from his hands.

a pain-hope career (part 9)

There was water,
and there was Smith
With Smith was metal
and more blood

Kumiko, mixed tears, water
and blood
all in his eye sockets
with each lid's movement

The shadows were gone
The stupid men, were gone
the book was wet
and Smith breathed heavily

Kumiko, sat without his pride. He groped for the book-for a moment, then looked at Smith's knees (he couldn't look him in the eye). "I..I didn't do it. I don't know why, I just sat in there and then I got the book, but I lost, I lost he wraith" Kumiko feared Smith killing him. Smith was a killer.

Smith's eyes made years seem short. Before another word was spoken, a sharp scraping rang from the hall where wraith had escaped. Smith's mouth dropped open as he slowly turned to look.

"It's her." He said.

FIN

The swirling .

It was a mix of color. I had lived there for 12 years, sometimes mixing the colors, sometimes watching them and sometimes staring at the line stretching out forever.

When I was watching the colors I was transfixed...such patterns...light and dark, circling my feet. Somehow they spoke to my unblinking eyes, pointing to the line that led away out from the side of them. They had a voice like metal grinding into trees, but motorless. Like huge pieces of shrapnel cutting through a forest, with millions of splintering voices.

At first I thought they were mindless and random radio static. One day in my twelfth year I tried something.

The colors had been talking.
"Money spilled all over the highway....cshhhhhhhh..cshhh driver dead pedestrians scramble to collect dispersed cash.....shhhhhhhh...today I saw the dhali, he was on TV...everyone was given the vaccine, without any knowledge of it's side effects...."

"Hello." I said.

"cshhhh..cshhhhhh"

"What do you mean?" I said.

"Hello?!" I yelled.

"cshhhhhhhhhhh..."

"What is it's problem," I thought. "I have been standing in this circle for so long. The rest of this area is empty but the circle never shuts up".

"cshhhhhhhhhh...cshhhhhhhhhh....the dog was thought to have been barking needlessly, until the neighbors came closer to see that it had actually trapped someone robbing the residence....cshhhhhhhhh.."

"hello?" I tried again.

"cshhhh...cshhhh....the satellite had been considered useless until the current mission to refocus the lens enabled it to see. cshhhh...cshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...cshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
The dog had not been barking needlessly."

and with that, I broke into a cold sweat. My eyes started to tear.  It had had reiterated something! It did not do that. Were these swirling colors the body of a living being? Had I been standing in a living being for 12 years?

I almost fell. My legs were shaking altering the swirling patterns of color. I had never talked to it, and it had never reiterated anything. I suddenly felt that I might be swallowed by it, sucked down into the colors and never seen again. Fear's hands clenched deeper and deeper into my guts as I struggled for words.

".....uh, can I get you something?" was all I got out.

"cshhhhhhhhh....csh"

This one place had always been, well..home. It had something going on. It had noise and shape. Now that it had intelligence...it was terrifying.

"cshh...cshh....the currency was then considered useless, many German's were actually seen burning it for warmth as winter approached..cshh."

I got on my hands and knees, sweating and shaking.
"Are you in there?"

"cshhhhh....csh..................................................."
silence.

Now whole tears of horror spilled from my eyes. It had never been silent. Never. I could hear myself crying, my whole existence turned in mere seconds.

"WHO?" The voice boomed. Without static, gaps or hiss.

"OH God!" I screamed, falling now to my elbows and knees my hair dipping into it. "Oh God! Oh god! Oh God!"

"What is this" I thought "what are you?" I whispered.

"Who?" The voice came again.

I spilled over onto my side and let the colors flow into and out of the left leg and sleeve of my suit. I was scared and helpless, painfully so. Seconds past in complete quietness, no blur of noise to distract me from the feeling that there was life behind the reality I lay in.

A life that could see me, a life that surrounded me a life that transcended me. The working of my mind ground to a broken halt, fixed on one fear...maybe, maybe I was not God.

My friends

I've got ten albums
and ten people who've heard them
I love each of you
With all my heart.

You know the truth that I do
You feel the same as I do
You know I never lose you
that time and space won't always keep apart.

A sincere embrace

Be all the things I berated you for.
And shaking fingers  point  me away
How long will the opaque mirage suspend

I beg the heat of love brush it all aside
Our bitter  smallness  erase

How small the sanctuary seems
Without the firelight to open eyes
How long do we stare at ourselves

I beg the breath of god breath me back alive
And lift my shortened gaze

We have the things we don't accept you for
Hidden long inside our disease
Knowing I don't change you or give you spell

Turn our faces to you
Your love  and the ways you scare us
Uncross my arms.

I can feel the limit

Somewhere during my cellular division
I looked up
I saw the gasses strewn in beautiful shades
An arc
A mile above my head

Sometime in my bodies young days
I shook to
Find the grey in my beard, thought it was strange
and hard
A mountain breaking in

I leapt and crashed
stretched to find my limit a meter away.

So while the silent invisible goes on
The scene struck here
of jawing masses living in the man made
Should start
and see the limits we live in.

An embrace over my head

I tried looking down on you,
I got nothing but anger from it.
I tried to draw a line round you
But I couldn't hold you still.

I set my teeth on edge
Rigid and angry
And I opened my mouth
Till I was sick of complaining

Exhaustion and confusion
At your high and mighty strangeness

You hadn't changed
I caught a look in your eye
That you wouldn't forsake me.
That you would still embrace me.

conceived in promise

I circle my patience
with a  cord.
Marking the front threshold,
with a spatter
of the grain encased on
my still back.

Contemplating the way,
Wondering,
inquiring the spiked field.
Which, abstract,
at this time, will pain me
with each stride.

Nativity awaits
with the thorns.
My track, tracing to them,
weeping walks.

Gather me

When the light cracks my eyes
Will you grow sick of me?
Like I grew sick of you.

So many times.
I've surrounded myself
With garbage, I can see.

When the light cracks my eyes
and i begin to see
When you take the scales off me.

When the light cracks my mind
I can feel your feet coming
rushing towards me.


You stood on your mountain
Saying you would gather me.

Oh God, gather me!
To your faithful heart.

Take me somewhere nice and some

I don't have anything in the whole world to boast about, but I do have someone who bled out for me...and he is alive again

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSDPShtGBWU

Buddha's vacancy

With a held jaw and eye sockets of coal
a hammer and a rifle.
look the hands are both of the hardened type.

He trades a blow with a soft palm
and calls his father buddha
with no pain and no cares

But his palm is not soft enough to be pierced
and his no-care is a hard heart.
He does not wait for death or fear it
because he is dead.

With a master's patience and an empty grave
an embrace and a healing.
look the hands are both of the wounded type.

Transcontinental Concern

The distance is continental
Our arms just three feet long

In decent times
I would let you know

But the fear is on
The fear is on your voice
and on the telephone lines.

FIN

Note: I am not sure this one really works as a poem.  It's a song I wrote, but now that I read it without the music I think it's more a song than a poem.

Promptus

Doesn't my heart strain for my friends
as we pull on our clothes each morning?

Don't I love them,
want to see them?

Is it sole love that pushes us,
out the door, with the speed we tread.

Are we blind then,
do we see then?

Could my bones be steel and my face of diamond,
I would cut a path for you.
Clear the sound for you, smash the screens for you,
break the engines for you, until all is quiet and you can hear.

One clear voice filled with blood and compassion.

World Champion

You are on the train that says
"I am not running out of rope."

Because of these things they're yours
no eye lines, no cell seen dying.

You soak them in yourself
of a false permanence.

Still, you, them, and me are always dying
With dust falling from us each step.
An inch from Where the Earth crests and ends
Where we all go and divert
Where the shadow consumes some
and for others merely passes.

You shine for a mere convincing second before you die.
There is no quaint Jesus here, only a real live God.

insomnia again

I have insomnia again tonight. Over the years I have learned to be at peace while having trouble sleeping. It makes it much better. I have a lot of great times with God while I am up late by myself.

Tonight I watched this



and this



and this



and this

stones who were people

They are cold and their arms are down
We can stand but a foot apart
and no grins exchange
no excitement

They are grey where they were rouge
their hands hold things that are dead
they groan when their
grips slip

They used to be children
and my friends
now they are dead
Their gods in their hands.

A second office made beautiful

To my wife on her first mothers day with a son (outside the womb). The first poem I have ever published for an occasion.

It is a thing I would not set aside
to search what's dry
and then find you
my precious wife

It might seem what's wet
is not so deep
next to your eyes
the strengths and fears
you keep
my heart

and should this world be one
of many homes
still glad to have
you
in this one

It is true love
the truth that guides your love
for me
and our son

another bloom has come
petals bloomed for our eyes
and we
filled with love.


I love you Erin, you are a beautiful wife and now a beautiful mother.
Ryan

removed and running

when the turn came you turned wrong
a right for a left
shaking your head for nervousness

if the breaks had worked you stop
but you have no breaks
your core like a city with no walls

you never pin your thoughts
to one hard truth outside you
and so the bandits come in
and the bandits go out