Net

No mantras for this–

Fingers,

a most delicate

and provocative net,

cast to capture

the spreading pulse

of someone else’s longing

mirrored in your breath.

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Parting

Hiding in plain sight,

a lost kiss, unremembered

to the parting of lips.

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Cadence

Symmetry,

as a caulk

to the voracious appetite

and carnal din

of passion–

Where the stitches

tremble

and falter,

follow your pulse

to the origins

of cadent scarring.

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Performance

Guttural streams

of dream-rock

in an amphitheater

for the five senses and beyond–

Here, at the liminal edges,

you will find fire-kissed wildflowers

applauding the performance

by opening their volumeless mouths

wide

and swallowing whole

the cathedral of sound,

in which you the singer,

they the wildflowers,

and It the holy third,

put an end to mirages

and merge fluidly

to no end.

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Peony

This peony is an empty house/ In which each of us recaptures night. —Jean Laroche

In the panting still of night,

a peony, trembling,

fragrant, blushing bright

against the dark matted vines

of memory,

in which lovers, tangled and throbbing,

ground their rapture

into so much favored dust

for peonies to dream upon.

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The Whisperers

Nothing frightens

a man firmly ensconced

in false power

more than a whisper.

Volume, shouting,

roaring,

these reside within his comfort zone

of conflict,

but a marvelous whisper,

connected to the unseen river of sound

where many whisperers are called to share

and collaborate,

these are the currents

through which the universe

oh so quietly

swallows the small world

of false power

which goes under

kicking and screaming.

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It Begins With A Whisper

In a world

of far too many assassins,

conducting strikes, consciously or un,

on souls

and their tenderest wilds,

we need more whisperers,

those miming the cursive gist of stars,

willing to rise up in choir

and share the stories

while imparting the secret codes

indelibly imprinted into the molten core

of our divine origins—

The whole shebang a song and dance routine

that never goes dull, never grows old—

singers, dancers, dreamers,

stirrers of the heartstock jazz soup

in a bubbling cosmic cauldron,

and mark my words,

what begins as a slow river

of whispering

will become the silver-tongued sea change

upon which new vocabularies

and seasons of being

will turn us inward,

to the angels

and reapers

who were always us

to begin with.

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Housewarming

“The already human being in whom I had sought shelter for my body yielded nothing to the storm. The house clung close to me, like a she-wolf, and at times, I could smell her odor penetrating maternally to my very heart. That night she was really my mother. She was all I had to keep and sustain me. We were alone.”—Henri Bosco, Malicroix

The dreamer’s last

and first dreams

are born in the maternal

crook and cradle of a house,

real and metaphysical all at once,

where the slow blue seasons

of breathing,

between you and “her,”

shape the bones

of sound and memory,

upon so much pared

longing.

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Sanctuary

“It is on the plane of the daydream and not on that of facts that childhood remains alive and poetically useful within us. Through this permanent childhood, we maintain the poetry of the past. To inhabit oneirically the house we were born in means more than to inhabit in memory; it means living in this house that is gone, the way we used to dream in it. What special depth there is in a child’s daydream! And how happy the child who really possesses his moments of solitude!” — Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

In praise of solitude,

and daydreams,

as the marvels,

awe and terrors

of childhood,

lived beyond the borders

of time,

hold us captive

and spellbound

to the shadows

stalking across the floor

in the house

where the light

in the window

looks out at us

looking in

to secure

favored intimacy

from the company

of dreams.

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Tongues

“To meditative minds the ineffable is cryptic, inarticulate: dots, marks of secret meaning, scattered hints, to be gathered, deciphered and formed into evidence; while in moments of insight the ineffable is a metaphor in a forgotten mother tongue.” — Abraham Joshua Heschel, I Asked For Wonder

So much to be said,

for metaphors mixed and lost–

Eden, true to form.

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