POEM: When I Wake (Part I)

When I first awake
When I wake
When I first awake
And when I arise
When I awake and rise to greet the day
When I am alive and before I judge things
Before I am judge and jury
Of myself and others
Before I am sane and brim full of logic
While I am still groggy but before the deep rush
Of sobriety and good common sense
Races in before I hold back
And surround myself
Before I hold back and isolate
Before I know the meanings of words
Before I wear knowledge like clothing
Before words become mayflies
And I swat at them unmercifully
As some annoyance
When I first open my eyes
When alertness and caution creeps in like the dampness
When I am able to be
Just to be
Before my pain has had its first
Cup of coffee
When I am defenseless and stupid
And naïve and a dupe, it
Is THAT person that I want you to know

Me at my very best at my most inept
At my most unkempt
Slavishly attached to my disheveled best
Unhinged as an open box, open
To the joyful crying outstretched arms
Of the blue of sky which has waited
For me all this time
For the real me –
To once and for all finally arrive.

POEM: When I Wake (Part II)

When I am brother to all things
When I am sister to all things
When I am the sum of man and woman
Of flora and fauna
Of rock and water of land and ocean
When I am the dark dark matter
Aloft in the dream of space
In the dreams of my head
In the dreamy landscape of my bed space
Where I return to the place
Where everything hidden resides
Where the blackest parts of night go
Where the bruised glow of sunrise comes from
As it arises awash in dreams
When it awakes
The sun and I when we awake
When we dream from the same place
(And who knows what stars dream?)

But awake it too rises before the horizon
Tries to capture it border it
Keep it in and box it in
Before it too is sensible (for a star)
Brawny and bright awake and alert
Before it too is judgmental
While it is timid and seeks nothing
Asks nothing.

Awake we are the same
The sun and I looking for the salve of creation
For the divinity within us
To come through us into the world
Like a miracle
Like resurrection-
(That is what light is!)

Faith that pierces the hollering of doubt
Which brings the darkest parts of us to life
Through creation
In seven days or seventy –
It does not matter
With human ribs or dust
It does not matter
From spilled blood or not
It does not matter
Your myth is not my myth
It matters not to me.
Before I wake and judge everything around me
As worthy or not
Before my brain strikes these words
Dead in their tracks
Cold lifeless words
Mourned too young
Dead before they had seen their adolescence
Before I arise and wake
And this page is put back in prison
And Writers Block is the overbearing prison guard

Before all this happens
The white field of the page is mine!
Every verb is my musculature.
Every noun is what I move and touch and taste and see
Ever adjective is my heart thumping
It is all mine.
Where alone is not a four letter word
Where I rise and wake and eat and wash
Where I fuck and garden and cry and doubt

I wake and before I let the parts I show
To everyone else control my world
I greet the heart inside of me
That just wants to give birth
To everything!

POEM: Just Today

Today
Just
Today –
May I convert an enemy into a friend.

Just
Today –
May I be bread that feeds others..

Just
Today –

May I not wear love like a garment, with whimsy
But may love be the muscle and bone
Of who I really am.

POEM: My Garden Is an Expectant Mother

My garden is this expectant mother
Belly full and round,
Sagging with all this life it holds.
Tomatoes on the verge of red
They pull everything down.

The engorged cucumbers try to hide,
While knuckled string beans
Dangle like earrings,
Filled with harvest pride.

My garden is this expectant mother
Belly, full and round,
Waiting to deliver
All the goodness of the ground.

POEM: (What I Understand About) Women and Men

Women love tall men.
Women love bad boys –

While men
Are trapped
Like coal miners
With faces bitumen black
And starchy white eyes
That stare out from the void
In wonder about entrances
And the nature of fresh air.

POEM: How It Goes

This is how it goes
Me this old shoe
Scuffing around the house
Without you –
This is how it happens
I imagine the moment,
Calling 911,
Calling famiy,
What do I say
And how do I say it
I never thought you would go on
You were never
So adventurous –
This is how it goes
How lives cleave
Rip apart
Like a geologic fault.

POEM: The Sinfulness of Moonlight

The yellow moon gives you away,
This heat, the sadness in your voice,
A trip to the beach, you tell me – you might as well be
Stirring a cauldron, reciting latin-like phrases
And be dancing about nude, enticing the moon
To descend, to engage in Love’s
Profundity which grows in the dark, moist sky,
Like earthworms wriggling through the
Bark shade of soil as slippery as oil.

The clouds try to hide your yellow love
But they cannot even come close.

You are at this canyon about to step in…
Go ahead and smile - no grin - and enjoy the leap into sin.