The Perfect Storm

my back’s to the wall here
where
this snarling call deep down sounding silent shouts,
spirals a covering hover-fall
a story of
reverberations resounding roars and all those long lost soars coming home
to roost and grope every fragment in a fusion eradicating
everything i relied on, homing me here having the be

hush

someone, something’s let me out and i circle overhead massing magnificence clouds
storms brewing my
tender, fierce, urgent emergence,
no frivolous shed,
shite sham
will remain

hush

take cover ’cause we’re all done with pretend,
these winds whip wild wakeful
gonna shred all the cloaks you claimed me for
long ago back there in the womb of reformed gynephobic fantasy

hush

see – silence speaks something forever changed and changing
but don’t expect the cagey girl
or the wordy woman
she’s all done, her fingers want more than cold flat surfaces
and carrots dangling conjurations washed away by rain

hush

see – you didn’t calculate, forecast or otherwise regard the once-in-a-lifetime
wonder brewing thunder rhythms
evacuating comfort zones and
sending us all home.

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All These…

heartaches, shakes and victories,
delights, rumbling mysteries…
sad betrayals and aborted hugs…

reasons screaming meaning, making nonsense of karma, shredding ideals whose humming “virtue” obliterate the stuff of love, saying “what goes around, comes around” while studiously ignoring the so much that goes around for so many and never comes around…ever and. And turning love into this gross assessment of cause and effect when some cause just don’t care about effect, let’s all shaft the masses and watch them writhe and when we die in beds of soullessness… rich and fat, what is that? What exactly IS IT that goes around and comes around? Will someone please tell me? No, nevermind my rhetorical quiz. I know. What goes around? Our fathers’ programs and mothers’ lessons leaving all this rot in our words and stories, telling clever belittling jokes and smacks at siblings in “playful” jabbing sarcasm posing “wit” with cuteness, our self-absorbed fixation on whether or not we’re “right” or “growthful” or making the difference that wasn’t made for us or or or…

What else goes around?
Sing it out, will you?!

The love, regardless.

It goes around. It comes around. That’s all. Karma be damned. All these wild dreams of karmic justice, karmic absolution, karmic restitution, karmic shmarmic nonsense posing LIMITS on love. See, now. Watch, they’ll get what’s coming to them. (beauty or malformation, all!) They’ll get every chance to heal the bullshit posing as clever wit constructed in daddy’s ugly mockery. They’ll get every chance to walk away from the fight with dignity, seen as wrong but knowing otherwise. Knowing there’s something other than rightness, something deeper brewing compassion, brewing awareness of real, yes solid, yes exactly justice. But it won’t look like karma. It’ll just be this…

quiet humming grace
oozing love through every pore
dripping awareness and presence
and standing witness 24/7

because there’s no holding of the breath for karmic salvation, no measuring exact portions of recompense for lives and life details whose value is boundless unfathomable preciousness. And, in spite of that fact, could die on the side of the road never realizing just how sweet. All these layers, all at once, no karmic salvation to make sense of it all. No sense to be made. Only love, people. Only love. And that not in fear, not in desperation, not in frenzied hopes to keep us all from dying on the side of the road but

in quiet confidence of just how sweet is the now chance to be,
breathe, expect love
and love’s best.

 

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So far…

you lie there under blankets
breathing in, out
a whole planetary system supreme
with aliens and natives restless,
unaware of the company
of a whole host of unsung,
unfound song within,
a festival of feelings and natures
undiscovered,
unexplored…

all

there

‘neath a canopy of rest
breathing in, out the night,
the sounds of day’s murmurs fading
in your ears, softness falling against skin
and ‘though we know each other…

so much

we’ve not known

hums here in the lines that separate,
lines we can ride and cross
and set aside
for the knowing we choose

not

so far.

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In Every Drop…

“Extinguish my eyes, I’ll go on seeing you.
Seal my ears, I’ll go on hearing you.
And without feet I can make my way to you,
without a mouth I can swear your name.
Break off my arms, I’ll take hold of you
with my heart as with a hand.
Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat.
And if you consume my brain with fire,
I’ll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.” Rainer Maria Rilke

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Even…

Take me off the shelf and dust off the abandon.
Set me on the ground and watch me writhe…
see…I thrive.
Eventually.

When the wreck of others’ feelings,
judgements, dealings melts away
and I’m left to play in this broad, deep,
wonder-field of abandon,
the soul sings and

no one is guilty,
no one is wrong,
no one is anything but
what was intended all along

and even if it all blows up in the end,
this field and all that happened
is more real
than any sham posing the “ultimate truth” of life.

See, there’s no pose.
We simply are.
And beyond all the disfigurations of being,
of existence,
of hope…
we. are. love.

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Melodies

Sometimes the music plays me like a shivering leaf in the breeze…
sweeps through all these neatly arranged beliefs
and scatters my game all over the place.
my game. the one I thought was the real thing.
and I stand here naked.
but more fully clothed in a wholeness nothing
could ever strip away.
scraped and bruised
and somehow amazingly less confused
‘though all I thought I knew is naught.
But what I know deeply, where no words can sing,
where no face can convey, these melodies arise
and fall down my face in rivers washing
cleansing all the noise away.

Photo by Kate Stetler Holgate, Used by permission

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Heart Haiku

Here these arms open
wide, glowing color in sun,
bruised by love’s onslaught
broken open, full
surrendered but growing song
out of night’s worst loss.

Photo by Kate Stetler Holgate, Used by Permission

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In Moon’s Music

Whisper me out of this corner
or come,
come find me in the shadow
of some long gone judgement,
weaving threads from my filth,
linking light and dark,
in a grateful design knowing,
pulsing a pattern here of
my best worst
and cursing the idea,
the reality,
the haunt of shame.

Too much wanting goodness
for far long…
now these shadow threads
sing me more softly,
deeply weaving richer hues of being,
of leaning, needing, longing.

No longer enslaved to the perpetual denial,
suppression, hiding of these unsightly finds
supreme.

Don’t you know they make me,
break me out of spotlight
casting shadows more wicked,
in their pretending honor,
their alleged salvation?

Here, I am. Singing songs
in moon’s music, humming silence
in the glare of sight,
digging deep this dirt delight,
growing flowers fed on dew
and dancers’ rain,
rain,
rain…

kiss of love haunting.

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