Creative Samples

​​​

​

Down in the River to Pray

 

It's very subtle 

how we lose ourselves, how we are 

carried off like silt in the currents, little by little – 

Silt that cannot navigate back upstream 

piles together at some end 

where this form transitions, often mournfully, with wide berth 

into the next and greater –

 

Too easily we erode 

into the boundary-less murk, and 

it is unarguably beautiful 

the way we fuse with whatever shifting surface 

might bear our reflection; 

we all but dive in 

to forgetfulness – looking for ourselves 

elsewhere, 

in a wasted life. 

 

I dare you to sit beside the water.

You need not be baptized again,

you need not voyage to find thirsty roots, exposed, 

grasping for the steadiness 

of your soulful embrace.

 

In terms of the density 

of mattering and not mattering, I believe 

the longest journeys – which demand 

all your life – are measured 

in valiantly-pathetic increments…

Pray for the will to stand! 

To remain damp and unmoved.

To hold onto the Self – catching the sun 

at every angle, 

letting the prostitute currents brush you fiercely 

without being taken –

 

God may answer,

Remember,

you 

are 

dirt.

 

​

Otherwise, I Would Stay Dead, Forever

 

All miracles pound 

with their unformed extremities 

against the walls 

of this dark womb – half-baked 

with no sight for fear – the air 

gathered to scream 

 

From Unknown makes room for us 

under the heart 

To Unknown watches lovingly, from 

the outside, our prodigal flight –

we are 

and yet refuse to be 

of Spirit 

 

Agape 

spares not pain,

but drowns us to term

in these prerequisite waters 

of Becoming, in hopes that 

we might bear 

just one holy breath 

and fall 

headlong into 

the beautiful terror it is 

to live

​​

​

Pushed Through the Aperture of Truth

 

Upon a fatalistic stage 

the Boundless paired love and strife

in arranged, antiquitous union –

each vowing “I’ll not get that close 

to one who could so change me –

boil me down to the bones –

alter my marrow, something fierce” –

now reckoning 

with the script,

 

Where, from enigmatic shadow-play, 

they are to bring forth

unrecognized genius – the terrifyingly wonderful sort 

that altogether eclipses 

this Midgard muddle.

 

Rhetorically speaking, in theatre, 

do not the martyr and betrayer

both hang? Right-angled turns 

are dubbed curves, and to create 

is the most holy 

ostracism –

 

Whatever is at cord’s length, 

Go and meet it! 

What we birth is strange, indeed,

repulsive, even as it is divine.

We are burdened to hold 

only what we lack the wherewithal 

to un-shutter and give Incarnate weight.

 

The right of first refusal is yours.

So, too, is the instinct 

to flow like Source without Source –

 

between them, you are destined

to choose

​

​

to nourish life

 

as the hungry-dark eats away again

the full moon fruit leaving only a rind

i lie on my back to catch

embers still dazzling, seeds that char

the shadowed edges of a heart like steel 

edges too late as 

all dying things must in their obsessive hailing to God-

mother-dust, give water, caring for nothing else

but the love prayer

that my bosom may from atrophy awaken a garden or even

old growth wood

 

for you

​

​

This, our Covenant with Growing Pains

 

In that quaint stratospheric signing room 

where with pomp and naivete 

we autographed our contracts

 

no one was reading the fine print 

We hadn't faculties yet 

we hadn't days numbered 

 

We had only just fallen outrageously 

in love with our greatest teachers 

those destined to accompany us 

 

deeper into life's heart:

the language of everything unwritten 

we hold dearest in the end

​

​

So I sleep with seashells

 

and currently my soul body is on the hunt 

for a new vessel – a home for what has been in me all along 

that I can only now wholly cherish 

 

it is both a fearless and terrifying experience to writhe

pregnable and unhoused with one’s immensity 

 

the old inhabitants swept away 

entering numinous prayers ever larger – ever more ruinous

 

and facing certain peril, the dreamer may become the dream 

 

I cannot stop nor would I desire to obscure 

this divine reconciliation of Self to the ethereal traveler it is 

when unconcerned with the trivial matters 

of life and death

 

 

Every garden starts a mass grave

 

On the hill where we all go to die, God 

hands out seed-packet invitations to new life with 

the simplest, most dreadful instructions:

 

1  Empty kernels of potential onto a mound – bury all, spare none

2  For days, what appears like death, keep damp with mourning 

3  Expose to full sun the evidence of no progress 

4  Wait, 

    contemplate resurrection, 

    grow very, very hungry, 

    pray that not everyone's a dud 

5  Sprout without regret

​

​

Tinkering with shutters and hinges

 

Once I captured a moth under the sweet 

strawberry summer moon in a cage of 

woven fingers, from where it tickled my palms to be 

let out, and I surrendered, lest I reckon 

with the violence in my nature 

 

Conventional mechanics require us mostly not 

to know what we are capable of, good or evil 

preferencing ignorance and the failure to recall how 

before taking the blue pill, we first ate of that delectable fruit 

setting us apart from other beasts 

 

But we don't tremble against the amusements of Fate that 

could so easily rend our artificial intelligences 

forgetting our evolution from sentient to carnivorous and

remaining largely unconscious, like Persephone, that we have 

of our own ambition consumed ourselves halfway 

to hell on earth 

 

I marvel! But what of this un-detainable light?

Pierced through the aperture to strike a film

I must develop alone in the darkest room 

and can truth, anatomized, flutter from my cupped hands?

 

While some feign innocence and perpetuate the great delusion 

I am reverse-engineering this sham of a claw-crane machine we 

give our everything in exchange for emptiness 

 

My heart is a quiet hunter, a squinty eye, an unmuzzled 

fly trap raking the sky for a taste of them 

existential buggers that squirm 

for our flowering