light moving

Quiet early morning joy.
Trees dancing in shadow walls
Against music, feather drums.
Mothers nourishing the nature of uncertainty
Nested only to fly away and try
Floating, maybe
To mornings elsewhere.

They rise and grow thick with time
Then bow to fragile memories
Swaying long casted hymns like
Barely remembered voices
Branching shadows of yesterday.
Though always, light arrives
Dancing the earth and hesitant wings
Into this moment from its last.

The Other Side of This

God has fit together pieces, not golden edges or sharp
Puzzling as they may be
But gives us access, inner wells, into which our hearts sink
Still further to soul wells, God's springs,
Fountain of all that is Love, compassionate Love
Highest gratitude to Him.

Lord who walks us through those, our wells
Creates forms of faith, seen and unseen
Walks us upon His waters seeped through us
Rising us from bottoms of faithlessness to belief.
Hopelessness to relief.
Unworthiness to worth of being.

And when we walk, collecting forms of His pieces
Into our hearts, deeper into our souls,
He commands us to go further deep
However light, however dark
Trusting always with Him be
To the other side of this.

I walked tonight to the other side, listening
His courage my knowledge informed,
To realize at once, my soul springs entwine endlessly
To hearts about me, seen and unseen.

He, our One Fountain flowing through us all
Pours waters into our empty cup
And overflowing from what we choose to give
- even the last drop we've saved till dry,
Spills to fill another's emptiness up.

I am told we are pieces of each others' wholeness.
Without faith -
Meshed humanity unreached
God's love and our love for each other
Fabric of my soul tied to your heart -
Remain broken unfound pieces.

We cannot find our piece
Without believing our piece.

We cannot share our piece
Without being our piece.

That I cannot teach the faith that I know
Only live faith in Him and show
Others the love He has for me
And how mercifully He does giveth
Is His inner revelation to my whole world
- that I must with compassion and forgiveness
Give away each small piece of my small soul
To all those who live in it.

natural night-time sedative

Sometimes, midnight poetry isn't obsessed or dreamy,
alive and screaming.
It's not all worked up, street fistacuffs and bleeding
despondent and needy, heavy or heaving.

Some nights, midnight poetry is just flat bored,
and sleepy.

Unoriginal

I cut the sleeves and made it fit.
"This is a Recycled Idea."
Descartes shuffled past me,
recognizing his t-shirt.
I could tell, so I told him:
"Get your own, this one is mine."

Confessions of a Deadbeat Poet

To all my children I've abandoned all these tortuously separated years.
I say, please give me a second chance.
I am sorry for not being the kind of Mummy and poet I wish I could have been.
Every single one of you I've generalized and summarized and so sorely missed and mis-analyzed since
I bore you from school desked stapled syllabi and into my life's alibi:
6th grade: Rynd
7th grade: Steinbeck
8th grade: Bradbury
9th grade: Hemmingway
10th grade: Plato
11th grade: Plath and Vonnegut
and 12th grade well Mummy was too busy being Ms. Valedictorian A.P. World Lit on a 12-mile bus trip to another school district because my brilliance wasn't contained in the unmasterful curricular map of Allen Park High School Go Jags even though I just recently attended my first spoken word mic night in over 5 years and someone mentioned "parody" and I chuckled in the air like I was going to snap my deep literary fingers braised against themselves in beauty when really, I didn't know a damn thing being said or the poet who was being read (Poe) or which part of it I was supposed to tap the table on and when to nod my head ...instead I was just immune to the highly inaccessible irony that was being shared in head shaking eyebrow glancing tight-lipped commune between every poet writer lover reader in the room even though I diseased myself with false imitation just so I wasn't the one grossly literary-anemic sickle celled mutation just sitting there going "what's a parody again?"

And to you all, my children's loving foster parents, I know what I may look like. Yes, I may be the charming yet absent for their whole life mother slouched in the back at their wedding the drunk and uninvited she's-the-kids'-mom-a-total-crazie who wants back into their lives just for the big drinks and free company and even though she's clapping at all the wrong times and red faced from the wine just let her drink and let her dine and let her dance and let her cry. Not that I've ever gotten drunk, danced, cried, and eaten six meals between midnight and 4am when I closed my eyes and passed out between the curb and some fries. Never, never, never.

Did I tell you what a great dancer I am too? And yes I am a singer, but I'm more like the Rihanna of singing and Celine Dion of dancing but anyways, I'm sure, there's no reason to go off on a tangential detour. Either way, I read better than I dance and write better than I sing so you can understand why I have been MIA from this whole thing, this literary scene, I mean not inaction but in action so amazing it would blow your mind. I am a little bit jealous, by my own admission, since I don't know allusion from alliteration and you, you live inside of a literary jukebox where you sniff out like ravenously rampant wild boors hyperboles and imagery and aphorisms and circumlocution (thank you Wikipedia) and I'm just the stiffed-neck imposter standing here with two fistfuls of quarters pretending like I've meta-analyzed Emilie Zola to Jane Austen (thank you about.com writers) and now, here in front of your comprehensive jukebox selection, I'm finally ready with pantameterical precision to choose one of my innumeral lost children to take to McDonald's for a 45 minute happy meal excursion before I have to hit the road to taste the Midnight Ride footprints of Paul Revere in my bonnet and Revolutionary dress just before I push off in my raft, no engine, 3 oars and an Amazon box filled with the last 18 books published by The Harvard Press I don't discriminate if they are words on parchment I will suckle each syllable like lustrous (thank you spellcheck) aromatic goji berries (thank you gardeningchannel.com) and you may wonder this, which lucky child will I select from your jukebox to play with? Well, I just can't choose between Tan and Dostoevsky because I just read all of their works both of them, three times, last night wrapped in a canary terrycloth robe and wrote poetry with my right and with my left puffed three packs of smokes, not all at once of course that's ludicrous and mad even though I once smoked half of a cigarette feeling quite the sexy savoy before realizing I had lit the wrong end and yes, I understand, you punctuate Dickinson like a printer and punch out Tolstoy like paper for all these long long years while I've been away and I just want to say thanks, so much, for being so dedicated and so brave, taking the time to get to know my children, all of them whom I've shut the book on and never got to know and if anyone in here is adopted or has been through foster care and is upset with me and wants to go because I'm analogizing the abandonment cycle where you've been left on the streets of Korea and eating out of alley dumpsters and then found by the police with your brother who was malnourished while you were an 18 month old chubster and then 8 months of foster care later adopted by white parents in an all white Midwest suburb and then recycled your unaddressed internalized fear of abandonment in every important relationship you've ever entered and then had an epiphany at the age of 30 that you really do believe in God and desire Jesus as your center and that you have 47 pages in 8 point font of people you need to see and apologize no joke straight faced and to their eyes for being pretentious or fake or distant from their lives especially to your adoptive father and mother, who spent their entire life savings to adopt you and your biological brother your only lifeblood to your vanished self and provide you unconditional love and redeal you a better hand than the cards that you were dealt but you were pissed off that the drop-ceiling of their emotional and intellectual capability was just not adequate for your I don't know who I am insanity so you shamed them into never stepping a foot into your room or your track meets or any compartment of your cold and callous heart until you cried a month ago in a minivan and said you were so sorry and begged your beautifully innocent mother for forgiveness for missing out on the love she tried to give you while you pissed years out the window - please stand up. Does that describe anybody here? No?
Great, so glad I don't have to say I'm sorry to anyone because saying sorry is for total duds and weak kneed pigeons so anyways moving on, back to my lovely unread children.

You know, I'm already pretty tipsy not as much as I was at my parents 25th anniversary party that I planned and then drank seven giant vodka tonics at and danced with my dad's 4 foot 10 inch tall cowboy hat wearing retired coworker but that's neither here nor there, right, no I can't see the buttons and I should save these quarters because I always keep fistfuls to drop into the buckets of homeless men and women who I pass by and forget they have a name and a story and a life and then go home and beat my mental unhumanitarian feet so that they might feel the pain just for a moment of what it's like to stand freezing on the street for three winter years and beg for the change other people drop in jukeboxes then go the bathroom and stand in line like herded sheep, so they can fix their makeup and adjust their bra and pick a 14 dollar dinner and 30 bucks of beer out of their teeth, and then by the time they come out, Rihanna is over and Celine Dion's about to start.

Yeah so, on second thought, I will not be selecting any of my children to play with today I'm so sorry children, dead or alive, Mummy will be back and it won't take me 30 years this time - so I may look like I'm from some East Asian peninsula but it always bodes well for me to sound white and Britishly on the phone when I'm yelling at a Comcast representative to just connect me with their billing department because they've overcharged me for 6 months straight and have no idea how difficult it is to have a 2 year old clawing at your leg as that automated bloat sings her digitized refrain "I'm sorry, I didn't understand your response, please say your thirty-nine digit account code followed by the pound" and just as I'm about to finish verbally cracking the dizzying davinci code my 4 year old daughter yells "I don't like marbles!" I mean, not that I have two small children living at home because I have no home I only roam in Twain's swathy colloquially infested rivers and in the fragmented pastoral mysticism of Faulkner (thanks answers.com).

So, in the meantime, please take care of them for me, I promise that I will come back to look at them, perhaps borrow them just to stack them on my nightstand, adore them as decorations to make me look astute and well-read then in 6 months I'll return them, a coffee stain or pizza grease or a few snickers chocolate fingerprints but always, always,
I will regret just one small thing in my being MIA from this literary scene for so long - that there's just something not quite in me that you've got that you can wrap your comprehension around the words of these children, the authors of our history, and you can absorb them, breathe them, hold them and read them explain them without pretense, quietly, for the one tacit reason that you must because they aliven a golden strand of silk truth that connects to the belly of your soul and if they disappeared from your life, so would you so you don't sell them out of your garage or loan them without knowledge but with insistence that they go to nurturing untrembling hands not strange foreign lands where they will be left beneath scattergories and 13 inches of unopened mail and a diet coke can. So to you, I tell you this - my admiration of this scene and everyone here shines like a child's flashlight from afar as drunk as I may be sitting in the back in my broken glass jar, though I stopped drinking three months ago because I realized that alcohol for me is my sin bottled up and pointless and empty, so this sober light that I shine is as much upon the literary faces of those whose writing lives have lifted our universe upon the pin of their imaginations as it shines upon you, you who know that if you were not here, perhaps literature and the writing art just like children would disappear into thin air from our textbooks and conversations, microphones and constellations, and it's for the next generation that you will and must continue to raise them at the foothills here of cafes and writing groups, or your confessional reading chair you cry inside in the corner of your living room, or maybe it's your closet or your notebook or your skin but somewhere you take your soul and confess out loud what your burning lungs can't hold in. And since honesty is and has always been my motto, this is what I must confess: I am a deadbeat poet, an estranged writer, but with your help, and your support, maybe one day far far away, I'll pick up my pen and cast golden strands of silk words like the knotted velvet souls I don't understand or haven't read or bothered to appreciate or know and I'll humble myself as bleeding ink like a footnote upon the shadow of their shadows, and perhaps over many'a coffee stains and freezing winters and apologetic tears, I will pen enough inadequate love letters to pull me out of the regret of not listening to my heart but listening to my fears, for 30 dusty years I've ignored all the words that have now called me back to life, and maybe one day you will invite me over to your home to stay a while to sit inside your beautiful literary jukebox collection that wait in rows on the bookshelves of your affection, just so long as, just one time, you'll follow my golden strand, give me one momentary glance, then read the confessions of an adopted mother who was given a second chance.

Love thy Neighbor

7 miles from where we live there's
Broken bones and jarred up wishes -
Where, where, where?

Across 7 oceans find praying beads
Shacked still shots of poverty
There, there, there.

Un-noose the whole world inside out
What's unentitled
Don't trickle down to

Institutions, revolutions
Unconsciousness to constitutions
Trip line mines and centuries
Rip skin off and underneath
We're blood protesting and unseen dimensions
Emptiness not filled by what we know
But with what we don't.

Right side wronged
Cast wrong aside
Abridged definitions to what's undefined
Plead not for answers but forgiveness -

Leaves us blank and crying,
What else have we been missing?
What else have we missed?

Blinded to extermination
Memorial timeline generations -
Children gone before they're grown
Old dying stories living still untold.

Indivisibility divided by
Street steel blocks and
Clashing sins
Holy grounds and versions of diverting opinions
Cross intersections and a disregarded resurrection.

We know what's now but not who came
Don't know tribulation or
Our neighbor's name -
How can we love them
When we judge them
Deny them worthy of salvation
Knowing nothing, really, of our own creation.

We observe two dimensional reality
Yet inexplicably we perceive three
Sight of faith given to believe
Trinity given but too proud to heed -

Choosing ourselves keeper of our own small space
Forgetting we breathe
Involuntary pulses and unchosen races
Though at different times and different paces
And left unnoticed is that
We're all stumbling, running in the same direction
Toward infinite gates that teach us
To love the hated and
Hate the hatred.

Slowly we get it.

That our distance from them is the same.
That we're the neighbor living 7 miles away.
That maybe we're the souls they're trying to save.

Pray with me.
Don't leave us blank and unaffected
Help us connect the disconnection
Help us unjar our jarred up wishes
To forgive us our lineage of unforgiveness,
To live the answer we demand from each other
Of what else will be missed
If we don't love thy neighbor.

Ode to Jack Johnson

It's time to hit the road
Where should I go?
Here or there, I don't quite know
Just anywhere but home,
home, home, home, home.

It's time for me to roll up my sleeves
Go see some different places
See some different faces
Feel some different spaces with
My two hands
Open wide
This beatin' heart inside sayin'
"C'mon let's try."

I know someday I'll be back just
Not anytime soon
This is what I must do
It's now or tomorrow why wait
Why wait til a quarter too late?
The road is laughin' my name,
Name, name, name, name.

I've got the whole world packed
Folded and flat
My yellow fisherman's hat
Two number 2 pencils and postcard stamps -
I'll beg and barter the rest.

I'll follow the rising sun all the way around
Til my feet splash down
In every blue ocean sound they can reach
Climb every mountain they meet
Stroll every cobblestone street.

Then one ukulele day
I'll run out of road or
Run out of flow or
Run out of clothes then I'll know
It's time for me to roll back home.

But here inside my soul
I'll write about every night sky
Every boat dock sunrise
Every pair of eyes that I meet
I'll meet, I can't wait to meet.

Then when I'm comin' back travelin' home
I'll sing a thousand long miles of
Musical notes
That I will never live or will never know
Unless I seize today, seize today
And get up and go
Go, go...
It's time for me to go.

Writing while driving

Hum buzz bordem drive.
Listen, it said by way of
Blacktop jazz thumping rocks

From miles away.
Write melody and recite memory and
Altogether it's all the same - Poetry.
Road octaves and talk radio streaming
Consciousness and ourselves - thinking in
Silence. From here to there across
Time and everywhere, just that short store
Trip to the longest place.

Our fingers invent cylinders of poetry
Because truth can't resist tempo -
Measured yellow stripes dashing
Rhythms strapped and seated
Inside something moving us.
And always, the refrain is
Don't give me that crap that you can't sing. So
I wrote music in the sky while driving.

White cloud chords and canvas,
Lyrical roads remind us
Poetry, just like our soul's sound,
Can't sing itself.

Books

I like to study rows of
other people's books.
Head tilted toward curiosity.

Boston morning rented.
New for me. Used for her.
An arist's place.
She offered reminders by her purchase
titles and names, what I do not know.

Socrates, he knew nothing.
Hey his words not mine.
All I know is that I know nothing.

So when I fancy to ride high on pride
I'll have to ask myself if
I'm really leaving a bearded philosopher behind
to bite my dust.
Not even he challenged authority,

His that convicts
not shame but love.

His that beckons
humility not pride.

He who commands:
Recite one book there
one or a thousand or
one hundred thousand.
Then profess to Me
not what you know
but what you do not know.

Ungrip

Every time my heart hardens with complaint, I contract, a universe going the wrong way. Why swing myself with my own choice momentum. Toward the pain of return. Every time my heart hardens with unforgiveness, I feel encircled by fear, closing in, the voice that says "I will let you eat salt, not just taste it. I will replace the too plain joy, at least your act convinces, and give you the better joy of suffering."
What tragedy before I ungrip this moment to just let it be, to let it breathe? I can only pray, pray, pray, and pray again. When will I? Rise above the clamor, mirrors of this house to what I wear inside, below the reasonable voice and cool skin trying to keep everything inside from turning out. It's all kind of coming apart, maybe just today, but I can't somehow wrap a single thing around this universe, or even, around a shred of why or wisdom. It sounds too desperate to sound desperate, but oh. Maybe that's the shred I was being led to write.

too much

If I'm writing too much it's because
I'm not writing enough.

a rough morning

Those scattered laundry pieces about
bowled me over. Anger at underwear and piles
completely lifeless.
How is it that I can wake up to read the Bible and then
one long too familiar sight of something,
Completely unextraordinary like nothing more than
yesterday
About threw me half way across the room
with language I can't put down on paper.

"Everything always works out somehow"
Sometimes it makes me want to slam a hard door
open, or closed. I'm not quite sure.

Giving, giving, giving, I give.
Giving everything including blame,
including complaint, including love without
direction.
Giving except - credit. I take that.

It is worse to sin
but worse still is to look sin in the eye and
say it anyway.

Phone call after errand phone call
trying to sort out the mess since
stuff won't pick itself up and move.
That suitcase doesn't care if it stays empty forever.
But I do. Sometimes I wish
I was like the suitcase.
Filled with space instead of
worry. Anger when everyone else seems
filled with lightness
"It'll all work out somehow"
and I am chucked full
overstuffed even
with an uncontrollable need for
control.
Funny, it seems
that the uncontrollable part
is the only thing I can't control.

Maybe I can't find the humor because
the humor of it is
My lack of it.

Microscope to telescope
take it easy or take charge,
I can't really figure any of it out today.
God gave me the suitcase
now I wonder
how I will fill it.
With the lifeless stuff
or, with life itself.

dreamin' and singin' and piano playin'

Foggy misty moonlight rolls low
Stars crackling up above me, or, so it goes
I'm not sure
It's not clear
I'm just waitin' for a ride
so I might'as well enjoy it while I'm here
I'm here, I'm here

Small town yellow street lamp buzzin' in my ear
There lay some scattered brown bag bottles, over there
I'll sit down
Look around
I'm still waitin' for a ride
Might as well enjoy my life since I'm here
Oh I'm here, I'm still here

Was I dreamin' about leavin'?
For that moment while I was sleepin'?
Don't see a single headlight comin'
Rusty pickup truck a'rumblin'...
Maybe I
Just missed my ride
It's okay it ain't a shame
Don't even think I knew his name
Nor he knew mine, oh it's fine

I'll be alright
I'll catch another break, just not tonight
Carryin' my bags
Barefoot walkin' this dirt road line
Three blocks up to that sign
Hang a right, 'round the bend
Back to my little piano waitin'
Patiently dependent on me
To sit and play it like
Each other's only friend.

Foggy misty moonlight rolls low
Foggy misty moonlight
rolls me home.

more than a talk

you know when
flesh splits wide.
a long time coming or
spontaneous revelation.
when nothing will ever
be the same again.
the muzzled bear breaks
ice, to stop you
just to brush against the current
treading history before and
this chance ahead,
life moving past.
you dip your hand
down deep into all you have
offerings and an apology
to eyes across,
or sitting beside you
all this long time
waiting, a smile, however small
or tears of thanksgiving.
not for you but with you.
a breath is not a sigh.
awake or being alive.
the difference only you know.
and too, the small rare moments
when we are both.

you just can't predict when
heavy cloaks no longer can
carry themselves, a tiny needle unsews
and honesty falls -
a crystal time, no bridge between
currents of every right word
to none at all.

still, grace

I keep the lamp on.
like i need these eyes
inner searchlights
panning waters for
lifting floods and
a reason.

A calm switch,
the furthest one.

Every room dark.
surrounded in
silence shining and
still, grace.
again the permission it gives
empties me
to know differently.