poetic #4: meta

following recent pull of creative forces, i wish to volumize my poetry. sort through items from the last 10 years, make a book. or at least a cycle. then send it places and see if anybody bites. i've shown my poetry to people, here and there, and usually i've gotten no reaction. nor positive nor negative. this perplexes me.

but i love it. it speaks, of course, to my soul. one of the wonders of reading my own poetry is the occasional feeling of never having seen it before. last night, sorting through boxes in preparation for a move, i found some pieces that felt completely new and foreign to me. and i wonder, who wrote that? what is that state?

poetic #3 : gardens

in my garden
i've been fertilizing the weeds
and now
they've grown out of control,
and the plants can hardly be seen.

in the worst moments
i want to clutch you to me,
i don't want to be left alone in my unhappy garden.
and when you won't stay and wallow in my garden,
i sometimes pick up clots of dirt and throw them at you.

in moments of clarity
i see how unfair this is, how unkind,
asking you to neglect your garden
and to prop me up while i moan over mine.

in my heart
i know that mine is a beautiful garden,
there are lovely plants, rare species.
my work now is to care for my own garden,
to cull the weeds and nurture the plants,
bring forth my happy garden.

in love
we visit and admire each other's gardens,
continuing to care for our own.
my hope is to return to gardening together,
side by side,
each with our own watering can,
sharing the sunlight.

poetic #2 with whimsy

the run from guadalajara to oaxaca
stole my breath
wore me out
and made me weak

now
let me dump the sand from my shoes
feet baby soft
ready to sleep
tomorrow we're on to belize

on falling tree branches

today in the midst of my ordinary life
something as uneventful as a paper cup of coffee and two friends
outside, beneath a tree

the wind pushed a dead branch from its home 30 feet above me
and i was struck, suddenly, without warning
life does that sometimes

first it seems like nothing, a surprise but
easy enough to fold into the day

the fallout sneaks in over days,
little lingering liabilities,
not marked as part of the impact.
the challenge is to sort these out,
attend to them,
and maintain the world we know as our own

depressed poetic

emerging from a dark place,
a place of stagnation and decline,
finding again, maybe for the first time,
how to feel happy, how to hope,
how to expect good things from life

then a good thing comes along,
or maybe it's a bad thing,
or maybe it's just an average thing.
maybe it's earth-shakingly remarkable,
maybe it's just ordinary, the way life
      is when you're not in a hole,
or maybe even it really sucks but just
      looks wonderful in comparison with
      what you *have* known.
and this is all a whirlwind,
      massive confusion,
      your feet no longer feel steady.
you feel like a child, confused,
      overwhelmed, lost.
and you realize that your hope and
      your happiness are horribly fragile.

the infrastructure you've built can
      support day-to-day life, the things
      you know and have dealt with, the
      familiar, the routine
throw in something new, especially
      something charged with feeling and
      slippery emotions and lack of clarity
the beginnings of a relationship, that
      notoriously agonizing but thrilling
      piece of life

and the supports start to creak and bend.
and you're falling.
and you're scared that you're heading back
      into the hole, the hell you've just
      fought your way out of

it's too soon
for anything too intense
yet intense is what you crave

so to do what is best for you,
      to step back and shore up
      those supports,
is also to deny yourself.
it's its own sort of hell.

poetic #1

Today I am in hiding -- my voice is subdued. But I'm not dark or blue, or dark blue. Rather a pale orange, I think, very pale, with outlines in grey. And I feel that I'm strong inside, but it's very far from the surface. I want to sing a song and awaken that part of me, entice it to come out and celebrate, to really live.

Always I feel this tension between good and bad, right and wrong, continually judging my own behavior according to everyone else's guidelines. Is it possible that the things I'm doing really aren't so bad? My first thought was that my fears lead me to do things which could harm other's perceptions of me, well really I thought that my fears lead me to do BAD things. But I'm starting to wonder whether that is part of the world-is-flat mentality.

Through our experiences we develop ways of thinking about the world, some of them surprisingly rigid, so rigid and so all-coloring that we may not even know our perceptions are being transformed by our underlying thought patterns. I've had an aha moment -- an eye-opening moment when I saw the pathway my thoughts were travelling and I also saw another possible pathway. And I experienced this feeling of awe, and I almost felt my brain remapping. World-is-flat gives way to world-is-round. Or at least the suspicion that the world might be round. So -- maybe I'm not so bad after all.

day one

getting myself out there,
getting my words out into the web,
getting my words up out of my head.