August 2011


Deeds of Common Sense
Fox Hollow
In the Spaces Between
As Dawn Came
Living Temples
On the Dark Side of Light
Sky-shopped
Love is Eternal
Skin-speak
A Gravy of Light

Deeds of Common Sense

I’d steal gold from the sun
if it would brighten your heart.
No one should lose blood.

I’d hide the wind from Mariah
if she threatened your ship.
No one should lose their home.

I’d lay my harvest down
should you face the fist of the King.
No one should fail by greed or tyranny.

I’d loose a deadly arrow
into their pious delusions.
No one should suffer to the bonds of ignorance.

Fox Hollow

In the new moon darkness
fox let out anguished cries,
great mournful barks and calls.
A haunting in the blackness,
as if practicing for death, for the jaws of traps
for the keeps of bars and walls

Fog swirls like a living enclosure
lifting high and thick off the pastures,
nearly obscuring the distant cypress stands.
The den cries out again;
like tortured wolves to the moon
Comanche yips to their roving bands.

In the Spaces Between

I’ll be here should you ask,
Just beneath the sheets
and the layers of your dreams.
A mote in the shadows of your tears,
on the tips of your fingers
as you slip ever higher in the darkness,
grinning from the gleam of your ideas.
A sigh, an ellipse…
on the curl of your lips,
a cheshire smile
in the spaces between.

As Dawn Came

The river's inlet lay like a tin of sardines,
a dull silver lid with a brine inside,
a sluggish pool of brackish secrets,
a throat for whispers dancing to the sea.

Dawn roused, sallow, like the gleam of polished bones,
the sun breaching the thighs of the land,
oleo spreading, chin to hillside chin,
like the grimace from an old man’s teeth.

Full morning took the land,
a tsunami drawing back, then out upon the darkness,
relentless, surging, fisting the air.
Dawn came, raw shards of blue-black bruise violated with light.

Living Temples

Gnarled pillars and layers,
walls whittled by the wind,
as if from breaths of reverence.

A living tapestry of stone
evolving when we turn away,
changing in the light as we watch.

Geologic spirits,
snarl with the teeth of the sky,
violent caresses
rasping the canyons,
a cat’s tongue of blades,
light stirring the glimmer of time.

Colors woven from skeins of light,
great planks of sun pierce the darkness,
a pressure of sacred silence,
the sculptor’s knowing smile,
an embrace of inviolate peace.

Inspired by the composition of the same name by David Lanz, and Gary Stroutsos.

On the Dark Side of Light

I come here to dine,
on the underside, the belly of us,
in the dark wet caverns
where thoughts have no voice,
where the hot slick walls have only eyes.

I crawl in here sometimes,
when I need to to be shaken, not stirred.
I come here to feel the pulse of our tongues,
to listen to the whimper of scars,
to embrace our mortality.

To the underside, the belly of us,
the incubator of our dreams,
where the fissures mend,
where the new colors scheme,
and the mind's eye comes to be washed with light.

Sky-shopped

A great tear in the heavens oozed in auric-rose.
A great scratch across the cheek of the sky,
as if a claw from some constellation,
reached in through the dermis of cloud.
A Manticore?
Ursa perhaps, or Canis?
Siriusly! It is the dog days of August after all.

As with all scratches it healed,
mending as if covered in foundation,
gone in one Gaussian blur.
Sky-shopped away by the wisps of entropy.
Were my heart but healed with a brush.
Were the fractures and necrosis of you
whirled away in a simple blend of sky.