To the Endurance of Dandelions: Freedom

Random Poems written in
Spring of 1999. On line to lovers, friends, soul mates and children.










1.
Wind winnows hair
Walking, breathing, laughing, free
This, the best of what can be.
Tasting, touching, loving, glad
This the best that can be had.

Winnowing through idle truths
To find the glow of lies rebuke
Gleaning rapture from a song
That languishes but melts along

The odor of a new fledged-rose
Kisses me and so my nose
These, the pleasures born of life
Are sure pledges of joys height.

This, a poem for you writ.
A sure device to please my wit.

2.
When?
I enjoy the dappling of light
The speaks of clouds and close-capped nights

I enjoy the water, blessing skin
That invites me into magic whens.

I enjoy the semblance of dawn
That first mocked light that lingers on

I enjoy the feathered brush
of fingers which, speaking, say so much.

These, a few of life's rare jewels
given me for joy's renewals.

3.
Written to Hunscher and never sent
Spun thought
Golden threads of light
Revealing mind-borne flight
Into realms of what can be and can be not.

Silken touch
Velvet glances filled with love
Which sharing values prove
To mean so much and more than such.

Cradled forms
Lifted into worlds of wonder
Raised by fantasy to ponder
Intimacy made magic, lightly worn.

Filled with anticipation
I resonate in celebration.
Gladness warmed

4.
In Response to Ayn's artless question
Older than the staff of Time
Older than the deadest crimes
Older, yet than hallowed thought
Older than the shadows caught
In rune-born eddies of life's dawn
Older than sweet Hera's song.

Old before the ancient touch of grace
Left its dew on Eve's embrace.

This, the answer, wrot by me,
given, dear that you might see.

5.
Ted Ditty
The Kaballah speaks with ancient tongue
Of esoteric ransoms won
But in deeds and thoughts now lost in night
The face of God still hides from sight

6.
Magic voles cannot be eat
By any of the cattery.
For the cats, sweet furry things
Have not claws and fangish rings

7.
No such emotions touch my heart
Button pushing my sheer delight
The voles are magic, glad to start
The engine of my smiled sight.

No, the source of this disease
Is someplace else, you merely tease.

8.
Forget Not Yet

Forget not yet that touches burn
And rapture sings from deep in bones
Forget the never found release
Of loving that extinguished peace

Forget the magic of delight
That found, is lost in thin stretched sight?
Forget that laughter fractures ease
That still regard must surely please

My memory might not regard
Tactile pleasing well loved shards
But this I know in measure full
The taste of love can make us whole.

9.
Vestigial thoughts of unseen psalms
Touch us when the nights grow long
Reminding the inner mind of truths
That linger on the words of Ruth

Savants tremble to remain
Alive to what is also sane.

10.
Predator and prey are one
A single flesh, a single thought
Born from pulsing of one sun
They consume in strife and not

The anguished need to live and breed
Granted them and thus time freed.

11.
Passions unacknowleged, strident words and life's fast curves
These, the stuff becoming, in the chuming must occur.

Falling into error lends the life to the bewarer
Holding back from living, yawns the grave of no beginning.

12.
Glances bond us, untouched kiss
Summoning the hope of bliss
Found within another's mind
When they are with us so inclined.

Glances bond us fast in need
This, the life from which we feed.

Candles carry waxen thoughts
that stem the ravishment not sought
Their light affirms our given word
Reflected in those prayers not heard.

13.
I walk in and you walk out,
Early morning, fogged with doubt
Here in haloed screen and toward
The moument of mindful words

You walk out and I walk in
A sad displacment for two friends.

14.
On the Midnight side of life
The roiled ripples tipple tongues
And vanish in the cloudless sight
Of failing dreams not yet begun

On the Midnight side of life
Laughter grows both sharp and quick
That its armoured wall might cancel strife
And deflate our raptures with a prick

Of unreal vanquishment and pride
For in that place the desperate hide.

15.
Little words give light to heart
Love is a nice place to start.
Love blends fractal, scattered schemes
And cherishes the source of dreams.

16,
Cyberhugs are made of light
Transcending time and space and sight
These unexpected, warping motes
Give us laughter, though remote
Along with pause and thought and note
That our emotions can also vote.

17.
The Oldest Dance
Enchanting thoughts of ancient dance
Moving. pulsing, stirring, felt
This the sorrowed, time borne flight
That Circe played while others knelt

Dance remembered, dance improved
Dance resembling our moods
Dance sublime and also mirthed
Falling laughter given birth

This the dance that can't be won
The serious dance that life begun.

18.
DANCING
I dance the dream of time warped flight
And learn the balanced touch of ease
That carries me in motioned thought
To places that I know will please

For dance is balance, body, mind
Joined to capture what is sublime

18.
Arrows flight
I touch the thought of mind's devise
I scamper in uncharted lands
To taste the things not seen with eyes
And walk uncharted, new-made sands

This, the arrow set in flight
That turns back the gloaming night.


19.
Stars that shine with self-made light
Glowing into promised thought
In the mind or in the sky
Still they lend our spirits hope

Candles coddle eyes and ease
Spirits lessons surely please

20.
Interrupted interloper
Riven thought and rightly drained
Poetic intervention that allows me to be sane.

21.
Vanished, gone without a trace
None can find his witty face
They didn't think to check the tub
Where he is lurking, going "glub."

Practicing his scrubbing ways
Hoping to fulfill his days.

22.
Unwoven thought, unmade dreams
Eyes that see too much for peace
child play creates the place, streams
And meadows, beckon ease

Still the mind in sweet unrest
Build a clime of tenderness
From this mote of emptied thought
Dance and so deny you're not

On ships in shadows, bathed in light
Balanced, poised in mind made sight.

23.
The fickle wind flows hot and cold
Raging storm and languid, curling, tickled flow
Of thought warmed air that ebbs and shows
The beasts and humans in its way
The fragile side of life lit days
Replete with promised, fragrant ties
Composed of laughter, hope and lies.

The, the gentling winds of time
Fickle winds, which hold designs.

24.
Live deeply.
Laughing should be as soul searing as tears
and our tears should banish both hope
and untimely surrender to the hazards of life.
Live completely,
touch with your mind all that is.

25.
Written for Ted, March 25, 1999 in response to doggerel he sent. Fun!
It rains, it pours, the sheeting storm
Reproves the fates and I curl, warm,
into the comfort of my bed
This a thing that glads my head.

IQs so low they shock, appall
But turn men off?
No, not at all.
A rare man, yes, wants brains in love
But most, prefer bland, brainless doves
To murmur, yes, and more, and now
Nymphotic fantasies endowed
With sizes "D", and brains well cowed.

26.
Never do I squeeze the fruit
When I shop, and touch and look
I only stroke to judge it ripe
Ready to carry home and bite

27.
Giving is a wondrous thing
Gladness making, slaking, keen
To multiply the joy on Earth
Goddesses gave life through birth.

28.
Nature's Law misunderstood
Cycles, dancing, all are good
Living within vested thought
This, the law, most oft forgot.

29.
You play, and warp in song wrapped thought
This, patinaed, flail you wrought
To idle in the halls of time
Finding raptures, pure, sublime.

30.
Y2k cannot reprove
When your actions must improve.
Knees, remember, hearts take hold
Savor then, this touch of gold.

31.
Boswell, languished, fenced and strode
Among those giants, lightly known
Who spoke the silvered truth of time
Fraught with magic, warping, mined

Through years unfurled into today
With winsome messages delayed.

We see, we touch, yet fail to know
The things that only time can show.
In time all things will be displayed
This the truth that might dismay.

32.
There is no death, no shadowed place,
where, extinguished, souls cannot be traced
By the long, fond folds of tender time,
finding them, in place sublime.

She sheds the certainty of needs
Known and harbored, made her free
To incite new thoughts, new paths of mind
Shattered patterns, build new kinds.

Love remakes us, renewed and whole
And captures every moment, owned
That melts into the promised hopes
Enlarging every part and scope.

33.
Lollipops of sugared thought
Which rapture tongue and havoc wrought
On furnishings, the least sublime
In meltings of the icky kind

Smell of newness, soon worn off
Crisp, taut odor forbidden thoughts
Dustballs in the unplaces move
In eddied currents, which reprove

When play could tease, consume our thoughts
The slightest follies, discovered, taught
The newest naughtiness we learned
To use again, each in our turn.

Licking on the self-same pop
The last lick wins the thinnest drop

34.
Tanya is happy, yes,
Unthreatened by the snarling car
Untroubled by things as they are
Untouched by raptured, Cosmo's dreams
Unrequited, and unseen

Glad to be your closest friend
And know the you that fancy sends
On trips of commentaried thought
Into what is, or is not.

Abra stashes quick killed prey
In the places that dismay
Pouncing on the motes of mind
That reflect your state of mind
Claws, a tremble to taste heat

35.
Spinning words, iconic tunes
Wrought in fractious, mind made runes
Delights which sizzle, light and smile
The sure rewards that must beguile.

Share this pass time, yes we do
Silly savants, telling trues

Makes us merry, makes us laugh
To jiggle, wiggle, tickle, craft
Wording pictures which take flight
To the mind ward sides delights

Words, the symbols, forged by thought
Weave and wander in the mind
Imprinting us, by what we wrought
To passions shallow and sublime.

We share this game, in cyber-time
Linking us through worded signs.

36.
Children's play, a serious thing
Tracing what the world will be
When time, the metronome of age
Informs the child in living's wage

Forever is a long, long view
Moments strung in long lines though
The past to present, future scenes
That when detected are still unseen

The mastodons of ages past
Trampled only when we asked.

Playing, saying, speaking, spoke
This, the fantasy we invoke
But weaving words with tensiled touch
That reprove the premised, crusted thrust

Here the place in cybered thought
Where horns, and thorns and pixies haunt
Shallowed only in the mind
That laps in liquid space sublime

To dance beneath the moon of time
Shatters patterns, stilled in kind.


37.
Tickling is what ticks will do
When squeezed between this one or two
But silent, not the tender tick
Yammers on, complaining quick

Ticking clocks will also toll
When captured by unlikely goals
Waking slumber, minding times
When those encumbered lose their minds

38.
Lust for living , lust for flesh
Lust, the raptured, shattered jest
That steals our sense, our minds and hearts
Preys on sanity, imparts

The Needing, Wanting, Hungered greeds
That empty echo which yearns to feed
On kisses, touches, silken skin,
This, the sheeted game of men.

39.
Bells will toll with endless goals
While skin will tender and extol.
Ears still hear
if minds are clear

40.
Sleep in shadows, nature's toll
For making life your self-same goal
A lust for living can grow thin
When playful follies remake and twinge

41.
I play with you most every night
Giving quickened, epic light
to the source of these poetic flights

Dancing to iconic dreams
That, written, bid delight to tease

Touched with words, I have been, true
Is writing them a task for you?
Words flow and gush and rush from me
Never stopped by thought or grief.

They come, unbidden, night and day
Rapture filling, inviting play
I've written them through all my life
Shadowed shards of love and strife

I live in that electric place
Of words devising, knowing, grace
Deep inside the me of time
I write divining the sublime

Thus, for me its always been
Words, symbolic, collect of when
And where and what I do
Written, summoned here for you.

42.
Embraces lead to those delights
That rapture, join and thus incite
Those thus drawn into the heat
To give themselves up to their needs

Danger lingers in that cusp
For love is binding, seared with lust
Danger languishes, extoles
The banished echoes thus enrolled

Remember this when drawn to touch
And pause before the cost of lust.

43.
April 3
Lust, the primal drive that feeds
Life's continued need to breed
Is out of phase with much we know
That speaks to life of other goals

But love, the spark of human thought
Resides, incites, and cures drought
that need internal, owned and long
That speaks to heart of spirits song.

Blended with remembered heat
Passions that meet al our needs.

44.
Hugging speaks to human needs
To be held close, returned and known
To Mother heart, that made us free
When we felt fragile, lost alone

Hugs remind us, speak in tones
Of arms and warmth that cherish, show
The place in mind we know as home
Reigniting life's first glow

This, the harbor of the hug
Perfect statement of first love.

45.
Acceptance, hugs and searing truth
Reside in us, align our days
Resonate and call us home
From places where our minds have strayed

Home, the always inner peace
That sustains, remains, maintains and keeps
The never thought, abandoned grief
That kills the will and sheers belief.

Hugs that heal, love distilled
Hold our bodies, mend our will.

46.
Dreams
Dreams that drive and bend and make
The world we live in, feelings slake

Dreams that tantalize, revise
The places that we seldom touch
Because we've let ourselves forget
The passages we must regret

Feelings, maps in which we live
Limiting the choices, give
And take, select and know,
The time eternal, chances grow.

47.
Passages through time and place
Define, refine with mind wrought grace
Power's hold on what will be
In the cusp of fate's dark seas.

Did we meet, in body, mind?
Seeking wisdom, ancient source
Did we set this time bent course
To meet again cleansed of remorse?

When Isaiah's spoken voice
Reverberated, shifted course
Choosing one of many paths
Did we know and truly grasp?

Promised place of soul's divining
Visioned first in ages past
One course chosen, hopes resigning
This, the only path at last.

Truth from one within the sight
Of banished rapture, cleansed with light.

48.
Reaching

We reach and stretch again through time,
defining who and what we are
Banished paths we do not walk,
banished thoughts we don't employ.

The dance of life, the soul-joined coils
That bring us joy and sear and roil

The changing, changed, the same removed
And still, for most, leaves nothing proved

The dance, though given to all eyes
Is singular in every guise.

And love and lust, both joined and lone
Remind and ache with need born song.

49.
Dedication

I dedicated thought and touch,
Mind and memory, life and needs
In time past knowing, granted, joined
That all becoming is still just me.

Searching finds what was not lost
Finding binds with wit-born jest
Never count the dear paid cost
The boon, bright chalice of the quest.

What is lost is well repaid
When time, reminds and has its say

Thanks for clearing, knowing words
That never spoken still are heard.

50.
Words ripple, stipple roil weep
inside my mind, enjoined to heed
The raptured messages they bear
Shattering all my despair

Messaged echoes of what I know
When I allow myself to show
The coiled, living, mindmade truths
That subsume my self as living proof

Woods of wonder, warming flowers
That express unrest and joyous hours
Hugs that banish all despair
Worded touched sent with care.

Friends that speak in cyberspace
Telling tales erase all space.

51.
Later in the Day

Laughter scented, winded tones,
that silken silence before the moan
When time, the harbinger of light
loses self in mind-caught flight

Winter closes with a sigh
that leaves untold the reasons why
Idylled magic lives within
the minds of those we know as friends

52.
Plastic candy's nice to chew
when nothing else will really do
Crunchy stuff with no real taste
Give us appetite for haste

Wiggles win attention, teach
What mindward thought are there to reach
Watch the wiggles, enjoy their heat
And ring the bell of times defeat.

As elephants parade and pose
Telling of what no one knows.


53.
We touch the face of God unseen
by forgetting self and space's sheen
That illusion of time's unsaid lies
that knowing only flat denies
That life is woven, time warped in
life is chosen by each again
When the joining thoughts converge
and give the soul the Earthward urge.

Know that all the unmade ages
Link us back to unnamed sages


54.
Tanya touches all she knows
and thus responds to mindward gnosis
The sweet, low hum of distant honing
Possible are not yet showing

This the time of her long awe
Ending when she is less raw.

Stroke with eyes, and mind and this:
The tender yes that speaks of bliss.

55.
Echoes can touch or score and rend
Delight the senses, savage, rage
The difference in the kind and bent
Written on each life made page

Good and evil, merely words
That express subjective, human views
Of forces which play out the chords
Of songs now music in Earth's sinews

From cataclysm, ages long
to minute change in minor cleft
Each weaves in its shard of song
And each then finds its tiny death

Winning is subjective, too.
The only medal's coiled, true
And only Earth, symphonic whole
Remains in place as virtue's goal.

56.
Plastic gives the mind more scope
to manufacture magnitudes and kinds
of things that light the hearts of folks
Whose poverty would else them bind

57.
When leaves fall soundless to the earth
A cat may play and roll and jump
The always of delight's first birth
Makes serious work a sodden lump

58.
Bugs may flee and find resort
But Abra'll eat them in the end
You need not scold or yet exhort
Abra shares with all her friends.

59.
The Inner Friend must always speak
In words that pierce our first beliefs
For fear is just a thought away
from the truth, "Please, not today."

The dead are clothes, we've taken off
And put aside to be recycled
The essential 'they' are not forgot
But mourned, for all the ways beguiled

But all ends are also death
Death are passaged, counted marks
The metronome that counts our breaths
And knows the moment we'll depart

60.
The Health Department, managed thing
That harbored roadkilled, savaged death
Is in the past that all time brings
Wide the path and great it's breadth.

Important is a state of mind
Determined by our sated thoughts
Important lists of varied kinds
And tells the watcher what we sought

61.
Unerased the space is cleared
unelected delights the savant ear
New things evade the well-worn pose
That seldom says and hardly knows

Great abundance, reprieves from greed
That can't be sated or taught or freed

Good cheer should be your heart-close friend
Given to you to amend
The trammelled life your soul has lead
Divining paths that can't be tred.

Flesh won't falter, eyes won't close
Until you've done the things you chose.

62.
A short love letter
Bodies cradle worlds entire,
interactive, lit by fire,
burnt through time from ages dead,
Their long becoming still unsaid

Joy is written, rapture sought
That time
might twine
with what was wrought

And that in some dimensioned place
Time might ease and grant us grace.

63. The Endurance of the Dandelion

The dandelion is like the will to be free
It springs up when boots stomp
Ripped from the Earth it replants itself,
mending its injuries without complaint.
Where ever their is light and air and water.
It endures the long ache of oppression
It sucks up the sparest sustenance, refusing to die
It breeds true to its form, rejoicing in the
simple heat of the sun and the touch of air.

Sending out shoots and seeds in joyous abandon.
It refuses death and parades its pride in golden bursts of flower.
It defies the plans of the powerful, asserting its own life as true.

The dandelion is like the will to be free.
Not invited, it takes its place in time and space
Defying destiny it lives on past expectation

The flower of freedom is the dandelion
Because the dandelion chooses for itself.
Choose. Be a Dandelion.

When I was young and older than time.

1. Ode to Identity

I

am myself
No image, no reflection, no excuse
I am myself
I live and think and make
Take the day for what it is
Take the night for what it gives
I am myself
Born to be unsure and striving
Born to vanquish dark and lying
Born to cry and suffer pain
Born to live and become sane.
I am myself
Denying nothing I have felt.

(Written in 1984)

2. From the Shadow of Tomorrow

This narrow room that binds my dreams to sorrow.
And sends their echos down the stream of time.
To catch in all the crannies of tomorrow.
So that I may pay for all my unseen crimes.

And so, accepting each fell day in numbered sequence.
I walk the path I set before myself.
Refusing to hold back the Love that lends it meaning
Or moving to avoid the things I've felt.

For pain is not the deadly end of knowing,
And Love has tempered fate to let me bear,
The agony I hesitate on showing,
As well as all the laughter sheltered there.

I walk alone in evenings broad awakening
To taste the pleasure lying there for the taking.
(Written in high school, 1967)

3. Time’s Twin Who isn’t Seen

Times twin has shored up shorter lives than mine
Causing them to ripple out in different ways
Where before they echoed on in thoughtless kind
The Twin has multiplied the passing days

For I am not exactly as I was before
The Twin called my attention to the change
Because I had not seen what questing held in store
I could not feel the agony that is not pain

But now I do.
I have looked past the complexities to find
The inner shrine.
(1984)

4. A Star

I'm walking toward my own fast star of destiny
And shadows echo out of gloom
And brightness beckons me to climb
The lonely mountain
The silence whispers

Peacefully, the moments slip behind
Each foot must place its self
Strongly on the road whose end I fear to see.
(1968)

5. A Response to Kipling in Kind

Males are strong and braver than
The female half of species Man
They stand instead of lending feet
To well thought out and tight retreat

Only man will stand in place

Risking death before disgrace
Could it be that in that space
Behind that hard and rugged face
Are gonads, simply out place?
(1982)

6. Shackling Cold

I have been cold
With the strained and lonely shadows
of your words unsaid.

I have turned away to find the self
I had denied
And left these precious parts of me aside.

So let it pass
For I have come to know it cannot last.
Let tolerence persist
And let me find the strength to not resist
Your hold

Until my love of life turns cold
And the shadows are less bold.

For this is what you are to me
You are myself, my heart, my soul,
my smile in the face of all adversity

And if I could reach out and change this cusp
in time I wouldn't move
And love is thus within me proved.

(1985)

6. Self-Changing

Patterns in the water changing endlessly as me
Becoming something else and yet the same
Reflecting living's essence I grow strong inside my mind
Rejecting all the visions of myself that others made.

I build upon the central core
The only living me.
I check the hard foundations without end
Reinforcing and refining the one who I would be
By finding out just what it is
That makes this being me.

Living through the anger and remembering the shame
I close on my beginnings and the spaces that remain
And I fight with quiet surity to break each link of chain
That bound me to a past that was the cause of all my pain

And in breaking out of anger and in severing the bonds
I have found that in becoming truly me

I have been freed.

(1985)

7. A Book Once Read

Will I not be?
When all the pages have been turned
Will the cover close on me?
Is it possible?

Isn't life an endless, twisted path;
For I remember being here before.
My mind has ventured out to touch the truth of it
And tapped the source of knowing with surprise.
So, I accept the interruptions
Find them good.
I will not let them interfere

With the central quest- that is more me
Than my body or my fear.

(1968)

8. A Freely Given Gift

I will always render you the gift of truth
There is no charge for it.
The cost was paid the day I came to love myself
And to forgive,
The kind of life I've forced myself to live

But truth is not a gift without a cost to you.
I think you'll find
You pay for it each day.
Because you must enlarge on it
and give it back In kind.

(1981)

9. Pride

Because I'm proud of me
I celebrate
Because the values I reflect in life

Have often led to strife
between us two
I mourn for you.

Because the you I see
wants complete control of of me.
And none of you you's trust.
The me's to do what's just.

And you know the bottom line?
The me's let you everytime.

(1980)

10. Do Not Assume

There is no price that virtue will not pay
to encompass the knowledge most assume
And see that knowing held by light of day
Can cancel out the fearful shades of doom.

To know yourself as sovereign is to say
That nothing else has relevance to life
And armed thus nothing in our lives can fray
The constancy to self that cancels strife

For peace is not the absence of all living
The inner strife can focus of just ends
And tempered metal's born from base beginnings
For at that point the journey just begins

To see this vision born of essance makes us real
The sovereign man is not afraid
And on this hardened base our soul is laid.

(1982)

11. A Moment Lingering in Memory

(When I was living in Rome as a teenager I was almost struck by lighning that came through an arch of the colosseum and hit the ground within 20 feet of me. The image was so compelling I went home and wrote this that night.)

The night rains wet and cold upon my head
The lightning sears the grass blades on the ground
One white-flash-sword days the night
And holds my eyes and heart and scars my memory
There it stands, piled like a devils maze
Ghost silver in the still-born Day.
Curves piled on curves, jagged it lies
A broken hero in the light

While thunder sings its hymn
And Still-born day returns to night.

(1965)

12. The Distant Blue

You can forget Distance covers all with shadowed blue
And memory can thus be masked in gentler hues.
The scenes are less distinct
And the words are rearranged
Until their metamorphis eases pain.

This is what you'll see
If this is what you'll have it be.

But if you hanker after change
And dispise the weakness in yourself
That cannot deal with pain
- Then you'll remember.
(1994)

13. Cycle Accepted

My flesh is grass
It wavers greenly on the undulating hills
And echos down into the canyons.
It's lushness flushes deeper
In along the rivers bank
And winnows out to nothing

On the dusty plains.
Watching as the twilight flickers through the fields
I see myself part of this whole;
Taking out my life's blood from the grass.
I live prepared to give it back.

(1968)

14. On Carol’s Dying

Silence holds me close tonight
and echos down in past my bones
Reaching to the inner self
I call my home

This peace, this silence
Stranger now
I welcome back.
The thrashing sorrows have emptied me

I have met death.

Not as before - a distant messanger to someone else.
But something cutting close to self.

I've felt the pall of misery
That pulls the blue skies down.
Sorrows had me by the throat
And pulled me toward the ground.

I've been engulfed in quiet agony

And emptiness;
His chilling hands have clutched at me.

Regretting words that passed my lips
In anger bred.
But most of all The words of love

Now left unsaid.
But silence breeds it's own release.

My shell-shocked soul has found its peace.
Love walks with me beyond the grave
I judged myself and then forgave.

(1974)

15. Lonely Moments

If I could lay the lonely moments end on end
And measure out their length in metered time.
The days thus spent in desperate quest
Of meaning might weigh with me less.
But time and truth is only as it is.
And lies cannot deny

The lonely hours sealed behind these eyes.

(1972)

16. Soaring

To be myself.
To soar on wings of pride and self-esteem.
To leave behind this shell of shattered dreams
To exchange the might-have-beens
for What-will-bes

By becoming with a vengence
Most truly - me.

(1982)

17. Silent Guns

There's rust-red violence in the sky today
The shadow-mountains lick away at purpling clouds
Excitement rustles in among the trees
And frees the night wind from the day's embrace.
The evening rushes in to mount its guns along the far horizon
Then to shoot the silvered stars into the darkening sky.

And watching this I sit and wonder why

The echoed song of someone's voice
No longer empties out my joy into remorse.
Distance has now killed the blast of sorrows claim
And left my cleansed of feeling that for a while maimed
Then strengthened

Like a vaccination against a worse disease.
Once when the moon dish wandered through the sky
I only thought of him
Now thought is dry
And other thoughts race madly through my mind.

So, like a hundred million other men I wait
The dawn of that unquestioned Sun
That stills the guns

And hovers on the plains of battle
Quiet beneath its wings
Not looking back to lesser fate
But on to that sun-drenched alpine zenith that

I've yet to make.

(1967)

18. A Day in the Life of....

This day is gray.
It looms leadenly like a down-turned cup
Enclosing me in cold and rain.
It's edge can cut me to the bone
With sickle-cold wind and restless clouds.

I have looked up, now I look down.
To see the earth, refreshed and clean.
The source of life, and all my dreams.

(1968)

19. Home Remembered

I always knew there'd be no going home.
A person grows past need of things like that.
Yet summers shining promise hit me in the face today
And I knew I needed home past reasoning.
I cry for it, abandoned, frightened, sick
And in my need no answer summons out of sense.

So I need home.

That space where I knew life's own terrors
And all the dark intensity of shapeless fear.
Always in the distant haze it loomed
A promise never reached - but always there.

Harsh and chastening; But always mine.
Now gone.
In one day wrenched from my own soul.

I sit here naked to the world
So friendless and so cold.

(1972)

20. The Rider

His hooves cut clay.
The animal between my thighs
Echos out into the light of autumn's day.
The horse's stride intensifies
And my body bends
To ease our passage through the wind.

The wind runs fingers through my hair
And the misted morning cleanses me of all my cares.

I have discovered freedom.
The movement of my body has no bounds,
It rejoices in the glory of the power it has found.

All is ease.

The balance has been struck between the two.
The body that is trained
And the knowledge that has congelled inside my brain.

These few minutes have distilled for me
All the things that mind and muscle can be made to be.

(1986)

21. Even-Call Pause

The quiet melts about my ears
Like waxen candles carried in the night.
And stillness sinks into my soul
And stalks my worries down.

The silence slips softly up about my ears
Tucking in the blanket round my face.
Mystically the darkness shelters all
Arching up protectively across my bed.

Then rest.
Oblivious to outside stimuli
I breath my best.

And curling up into the darkened sheets
I sleep.

(1966)

22. Solitude

I am alone in this dark water tomb
Enclosed on all sides by hateful walls
I am bound close to my fate
And cannot escape
It's parasite-like grasp

I've been here too long to remember
From where I came

And my one desire is escape
From this shrinking well
Of tearing night

I am being squeezed close

The fire pain comes again.
Harder now I go to death
Or is it something else?

(1966)

23. All Ends to Glory

I want to see the glory ride again
I want to sense the magic of a morning spell
As power warps its way up glowing
In the silent light of Earth-fires whispered dawn

All ends to glory.

As the fountain spurts its peeling
Water up into a statue
To the wills of those of power

Joined together for a cause.

To fight for glory.
The blood-red battle calls
to something deep within us all

And the thing responds with fervor
For the love of life, the love of self, and glory.

To leave with glory.

Even as the darkness winds around the head
All other meanings pall
And the single, loving, lasting thought

That sums it up and echos on
To those who know
I lived in glory.

(1966)

24. A Darkened Cave

If I could just escape into tomorrow

And leave my yesterdays in some dark cave

Not to remember the forge that pound me

Into this piece of leaden stuff

That will not let me reach beyond today

Then I would feel the dawn of all the well-content

And wallow in the fullness of a life not dreamt

And yet, what holds me is the memory of my own clay

My beginnings, locked in me onward from the womb

Will ever overshadow 'til the day they arch across me

As a tomb.

(1967)

25. An Unimagined Light

Listening, wondering, watching, fear

Steady danger drawing near

Stomach taut with horrors thrust

Day is old with hours rust

Intellect has shrunk behind

Wisdom of another kind

Consciousness returns to show

The light that I had ceased to know.

(1967)

26. Breath taken Alone

My body seemed to make itself a part

Of all the things that shaped that day for me

Even at this distance I can't say

Where sky began and left my body free

Motion seemed to slow the very hours

And my lungs responded to the change

To swell and take the sweet air into them

To pause to breathe, and pause to live again.

The sun distilled the smells out of the air

And bathed me with perfume of pine and earth

The breezes blew the hair out of my face

And kissed me with the newness of their birth

And looking past the pines above my head

I saw the blue sky mottled white with clouds

Bringing back the things I'd left unsaid

Knowing, that once spoken, where they led.

I let my thoughts evade the central truth

Giving as excuse my ageless youth.

(1980)

27. Climbing Rainbows

I've stolen back the freedom to climb rainbows

From the jealous god of promises not made

Because I know the cost of it is long since paid

And I could not have my travels once again delayed

So come with me and share the silent smiles

As we go on journeys that can't be marked in miles

(1981)

28. Hesitation

If I can tarry in this lonely portal

Yet one more night

Prehaps I can be saved

But if fortune tells me to bear on

I'll rush to cross my Rubicon.

(1966)

29. Always Looking

I've spent my life in seeking things

That I have never found

But the looking has been something

That has set me on firm ground

For I now have set my compass

On a very different course

And the values that were foreign then

Have been my guiding force

I saw that all the goodness

That I thought

Was buried in some strange and lonely spot

Existed all the time before my eyes

Behind a face that struggles with its lies.

(1993)

30. My Lady Love

She waits beside a vast expanse of water

Her hand holds up the light of living day

And never will the justice in Her falter

And never will Her seekers lose their way

For justice is not made in court opinions

And truth is not defended at the polls

As into living rock we drive the pinions

That hold the deathless thoughts that are our goals

Does Justice need the heart of Her defender?

Will Her loving message echo into time?

Will our children's children yet remember

That those who cherish liberty are one kind

Liberty cannot be won - and never lost

Remember what it is and not the cost.

(Written in challenge to a duel of sonnets with Craig Franklin, 1983. He lost, but he will always lose. There is no poetry in his soul. )

31.

A Sonnet Written in Challenge

She stands beside a darkened mass of sorrow

A distant hope of freedom in our lives

A hope that may be realized tomorrow

If we can only pledge ourselves to strive

That promise has been built into our futures

And forged in blood before our mother's birth

In knowledge that the cost can not be counted

Except by minds that understand it's worth

So watch the Lady with her lamp upholding

Salute her in your mind, if nothing else

For her pledge of hope is given us for molding

And each of us must do it for ourselves

The Lady is a promise we have made

And freedom is the value we must save.

(Written in challenge to a duel of sonnets with Craig Franklin, 1983. Craig kept rewriting his poem for the next several years. He still lost. If you can't do it in five minutes then you should hang up your pen. )

32. To My Daughter, Carolyn, now dead to me

I love you.

There is no range or boundary to my cherishing.

I love you now, as I did before - and as I will.

Time out of mind

On and never varying.

(1972)

33. Note of A Political Nature to Chris Hocker

Privily speak I of promises well made

For I would have you know I them remember

For pen to paper thus I put - for so you bade,

And hearing thus your words could I malinger?

You said that you would give me many wonders

For papers writ with wisdom good and clear

That Clark did read to parry many blunders

Of policy when run he did last year.

And murmured you of booklets that you wrote

Designed to teach my candidates of things

That will make them yet less clumsy with the votes

And credit to the cause of freedom bring.

So find the stuff - tout suite, and make it fast!

For I needed it all months ago, you ass!

(1979)

34. To My Son

The door is open.

And through it walks my son.

Out into the night

Away from me.

(1976)

35. The Child

He was a child

Loving colors that explode

And holding life in both his hands

Not afraid to lose

What he did not understand.

He was a child

Forcing patterns on the sand

Accepting nothing as it stands

He wants to know the things

That others are afraid to see

He seeks to understand

To be able just to know

Why everything is so.

A quiet child

He feels the power of his mind

Joined like music with his soul

Making beauty out ofthings

That shine with ordinary rings.

A hungry child.

But inside his growing brain

Lives reason - born again

Crystallizing into being

And breaking out of bonds

Cutting through the veil that shrouds

Raising up and blooming out

Not satisfied with what he is today

He will soon become a man.

(1968)

36. I’ve Always Loved You

It's never been as though I didn't care.

Even when it didn't seem as if I could

I've always tried to do the best for you

And a day has never risen up and fallen down

When hopes for you from me haven't echoed out of mind.

My arms have ached for all the times I haven't held you

My eyes have cried until they throbbed their pain into my head.

I've wondered how you've grown.

And if your friends are nice to you, and you to them.

I'd like to ask if quiet can invade your soul

If you think of things beyond yourself

And days long past next week.

I wish it had been different for us both.

And if all my wishing could have made it so.

I never would have let you go.

(1979)

37. Question of Identity

I am the cusp

I am the storm

I am the darkness of the night

I come as shadow

Cling with murmurs

Leave in newborn light

Not a presence

But an absence felt

Too often let remain

My flesh engulfs you

Laces through you

Twining into you with pain

Often known but never spoken

Feared, denied, and then locked out

Keys and tears will never hold me

There can be no Redoubt.

My name forbidden

Will stay hidden

As echos down a hall

Seeping even creeping

My very mention is your pall.

Some embrace me as a lover

Fearing more to live without

To those I cleave with ardor

Their craven fear has

Locked life out.

(1967)

38. Triumph

I want to laugh and dance and cry and sing.

I want to let the feeling

Building up inside my frame

Pour out to form

A silver fall of shining rain.

I am gladness

I am the effervescent bubbles in champagne

I am every man who cried to find release

From ecstasy so great it left no peace.

(1978 - For LP ballot drive.)

39. Frozen Moment

Despot sun reigns over tide.

Small fish duck under rocks to hide

Fire falls hungry to the earth.

The foam is valued at its worth.

Wind strike screams at top of lungs

Flashing off their soundless guns

Quiet lover laughs at wind

Changing what he wants to bend.

Silver gilt on small fish shines.

Wanting what they left behind.

Fearing yet to hold again.

Frightened even to begin.

(1966)

40. Benediction

I wait for autumn every year.

Eager as a lover is

To taste the beauty of her lips.

For I remember wind through

Falling leaves and a sudden touch of winter chills.

I love the morning air that never quite gives way

To the warmer haze that plaqued me of a summer's day.

I walk through conscious every day

Of fulfillment spelled so many ways.

And when sated with sensation I turn and see

The symbols autumn yearly writes anew for me.

The harvest, earned and taken from the earth;

The sweat turned into living proof that labor is the source of worth

Creation, mind, and value’s birth.

I breath it in and relish all.

The fall of leaves to me becomes

The laurel of a battle fought, and bravely, won.

(1985)

41. The Dragon

The dragon does not see the far horizon

He lives to suck to yolk out of the egg

And though widely spread is he in all his powers

Narrow is the path before him laid.

He finds echos in the lower planes of battle

And does not see the stars above his head.

For all his force is given to his proving

And for that end his kind is finely bred.

So find yourself emblazoned as the lion.

The dragons badge of honor can't refuse

As sinews twist and strain affirm you victor

The dragons stealth denys that he can lose.

Knowing self endows the age-old shield

Knowing dragon-self you needn't yield

(1980)

42. Dragon’s World

Dragons are escaped from this world

Of things that wax material in the light

They have retreated into sleepless waiting

To bring their winged shadows back from night

They wait to see a turn from things electric

To values lit by waxen candles glow

And do you now wait also for their coming?

And do you seek the mysteries that they know?

(1980)

43. A Cry from the Darkness of Time

I loved you thus before the dark unwinding

Of time had rendered up the message of Your birth

And thus before my heart had quit its beating

I saw in you the Savior of the Earth.

And so I bound myself for time uncounted.

To give You all the strength that I possess

The little Babe who laid in home-spun weaving

Taught me to understand my soul is blessed.

And in giving up the Self I thought was me

I found that in exchange that I was free.

(1967)

44. Poppies

Red flowers clash hard with green grass

Brass poppies grow

Row on row

Crying over sun-death

Laughing at the moon-tide

Whipping nerves of men to hide the name

Bright, innocent they are

Bringing evil to the bar.

All innocent.

(1968)

45. Natal Wishes

I wish you pleasure in the everyday

Occurances that fill your life

And the perpetual newness of things often tasted

as well as those untouched.

May you grow to fulfill your capacity for loving

And in the growing come to know yourself completely

(1986)

46. I Am The Wind

I would soar lightly in among the clouds

Letting the carressing wind

cleanse my skin

I am one with this

I am the wind

Bending all and stretching thin

Suspended in a timeless breath of finely stretched intensity

I am the clouds

That look up

In thunderheads of power

Rolling past plains and valleys

Radiating out their blinding strikes of light

Dissolving self back into rain

In cycles unattached to pain.

And I am man

Who sees all with eyes that

Measure time in miles

And journies in transcendent memories

I have learned to see and feel and think and be.

Past singularity

To Self

And I am wind, and rain and clouds.

Encompassed; all; and without doubt.

(1969)

47. Close Friend

To you who touch my quiet core of being

And understand the echos from my soul

With eyes that speak to me and let me grow

You stand with me and know I'll love you always

That the bond we've forged between us served to share

The strength of each when one is grieved or lonely

And would retreat into himself in grave dispair.

Let this mark its memory on you

Love binds us, makes us one instead of two.

(1985)

48. Leaves of Death

My address book holds leaves of death

Names made dust

Memories that live in thoughts grown fainter by the day

The ink is fading

Becoming musty blue from vibrant black

My eyes release them from the page to wander in my memory

Carol's electric blue glance pierce the years

Her laughter, harsh and unforgiving, echos in my ears

I see my mother

reaching out to touch me; wishing there was strength to love

When she feared to even live

Bob

A country western hero

Riding the mustang of honor to

MacDonalds for a Big Mac

No bluster, no pretense, no cynic

Just love, ready to give the substance of yourself

without question.

Stan is there

Alive with hopes and dreams of times that

Slipped through his fingers

Never tasted, never broached

A ephemeral wonder

And Phil

Who lived within the circle of the world

as he knew it

Never afraid

Respectful of justice and honor

Doing right with an automatic grace

Father

Your eyes revealed the child

That your life was bent to hide

You were a gentle soul

Stalwart in purpose

Passionate for truth

A quiet lover of the small gestures that matter

Anne

Your call tolled death, time and time again

That was the most I had of you

Death and death until the end.

You danced into the light

winding ribbons, pink and blue, as your spirit left my sight

In death I was not sister but your friend.

The passing years have taken them

enveloped in the darkness eyes don’t pierce

Hands don’t touch.

Taken and still here,

fading blue, untouchable, but touched.

(Written for those I loved who had died. 1995)

49. Truth & Conscience

Time has swollowed lives without a ripple

Leaving only emptiness and fear

Time can touch you only it you tremble

To lose what is not yours to take from here.

We breath to live and love and eat and wonder

We struggle to unlock the unknown truth

Taking as a given time will sunder

The search that must begin in our first youth

Retreat into oblivion if you must

Life is what we have - and it is just.

(1996)

50. A Short Commentary on the Justice of Nature

Nature is becoming

Never finished; never perfect; never wrong.

The Earth breathed fire

Water sizzled

Steam arose

The crusted, tortured, new-born skin

Crackled, folded, sulked and cooled

Water fell, trickled, flooded

Seas grew, a droplet at a time

One joining one unnumbered and unknown

The Earth Breathed, steady and slow

Wind waxed and stippled water, turned stone to sand

No movement, but light became life

The Earth Breathed

Slow, regular and steady

They came from the nothing

That is the Breath

of Earth

Filling Sea;

Cloaking Land

Colors crowding the mountains, touching the plains

A multitude of living things

Breeding, fighting, birthing, dying

And then gone, forgotten

Bones yellow and breaking into dust

Some fraction impressed in stone

Most erased without a trace

The Earth Breathed on.

Each life mingling in what was

For just a tiny fraction of a moment

A blink of eternity in

Their Long Forever

Mountains stretching tall

Recede and fall

Earth’s face changed and yet the same

The Earth breathed on, steady and strong

The threads of life reach forward into time

As life remakes itself, struggling to survive

Straining muscle, testing will, changing and changed

Time is long, and life short

And always, as the struggle wages war, winning, waning and worn

the Earth breathes on.

(Written in 1996)

51. Birth Song

Buried in grief

Shackled and owned

For slowly bleeding

Generations

Uncounted and unknown

Now.

Emerging

Into Light

Gaining Sight

Hungry for

Possibilities

Untasted and untried

No longer cramped, Restricted

Deformed and bound

Life inflicted

Face forced down

The Woman Dreams

A life distinct

Her life her own -

With all lives linked

Released from Pain

head upraised

Hands unclenched

Child regained

Future bought

With Truth Rethought

Eyes that see

Air to breathe

Lungs that fill

With Sacred Will Stretching, testing

Knowing, making

The Goddess waking

Joyous, still.

Hands caress

Lips poised to bless

Mother & Earth:

The Spirit’s Birth

(1997 - for the Women’s Box project)

52. Time’s hands

(Written in the lost hour of October 26 - 27, 1998)

Turn back the clock of minutes, days

Turn it back and let me gaze

On those I loved another time

Let my griefing ease their minds

Harsh and glaring my repreive

Locked and failing my disease

Turn back the hands of guiltless time

Turn back the clock to seal my crimes

Committed in that shadowed place

Where memories reside with grace

That I have loved is not enough

What I have learned become reproof

Times hands are just and live with me

Slow cadenced metronome of banished dreams

Clamors to remind my heart

That no one ever really parts

Death; illusioned judgement gives

The Soul, the Self can’t cease to live.

September 28, 1998 10:43 p.m.

53. Dedicated to Craig Franklin and Morgan Pillsbury

- Two unsouled beings trapped in Self

I have been ground and milled out fine

For the least of my unmentioned crimes

For I refused to see the truth

And this crime stole all of my youth

I’ve been smashed and ripped apart

The substance fractured in my heart

Because I would not see the light

My soul was banished into night

I have lost all I worked to make

And ventured for my children’s sake

Punished for what I would not see

The ugliness engulfing me.

I found a home in his embrace

A sheltered place of measured grace

He battered my illusions then

He I thought an honorable man.

With nothing left inside of me

Empty, echoed, ravished, grieved

I stood up on my feet again

Felt life’s breath and said, amen.

54. Time Pauses

Anger drains away

Acknowledged, owned and known

Boil bursting

Easing hurting

Throbbing cools

peace renewal

Anger gives us self to learn

I use anger, fear and pain

To pinpoint needed change

Body wisdom

Spirit mind

show me where to use my time

Giving birth to Shadows death

I flow with peace and grace at last

it was an explosion of pain

The pain owned me and

I was consumed in it.

"Jimmy was good."

Hour after hour a small girl cried

Aloud, denying, lies and holding

"Jimmy was good, Jimmy was good

Jimmy was good, good good."

(Written for Women Together at the Unitarian Society. Reflecting remembrance of a traumatic childhood event.)