The History of Post-Medieval Love

If the body is a temple
For the mind
I could use a reformation,
Though the thought of theses
Nailed between my ribs unsettles me.
Still, I read somewhere in a book
It’s not the nail but the hammer,
It’s not the cross to bear but the witness
To the way the aurora is unspeakable,
Before we all supernova sometime
Out into our otherworldly light.
Yet despite the stars
My worst moments feel terrestrial
Godless, scarred all over with scorn
Like a poor man’s memory,
Like the August midnight hours
Awake, humid in our earthly autoclave,
Thrashing through black bedsheets of guilt
Until I calm at the penumbra of dawn
To open my heart to hope,
Nestling my head between pillowy prayers
And hollow doubt.

Dear You,

Under the Half Moon of the Almost Twilight, cream-blue sky
I looked at the flex of your body and thought,
We have such beautiful machinery,
Instruments of the Universe as we are.
But also that and how could I forget
My Instrumental Self was always programmed
To endeavor to show the Ultimate
Ephemeral Nature but Persistence of Love
in all things was my passion, my passion was
in all things, You saw the Great Coalition of Doubt
grayblack and shadow-edged, lurking in the abyss beneath
and through the retrospection
of the Time we are not thinking,
when we wrestle ourselves awake,
when will we dance?
when will we dance?

Cracks in the Compass?

Unless a raindrop contains the universe
The Way a map contains an atlas,
Differing in its essence without
We are lost.
Unless we all come to bear
Witness and hope and
Its essence within
We are doomed to decline
Down the tar-pits of time
and hesitation.
Where is the captain!?
Where is our firm voice through the spray
Barking orders to men
Who know but still hear
Their duty and place
In tongues already understood?
Even the oil painted boat with blue sails
That owned five years of this café wall
Was somehow sold to someone,
Leaving me in a familiar seat
Under an unfamiliar SOLD,
And as my coffee cools
The café radiates
Something that speaks
Of life as all impermanence,
New belonging.

"There are some things you still need to get."

No one tells you how or if
to trade the purity of longing
for the dull daily sting of certainty
either way.

But it says in the Great Book
that to grasp is pain
and to seize is crime
and to fly under-over clouds is at hand
but don't desire it.

And it says in the Great Anti-Book
that the ego can be an instrument
if you let it, let it
love with radical abundance.

Then there are the fringe groups
whose books are all embossed
in a language still waiting to be understood.
But even as I fold the fringes
into the endless center
and carry the pocket square of infinity above my breast

I still find myself out in the backyard
each day, walking through the rain water
to glide along the inexplicably green grass,
to trace the circumference of something
with my softly muddied feet,
to mark the point with a cross

section of breathing and movement and
time, this is where doubt starts seeping in,
like a cut under water
red wisps waft
and then, deeper,
for sharks.