Dear Santa,

This year I turn
older, just like last,
so could I have a few more
porcelain years to place
on my granite mantel,
Hummel talismans to time?

Also, there are some things—well, lots—
that my teachers won't tell me.
Why does the grass grow and
stars shine and people
keep killing one other
amid the miracle?
Why do we always hide?
Are you and God related?

I can't understand
how air bathes the globe.
I can't understand the words scribbled in the sky.
I can't understand how death fits so firmly
in my hip pocket each morning.
So please help me shore up my defenses;
cast my soul in iron, my hope in brick,
plaster over my fear and mortar my faith,
teach me to see the empty fleeting nature
as a flitting bird in flight,
as a fact like a flower,
as a bowl of warm soup.
Teach me to be

Yours, Truly.

Where Are We Headed?

The hawk glides in place-
Effortless anchorage over
The strong summer wind
Barreling down the cliffs,
Lifted by nothing
But the air of the earth.

This is where we are
Supposed to talk about dreams,freedom,
Maybe God. This is the point, the rift
Where grandiloquent proclamations of hope
Seep in through a crack in the poem’s foundation
And collapse like wet cardboard
Under their own weight.

But maybe it’s best
Without all that?
Maybe this is just where the hawk stands
For himself, where the confluence of the universe
Who put him before me
And me behind him
Is enough, maybe this is
That part of our story:

A day that once would have been
Nameless, predestined at a point to be July,
Under relentlessly loving sun
Plants growing
A universe of their own
All around us.
This is where we are.

Summer Rain and Such Things

Flowers tickle the back of my neck
like cigar smoke, curling in
and out of me, blooming vanilla
and pearl, a scent so fresh
as the birthing of souls
it's almost enough to forget
the gauntlet that lies ahead,
the endless trap of the gray mundane;
Red alarm 6:15 glowing through the winter void
anxious lines for coffee that steal
my kindness like a fly in the gaping maw of venus
where our lives seem simple as cigarettes
in geologic time, regret and relaxation but
burning, always burning
down, it leaves me feeling
anorexic again at the table of life,
no communion, every line on the menu
a brand new way to be damned.
But no ink of despair is so dark
as to blot out the spin of our sphere,
and Heaven as the sky and not a mandate
turns ever around us,
and the only way to wash out stars
is light
and the crashing storm always opens
cloudless blue
opens again, to purple, to green
to all the layers that allow
grass, gods, bodies.
Grow.

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.

On Returning from Six Weeks Abroad

It is being born into a dream
who is strangely familiar.
It is forgetting and relearning
which key is the laundry room,
admitting you have no longer any use
for the skeletal subway map in your pocket
that held fast for so long the flesh of life
at one past corner in our flooding pool of time.
And you can't quite grasp the order of things
so your actions take on an air of superfluity,
an extra degree of difference, like ordering
another espresso just for the accompanying cookie
that they don't even have here.
In some cases, this sense of semi-permanence
may seep out in circles as ink in water
'til November days feel less autumnal and more like
Fall, as though the whole world was,
a playground at dusk,
emptying of its children.
But of course it is always
summer somewhere, though to hold this
in the mind's anxious eye
is like trying to track the flight of a single bird
the whole afternoon, which will render refulgent
the shadow-angle season change endlessly
conquering territory to frost,
retreating beneath May's bloom of birds.
It is choosing which old pain to forget
and which to wear like a soldier,
medals shining sun
resplendent scars
splaying soul
across Horizons
you're yet to see
but will

The 21st Century in Germany

The slow motion
forward, the creeping recognition who comes
sudden as the flood—like falling
out of love—your train has begun to move,
Boundless for Berlin. And in minutes
you've left Leipzig and her
soon to be ancient history
behind, concentrating only on
the white arms of what once were
called windmills, watching them
grasp wildly after something
they never fully reach
but always have.
In this way we are the same,
you and I, with our common language and hatred
of the times when only void flows through,
when the incorrigible heart and her allies
usher us only on
and never to.
But this is not now. Now
we are going back to Berlin, now
our only concern is the singularity of this
village road overpass we rumble across,
our only concern is who here knows
this small corner of being so well as
I know the walkway over US-441
4.3 miles from my childhood
home. Or at least that was
our only concern, before we were hit hard by the inscrutable
yellow brilliance of rapeseed in bloom,
flashing by like a plain of pure sun.
Hand in hand we bend our bodies into birds
and fly through the fields, breaking stems and stamens
as the pollen paints us
Gold.

That With Which We Name The World

When the seasons slip
Too fast like sand
Paper across our foreheads,
When our penumbra of pain crests to spill
Like a moon bleeding her dark light
Ink night all over our muted stars,
When the ever unassailable awareness of
That which will outlast us fires itself awake,
What else is left to do
But gather up our things
Write to those who need to know,
And sing?
Perhaps I retreat forever into the Transcendent,
Perhaps I am the only monk left chanting
To Myself in a once forgotten temple,
Perhaps the golden ice that drifts down in flakes
To shine the people and pavement
Alive is a myth, and comes not from heaven
But only from the tenuous delicacy
We call words.
Still all the questioning qualifiers can't
Pull the breath from my living lungs
Unless I command them out like marching soldiers,
Still my heartbeats will never be numbered,
Still the World sits as the trees breathe for us.