White Men Dancing

They lost their rhythm
not their love
of the beat
that connects their feet
to the turning of the spheres.

Trying to find the time
the time
the time of the music
the time of the music that
poured treasure
into the ear and the feet
the feet
spoke clearly in response.

The talent took a turn
toward couples coupling couplets
toward symbols of love and marriage
and lifetime
of promises kept.

The tribe was forgotten
but still its voice pleads
pleads in the memory of eons
pleads to bequeath
the beat back to the feet.

The rhythm
the lovely rhythm pours
back into the heart that beats
that beats as one.

One tribe under the great Wheel of Heaven.

Empty Page

Standing over this barren land, my pen heels to me, panting. I survey the vastness of the place and pay honor to the sterile vista. How clean. How virgin. There is a part of me that is afraid to set my pen’s stroke to the smooth placid ground. To stain the purity of it with my dream-marking.

I toe the dirt,longing for a little more time. I close my eyes and ask for forgiveness, and a blessing. I breath once.

At last, I call my pen to attention. “Away to me!” I snap and my pen bounds off across the empty plain, careening toward the end of the story.

Momma’s Cookin’

Her makin’ space would be mocked today. Would be reviled like a slaver’s block. Would be the chain that boundeth her treasures to the patriarch’s greed. Well, I don’t know about that. I know that the smokes that emanated from her cauldrons and ovens twisted and billowed and journeyed to my nose and spoke of her love, her care. The smokes became holloways we all followed to find home.

And we would sup there, and we would laugh. and we would be filled.

Those smokes are gone now. Gone when her mind took the dark road, through the haunts of unknown terrors she makes up about a future she knows nothing about. But I remember the love they wrapped me in and the fullness of my belly. I learned the way of smoke, and now I create my own holloways of love for my people to follow home.

Peace

Sweet is the air when the lights flow across the serpent-time sky, when my mother’s womb is finally quietened and she no longer demands her children return to her laborwaters, her ocean.

My sighs in the morning, like dandelion seeds on summer zephyrs, call my evangelist’s heart awake to the good news, good news that blows the horns of the morning soft into the dawn-gate.

The air. My breath. Gifts that lie on the thin threads. The thin threads that reach. The thin threads that reach to my ear and whisper life and joy and wonder, my catharthsis, my apotheosis, when all darkness has fled from the marching sun.

Bad Dreams

I’m stuck in the ether, up to my neck in plasma angst. A voice summons the fear geists from beyond and down. Always down. All my anchor chains rattle as I feel the demons worry them, like maggots on a corpse. My muscles are flaccid, impotent, and bewitched with abyssal bindings and wards. All my wisdom is washed away suddenly and aborted, like an unwanted infant. The fear geists have gnawed through the chains, my anchors are sucked into the mud of oblivion and I am adrift on the ether. It washes over me. I inhale. I cough. I sputter.

I wake.

My body groans in protest. It pleads. My mind cannot hear. It is tearing down the rails rattling all the screws loose. It is running as fast as it can. It wakes the body, pleading for help.

“Help me! Help me, please!”

Dreams

The blessed chrism flows away from me. This is not special. I look into my truth-sphere. O’ glass globe, reveal! It shows me the way. But I cannot see past my anxious curse. My thralldom. The draggling thing that leaves me in my fear awaiting the chain-breaker.

“There is no chain-breaker.”

“You are the chain-breaker.”

“No.”

And the dust shrugs at me before it catches an electric breeze aloft, and I am alone again in my sleep with my Mother and my Father arguing over my worm. But there is a seeping of the plasma that lives and I breath it in. I remember my way for a moment.

I go now.

Happy

Worry just foots a bill, it never pays it. When I fill my hat with it, my head still fits. Let’s you and I think on the good things. Like a coat in winter, there is always something to keep you warm, even if it’s just breathing’.

I like breathing. I have plenty of food. I don’t have Nazis or fascists. I have a home. Gratitude. Gratitude is the thick leather glove that keeps the sparks off when you stoke the fire.

I am grateful.

I’m grateful I can write. I’m grateful I can write total shit like these lines and still have my Nazi-less food and shelter. I’m grateful for my hat, ‘cuz it makes me look dapper.

I was reading my published work last night and I found typos. I’m grateful for a published work with my very own typos. I’m grateful for being able to laugh at the fact that I have probably read it 20 times and I still find them.

I’m grateful I can read.

Heart

Empty spaces thrum in my brain and knock against my skull; like stray birds dying on my window because they could not find simple south this winter. I know what they want. I want it to:

But to do justly,
to love mercy,
to walk humbly with my God.

These things alone, and always.

I, like the thoughts, like the birds, cannot always read what is written on my heart. I cannot always hear it hum the lullaby of my soul. Too entangled in the world-web am I. Too hard a-running from the wolf that lies, that is not, but sounds ferocious, howling, howling at the murder-moon at blood-tide!

Peace!

Peace.

these wolves and webs are dreams of a future I know nothing about.

Rest.

Lay down in the words of your heart:

Do justly.
Love Mercy.
Walk humbly with your God.

Sweat

The long long day worries me like a bone. All the trouble I put away last night is up with the dawn. Like children on Saturday morning, it’s watching the cartoon of my life, stomping about the house, laughing. I find my kindness in a cip of hot copffee and get started with the Hammer of Salvation and start working that trouble again. I’m trying to make something useful.

Up comes the hammer, suspended in space-time, as I take aim on the thing darting about. It seems like I hold it there for a year Face beading up. Muscles quivering. Panting. It always starts this way with me spending everything trying to be accurate and economical.

Down I swing with my hammer. A mighty blow.

I strike.

and miss.

So early my patience is spent.

Simple

I insert the copper anode into the chamber,

the feed returns to me and completes the circuit,

we fold the space between then and now,

the copper anode sings in time to passing bodies,

the feed heats the plasma chamber and expands the time that was,

space is ejected and the body moves to respond in rhythm,

time and space and plasma wrap and fold and entwine the copper anode,

the feed slows my rhythms to feel the inner courses,

space is created around the copper anode, ejecting the anode, and we repeat the process until we have arrived at Buddha’s Gate.

Easy Peezy!

Do you want me to write it down for you?