Hallowed

My friends fill my cup.

I am loved. 

I am sustained. 

I am full like my cup.

I live my life right. 

I walk my life with confidence.

I let love guide me.

I make no missteps.

I am steadied by the love from others.

I cannot be shaken.

I am assured.

I am a goat, sure-footed on rocky terrain.

I know what I want.

I do not settle for less.

I seek equanimity, good judgment and peace.

I do not know turmoil inside myself.

I am whole. 

I can be healed.

I am not so broken that I cannot put myself back together again.

I will not be shattered.

I have sustained myself through darker times again and again. 

I find peace even in turbulent waters.

I am buoyed by the love from others.

I sail through tempestuous waters 

Knowing that the stars above, behind the clouds, guide me and are ever present.

My instruments are accurate, and I am skilled.

Consecrated and uncomplicated,

Holy in the divine,

I love myself. 

Lentes

Distorsionado y grabado, es difícil de discernir

La arena de tiempo crecientemente difumina mi realidad 

He confundido las lentes en mis bolsillos 

Demasiado a menudo, disminuyendo mi mundo con convexidad

Si tan solo tuviera el sentido común de mirar al espejo 

Perdido

Me hiciste perder el tiempo
También me hiciste mejor 

Pero tengo que despedirme de ti

Blessing Of A Glass Half Empty

O Pessimism

Forgive us for our mischaracterization

Bestow upon us the clarity of Pragmatism

And lift the distorted veil of Faith

Let us design our agendas 

Free from optimistic ambition

On the pure bedrock of Realism

Grant us continued protection from 

The sharp-edged sword of Hope

The mistress of Futility 

Who compels us to bail our ships

When we are better suited 

Donning life vests and boarding rafts

Let not the milky tears of Security

Blind us from the utility of Truth

Assign to us Disquiet so that we may predict

Our futures free from the bias of Idealism

Handshake

If I believed in the devil
I'd tell you I've met him

He's a silver tongued liar

And the world's best salesman

I met the devil and he lives in my head

He tells me he's got answers

And he'll sell them to me for free

I met the devil and he shows me the truth

Distorted and bent like me

The solution's permanent and less than ideal

But he'll sell it to me for free

Stuck

Bitter, crushed, and frantic, here I go
Fastened to you like a moored ship
When there's an open ocean under an infinite sky
I just can't seem to ride it out, I still find myself here
Starting over in another decade as your love for me wanes
Delirious, madly licking my own tears
I am as powerless as the storm is to hold back its downpour
Hungover on the honey mead of memory
I'll never sing the sweet symphony of what we had again
On all fours, mouth open wide, trying to expel
The sadness you poured into me when you said goodbye

Lilacs

I love the lilacs

I wonder why I love them

Ancient reverie 

I Did It

Shotgun shells hot in my mouth
Bounce across the floor of calamity
A more sensible bird than I would fly south
When the key turns to unlock a vacation home's worth
Of trauma much in need of marie kondoing.

The musty smell of all that ended
And all that will end in an uncertain future
Fill my friends' nostrils as they visit
And tend to my broken heart
Dressing wounds they cannot see.

And here I am, alone, floated by the love
Of everyone and the person I cry for.
Because love is a victim of circumstance,
And happiness is no more than a prayer,
They say, "leave your heavy heart behind."

"It gets easier. Next year will be your oyster,"
They promise pearls in lieu of wisdom,
Unaware of the guilt that incubates,
The fight between good and evil diminished
By my own selfish suffering.

Body Anxiety

O Circumstance, I am but your guiltful prisoner,
Who builds their ship from a forest of experience,
To navigate the choppy waters of happenstance.
I beg thee for the grace to deliver me forth
To your sisters, Intent and Purpose,
And the redemptive hands of Acquittal.
Let love see fit to lift the heaviness of loss.
Do not let me forget the grounding
That's found in honoring instinct and intuition.
Let me always intimate from my body the wordless lessons
To be found from a lifetime's history and a deeper remembering.
I vow to myself to always be my own safe haven,
To never compromise the messages soma delivered.
I trust my internal alarms above all socialization
And recognize that respect has served me well,
No matter what pleasing inclinations try to dissuade.
In dignity, we heal and reclaim autonomy and independence.
Nothing in this universe is so static. 
Grasp the present and release the dynamic movement of place and time
For the appreciation of that refinement of variance.
Sustain me as I eschew the inclination to objectify the subjective.

Remember

Fast worship shines through the boiling lake of lust
Delirious joy, fiddle drunk, heaving together
Through a thousand stormy seas of bitterness
Sweating, crying, cooled and pleased
Our tongue chanting the gorgeous blood
Of Heaven, screaming love like tiny symphonies
As frantic language drools from the mouths of men
One thousand moons witness the meanness
Beneath the mists of our mortal suffering
I recall a red braid intertwined in the Ceylon's roots
Diving deep to an unseen spring of elan vital
The pole, a soft embrace meeting breath and air
And desire sailing the blue seas of opportunity and endeavor
Save me from the clever haunt of cyclical natures
And send me home to velvet intuition in the belly of wisdom
Perfumed by earthy experience and integration
A slow universe looks upon the open magic in our work
To devour the liquid rhythm we spill over our exposure
The wild sacred longing for the milk in my eye
I linger to kiss the broken ice, ferocious and fat, smiling for a ghost
The morning decays into a porous sunset blessed 

Summit

Where stunted shrubs sweep thick clumps 

Of green delight across crumbling taupe canvases of stretched reason,

Unafraid to lick the snowy drifts of understanding prostrated across wisdom's polished crests,

A dangerous seventh wind of that mountain top 

Also inhabits the same body that swims delirious through the landscape of sleep.

As the soul strokes a coin reflecting the aching light of love,

Nine centuries grow pink in the rising and setting sun of samsara.

Reflected in the wet pebbles on a beach of memory,

I stumble over the soft spoken promises of a long forgotten friend, a trembling petal entrapped by an invisible current.

A new season steps barefoot into the mossy carpet of eternity 

Obediently displacing previous instances' murmurs into the intoxicating wash of time.

The suite of worship, radiantly languid as it patiently trickles through porous faith, 

Beckons, standing in the foyer of yesterday,

Rendering ghost and flesh as elaborately indiscernible as rain and river cupped in the same vessel.

Dishonor

Dishonoring my emotions
Holding them in my mouth
Clenching my jaw against them
Swallowing them deep into me
Where I can't see

You know me best
But sometimes it's like you hardly know me at all
Because I couldn't ever let the needs inside me
Come tumbling out around you
And that's why this will end

When I met you, I thought I could live without myself
But I transformed because you helped heal me
Making me feel safer than I have before
I could embrace what I thought I'd killed when I buried it alive
But now I'm burying myself for you

It feels wrong to do wrong by both of us like this
But I feel such shame and fear
When I think of telling you who's really there
Sleeping next to you in the bed we share
I wish I could control my thoughts and feelings, but life is never fair.

Mourning In The Reeds

My love was a cattail scattered to the wind when you disappeared
A soft but multitudinous explosion without a destination
Subject to chance alone and all too unrestrained
You left footprints in the mud of my affection
To be washed away into the floodplains of a lifetime of memories
The sheer aggregation ensuring your opacity fades to transparency
Like a beach subsumes the independence of each grain

Exquisite

Purified the only way you can be
By the loss of your other half
Now you are one, only one, just al-one
This is the finest pain ever experienced
A closer look reveals exquisite insight
Into the origin of your humanity
There is no forgery

Sifting

Grant me the restful slumber of fresh snow upon the streets
Blurring all senses with cold gentility.

Grant me the peace that only meadows know
Of the inauguration of certainty and faith.

Buoy my spirit through the choppy waves of vulnerability.

Fasten the cloak of hopeful compassion around my shoulders

As I face the cold sleet of anguish and despair.

Warm the bones of my soul with
The flames of companionship and community,

And send me with zealous affection
And earnest fondness into each enterprise I endeavor.

River

You were probably a river
Babbling with mirth, bubbling with clarity.
You were probably a tree
Grounded and strong, drinking in the rain.
You were probably a star
Eyes twinkling when you smile as you divinate.
You were probably an ocean
I felt you buoy my soul as you held me.
I think you might be the wind
Stealing my breath and carrying dandelion seeds.
Were you that mountain
Immortal, immense, immovably sturdy?
Did you live as that sand dune
Just as transient as you were in this one?
You were probably a river
Moving steadily through every form.

Barbarism

Laughed at by the gods
Our losses just an elaborate prank
To entertain something more
If freedom and abandonment
Were not loud enough
To put a force in me
To search for my own exculpation
The way a dog subsidizes
Its household's decisions
In a world that is abjectly unfair
Imbued with free will
But forbidden from philosophy
To bring us into this world
Only to discharge us again
Inhuman and hence divine
This is how I know
God is a terrorist

Mangroves

My fear, baited like a fishook,
Places the fruit of anxiety with a pit of trepidations
Into the soil of my abdomen to nourish and grow
Fed by insecurities and self-directed cruelties
Whose roots will wend their way tortuously deep
Into my own egregore, twisting through foundational ontologies
And cracking the bedrock of my confidence.

Uncertainty

I grow forests of worries saturated by my tears
They bloom anxieties whose fruit
Is always overripe and so often bitter
I chop them down with my ax of reason
Sharpened on the stone rationale and wet with deliberation
Their trunks fall haphazardly tearing at
My faith on the way down, shattering my ease on impact
But no matter how many I burn
To sustain the warmth of self-compassion
There is still a forest of doubt before me.

Loss

Mediated by the unforgetful soma
It's too hard to convey
The devastation we weathered
That is your latest transmutation