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. 

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

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.

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.

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

Arroyo

Your love is a dry arroyo that for years sustained me 

And quenched my parched heart with your flashflood adoration

But now crumbles under the footsteps of my words

Greedy for traces of you.

Grief

I wasn’t ready for this trip.
It was unexpected, and I was unprepared.
And now this journey will color the months of my 30^th year
As I navigate how to undo what has been undone.

upset

[ verb, adjective uhp-set; noun uhp-set ]

verb (used without object), up·set, up·set·ting.

to become upset or overturned.

Pangaea

The people I've loved the most
Have turned me into the vastest ocean
And the ache seeps through my teeth
And numbs my lips and fingertips
Now all I have left is to take when I'm denied
So I drown those who can't give me what I need

Miss Me?

You missed me
Or maybe you missed her
And I was the ersatz replacement
Or maybe you missed something
You'd never even had before
And we were the vessels of your journey
Maybe you missed yourself
The person you closeted away inside
And we were false idols to be worshiped
In order to distract you from You

Love Neglected

Why did you teach me to hate my body?
You shamed me young
For looking older
While older men leered
At me for the same reason.
I learned to resent my body through shame.
Then you taught me to hate your body,
The body I would grow into
While telling me to enjoy the stares now
Because you don't get those anymore.
You implied that a fat body
Is a body absent of value.
You never taught me how to love.

Cut Me Down

Cut me down
Scream at me
Flecks of spit
Hit my face
As you flail
Your arms wildly
And shove an accusatory
Finger in my face
Just like my daddy used to
And I look up at you
With love in my eyes
And apologies on my lips

Over Easy

Now I'm cracked again
And the illness has seeped in once more
And honestly I'm angry at you
Because you were the one who dropped me first
And you dropped me again most recently
I don't know why I let you hold me anymore
Perhaps it's because most times you don't drop me
And it's easy to forget you've been dropped
When someone's strong and gentle hands are clasped around your shell
It's hard to see the butter smeared on your fingers
Or to smell the toast in the toaster
Or the hot oil on the skillet
When you're safe inside your shell

For Landscapes

Sometimes it hurts to be with you
I can never be close enough to you
All I want is to be undivided
For my body to be indistinguishable from yours
To be buried in your soils
To be your soils
To be part of you
The way you are a part of me

Forester

A forester's Bible in hand
I learn to mete and measure land.
Reading the good word
Statistical precision's always assured
Because sampling design and stochasticity
Are my foundation's chromaticity
Used to paint a plan for inventory
To record the forest in all its glory.
Cruising and traversing
The trees and I always conversing
Greeting trees with tape and recording
Always sampling enough to be rewarding
Then attributes and values are poured into excel
Regression and error are the stats I compel
To build tables and predictions
To tease out conviction from contradiction
And perhaps most importantly
To encourage forests' conservancy.