LUVDRUNK POETRY (FILE 3) OPENED 6/13/97 (Last complete re-write: June 8, 2001) A... ALL THINGS MERELY IN TIME A MAN WHO CANNOT FORGIVE A MIRROR OF GOD ANOTHER QUESTION AND ANSWER ANSWERS IN THE DARK OF MY HEART B... BIRTHING THE GRIEF OF BLESSING C... CASTING HALF LIGHT AND SHADOWS E... EXERCISES IN AWARENESS I. F... FOR THOSE WHO DO NOT FEAR H... HOME, FOR A MOMENT HOW PEACEFUL IS GOD? HOUSE BEYOND THE SUN I... I HAVE A MASTER IN HEAVEN IMAGES FROM A DREAM INCARNATE POETRY IN THAT NAKED MOMENT I SAY, YES! YES! I SPOKE BECAUSE OF THE LOVE IT WAS US! L... LET US LAUGH THE LOVE TOGETHER P... POEMS WRITE ME R... REALITIES PROJECTED AND KNOWN S... SHE'S ALL SPRING-SPRUNG AND IN CHICAGO SOME DEEP PART OF ME T... THERE IS LIFE TO RECOVER THERE'S A TENDER RIVER THESE THINGS TURN MY HEART BACK THREE CHRISTIAN MEN THREE MAD SOULS SANG IT THREE POEMS ON SPIRITUAL FREEDOM U... UPON THE DEEP PASSION W... WHAT WOULD WE FIND? WHY I SING Last Poem: HOUSE BEYOND THE SUN |
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INCARNATE POETRY A Magical night of love and poetry and song with kindred souls: Kimberly, Joan, Jess, Shelly... Bend, Oregon. April 18, 1997 Why should I wait? Why should I talk as other people talk? It takes courage to be God's fool! To splash in every puddle, to howl, as friends howl together at the moon! To love so deeply that one calls an opening soul sister, brother --to speak the magic that frees us! Why should I wait? and who am I waiting for that is not already here, invisibly within me, standing around me, loving me, luminous under the shadows in each one's eyes? IN THAT NAKED MOMENT Isn't this the direction we must go, in this magical, colossal way? We speak the awakening sun spontaneously. The deep soul catches its light and tosses it quickly back through words--mirror shining in mirror, glances of opened eyes. Oh! the light of faces! The wounded people laughing, arms around each other, swaying in memories of the moments we loved who we are. In that naked moment we have become the poem none of us have heard but we always remembered. THREE MAD SOULS SANG IT Three mad souls sang it under the moon. Five of a family, who though strangers in the mystery of their journeys, echoed it with light glinting through their words. It was the clown, the coyote of God, Lilly, the wind-like laughing of love. She shown in huge, luminous eyes; she spun in hippopotamus- filled mud puddles; she caressed her own silky thighs and made love to the world through her song. I call this, kindredness in starlight, community in freedom, life's beauty... Do you long to be known, your soul relished by the sudden stranger before you calling you brother, sister, my oldest, truest love? In that nakedness of moment you are the poem— the mad movement of love. I SPOKE BECAUSE OF THE LOVE I spoke, because of the love in their eyes, because a woman was listening with her whole body to our songs. And it was the truth that first birthed me, that rolled out upon the star-filled seas of my memories. They drank me in, honoring the soul snapped from confusion to clarity in a communion of poetic words, in the soul-sensitive harmonies of song. "You should preface all your poems with stories of angels", said the teacher of young children, "So we can enter into that love where we hear the heavens sing in our own souls again." Then, what I had begun to remember with a familiar, sad longing was swallowed up in a fresh splay of love and laughter until I almost entirely forgot how lonely it can be for every singer of that wildness which honors souls in a "who is it that's not at home now, anyway?" world. HOME, FOR A MOMENT Drifting in golden clouds, everything getting hazy... Home, for just a moment, a song shared, in the laughter that makes all our weeping meaningful in the end. We spoke words that broke out all green, and young, and shining from the hard seeds of our world weary hearts. They washed over us, affirming us, life words... affirming us, until a fear, a naked suspicion flitted through the last glance of two brothers before they slept. IT WAS US! It was us! love drunk in the night, being the light, and witnesses to our own pure breath returning to the Word's intoxicating breath, until the sun and moon passed from our eyes and need blew knowing from our lips. Then, by dawn's dim light we ceased drinking our imaginations... Our words were bland and gray and where was God? CASTING HALF LIGHT AND SHADOWS Out of form and into the foam we find pasture. The essences flood through in a melt down into meaning. The prison house of the body, furnace of pain in a God-empty world, becomes a huge, Nantucket garden. Grandmother love is there, tending her towering daisies, her spires of sunflowers which pierce the sky, the eyes, the heart. Grandfather Love is there, eyeing the soul from the inside, plain-talking his soda-cracker wisdom with a brown voice. His old hayfork tears off every button... until your clothes slip down. If every sense-gate opens to love then where is the curse of the body? And what monk, what nun, what poet, what prophet first feared this God-willed delight of a clay and water journey — casting half-light and shadows all over the world? A FLOWING MOMENT THROUGH THE EYE There is a flowing moment through the eye: wheels everywhere turning, and a waterfall slowly tumbling everywhere up. COMPLETION God must roll through us into expression: a loaf of bread, a sip of wine, a crazy, silly song; many people with their hands raised in praise... or weeping together: arm around shoulder, at a funeral; or love reading poems in the nursing home... or caressing the lover's body. We must be the expression of the God we seek: I mean, this God we glimpse over our shoulder in rare moments when we are utterly clear, or when we are dying. ANSWERS IN THE DARK OF MY HEART Is God the slow whirling, spherical instant of peace? or the water fountain splash of the instinct to laugh? Rumi said it... I concur at times, though, because of innate dizziness, can't, like him, twirl until I'm love-drunk. Yet, when my heart opens into that spacious place birds have always known, I'm pressed by every urge of Life, and through every misinformed understanding, to forgive God, and myself, and the world so radically that only a simple, white peace of laughter remains here in the midst of this heart of grief. A MAN WHO CANNOT FORGIVE A man who cannot forgive is like a gazelle with one leg or a swan with no feet. A Rabbi came into my room in a dream at night, and said, "You must forgive God for all his terrible, human crimes." And I said, "No, though I love Him." Next, a Sufi spun upon my bed singing, "You must release yourself from the shame of every failure..." then disappeared, spouting poetry in a trance. And I said "Yes," then wept because I was a coward and would not face the pain of it. Then, Saint Francis danced outside my window singing a canticle to the beat of a goatskin drum given him by a Caliph in Palestine. "You must forgive the world for its harsh injustices and love every harlot of the church," he sang, and his voice rang like light in the deep throats of flowers. And I said, "This is far too hard to consider," but instantly knew that forgiveness alone would alter the outcome of my destiny. SOME DEEP PART OF ME Some deep part of me hidden where clouds move freely through the bones, knows that this part of me in grief is not me... but that I am now laughing and silent in eternity. SHE'S ALL SPRING-SPRUNG AND IN CHICAGO It's good to be flabbergasted in spring! when the myopic white haze lifts from winter-grayed eyes and blue, blue, blue! bleeds through the skies into a farsighted brain --to blue up the insides! Not the down-dumped and belly-scrumped blues, nor those commercial-blown blues sung in certain French hotels for dollars and beer... but that laughing, hot, near to bleeding blue that breaks through hard sorrows like the green-leafed gratitude of a certain sun-spun, revolving, star-flung, God-brung, quick-sprung thing: It's good to be flabbergasted in spring! HOW PEACEFUL IS GOD? How peaceful is God? Absolutely peaceful: like sea foam, like swan feathers, like soft rivers of air. God craves nothing, being the fountain of all blessedness and beauty. God flows out His unconditional deluge of loving being like the sun profusely pours out its light and heat. If the sun wavered for an instant wouldn’t it cease to be? Wouldn't the dynamic chain of fusion stop and the star die? If is unconceivable that the sun should falter why do we conceive that God, the Creator, ceases to love us for an instant? The Great Being peeks through the windows of our hearts, peering through thick shadows, and shines on! We are loved—and hide within a veil of emotions that are not true! * "Your loving kindness, O Lord, is unwavering, outlasting the mountains and the stars." |
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