Membrane

I do battle with the ego
It parries every thrust
Absorbing all my anger
In orange plumes of rust

The ego is a monster
It lashes out in fear
I relax; it plunges through me
And we simply disappear

hornets made a home in the unused equipment

I close my eyes against the flood
but have no eyes to close.
I swing my fist —
my armless fist —
at Satan’s faceless nose.

In fish-stink markets
drunk again
unready for attack
I vomit down the wishing well;
dull animal stares back.

These forms arising from within:
illusion without end.
These animals were always mine
to butcher, or befriend.

I do not mind:
This hole, this heart,
the knots were loosely tied.
The desert’s lip is at my boot,
machete by my side.

stochasm

meet me in the stochastic light
lasering through shepherds on that hill
flinch at the thump-crush
of fluorescent bulbs imploding
and the drone…
homing signal of lost gods
banished from these pastures
an endless hum
ripped away
now vibrates back
on the edges of our skin
homecoming
his radioactive foot on the meadow
ripples away
the best laid plans

“CLEAR THIS CHANNEL!
This is Crisis Control
and we need an empty vessel.
We gotta let the message through.”

the wilderness can absorb
all that noise
deep in you
and when you return
at last!
an empty mirror meets your gaze
now the message flows
now the badgers stop and listen
to the empty field
where daisies waving in the wind
tune in white noise

Report from Cutler, Maine, October 1997

Salt shore,
where the seaweed grows,
and the tide kneads life
                         slow.

Evening gulls’
squawking fades and falters,
and the gulping crows
        revise their last oration.

Little mussels nestle
into curves of soft
green mud,
borrowing space
        from        some        stones.

And a lobster laughs
and a cormorant
follows his fish
                          alone.

***

City, scrape, truck.
Sick surplus.
Rush return to restless wait.
Back again in nexus.

This desert, flesh
rehearsing sermons,
pockmarked shield of mirrors.

Inside, the roaring
tide is pounding, pulling,
pounding at the future.
Unless…
Unless…
Remember something
calming, mussels,
                         still.

Mine

Can I really claim this mind?
This matted den
I call it mine.
But why?
When deep inside, great tunnels bend
to hide the truth from Ego’s eyes.

Now
A restless cell
divides
It ends, yet multiplies:
Thus the many-mirrored Mother
in disjunction never dies.
I am one and I am many, in an endless string of lives!
And so the chambers deep within me
reconnect and ramify.

…A light?
Yet even here one shines.
Who would have guessed, in waking grayness
That there was another side
to this milky maze of drainage
with which each of us is mined?

There it dances
at the edge,
on the lip of sagging matter
Lighting up a land we’ve left behind.
And our body is the shadow it defines.

These dark waters running,
surging
Passing boulders, cliffs of stone
Through valleys rank with centaurs sunning,
Forests sweetly overgrown
with vines
At last
In moonlight full emerging,
The stream another million finds
In the Dreamtime all converging —
O star-seared sea! O endless Mind!