The pond is deep with pine trees now

And in the night a film of ice arrived

Around the margins where the evergreen shades

Everything that’s hushed and still

 

I’m wrapped in wool and standing fixed

Staring at the frail and fractured waters

Thinking of how it heralds and hides what’s

Constant beneath the blur

 

And on Thanksgiving the gathering noise

All that marching toward the center

All the chaos and the churn

At the edges of our love

 

Breaks apart the holy veil

That waits for rising sun.

 

I’m not good with blind anger:

Not with pundits who sling it freely

Or families who slam it into cupboards

Or strangers who spew it into comments

Or stuff it with statistics.

 

I can’t sit in your putrid stew

Or near the bellowing of your gross opinion

I don’t appreciate the cloud you fill the room with

And how we all are left to swallow your second hand stupidity.

 

While you rise in an uninformed frenzy

While your madness recklessly bellows

While you inflate your mindless case,

You are victorious!

 

You’ve crushed the gentle

Who are sealed in unbearable tension;

You’ve decamped the wise

Who have already left you behind.

 

But you’ve got your crouching army!

They fill all the fields and the pages and the conversations

But you should know

The only thing they are loyal to is rage.

 

Listen: if you are angry at least have the decency

To shove it up a bad poem;

To unpack your tiny brain and try to understand

What it really is.

 

Listen: we’ve been working really hard to rally the mercy

Of optimism and light;

To fight the relentless, stinking, piles

Of what it really is.

 

But compassion is muted by your battle cry

And silence misread as retreat

So nature and art must carry us on,

And one angry word:

Enough.

Rain falls fast, lamps are lit, coffee’s made
And my day begins with a prayer,
Because I saw the first fully decorated Christmas tree
On a Facebook page this morning.

And like October displays
And November carols
And everything about Black Friday,
I feel not joy for my friend whose home looks lovely
But a lonely space between us.

The season has arrived
And already my heart is left behind;
Without a house full and a cart full
And a month full of frenzy,
I feel separate and apart.

Why the divide?
Am I not like you?
As if my soul isn’t longing for lights,
As if my smile doesn’t come from a gift,
As if my home isn’t found in a pine?

And so my prayer this season:
Let me not remove myself from the world
But add to it a silence and a star,
A fixed and quiet point
For us to meet.

Amid the spiritual wreckage

And cyclical lapses into dark

What keeps me looking for

Beauty and meaning?

 

Sadness and radiance walk

Side by side

And I can’t stop seeing

Either.

 

Always, always,

The cardinal in the snow

The bittersweet

The pointless and the reason

 

I see your side

I get that how that could happen

I was once like you

I still am

 

Remarkable, even trauma

In bedrooms and boardrooms and passing the salt,

Near birch trees,

The ground you die on is mossy.

 

What keeps me up

And keeps me raised

Is that we are all strung together

On the vine.

To follow your bliss 
You don’t have to trudge to distant lands;
No matter what you do, 
It’s fighting for its’ life to find you.

But you do need to learn 
That it’s not chasing fun,
It’s not escaping a hard life,
Expecting bonfires of constant delight.

Bliss knows happiness is fleeting and lovely 
Like when the sun hits you
But then it’s gone,
And once more you’re left just cold on a beach.

Your bliss is not an impractical pursuit,
It’s just misunderstood; 
It’s not for dreamers who refuse to see how things are
Or for those who won’t stand on their own.

Don’t you know you must commit fiercely to what you know to be true
In the face of every unknown terror? 
Only then, neither logic nor loyalty
Can take it away.

And if you’ve turned from it and left its’ small body to die on another shore, 
You’ve forgotten what it feels like 
When one humble act of generosity
Or thousands of strangers in a foreign land

Lift and carry you wet and exhausted,
Further than you’ve ever known;
When you end up where you didn’t plan to go,
With no words and an impossible heart

If you will please show up, 
If you just show up in spite of your fear,
Someday,
Bliss will follow you.

Sometimes

The weight of it is too big

And time moves too soon

And no one is talking about the right stuff;

I don’t care about your stupid trip to Myanmar

Or your cauliflower pizza crust

Or your day.

 

Sometimes

The loneliness is too vast

And words are too small

And no one is meeting you where you are;

I don’t want to read the book that changed your life

Or told I have a choice

Or join your cause.

 

I don’t get why you run.

I don’t get why you fix.

 

Let me tell you what love looks like;

 

Sometimes,

It suffers.

I’m thinking about the tension between being an artist

And needing to make money,

And how I divide myself in pieces over this;

As if in loving one

The other becomes the enemy.

 

It would be easier if only one survived;

Then I would know which to root for,

Who to talk about in snarling tones,

Or what to leave behind at the water cooler.

 

Maybe like the trees on both sides of the pond,

In the reflection that comes between them

They proclaim a way

To be.

The moon floats in a whale-colored sky

And all the fisherman shine

And one must have heard me far below

To lean out and toss me all in a row;

Black branches down at the edge of the field

To rescue the end of the day.

I craved a day of silence, without even the nails on the feet of my dog;
A day of sky and grass without cliff or bluff;
A day without the grind of joint, without the astonishing burden of body;
I craved a stretch, a float, a field.
And then it came and have I squandered it all on a staring spree?
How pine needles fall in tiny threes, like the footprints of tall birds?
Did I fill my empty field with lichen branch,
with end stage leaf,
and dying light?

Is my time not well spent kneeling at the base of a tree?
At the end of all entirety;
What of this debris?