Kiss a Holy Man

The holy man sits under a tree
in the desert
of these here United States of America

Open to the stars
the drops of rain
the beating of
ancient drums

while the next generation
sees only the dirt
in which they stand
shuffling their feet
as if in motion

The ghosts of America
past and present
gesture vainly
mutely and invisibly
for attention

Thinking of tomorrow
with eyes on the dirt
forgetting
that we put a man on the moon
forgetting the moon
forgetting the sky
forgetting the horizons

Greedy for our
next dose
of the dream,
we fail to acheive
the dream state

In sleep
we still see dirt
We let the
boxes of idiots
dream incompetently
for us

Our hands
our hearts
our heads are good
but dying the death
of the unrealized

Open your eyes
and see inside
Close them and see
what should be
Assemble good hands
and hearts and heads
Assemble a dream

Open the factory
the farm
where dreams can be made
or grown

Send the holy men
the ghosts of America
the dreamers
the healers
the lunatics
the genuine crazies
into the schools

Play a tune of more
for the children
Instruct them not
in the history of the dream
but in the process

The mind that can be
a vampire,
a werewolf
an Indian princess,
can travel to
Jerusalem and back
on a flying horse.

The rider can go
to all the hatching grounds
where the shells of eggs
long since hatched
lie mixed with fertile
whole eggs
capsules of potential
a river of possibilities

Close your eyes
Look for the dream
Go down to the river
and bathe in it
break some eggs
Shake the hand of
your local holy man

Let the waters
seep into every opening
Follow the flow
into the dream
into the future
inside
and into the
furthest reaches

Close your eyes
open your doors
feel each other's fantasies
feed each other's fantasies
water them and
set them in the sun
and see where we grow
See where we go

See the lines
between the states
blur and begin
to vanish
Live on both sides
of those lines

Let go
hold on
hug everyone
hear everyone
Listen to that
holy guy
Laugh and love
and raft the river
and open the doors
between hearts

Make one heart
many dreams
many tongues
Turn on the
possibility factory
Give the workers
the job
of assembling tomorrow.



With thanks to my favorite currently local holy man.

A Woman's Heart

I grew up, as I like to say, the oldest of three boys. Raised by my father to be no different, my feminity perceived, I think, as a weakness that made him fearful for me, he denied it to himself. Sensing some safety there, I think, I denied it to myself. So, after living somewhat comfortably in the company of males most of my life, I am surprised to find that simply, and obviously, I have the tender heart of a woman.

I don't really know if it is different from a man's heart because it's the only one I have. But I do know that it is close to the surface, touched by all that touches me, tender, open, and yet, fierce and full of fire, full of yearnings, full of questions. I do know that if you touch me, I'll feel it in my heart, and that it may be beautiful and it may cause pain, but I will feel it.

This sudden epiphany leads me to consider all of my connections with the people in my life, past, present and future. To open up is to take a chance on pain. To close myself to avoid pain is to bury my soul in a premature grave, marked with my least favorite words: "I can't." What I know about myself is that I can. I can take chances; a woman's heart is resillient. We love in order to give, to feel, to be felt, perceived, realized, to realize ourselves, to connect to other hearts and feel the heat of those essential, vital connections, to be human, to be a woman, to be alive.

A woman's heart is a precious thing. I haven't always known how to protect it, or even that I should, that its' nature is to be open and vulnerable, though I did, I think, sense the resillience and the strength. It doesn't break. But my bones have never broken, and I'm not about to jump off the roof of my house to see how much they can take. Nor will I or should I do that with my heart. It comes equipped with a light to shine on those who I might allow to touch it, and I do and need to use that light to illuminate my path. The wisdom revealed in that light guides me through the choices I make on my journey.

It makes me cautious, but it is what allows me to remain open for the business of life, the business of the heart, open to my fellow travellers, open to the knowledge that some of them will walk with me always, and some can only stay on the same road for part of the journey. And I can know and welcome both, knowing that only time will tell me which is which, and that whatever pain comes from parting ways, the value of even companions who only touch us briefly is greater. And I know with that same heart that I will look for the good, find it, enjoy it, and survive whatever inevitable pain comes with being open to it.

The Secret Lives of Doves

I've often given my doves credit for no more intelligence than a chicken, and probably less. They move around relatively little, fly rarely, really just kind of stand around pecking at stuff on the floor. Pokie once spent days staring at a wall.

I wonder if she was really speculating about the nature of the shadows cast on the wall and her perception of the items that cast those shadows based on understanding them as shadows. It almost seems more likely than one of God's creatures being so uncurious that it stands and doesn't even realize that it's staring at a wall, and that there are more interesting things behind it. Maybe the dove is considering its' own nature deeply, in which case, facing the wall or not is entirely irrelevant.

You would think that if they consider their own nature, and recognize themselves as essentially birds, they would express that by flying more. Maybe their thoughts go deeper than that. Maybe they are considering their place in the cosmos, and the futility of flapping their delicate mortal little wings.

Maybe my doves are depressed, immobilized by existential angst.

Maybe they are so full of joy that standing still and moving are all one for them, equally joyful expressions of their beings.

Maybe they fear to attract the attention of the parrots with their keen curiousity and sharp beaks. Maybe they can't stand the bright light of curiousity that the parrots throw into their existence. It embues their every move. They are novelty junkies, forever trying to figure out how things work, including how to best operate me for their own ends.

It's Hamlet meets the Terminator.

It might be fun to add a few more beaks to the mix.

@$%&ing Snow

The snow was the icing on the cake of my decomposing sanity. It’s a little hard to remain sane when your creative and energetic seven year old has trouble falling asleep one night, outlasts your consciousness, decides to do an art project, can’t read, and ends up decorating your bathroom with puffy fabric paint. Of course, it would be easier if you weren’t just the tail end of a divorce, and in the middle of the breakup with your boyfriend. Then it fucking snows. It’s April for God’s sake! What the?

I used to have the perfect life. I thought, anyway, that it would be perfect if my husband wasn’t in it at all. Small thing. Turns out that the process of getting from there to here did not erase him as if he was a pencil sketch in the background of my life. It just made him into a dark smudge, and those do not go away.

Then comes this guy, all full of music, and love, and light. How do you not just go right for that? Maybe it’s like in Poltergeist: “Don’t go into the light.” How did I think I could do that and not have major and adverse consequences? For a bright gal, I’m pretty stupid sometimes. And I’m still just trying to figure out what went wrong. It’s like I got flattened by a truck and then it backed up. Except that nobody’s showing up with an ambulance, and I gotta get up off the pavement and go make sure everyone eats some protein with dinner and wears a coat (cuz it’s snowing in fucking April for God’s sake!).

I’m bleeding, and it’s not anyone’s problem but my own. No husband, no boyfriend, no father, no sister, no brother at the moment. My mom tries, but it took ten years of therapy to come to terms with her, and she’s still stretching pretty hard and lovingly just to come to terms with me. My friends are the greatest. Not a day has gone by that someone’s not been there for me when I needed them. They’re all so gentle with me, like I may break. Or maybe I think that just because I wish I could. I want to break. I want to stop functioning, just for awhile, just to recharge my battery. I’m so tired. I just want to lay down in front of the fire and just stop and just heal, and just get back to being me, the me who wasn’t always tired.

And my lovely friends still believe in my strength, even though the evidence of its’ failure is right before their eyes. There are things that even I can’t do. It’s a brick wall. I recognize it because I’ve hit lots of them before. People talk about being on the edge. There’s no edge, just brick walls. You hit them and you stop and you’re stuck. Going over the edge would be hugely better than just being stuck with your nose up to a brick wall.

Falling, freedom, suspended in air, suspended in everyone else’s life, yet alive, aware, healing with time stopped around me. That would be tits. Or if I could continue to hold my own feelings in suspended animation so that I could keep on getting on with the huge mountain of business at hand, and then deal with them later, when things were a little easier. Well, later turns out to be now, and now is not a hell of a lot easier than earlier. And I wonder when, and, shit, if, it’s ever going to be easier.

Not that I look back because the back way was totally impossible. Just one long year after another staring at the same brick wall. Hearing my kids growing up around me, yet unable to really see anything but that goddamned wall. So, I guess I am making progress. This is not easy, it’s amazingly, mind-blowingly, painfully difficult. But it’s a hell of a lot better than impossible.
But this fucking snow has put me right back to the edge of impossible, and I feel like I have to come all that way all over again. And my girls, I just want to see them happy, see them whole and feeling normal and comfortable and safe. I want them to be happy people. I just want to love them into happiness while everything crumbles around us, just cocoon them in sweet denial and make everything o.k. Speaking of impossible. And I’m just so tired.

Every day I feel like I can’t push on this big rock any more (that’s what I got in trade for my brick wall, the rock), but every day I do any way. And, miraculously, it’s actually going somewhere. I don’t really know where, but I imagine the wind blowing through my hair as I blow by that brick wall into the unknown. And that’s great, except it’s not happening fast enough to produce any wind. I’m impatient. I don’t know how to not try to move forward, to just go with it. It feels like I have to make so many things happen.

So, today, I’m taking a mental health day. It’s not the first and for sure it ain’t gonna be the last, but I think I’m taking less of them now, except this last couple in a row. You know, the black smudge, the bright light winking out of my life, all the bits of shit I have to deal with, and then, then, shit, this goddamned snow.