a slight jealousy

Should I envy the winds

That touch you when they wish

Or the golden beams of the sun

That find you through cloudy mornings

Am I jealous of the words on a page

That hold your eyes, embrace your thoughts

And places that you pass, keep a silent residue

A memory…they keep from me

And the spirit of music that sets body to sway

A seduction in the rhythmic way you touch

the world and all it can be, now I too feel

a slight jealousy in a 12 bar blues

Morning and America

It is morning in America

Because that is what comes after

An emptiness of stolen joy

In the night’s darkest hours.

Sown on winds of hope, now reap the whilrlwind 

a coming harvest from seeds of care

that fight and survive in fallow ground

Earth's sweet breath fouled by hatred.

Morning in America

Because the fiber of your being

Is resistant to destruction; though numbed by false sensation,

Will finally recoil from the temptation to wound

the weak ... simply because they are weaker

Morning, and the coming day

Holds promise of greatness

That the thin fabric and bare bones

Made by the sweat and tears of ancestors

Comes alive by the will of their prayers

To fulfill so many wishes for freedom

From the mean lash, and now to this day

It is freedom from a meaner lash of privilege

Morning and America, rising to a song of life

Precious beyond wealth, meaningful beyond measure;

it is the un-purchasable gift of a loving world.

It is Morning, when bleak darkness fades

To the rhythmic rise of an unstoppable tide;

The human spirit is not content to suffer

and rebellions seep through pores, as we

reach for the generosity of the Sun

The light of life has no favorite

leaves no one in shadow, it carries the spark

of creation;  it is we- connected, inseparably

in the image of something far greater, and

by Morning, it calls a day reckoned for justice

in the timeless want of the soul.

momentary butterfly

Perhaps every breath is an apology
for there is far more possibility than limits
my thoughts place...upon themselves;
truly in life, convinced of mortality,
I pause for mundane things.

I allow a sip of wine to dwell and occupy
the time a great novel might be born
I fantasize the passing buzz of a fly
to wonder if I could do more with a week of life
than irritate and vibrate.

I turn to the evening's menu, and the music
that will fill my ears and crawl into the seams of the walls
where once the music was a woman and song of passions
I think of the last and the next...and finally understand
love is the eternal strand of the momentary butterfly.

The epoch of a strife-less future could I have also
held forth like the vagrant millisecond-before
the Universe admitted the dimension of time.
The awful crawl of the hands on the clock
in the dream that comes like a mistral wind
when I was me and also he or she that I used to be
and knew I was losing and gaining myself.
A dream of birth and forgetting
and breath...without apology.





Inspired by:
Under One Small Star
by  Wislawa Szymborska  

funeral feast

In moments when each note brings
a memory, and feelings float above
the lines the singer sings and instruments play
such moments, like wine for the spirit
add a giddiness to the melancholy
and sadness to the sweet tastes like a cold, funeral feast.

It still rings in the ears and flows in deep thoughts.
Chest -deep snows, piles lead to flood near sweet water lakes,
dark clouds gather above the heart of freedom,
and madmen plunder the East. Yet, in all the world,
like the flutters of wings in chaos,
mankind is still linked to its weakest virtue; it is tied
to its greatest sins...

the child falls in Ferguson.

beija-flor

The whirring hiss and softest kiss

At  the edge of the petal

As furious wings belie

The peace of a moment…beija-flor

The burning yearning for sweetness fulfilled

As life spills into life

At the flower of the heart

A wind borne search, as thin air carries

A vaunt will to persist, an essence of the core

And seeps into the pores of an unwitting world

That knows so little of each and so much of all

That each stir of breeze has purpose

Every seed a greatness of hope

And every whimper, a pause at lips

That would speak rebellion until

 a tender surrender

uma Bieja- flor  Brazilian Portuguese literally means the flower kiss, to most of the world it is the hummingbird, for me  it will always be the flower kiss.

curtained mystery

I can feel heartbeats in the melody
that rise and fall  like the rolling sea
driven and borne of the spirit and love...
the boundless, endless care...
when we dare give all without fear

So much of life is a curtained mystery
amidst the chance of a passing breeze
followed from afar like the constant star
blind to all risk, the heart in full glows
Life is a beaming light amidst deep shadows

When we speak the art of the soul
and though we reach and try to hold
the soft wax we press, but can never possess
a burden never, the weight of a feather
the essence that binds us together, forever.

Venus in the morning...

A grand view of the fall of stars
around the crest of dawn
and the velvet deeps play
into a crescendo of lightened blue
that ends in the fire of morning.

The journey of a day finds its way
across a hurried path into the east;
 first the eyes and then the heart
grabbed by a moment of lonely Venus...

Speak to me of love
as distant stars have faded, lost
in the wall of morning, yesterdays long-past
find voice in the mirage of coming light.
You who have seen the dawn of ages,
and death of epochs, each folded
into the edge of endless nights.

You, who have seen the fire of love
grow cold, and the ice of neglect
cover vacant hearts,
and known the point of longing
when the unspent purse grows thin
Rise to remind
that love is ever like the morning-
it is the peace of darkness, and the
matchstick  of a coming day.

among night fires...

I was born beneath a dying star
its deep red glows from the past, afar
a light set free on a far flung  journey
Among night fires alone in the cold
defiant flames that yet grow old

the wane of life counts me from the start
down fleeting joys and pain, fill the heart
as if wind-born sands falling through my hands.
The lash of forgiveness leaves the deepest scar
I race against the night, beneath a dying star.

loving...

Hidden in an un-noticed breath,
within a soft exhale and eye blinks;
it was there in touch of smooth cloth to fingertips,
and in a barely-felt brush of your close passing.

Aloft on a wispy movement of air
stirred specks and motes in a sunbeam;
there too in the uncounted movement
of fingers through hair, or the
lost point of a stare to the nether of thought.

Floating like the winged hungers on rising drafts
when the world holds all of her life, 
there is only the  patient search for a final fall.
It is in the sullen glows and joyous sparks
that ignite small fires unto great rebellions.

The spirit is never still, for it is filled
by an essence and an untamed flow;
 it is love, in every part of us,
 and through its ceaseless inner voice
existence is loving...