co~arisen

I decide to make peace with loneliness -
surrender my self fully
sink deep and
fall in as if
i will not survive,
until i come out its
other side somewhere …
elsewhere -

some secret hidden destination
in the second-hand of a clock -

it hasn’t worked.

i resolve to sit in one place and count the birds for an entire day,
all the while aware that numbers are
meaningless.

i keep having dreams
about sleep

and the uncoupled sounds
frozen behind clouds.

each unlived life lives on
in us.

at the center of
everything is
everything.

to stay in the present moment – how, when it’s
ever slipping through our fingers? sometimes,
with the hands of a pick pocket, we try to hold onto
… something ... who has not done that?
who has ever succeeded?

who we are is how we grieve.

all of us, our love
is broken;
our hearts are broken.

how do we then
rescue each other?

how do we coax the angels
all around us,
rare and common,
without wings or voice
or feet to intercede?

they come to us in seeming need
and let us believe we indulge them
with kindness.

all the while they are the ones that save us

from ourselves.

let your self be
touched - just take
the heart from
the room where
you’ve kept it
so long,
It mistakes those cinder walls
for its own.

love grieves – at the heart of the heart
is ineffable hurt.
hold it tenderly
and let compassion
settle through your lashes
just as a child gives
over to some
man
of sand
with abandon.

the swell of the stars, all
ceaseless
just for this moment
-long enough, but
where then the surface
between ‘i’ and the
cup of the sky and
everything else?
where is the surface, mine?
there is not …
skin is not,
not any more than the sound
of a heartbeat or the roads
lightening traces
for birds to follow later.
if not this breath, not this thought,
than what?
nothing.
no thing refused.
every thing
renunciated
and thus,
at last,
received.

more nitewriting

I don’t want you to follow me.
I want you to follow yourself
and be with me (anonymous)

It is folly to take credit for
… anything.

madness often manages to be just a little bit
beautiful –

A glint caught
by the eye
of the rabbit caught mine –
a white flash,
color wash,
blur I chased
to ask,
why the tear(?)
couldn’t catch it – down the hole
disappeared.

time is a blind guide.
weaping is always relevant.

gaze in
to any animal’s gaze – something
familiar and also, something
we can’t know
- just like looking into one’s own mind.
And that, alice, is your
looking glass.

war planes.
true hunger.
torches.
a page of swords.
regenerative fire.
confinement.
beautiful rows of glowing hay bales.
redredsun with a soft light.
burning leaves and forest wood rebirthed in dusk strata.
easy to fall through and land
in love
in the sky
of your eyes
looking up
through heats
downpour, so opaque
and bright.
do not leave me.
not yet.

unhealed bends where wind warped
wheels spin off center

yarn that smells of salt and thyme knitted
into drop stitched scarf to keep the wind where
it ought to be and that is
of course
exactly
wherever it is.

strong
this back, this heart
- graceful
my wrist,
and neck
- crooked
my clarity,
- vast my flickering
equanimity.

what would you and i have become
if we had just happened
as an ‘us’
on its own
– the way bells
meet in the wind …

whispered under breath and into my hair:
love has nothing to do with the here and now

4 jdg

the notebook by my bed is different than the other ones I keep around -
the following excerpts are from a spiral that's been beside me for several weeks.
sometimes, a somnambulant insomniac wakes up and writes instead of wandering.

sometimes I am a somscribulant.

I heard a discussion about a musician/artist who was asked about some lyrics he'd written years before. he said that he did not write them and did not know the person who did.

I understand that - he was then asked what legacy he would like to leave behind;
he said he'd like, years after he had died, for some farmer somewhere to be out in his field singing one of the songs he had written, but entirely unaware of where it had come from or the name of the composer.

I understand that too.


here are some things that were not written by me in the notebook by my bed. some of them end mid-sentence and of course, I cannot complete those sentences now, since they are not mine.

********

why can't we wage a pandemic project, a gentle ardent anarchy to
put down the project of me and lift into that which
is truly
IS
amidst a country of heart's that miss themselves desperately.
if there were a hell it would have no fire or moving flame - it would be a frozen place - stuck -
unmoving like a mask with nothing left to hold it up from beneath.

.....

disrupted sleep's unnumbered dots
connect them any way you want
star constellations make pictures no matter what

because we want them there.

if to let go of wanting designs that map out what it would take to make us happy and
instead just asked

what each moment needed from us,

...


attuned to subtlety,
volatile grace,
sacrosanct ease, what can I
whisper using the tip of one finger -
a language
so soft with no place across any word's surface
to gain purchase
in my throat; I just feel the silk refuge
slipping back to
settle gently where the tongue takes
root deep in my chest-

from which direction do I enter this marginal silence;
the hidden palm of lyricism's lifeline that

...


woken by the sadness of those
unknown to me; watching over my
dangers, my weakness,
my loneliness, climbing my
halved sleep

unanswerable ache where i meet
without hesitance, a love for those who will
always be strangers to me.
and yet, thorough intimacy -
their humanness through my own
immediate, complicated nuance
-a.m. anguish
thicker than ever before

bereft

the prescription? let,
illness heal the physician let ...

.......................

(flowers and rain)

unapologetic icons - I face into their
freedom from what they are, through
field after field climbing cliff to gutter,
every bud wide open and every one, its stem
broken just below its bloom - still, just
nodding yes - a shine
building vision with or without an audience.
too many different colors become one and something new,
fragrance-freighted air in singular inter-scent

present and
dying through me
a somatic sadness
in every cell

hold here sweetly

perhaps beauty discovers itself in its impermanence
we honor this by letting it
fall away.

cling to love, we grow loveless, and to life,

lifeless.

there is

a place in my heart where there is
nothing for
10,000 miles

you should come there with me
we could bring
one tree and just sit very close to it and sink
very deep
- 500 feet deep - match
our breath to its breath.

half breath by half.

imagination uncoupled from sensation

silence turned up, speaks volumes
i dream birds in
my unslept moments


the. mind.

gets. so. slow. I. watch. time. break. apart.

endless streaming waters pour down the street's black sky
penciled-in dream segments dipping trees and geese V's into the horizon.

beneath what's frozen over, I can still hear
rivers moving just under - and touching
the ice - pouring from my eyes,
dry as light condensed in a sealed off attic.
blinding at these depths

no subject object context

true devotion is not self-conscious;
it does not know itself.

I'm not brave but I am
fearless.

in moments

here
not here

this and this.

layers and layers of leaves longing long into
the sky until there's sky no longer;
trees produce leaves just as the mind, its beliefs.
much to be said for autumn, we do not need our stories to be
what we are - essentially - a tree is not its temporal foliage.

don't we get this?

all my shadow falls up to dissolve
like breath into breathing - my inhale is always your
exhale. welcome. you are
well received - 500 sighs unwinding .

how do I enter my life?
unmoved, I continue arriving.
how do i listen to this rain listen to rain
listen like a microphone -
where is it heard? where's the soul?
no internal no external
acoustic lines turn inside out
occur,
run down uncoupled sense gated window
painless and clean into questions
that take refuge
in themselves - listen deep - 500 feet

- stunning -

i lose myself

but i do not
disappear.