Thinking about a Boy

Sitting at a stoplight, gas tank on empty, thinking about a beautiful blue-eyed boy. I glance over to see the young man in the pristine white T-Bird in the next lane blowing bright pink bubblegum bubbles.

Write the poem: Ways of Making Love. List them.

Early in the morning, just before dawn
To music
From across the room, using only our eyes
With words and kisses smothered with laughter
While dancing in the rain
Wearing nothing but water droplets and rain-boots
Drunkenly, in the afternoon, with clumsy hands and all the things we never said.

I thought this was important

“You only need one man to love you. But him to love you free like a wildfire, crazy like the moon, always like tomorrow, sudden like an inhale and overcoming like the tides. Only one man and all of this.”

“They say a good love is one that sits you down, gives you a drink of water, and pats you on top of the head. But I say a good love is one that casts you into the wind, sets you ablaze, makes you burn through the skies and ignite the night like a phoenix; the kind that cuts you loose like a wildfire and you can't stop running simply because you keep on burning everything that you touch! I say that's a good love; one that burns and flies, and you run with it!”
~ C. JoyBell C.

“Love is not an equation, it is not a contract, and it is not a happy ending. Love is the slate under the chalk, the ground that buildings rise, and the oxygen in the air. It is the place you come back to, no matter where you're headed”
~ Jodi Picoult

Passion Is Sacred

"The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there’s no doubt about it. The world without spirit is wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who’s on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it’s alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself."

~ Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers

"Imagine it's 30 years from now. You're looking back at the history of your relationship with desire. There was a certain watershed moment when you clearly saw that some of your desires were mediocre, inferior, and wasteful, while others were pure, righteous, and invigorating. Beginning then, you made it a life goal to purge the former and cultivate the latter. Thereafter, you occasionally wandered down dead ends trying to gratify yearnings that weren't worthy of you, but usually you wielded your passions with discrimination, dedicating them to serve the highest and most interesting good."

"Imagine this scene. You're really thirsty -- so dehydrated that you're feeling faint. Yet here's the weird thing: You're walking along the bank of a wide river that's so clear you could see the bottom if you looked. But you're not looking. In fact, you seem oblivious to the surging force of nature just a few yards away.

Is it invisible to you? Are you so preoccupied with your suffering that you're blind to the very source that would end your suffering"

~ Rob Brezsny

The Reader of Signs

“ever tried.
ever failed.
no matter.
try again.
fail again.
fail better.”

~ Samuel Beckett

On December 31, 2014, I was sideswiped by a hit and run driver. I wasn't paying attention. I was too busy reading the signs. He wasn't reading the signs. He aimed straight for me, then swerved at the last moment. I didn't realize it at the time, but it was a fatal blow. For the next two weeks I was one of the walking dead. Mortally wounded, completely unaware of my tragic fate. Such a strange word. Fate. But there it is. I'd been frozen in place reading the signs. Portents of what was about to happen, what would happen, no matter how I tried to prevent it. It felt like déjà vu.

It felt fated.

Fate? Souls? Reincarnation? I know how you probably feel about people who use those words. Believe me, I feel the same way most of the time. New age shysters out to sell you something or woefully deluded, albeit well intentioned, tree-hugging busybodies out to save your soul. Oh yes, I was skeptical, cavalier even. I scoffed at the idea. Even Nietzsche's idea of eternal recurrence seemed too hippie-crystal-metaphysical for my taste. But I am speaking of the soul here. At least, mostly, metaphorically. I'd sustained a mortal wound to my spirit.

He'd dealt the death blow before and would do it again. Will do it again.

It won't kill me. Not exactly. It is a metaphorical death and rebirth. Like the phoenix, I will rise from the ashes and be reborn. Forever changed into something new.

Cut-Up Poem for Johanna's Birthday

Women think
 I had thought in those years, I suppose

But what pain

 I thought now,  to settle upon –

did not hold – that even that was illusory?

some more fantastic and rare dream
having once aspired? ...the most-the best-we can do:


over and over again, in the quiet part of our minds.



* These are Johanna's words, taken from Goodreads quotes from her novels. I just cut them up and rearranged them to create this poem.

Salvation is here and now

Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think . . . and think . . . while you are alive.
What you call "salvation" belongs to the time
before death.

If you don't break your ropes while you're alive,
do you think
ghosts will do it after?

The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten --
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment
in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life
you will have the face of satisfied desire.

So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is,
believe in the Great Sound!

Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for,
it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest
that does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.

~ Kabir, translated and rendered by Robert Bly