the flowers

I admit I thought that I was somewhat complete

with the miseries of tantra

until I read your recent passionate poem to a friend


and humbly realized a lot more work was yet needed

in the areas of my self-control and

letting go of any and all control over others


so I worked on reopening my own heart to simply witnessing

the knowing of your own healing heart

and knew I was on a good road


a sense of honoring set me right again

and miracles being what they are

I began then to remember who I am as well


----------------


flowers often symbolize a valentine-like sentiment

and while there is some kind of invitation involved in their presentation

I offer them in the rather un-like spirit of non-attachment


an invitation for whatever the next stanza might bring

so long as I am not playing small

and thus undermining my part

in our radically honest conversation


-----------------


indeed why shut down

my playful freely-giving masculine nature

my amusement at my fear-flitting ego

my dance


as I allow you to have your experience

trusting you will ask for and do what you need


in honoring your perfect autonomy

I hope to set at least one or two things right

my relation to myself and my relation to you


-------------------


tantric reflections

being what they are

it thus occurred to me


to ask the dark haired woman

who I danced with

before you arrived


the uncharacteristically

bold question of

whether she was a tantrika


(the relative intent

of such a line of questioning

to be at least momentarily deferred)


and she asked what the practice meant to me

if it was more about the sexual or the energetic


and I said it was hard to put in words

but it was more about the healing

the great thing about tantra being that it's all connected


everything on the table in service of healing and liberation

is one way I've heard it put


-----------


and perhaps which I needed to converse about

in order to have the clarity and words for

why I brought you the flowers:


as my two cents toward

that heart-healing project

you are involved in


and for the simple enjoyment

of the rather liberating stretch

of giving them


while of valentines I cannot say

I do offer you my life

at least in play


tantra's funny that way

rebel girl

Rather than writing about tantra, interdependence, or the coming Imbolc, I will simply post the briefest of history lessons, in the form of a lyric from the Little Red Songbook. It was written by Joe Hill from his prison cell in 1915, as he awaited execution, on a trumped-up murder charge. It was written to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, fellow IWW organizer, co-leader of the Bread and Roses Strike of 1912. For more, see http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/5202/rebelgirl.html

There are women of many descriptions
In this queer world, as everyone knows,
Some are living in beautiful mansions,
And are wearing the finest of clothes
There are blue blooded queens and princesses
Who have charms made of diamonds and pearl;
But the only and thoroughbred lady
Is the Rebel Girl.

CHORUS
To the working class she's a precious pearl.
She brings courage, pride and joy
To the fighting Rebel Boy.
We've had girls before, but we need some more
In the Industrial Workers of the World.
For it's great to fight for freedom
With a Rebel Girl.

Yes, her hands may be hardened from labor,
And her dress may not be very fine;
But a heart in her bosom is beating
That is true to her class and her kind.
And the grafters in terror are trembling
When her spite and defiance she'll hurl;
For the only and thoroughbred lady
Is the Rebel Girl

STEW

sometimes I tire of poetry's
veiled allusions
and half baked ambivalences

and then it is time for stew
the kitchen sink variety
or as Ed Abbey called it
slumgullion

for forty years mom had thought this word originated
from my dad so badly mangling her german phrase
suzamen gekochtes

and it was never discussed
that's just the way things were

until I pointed out that Abbey's book
Slumgullion Stew
could not have been independently invented
along the same lines

having the evidence of printed word
may have granted me license
at least this once
to rock the family boat
with this taste for reality
__________________________________________

Abbey was not a hero of mine
although it was good to learn there was someone
more ornery in the world
than I would admit to being
which has led to a grudging admiration
for the man's honesty

Abbey's slumgullion was the kind of stew
that could include some old shoe leather
the only other reference to which I have
are long-faced 1930's cartoon characters

I recall putting nine vegetables in tonight's version
including onions gifted from an Indiana farm,
two dried from the sea and lugged through years of moving,
and a root from a plant most people chop down as a weed,
along with the meat
________________________________________________________

I learned of Abbey through another momentary mentor of mine
his buddy Jack who didn't let my initial wariness of him
stop him from laughing too loud at forgettable musical puns
thus teaching me that apparent content of any given moment
rarely has anything to do
with one's choice to celebrate the profound life within it

alas my emotional engagement with life is such a flooded barrage
that even my attempts to laugh loudly
have generally proven to be nothing less
than the final straw of some unintended insult
to a dignified sensitivity
untenable to a southern Italian hillbilly

so I have retreated to a saner mysticism
where like an old shoe
fished out of a big pot with a stick
I remain safe and limp

at least until the medicine runs out
at which point I sputter and smolder for three days
until the flames burst forth again

some crazed rabbit leaps out of the stew pot

and I must deal with the consequences
of a cartoon ego
the size of me

ACTIVISM?

Lately, I've been trying to answer to myself this question:
what kind of activist are you?

are you a kind-of-hard nosed,
anti-fufu, clean-the-arroyo type
activist

a quite-fufu spiritual activist,
who at least believes
he can get down and dirty
when necessary

or a non-activist
with an activist
self-image?

The truth is:
I am fu

_________________________________

My first response to the question
is to become rather defensive

due to the fact that

in the last year my menory
has gone completely to rubbish

and while I think I've done
this and that

I no longer store
excess information
for my ego's sake

my second response is to say
I am here for the ravens

the sequence of words following
you would be likely to predict

to include bliss, being,
definitions of enoughness

and pearly wisdoms like:
aren't we all just looking
for loving eye-contact?

_________________________________

it is my third response that wins
and that is that I have put my life in order
by choosing to put my faith completely in the Creator

and this has restored my soul to me
and my activism if there is such a thing
comes directly from the fullness of this wisdom

and it is to share this path, the many paths of truth,
the path of Tao, of Tantra, of Jesus
whose specific advice was precisely this

to Love God

and one another

following this path by devoting my attention to it
allows everything else to fall into place
to move as it needs to
in my life

and definitely radiates out from me

___________________________________

it is therefore tragic
to waste time worrying about things
and dimming my light

and that is why I have moved away
from the world
which I wasn't doing much good for anyway

I admit I gave all I could to community
from the places of should, have-to, duty and panic

I turned a man out on the streets to die last year
because he was drinking in his new apartment
I will not do so again

the system of helping works against helping
while shutting down the heart of the helper

such pain is not my path

___________________________________________

and the relative mind-space and heart-space of that-space
is infinitesimal in both joy and power
to that of Godliness

Through this God-focus
we become vessels for the light
of Spirit to shine through

AND the hands of God
doing the work of Divinity

gently
quietly

and with maximum leverage

_________________________

this is the best I can do today
for the child living in the streets
of Gaza, Baghdad, New York

having already washed my feet
of the banking system seeking to imprison the world
who despite the premature reports will fail

perhaps something more

an action
a vision
a request

will come along soon

let us pray so

Anthem

On this inauguration day

there are many around the world who take hope and I enjoy them

there are those who stand in opposition to the continued possibilities for rising fascism and I honor them

there are those with brokenness needing to heal and I support them

there are those who would worry about the imperfection of their art and I reassure them

yet

where I stand is

on my own,

holding this berry branch,

torn at the root,

waking to a bell clearly sounding,

sitting on a cracking chair,

amidst the genocides of the world,

on an island Huxley traveled,

with the master falling,

now





Leonard Cohen's Anthem:

The birds they sang at the break of day
Start again I heard them say
Don't dwell on what has passed away
or what is yet to be.

Ah the wars they will be fought again
The holy dove, she will be caught again
bought and sold and bought again
the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

We asked for signs the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed the marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood of every government--
signs for all to see.

I can't run no more with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned, they've summoned up a thundercloud
and they're going to hear from me.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

You can add up the parts but you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march, there is no drum
Every heart, every heart to love will come
but like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.

shiraz

I don't know the shiraz grape very well
but I sense it is a bit less polite
than the more familiar
cabernet and merlot

upon finishing
it doesn't apologize
for being a grape

no round of sweet pleasantries
in its goodbye

am I right?

if the 2005 Columbia Crest is any indication
the bouquet is inconsequential
relative to the initial impact
of profoundness on the tongue

followed by a full body blow
of spice plum and cherry
amidst fruity tannins

a complexity of tartness
to open the pineal

and throat-kissing departure

but wait

a second glass smoother
(and why am I so shocked?)

one might say captivating
if one weren't so preoccupied
with the experience of captivation

I will consider it a victory
to restrain from finishing
the entire bottle
tonight

diminishment

I realize too

that from the precipice of heightened experience or the publication thereof I risk being (somewhat rightly) perceived as arrogant

yet this risk is dwarfed by the actual suffering which usually follows bliss in the form of some malady

like that of everyday existence relying on a job lifting eight tons a day with a sprained wrist

or the simple loneliness of a life spent without intimacy due to too much time spent in autonomous experience and writing

leaving me with nothing but a vague and insistent prayer for mercy ringing from my parched and silent lips

in hopes of recovering some humility on this the other side of the dialectic

yet is there really any crime in a man's post-ecstatic diminishment?

WITHOUT ZEN

While I have little quarrel
with the field of counseling
and hesitate to even bring it up

(other than the pursuit of its profession
removing from the last couple years of my life
one of my favorite drinking buddies)

and while I do not wish to discount
the great gift of virtuous value
good counseling has been for me personally

it might serve in this moment
as an effective preamble
to recall that

I have on occasion wondered whether
it isn't a bit of a crime to professionalize
the natural empathy humans are capable of

place it behind closed doors
and demand four years of tuition
paid to world-manipulating banks

as well as approval
from a state bureaucracy
and then an hourly fee

all in order to establish
a clock-determined space
of formalized friendship

yet this is nothing

it is the crime of containment
of access to non-ordinary states
I call spiritual communion--

within the walls of buddhist temples
demanding endless chants
or allegience to the rigors of sitting still

or projected into
an unfathomable experience
only a distant saviour could attain

or demonized by criminal codes
against public celebration
or private intoxication

or torqued into destructive addictions
by government-funded Mena-airport deliveries
of crack cocaine to American streetpeople

or funneled into pornographic perversion
of the inherently transforming nature
of loving sexuality

or boxed up into a new age song and dance
costing $1000 for a weekend of professional empathy
shamanic journeying or tarot-reading

or manipulated into the capitalist nightmare
of commercialized entertainment
and moneyed stuff--

it is this alone which has been the single most pointed source
of the brutalization of both mankind
and the Earth

for as it turns out

life itself is the most magnificent koan
in which every challenge we face
holds the key to our arrival

and bliss is nothing other than
our natural empathic sensitivities
developed and magnified

by the complimentary courage
to fight and build and change
into that which we are not

in order that we may become fully human
loving soul in body
without separation

neither discipline
nor indulgence
alone will suffice

neither empathic commitment
to attend to the overwhelming despair
of the human condition

nor relaxing
into the precious comforts
of one's spiritual practice

but in merging our own bliss and despair
vulnerability and power
shadow and light

within the natural dialectic
inherent in the erotic Tao
of this Goddess-gendered life

have I become
so passionately chained
to the task of freedom in reality

and so free
to serve
God

ANIMISM

I realize

it is at least as likely
that the five ravens circling above my house this morning
care nothing for me

as it is that there is some personal connection
I as a human enjoy indulging in
by calling it a visit

my rational mind realizes they are busy
searching for food
or magnetically driven to the next place they must go

their spins and dives in the wind
are not specifically to show off
for my delight

when they fumble what is perhaps a new dive
for a moment before righting themselves
are they embarrassed?

no, this too likely a projection
of my anthropomorphic
human sentiment

yet

beyond sentimentality
poetic indulgence
and even divination of esoteric meaning

there is something I know
which I have no right to describe
but arrogantly forge on with

because

despite my love of the peace churches
and the integrity of gentle power
in their walk

my radical catholic passion
for a new and just
social order

my love of the purity of
the teachings contained within
Jesus' two commandments

or even my commitment to a quality
of a tantric practice centered in
bodhichitta

there is

something absolute and unmistakable
in a moment where witnessing
the beauty of creation

I hear a bird call differently
the sun becomes my dance partner
and all words fall away

God and Goddess merge
in a mutual animistic
re-emergence

colors brighten
ancient manna-mist
reappears

and the unlimited love I feel
is surely my purpose
on this Earth

where suddenly
neither I nor It
remain

and now I write

I have poured myself a cup of water
paced brick floors for perhaps fifteen minutes
and opened a vent for air

I know it will take this flow
grounding and cooling
to succeed

Most of the blinds I have closed
for the sun would add too much heat
to the burning already in my belly

I have stuck needles in my arm
tiny ones to begin to reestablish
function in my damaged hand

I have checked in with the ravens
committed to my breath
and at last sat down

I give myself permission
to say and be
too much

to come up short on meaning
get sidetracked by imagined glimpses
and lose all nuance of effective translation


And now I write

pv

I am relieved to be having a thinking-clearer day, much more relaxed, yet still active, getting plenty done in support of my landlord's quality of life.

PV, as he is known to my appointment book, is an interesting older man. He recently turned 80, has been recovering from a heart attack the last two years, and is vision-challenged. Yet he remains generally very positive and independent. He is continuing to learn French, and remains active with projects around the house. His nearest family on the West Coast, he relies on a loose network of local support, and quite adequate retirement savings, to meet his various life needs.

We formally have a trade agreement of transportation in exchange for rent on the small yet lovely guesthouse in which I reside. Yet our connection has various elements. I think it provides PV security to have someone around most of the time, in case some crisis arises. I also provide PV with some companionship and conversation. Due to his active, curious, and politically savvy mind, I think it is useful to him to have someone to talk with. (It is fortunate we find common ground on most things political!)

I feel I have been pretty steady and responsive to other needs as they've come up. This is not without its challenges, as sometimes it involves events like an urgent late night call...to acquire a compost bucket the following day. I am fortunate to have practiced empathy in recent years, so that I can usually get out of the way of my own potential reactivity, and thus respond appropriately.

While I am not PV's primary caregiver, in the strict sense of the phrase, there is an interesting dynamic to our relationship. I find it most challenging when placed in the role of a social worker (a position I was not very effective at during a brief paraprofessional stint as a case manager--likely because I have difficulty judging others.) I prefer to see everyone as autonomous and capable individuals, so it is confusing to me when someone acts in strange or incompetent ways.

So far this has only come up once with PV, when he got angry with me amidst his confusion about what we earlier had agreed to do. It seemed that no matter what approach I tried (including letting go of the plans) he got more aggravated. Fortunately, we figured out he hadn't eaten that morning and was suffering from low blood sugar, which was easily remedied.

This incident did give me pause as to the question of my role with PV. Seems clear it is up to me to make the 911 call if there is a health crisis. But it seems a crisis in mental competence could be more complicated! I have committed to drawing up a support-person list in such cases--other people in PV's life who could advise me in such circumstances. Fortunately, it has not come up again.

I appreciate the growth that the challenges of this relationship has fostered. It has improved my patience and flexibility a great deal, as well as my ability to set and negotiate boundaries in a pretty healthy way when I need to. It was very helpful to realize and accept that this is one of my primary relationships currently--this shifted my frame of mind somehow to be more spacious around PV.

While we are not family, there has grown a friendship between us. This helps balance out the koan of whether my ever-expanding position (transportation, food and supply gathering, coordinating appointments, landfill runs, domestic service, etc.) is one of service or servitude. In this kind of way, I am working through the complex dance of practicalities and just-being-present that most relationships involve. And to succeed for over eight months now, with minimal and decreasing drama--this is something I celebrate.

in the heart

Massage has to be one of the greatest of human endeavors. As a kinesthetic person, it is for me like water to a flower. I just received a wonderful massage, which I seem to afford once a month. I had been feeling so needy as of late, in so many directions, that I was beginning to imagine I was annoying everyone around me. And I was going a little nutty, being unable to put my finger on what my real need was.

Good conversation with a dear friend the other day began my return to humanness, and this massage is definitely generating further progress. I realized while receiving this healing touch that I have been out of touch with my heart lately, especially in the softer, more peaceful aspects of that chakra's energy. I think after the acute phase of grieving lost friends, I kind of went into a hyper living-in-the-now phase. And then felt a bit stuck after that, amidst some carpal tunnel aggravation and the pitfalls of bliss-chasing.

Very grateful to be at home again, in the heart--

yerba mate

I so like Winnings Cafe

for the artists and students and homeless all hanging together bumming smokes from one another on a sunny cold patio in January while I sit drinking a second huge pot of ridiculously strong mate and arranging new bluegrass tunes by strumming on the fiddle I had strapped to my back while on the bike I'm riding from last night's rehearsal back to the train heading up to Santa Fe, all of which supports a feeling of

aliveness

better listening

I enjoy blogging: so much I like to write about--it is great to have a forum just to let it out, maybe contribute something to someone with it once in a while, maybe not be read at all...

Perhaps the best of it is that it clears my oft-pressing Italian-Aries need for self-expression. And this allows me to balance irrepressible enthusiasm with a deeper capacity to be present for others, as I am able to listen and receive with more empathy and spaciousness.

My most primary relationships--work, landlord, band--all benefit from an accessible capacity for empathy. When the landlord is stressed about a doctor's appointment, for example, I am more often than not able to let any reactivity to the stress pass. And then his needs underneath begin to come through. And then I can respond out of clear choice, offering empathy and/or support and/or a quality of honesty that allows growth and understanding to proceed. How useful is that!

I've even reinvested in relations with the band, at the point I would in the past often give up. This time, I tried offering some clear and positive requests to meet needs that had been lingering. Again, I had also listened to others' feedback in the band, which was at first hard to hear. But when I could get out of the way, let go of the tininess of hurt feelngs, and empathize some, I could hear a request for an effective quality of communication. When I finally tried this, I was heard in a good way. And this process has kindled a new sense of collaboration in the band, renewed enthusiasm for all the fun we do have making music, and for me perhaps some maturing in how I relate to others.

Thank goodness for empathy...

aching

It has been another week of work, and I am in the process of trying to regain my mental faculties for a couple of days, my humanness, my bliss. I generally enjoy my grocery work, although this week was a bit stressful, for two apparent reasons. First, most everyone in the country has gone back to work after the holidays, and this has a certain grumpiness attached to it. Second, the work tasks have shifted around this week for the new year, and the new tasks on my morning shift are less enjoyable to me. There is less of a full body workout and more stress on the hands and arms. As a fiddler, I am not sure such achy wrists and cramping in my arms will be tolerable for very long, so I may have to change some things if it doesn't improve. Today it was all could do to just get through the day, get home and fall asleep, which seems to have helped relieve some of the ache.

There is also a bit of an ache in my spirit. Along with personal losses the last couple weeks, including yet another friend yesterday, there is the ongoing collapse of the economic system, and concurrent diminishment in life plans, as a backdrop to living in America the last few months. And there is the complete corruption of U.S. political integrity the last few years, the murder of a million Iraqis, torture of innumerable others being only the most egregious of the violence.

In concert with this, there seems to be, since 9-11 a growing attack on free speech here. I find the domestic spying less troubling than the structural barriers to effective protest. There are crackdowns Americans face now at most every public protest, there is ongoing infiltration and undermining of all public organizing, and the media is completely bought and sold, so that such outcry is never impactful to the common public dialog. There are the blogs, thank goodness. But it took a journalist throwing a shoe--after over five years of nearly genocidal occupation--for those of us protesting this insane war to feel we were at last, for a moment, heard in the mainstream.

This is intolerable on some level, and I continue considering strategies for emigration. Yet the old countries of my ancestors are not far removed from the same banking elite which is apparently running this world into the ground. I'm not going too far into my conspiratorial view of the world here, except to say I was born the year JFK was murdered, and this was in retrospect the end of hope for benevolent government, functional economics, and the rule of law. Although we have somehow have apparently made strives in overcoming racial discrimination since then, eh?

Perhaps Pres. Obama will offer some healing yet. If we can together mitigate both the violence and the fascism likely to be stimulated by the current systemic breakdown of society, then we as a generation will have done at least something. And this talk of Obama understanding the power of empathy shines a little hope for me into my otherwise jaded view of these times. In witnessing many of the movements toward justice in Latin America, the arrest of Pinochet a few years back for example, I also take hope for unexpected social transformation toward accountability for violent dictators. While this hope may be dwarfed by the massive and genocidal crimes of the nearly singular Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush administration, it is definitely something.

I think there is also hope in the breakdown of the system itself. While those of us on the lower end of the economic system will likely suffer the greatest increases in deaths and persecution, the systemic exploitation of the world and the Earth simply cannot stand. The treason of recent atrocities aside, there has never been justice or reconciliation of the wholesale global slaughter and enslavement of so many native peoples. I may be outraged about 9-11 for the rest of my life, but then I think what it must have been like to have lost one's entire tribe to the same miserable forces of violence. And there is no salve for that, nor salvation for the system by which it came about. Despite the hopes of my many middle-class liberal friends, we are clearly decades past the point of comfortable reform. We are in what I consider spiritual territory. We need some miracles.

Fortunately, I feel the miraculous energy of Divinity to also be close at hand these days, and this is my greatest hope of all. When we turn our hearts to Love, benevolent evolution progresses at an immediately accelerated pace. And hallelujah to that!

Kip

I gather my thoughts to try and write something coherent about Kip Corneli, a man I both respected and liked very much. This week, after coping for some time with cancer, Kip gently passed over to the other side.

I found Kip quite warm, ever inviting of connection. After my split with his daughter, who I remain friends with, I always thought it unusually generous that he and his wife, Helen, were open to staying connected with me. I think Kip reached out to invite me over for tea. Or perhaps I had called after reading one of his clear-headed, peace-promoting letters-to-the-editor. While I don't remember the details of how we rekindled the friendship, I do recall with pleasure the mutuality of it.

I enjoyed taking care of the Cornelis' place a couple times, while they traveled to attend to Helen's medical care. I liked being a part of their support network in that way. I must say that it was among my best performances as a house-sitter: helping to calm and care for Chablis, the high-strung poodle; successfully managing the sweet gardens Kip had cultivated; and leaving a welcome-home note, chocolate, and a ready fireplace upon their return. I bring this up because it shows how safe I felt to express my own nurturing warmth, and this reflects on the quality of connection fostered by Kip and Helen's kindness to me.

Kip was able to share with me an ongoing conversation ranging from politics and activism to his time in France. Kip had a unique conversational style, which was punctuated by an ongoing, and occasionally exasperating, search for the oft-elusive pun. This is endearing to remember. I recall someone telling me that puns are really the most peaceful of all humor, and thus fitting to associate with Kip, the longtime Veteran for Peace.

I recall now also that Kip came to a couple of my music gigs--how cool is that? Getting friends out to gigs at all is sometimes like pulling teeth, but there he would be insisting I keep him informed of when I would be playing. I remember, while playing fiddle in the marimba band, looking over and seeing him sitting there with a huge smile on his face. He was likely 20 years senior to anyone else there, yet seemed completely unselfconscious, finding immense joy in the music. To have one's music deeply enjoyed is truly a gift to a musician. So there I guess there was some more mutuality there.

In the last couple of years, I'd run into Kip at the occasional peace or Veterans For Peace rally. It was always a warm reconnection. He is one of the few older men that I have known, who have reached out to me in a warmhearted and mentoring way. And for this I am grateful. If there is one quality that came through Kip, it is that he was always, always ENCOURAGING. A mere mention of one's dreams, inspirations, and light would always receive Kip's unselfconscious expression of support.

I treasure the gift Kip gave me of his time, attention and kindness. And I hope, inspired my his gentle, relentless activism, I too can find my way to be a light for peace, mutuality and supportive mentorship in the world.

Gratitude, blessings, and peace to you, my friend Kip--

flicker in the cold

when I say
it is cold this morning
I mean my heart

waking disturbed at the wrong hour
after a nightmare of
psychopathic surgery

groggily swimming between worlds
until the 3 am alarm
reminds me once again
of the world's essentials

college bowl scores
and who was traded
for how many millions

as howling January winds
conspire on my 17 degree porch
keeping me curled up far too long

wondering

who is the psychopath
so empty-hearted and vile

is he the public mind
so dire after returning to
a post-holiday work grind

is he recent death
distorted into a bone-slicing maniac

a symbolic punisher
of personal and collective vain-ego

do soulless websites
somehow take a chunk of bone
from the base of a man's skull

is he too much pomodoro
the nightshade in my diet

the economic conspiracy
I was reading about
and JFK

friends I can't seem to find
and some vengeful lonely
shadow of mine

the lack of a secure
automotive and dental
infrastructure to rely on

reports from Gaza with
snapshots of more heartless
institutionalized murder

or just some random villainous schmuck
who on the way to my graduation
had it out for Captain Kirk--

what is he doing
in this psychic sphere
I've lately thought so well integrated

and how can I rest
until I know

what is to be done
with the sudden appearance
of such an icy mind

darkly figured
and behind the scenes
so cunningly cutting

but light a candle
to flicker in the cold

and wait for the thaw

two pillars

1.
it seems death
is all around these days

sad and ancient teacher
lecturing each of us
with unknown words

two pillars
in one week

two momentary mentors
now leave us alone

two communities
meeting in me

how can I not grieve

how can I not fear
the world has become
that much colder

and I
much older



2.
bitter biting winds of January
speak through snow

losses remind me of my rage

icy roads kill
as sure as cancer cures

the calamities of age


3.
you may rest now
I suppose

(check in with God about it, eh?)

I rest less now knowing
there is still the quixotic work
that you began

some idea I heard...

from a pastor
who thought it useful
not paying the taxes
which fund war...

and a Quaker
veteran...

for peace


4.
the sun is leaving again
on her daily betrayal

sucking the remnants
of illusions and clarity
from all of my eyes

i know more than ever
there is fulfillment
amidst such appearances
of nonsense

i know too now
that death is only real to those
who have never seen

the grasses of the arroyo
enshrined in life's glow

and the ravens dancing

free



4.
you knew something
of the nature of life

you knew the truth of peace
in your heart

and so helped the rest of us
begin to see

at least its possibility
in the world

and to begin our own work
duly mentored

of finding
our own
hearts

peace



6.
Who now
can fill your shoes

stand where you stood

hold the space that
you held in the world

write the letters
you wrote

speak the truth
with such eloquent
humility

who will take the time
to commit their lives

to ending war

who will resist
so gracefully

without dogma

who will shine the light
of their awareness

of their Creator

into the world now
each day gently

as you did

who will care for His creation
revel in the fruits of Her garden

and water the seeds of
a sweeter world


who

Phil

Where does one begin? A tribute to Phil Rieman--

I met Phil a bit over a year ago. He was the pastor of a church in Indianapolis. I did not have the pleasure of meeting his wife, Louise, who was away on church-related activity during the several days I stayed at the church. I was there training for a program teaching kids about nonviolent strategies. For travel reasons, I stayed a day beyond the rest of the crew's departure. And Phil, who was taking me to the airport the next day, offered me dinner. And we had time to connect.

Phil and his wife died last week in a crash on icy holiday roads. I had just been writing of him when a friend phoned me with the news. I was writing another friend at the time, describing the pleasure of my connections to the Brethren folks in Indiana, and their peace-related activism. After hearing the news, I wrote of my time with Phil:

"He made me dinner, and opened up to me about what it was to be a pastor, to be Brethren, to not pay taxes to the IRS, to have his van stolen by the feds, etc. I felt very able to be myself around him, and remember talking about the Earth-based spirituality I was particularly into at the time. He was totally respectful and interested. He was also very gracious with those forgetting to return the church key after staying over (and mailing it back from NM.)

He invited me to come back anytime, and described how the church would be setting up soon for their two-week turn in putting up and feeding the area homeless through the winter. I thought I might see him again in such circumstances, and feel sad that I won't be.

At the same time, folks like that--gems I have been graced to meet--are so ego-balanced and service-oriented that the inspiration of their lives is not diminished by their passing. I don't know if that makes perfect sense, but it's kind of what people mean when they talk about someone living on in others..."

I hope the church is able to remain strong in serving the urban community there, including sheltering the homeless, letting the local kids play football on the field behind the church, holding groups studying the post-corporate world, and putting up the odd frisbee-tossing peacenik passing through from New Mexico.

Peace to you, Phil and Louise--