Author: Michael

My Stethoscope Palm

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Christ / Poetry

I walked out into a field of grass and golden light to place my hand upon the sky, and spun the heart wheel. The world blurred into songs– the old ones, the ones that can fly– then became the memory of human heads nodding in the darkness as the truth was shared one to one. Knowledge poured out of me to join with the Directions. It told me that every tear will be wiped away, then […]

Seeing Through Seeing

comments 36
Poetry

The wind is blowing softly, and just earlier today, three morning doves were nestled in the grass, their rounded faces poking up like a clan of bottle-tops drifting along together in a quiet green sea. We were watching from behind the window, and they were watching, too– each of us studying the way our own reflection was illumined by the vision of the other. We were all looking, blinking, beholding– when we touched hearts sweetly in a pane […]

Rising Seas

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Christ

Something is happening but I can’t see what it is, because the day sky is an impenetrable scattering of color, and the night sky is too deep to see the bottom.  The moon isn’t a reliable reference either, because it’s just one point, and clearly an outlier.  You can’t leverage it at all.  Though the particulars are being worked out, I still take comfort in this vague arrival– in its presence– whatever it is. I […]

The Dangled Carrot

comments 47
Poetry

In the inky darkness of the void, beneath a tender moon, a door cracks open, and perfect quiet spills out to form a shadow… A moth appears– wings a-flicker from the very first, as if it has been curiously darting to and fro for quite some time, and the door has appeared of its own volition. To be polite. To show the way. The weaving gray feather is hardly more than a tickle upon an […]

A Sortie of Falcons

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Poetry

Hafiz and I on a bench, basking in a rosy sunset. Falcons gathering on the limbs overhead– some Merlins, some Sooties, a Grey– all of them edging awkwardly close, coalescing into an artillery of vision. The theater is full. A door opens like an out-sized black pixel on the face of the sun– a cuckoo-clock pronouncement– and brilliant birds of flame fly out to swoop across our sky like smoke rings blown by the sun’s innermost […]

An Artifact of the Heart

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Creative

I remember falling in love with Bucky Fuller’s use of the word artifact the first time I ran across it– the way the modern world, seen through his eyes, was an assemblage of present day artifacts.  These were not clay bowls and petrified implements unearthed from a Sumerian archaeological dig, but mass-produced silverware, jet engine airplanes, and home heating furnaces.  An artifact in this sense is the embodiment of a particular era’s state of thought. […]

Heaven’s Front Yard

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Christ / Poetry

Staggering through the dim light of Heaven’s front yard, slinking into the greenish shadows of distant outdoor halogens as if to hide forever, and ranting silently about the burden of makeshift woes and ramshackle postulates with which I’d saddled myself– including my favorite one about the  pending arrival of something hellish but indeterminate in nature that no being should ever have to face– why wouldn’t I accept the cocktail napkin and the nice sandwich offered to me […]

The Trail Up the Mountain

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Christ

This post was written in response to the Inner Child Blog Challenge that Ka sent my way…  Thank you, Ka, for the prompt… As children, what happens swallows us whole.  We occupy slices of heaven easily.  They’re what we expect to find.  There are no beliefs to suspend in order to gain access, for our minds have yet to form them.  Our physical brains are malleable potentials, taking in light and sound with curiosity, measuring […]

The Upside of Mindfulness

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Poetry

Without mindfulness, you might spaz out in a moment of adversity and plunge the toilet recklessly completely oblivious to the fact that only a little nudge is being asked for in that location, a gentle rhythm that will pass through a vast and holy maze of intersecting worlds that just happen for that one moment to share your half bath, so that in places broadcasting colors your eyes can’t understand, and sounding deft languages that long ago […]

Breaking Free

comments 41
Poetry

If the premonitions of being that scythe through your soul’s back forty all day like shadowy pendulums hung from a pivot so insanely near to the nodal origins of your existence that it’s a perpetually mild discomfort to your otherwise undistracted mind cause you to tremble, take a quick, nervous breath and brace for impact, dive towards an embankment, spontaneously recite procedures for exiting sunken cars, or climb the stairs of tall buildings to burden […]