All posts tagged: Ecstatic Poems

The Cheering Section

April 8, 2015
by Michael
comments 30
Poetry

Three frogs were sitting together under a newspaper watching the typhoon of unnecessary human ordeals roll across the sky from one side to the other like an entire model year of locomotives wrestling for the glory. It was Fantastic. Thunderous. Unpredictable. Insane. And I was in that sky– whirling, pounding, placating, admonishing, wounding, encouraging, listening, stinging, consoling, worrying, wishing, dashing, leaping. Suffering, basically, all the madness of that turbulent fury. What I eventually noticed, in a […]

The Conclusions of Our Chief Investigator

April 4, 2015
by Michael
comments 22
Poetry

What I saw was a line of smoke scribed upon the sky in a confident hand, like the swift first streak of an artist’s signature. This was not some willy-nilly scribble of carbonized particulates. No. Graphical in nature, the arc was infused with information. It was an ember-tipped flourish that induced a state of euphoric anticipation in the mind of every beholder– a clear-slated readiness for whatever might come next. Spontaneous genuflections and the unconscious recitation […]

Research

March 31, 2015
by Michael
comments 34
Poetry

They said once, in the papers, they found sea shells in the Rocky Mountains. To minds so disposed, these findings– like all such mockeries of the mundane– sparked a series of concomitant revelations. I know this because Hafiz pinned me to the wall, told me to hold quite still, and then cordoned my life– which suddenly felt like a pop-up trailer with ten thousand doors– into endless sectors of moonlit bedrock and crushed eons. We […]

Keepers of the Promise

March 28, 2015
by Michael
comments 32
Christ / Poetry

Snow tip-toes through the sunlight, falling in a dappled caress, a lingering sweetness, as the world bends around the corner. The passing season is saying its good-byes, asking to be thought of kindly for all that was and had to be. The blown kiss leaves the forest empty again, a landscape between tenants– a hallowed silence filled with the changing light. Who will come next? A caravan of deer march through this question in a […]

Flinging Fistfuls of Perfection

March 26, 2015
by Michael
comments 25
Poetry

I had a moment, very recently in fact, to which you might be able to relate, when I was looking up into the starry sky and thinking: why not…? Because it wouldn’t even be a violation would it? Statistically speaking, I mean. There’s so many of you… It’s like a goo goo cluster up there, right? Couldn’t there be some kind of unexpected gravitational perturbation? Like a universal sloshing effect where just one of you […]

What Was That?

March 2, 2015
by Michael
comments 21
Poetry

Every once in a while reality gets in a mood. Wants to bust up the ice. Show us our options. Get the lead out. Crumple up history into a ball. Rubs its hands together. Blows on the dice. Not for luck. Oh no. The devoted– the ones alone in the gym before daylight about to shoot their five hundred free throws– they do the same. Twirl the world in their hands. Breathe deep. Visualize it. […]

The Four Directions of Light

February 24, 2015
by Michael
comments 28
Poetry

The limited predictive intelligence of nuance can sometimes permit the obfuscation of the glaringly obvious. Said another way: forecasts predicated on the data typically accrued during the life span of a single human being are known to be astoundingly flawed. This may explain why Hafiz and Rumi stare at me like a pair of dispassionate fieldstones on the verge of sprouting horns when I wax extemporaneously about the day’s events— as if my mouth is moving, […]

Out in the Open

February 17, 2015
by Michael
comments 20
Christ / Poetry

This writing has undone me, peeled away my knowing and my nonsense, and led me way out way out from the edge to where there are no shadows, to where the clear light is visible in every direction, to where the wind is always scented by the horizon– in hues of timber and sunlight, in copal, cedar, and jasmine. Some days flowers fall from the sky, but no matter. What would it matter? I remember […]

Freshly Cut Light

February 9, 2015
by Michael
comments 16
Poetry

I was a diamond on the ride in today, a precisely cut sentience whisking across the frozen tar, a conscious particle accepting every direction, every possibility, into its center. Breathing. Zooming. Flooding the radio silence with unformed memories. Remembering forty years from now. Embracing the horizon’s glow. Letting that fire reflect inside of me from every angle before being released. Calling every misgiving home from the wild. Setting out food. Becoming the rookery while it’s […]

Any Way They Can

February 5, 2015
by Michael
comments 17
Poetry

I can’t work like this, I muttered. (I get emotional sometimes around beings of the most radiant candor– the ones who tell you like it is without even moving their lips, who shatter whole lifetimes of log-jammed feelings with a kind of glimmering eye thing and an emanating peace that sneaks up on you like a heated seat, a peace that feels as though it’s backstopped by a battalion of compassionate mountain lions who keep […]