Hafiz came along and asked what I was doing up there in that tree with soot all over my face and my hair in greasy knots, my feet scratched, blistered and bleeding, my wick burned down to the sputtering last, my eyes wild and leering, and talking to myself in curses and run-ons about trying one last time to impregnate the sky with the signal flare seed of the holy calvary I required. The snarling, yipping […]
There’s a new policy in heaven I wish to discuss. Instead of a life review, they set you out in a meadow full of this special grass that tickles your feet incessantly— a meadow with songbirds full of mirth and wit that line up in the sky to land on your shoulder one after another and offer a joke or a poem before disappearing altogether… Oh—! …and of tornadoes that swoop through sporadically, thunderous, crashing […]
It’s only been a few days, but I’m back for more. The life of an addict. My moments have become cracked glass, but there is a hint of honey in my tears. It’s been a bittersweet epiphany: I’m not cut out to be the person I’ve been being. I’m a crash test dummy careening into the wall of nothing whatsoever. For a moment I was full and clear, a moment without the traffic, unfettered, remembering what […]
So… Jesus and I are taking a little break. You have to set boundaries. have to have to have to have to My side is like this: after a couple of fervent decades during which time I was strung out on mantras, kale juice, free range chicken egg beaters, galactically resonating yoga poses, tantric how-to illustration books, and uncompromising techniques of detachment, I turned the cracked pavement corner of my block to square up my […]
I used to think the very act of coming out to this frontier town, to this slat-walled refuge set down in the wild light and crooning darkness, would be sufficient. A proof of concept. Like I could purchase everlasting freedom with an act of unexpected boldness. Without thinking it per se, I believed that after packing just my necessaries and lashing them down, selling the house and the grandfather clock, then riding west across creaking leagues […]
Once Hafiz and I were walking along the beach beneath a violet sky that had gathered around a glowing sliver of the moon, speaking existentially about sunken barques drift wood hand-carved initials and the audacity of the ruffled tulip, when the pounding surf whistling winds and rush of mad-honking gulls tripped a lever inside of my famished organs of persona. I was suddenly swimming in the need to give my whole life away, to tear […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Embracing Forever 