the homecoming

we printed no ads and
no search parties went out
for the pieces that had gone missing.

they came home later.

it seems they had been buried
under debris from wars, explosions and collapses,
concrete blocks of unfathomable rage
and piles of unclarified drama.

i had imagined they were,
like dogs who run away from home
in the face of noisy firecrackers and explosions,
lost,
and unable to find their way home.

i thought they were dead, decayed, rotted,
but they came suddenly, soundlessly,
not the remains of the day,
or a skeletal mass or a thin shadow
but full bodied and whole hearted
and full of love,
these puppies, or pieces, or fragments of love
that had been left in the aisle
and forgotten about
now ready to come home.

seasonal depression

after the monsoon has swept
over the land and ravaged it
into full-breasted luscious bounty,
it recedes
and the whole earth body
dries up and cracks and fissues,
and is parched with deep yearning
for the rains to come again.

wolves do not hibernate, typically,
but sometimes they accept dark meaningless
caves and do not emerge for long periods.
sometimes it's because it's comfortable,
and at other times it's because a
human-disguised-as-a-wolf-being tried
to tame them with things like
promises and psychiatry.
but wolves emerge, even though emerging is
blinding and painful and uncomfortable
and just quite inconvenient,
and involves the use of frozen muscles that
cramp and uncramp excruciatingly.
awakening is nauseating, unsettling, devoid of
a soft landing cushion to protect the wolf
from the shock of the hard surface that
they optimistically call "rock bottom",
where the roots swing low and offer
crude nutrition and something ancient and known,
yet distorted beyond recognition.
but wolves mend; they evolve from the shock,
they nurse their wounds and find other wolf friends
and cuddle with their old cub-mates
and cling to their mothers
and teachers and fathers and other fuzzy things
and eat whatever the earth offers and they mend.
they lie on the hard surface of the earth
and know they have never been closer to their source.
and when one day they have mended themselves,
and dug their way through the soil
and healed the broken roots...
... well, then they rise.

(like batman)

where there is a root
there must be tree.
the treeless root
is just as unstable
as the rootless tree,
buried far beneath the ground
with no sunshine or air,
no sense of the sky,
or experience of the wind.
so when one puts down
roots also, it helps to be
prepared to grow
a rooted tree.

she sat at the table next to the window, watchign her lemon-soda-with-sugar having a panic attack. she could relate completely with the great agitation, the undigested, insoluble sugar and the soda that bubbled over the brim onto the surface of the table, a large, fizzy, unbounded mess. in an almost sadistic sort of way, she was coompelled to keep adding more soda to the glass every time the panic was over, and watch it overflow again.

she sat at this table listening to the babble of tourist voices and the shriefs of the children next door, making this free-flowing mess and thinking about unwritten poetry about a thousand buddhist prayer flags, crossroads and indecision, the unbearable thrill of a first touch and the incomparable pain of a last kiss.

a thousand buddhist prayer flags could be hope abandoned at the side of a hill, surrender, a prayer too precious to name, wishes to secret to whisper to anyone but the hillside, which never falters, never forgets. a thousand buddhist prayer flags speak of pebbles inside shoes, digging into exhausted soles, and of groves where trees whisper and offer reprieve. a thousand buddhist prayer flags are beautiful, and reminders of beauty in extreme pain and great failure and complete brokenness. a thousand buddhist prayer flags are an offering to the fundamental insanity of being human.

and so there may be messes with no boundaries, lands carved into countries and cities and nightmares. there may be love that is simple not enough and many months and years lost to an impossible wish. and loss that breaks through fragile layers and fortresses on the side of the hill that remain mulishly intact through the flood and rooms affected by thunderstorms and people who only wander along the hillside alone, under the thousand buddhist prayer flags, whispering incomprehensibly of abstract notions like possibility, healing, love, recovery, hope.

10/06/2013

A rut is a rut
even with
prayer flags
flapping in the wind.

Laburnum

Some trees are full of thorns and spines,

and offer flowers at the end of their boughs--

the most beautiful aspects of their desires, 

a colourful culmination of their prickles and pains.

Others like the laburnum seem to burst 

into colour all over, as though they are so full

and heavy that they cannot help
but flower into multitudes of tiny happy
bursts of yellow cheer.