My heart is full of endings, and I'm going to meet the whales.
At the ocean's surfing edge, children tickle the toes of God,
While in the mist, world-weary elders breathe in heaven's peace,
And in the crashing storms behold
Old Testament fury.
Beyond the shore, below the waves, lie unfathomed depths,
Too broad to compass, too vast to hold, a surging, eternal will.
My heart is full of endings, and I'm going to meet the whales.
Wednesday, September 9, 2015
Saturday, September 5, 2015
Whistling Past the Graveyard
Saturday, July 4, 2015
What Used To Be Here?
Look at this corner -
My God! It's changed!
What used to be here?
A theater, wasn't it?
No - bakery, I think -
Hot cross buns and almond cookies.
No, no - a florist -
That one with the orchids -
Remember?
The doorway where we shared our first kiss -
The jazz club where I looked into your eyes and saw
The future?
Anyway, it's a gravel pit now,
A concrete hole,
A project,
A scaffold,
Construction zone.
Destruction home.
Bulldozed block.
Tearing down
Making way
Wiping out memory
and stories
and time.
Putting up
Walls.
They're building the future.
Future banks,
Future lofts,
Future over-priced world,
Future new,
Future hip,
Future meaningless shit
To us.
What used to be here,
Before it was razed to the ground?
Laughter, desire and broken heart-shards?
What was this once,
Before now plowed it away?
It was our youth,
Our courtship:
Romance,
Idealism,
Hope.
It was us -
Young and wide-eyed, all roads open.
It was us -
Talking of our future
over wine and ravioli
and shrimp salad sandwiches.
It was us.
It was then.
Wasn't it?
Friday, June 19, 2015
Waste Not
Waste not
this day
this hour
this moment
In withering worry and aching agenda,
Weighing worth on human scales
of fame and fortune,
bytes and stats,
and cruelly quantified commodity.
You cannot graph eternity
Nor calculate serenity.

Count what matters -
The sudden flutter of a monarch's wings,
The lone chirp of a lark on high,
The scent of jasmine in a city park,
The taste of lemons, lavender and laughter,
Bright breezes,
Sun-parched skin,
Drumming hearts,
The silence of being.
Waste not
this day
this hour
this moment.
this day
this hour
this moment
In withering worry and aching agenda,
Weighing worth on human scales
of fame and fortune,
bytes and stats,
and cruelly quantified commodity.
You cannot graph eternity
Nor calculate serenity.

Count what matters -
The sudden flutter of a monarch's wings,
The lone chirp of a lark on high,
The scent of jasmine in a city park,
The taste of lemons, lavender and laughter,
Bright breezes,
Sun-parched skin,
Drumming hearts,
The silence of being.
Waste not
this day
this hour
this moment.
Thursday, March 26, 2015
Lost In Thought
My mind is a forest.
On lazy Sundays
I leave a trail of breadcrumbs
To find my way back home.
The better worn pathways
Skirt safely about the edges.
Delve deeper
And they all disappear
Into overgrown, tangled
Life -
Dark and thick, dense and wild,
Utterly under-explored.
I follow a flash of feathers and fur,
A birdcall,
The sound of cataracts and wind tunnels,
Until I am lost.
Saturday, February 28, 2015
Dogs Know
Every new piece of human research shows
just how smart dogs are.
This dog is not impressed.
In a new study published in a human journal, Animal
Cognition
Researches have “discovered” we know how humans feel
It’s news apparently,
that we read facial expressions, can sense
when a human is untrustworthy.
Remember that time you promised a treat?
Fido sat quietly, for an entire hour
So you could work.
You forgot.
You forgot.
Fido remembered.
We remember your little lies.
We’ve been onto you all long.
Scientists at the Kyoto University
Promised food.
Didn’t deliver.
Noted that we didn’t respond to the third round of broken
promises.
It seems, amazingly, we can tell if people are reliable or
just
lying liars.
We had to evolve in our long history with humans.
We know too much
to be your best friend.
Sunday, November 30, 2014
Tiger's Wanderings - Character Exploration for a Short Story
It’s a bunny you follow this time, a little hippity-hop in the yard. Follow the little hippity-hop up the street and down the road and into the ditch and out of the ditch and across the street -
Bam!
Poor little hippity-hop! Little bloody one! Little smashed one!
Can’t save it.
That’s when the butcher ogre spins his wheel of fortune. All the streets and trees and houses, all the doors and windows and clouds, go whirling by, go flashing by, flippity-flip, changing one to the other to the other, and when the world stops spinning, you’re lost.
The munchkins point and giggle. "Just follow the yellow brick road," they say.
Sooner or later you meet a wizard or a fairy godmother and they take you to the Emerald City. It’s full of flying monkeys who’ve lost their wings, and heartless woodsmen and cowardly tigers.
Cowardly Tigers.
They always serve pork chops in the Emerald City. Porkchops and beans and mashed potatoes. You save the scraps for Bootsie. Good ol’ Bootsie. They’re only scraps. Even the flying monkeys share scraps.
Somebody in the Emerald City always has the magic elixir. You have to hide it from the wizard. All the animals pass it around. It takes you back to the field of poppies and up into the clouds and even the Winkies get a clue. If you drink enough and click your heels together three times, you find your way home, find it just the way you left it, and Bootsie comes running and you give him a treat because he’s so happy to see you and you’re so happy to see him and you promise never, ever, ever to wander off again.
But something always fails you. It’s the Wicked Witch that does it. She’s cast a spell over the whole land. Made it haunted. When the spell takes you, you’ve got no choice but to follow - follow a hippity-hop or an acorn-muncher or a spotted hornhead or a tiny flapper or a mini song machine.
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