Helix Nebula
Heart becomes a blood dense sun
Consuming all of anyone
come to take a seat beside
or to sacrifice their burdens.
Goes the ghosts into the pyre
soften, silent from the ire
consuming even their own ashes
magnesium memories in the fire.
Until love fumes spheres of aural stars
hums distant in the cradling dark
cuddled, lost, yet guiding lights
Hu remembers where you are…
when where has forgotten
who you are.
Educate our hearts before we speak our minds.
For it is we who keep our shadow company,
not our shadow ours.
I try to catch the latest news,
Lest otherwise,
I become rolled over by it.
And I heard the hiss
Of venomous spinners,
“We must arm ourselves to the teeth…
Kill them all! Bomb them all!”
Such comely pundits,
coated in makeup and gloss,
to read incendiary scripts from teleprompters,
to incite and heap bricks of lead
to tip their side of the scales of Justice.
Smoke speaks before fire,
then soon after comes the flame,
and then the wind of sentiment
to fan the inferno.
But who will speak low and soft of love?
Where are the healing eyes
and empathetic ears of poets past
who dipped their feather pens in compassion
and caressed messages, as
balms for our wounds?
Why do we taint the inherent scripture of mankind
with rhetoric and reaction
by those who seek to study the chaff
and not the wheat of a communal harvest?
Our great leaders have gone softly
into their nights…
battle weary
and brittle by war.
So if a bomb explodes at the Café I plan to visit today –
who will avenge my death
and who to see to the seeds I’d sewn
for compassion and peace?
Pray not these men and women on prime media payroll
and those of privileged wealth
and inherited power
who climb the backs of soft singing nightingales
to cackle the message of crows.
I’m none of these.
I was born of the womb,
and crawled to a walk, and thereon
through forests, and mountains, and shores,
shared with all things visible.
My heart rises and falls and races with beauty
and aches with darkness.
I fade, feeling the color run from my hair
and the suppleness of my skin
to dry and wither.
I watch my children quiver
like green leaves on the lithe limbs of youth –
fearing their fall,
but adoring their verdant energy.
All man is by nature equal
before the rise of knowledge –
and as the kingdom rises within each human being,
who will he take for a sage
and who for a fool?
Lo’ we must focus the light in our hearts
before we speak from our darkening minds.
For it is we who keep our shadow company,
not our shadow ours.
God undoes everything
From interstellar crystalline
To keep a distance in between
Each fair feather
in gusting flocks
in shifting weaves
with sequenced wings
numbered bezels of the clock
ripples role in circles, serpentine
spilt in pools of synchrony
beneath the melt of icicles
drop by drop, a metronome
ticks echoes in the vacancy
and tocks within those secret spaces
of snowflakes falling
and that between
a billion stars reflected, all,
in separate eyes that
once had seen until
all light went out in unison
with one wincing blink,
so darkened skies.
Such well planned placement,
where all things converge
into the vacant.
Where all things converge,
Into the vacant.
Love’s mystery unraveling
is a star burning out…
Naught but a flame without its coal;
a constellation sans axis
to circle about.
When its meaning exceeds
the object of dreams,
Let it go,
let it go to be loved
to smithereens.
#love takes a
#life, but be not
#sad for,
#pain gives
#depression respite, but more that
#death, gives life
#poetry, so that in times of trouble it’s
#you I see, as a
#heart in a lighthouse for a
#poem lost at sea
I took the top ten trending tags from a forum called Hello Poetry and let each word become the start of a verse/line. In a matter of 90 seconds, this came out. I did this hastily – so I’m sure some of you will amaze me with your #tag inspired insight. Welcome to Hash Tag Poetry!!!
#hashtag #hashtagpoetry
“What if the first command were ‘Write!’ not ‘Read!'”
(intended and received as a deeply introspective and profound posit by Maha)
What of the pristine experience
Of pure meaning
before the knowledge of word, it’s metaphor.
Even this pondering without words
is a paradox.
What is the spiritual distance
between the word as revelation
and the revelation thus revealed?
He who holds the pen
does not always control the writing…
nor is the one who listens,
control what is heard.
The path from the heart
to the writing hand
and the speaking lips
is fraught with struggle
between ego and intellect
The message becomes
a negotiation between them.
We seem to recite through veils
of various thickness and opacity.
Self-disclosure is a glowing filament within the heart.
Inspired messages are etched on it’s surface.
Comes a soft wind from a Voice
that blows dust from the cover of a book
written pre-eternity.
Truth is as quiet and vacuous
as any man can bare –
it’s pure recitation can indeed be painful.
Poetry must be
the beleaguered beauty of our struggle
to be honest to the Voice within.
“forgive me, I did not hear what you said,
because I was too busy listening to what I heard.”
Morning reflections as we enter 2015:
Civilization has evolved over time – and as I reflect on the present, I’ve never found a conflict between these religions where there wasn’t first an abandonment of faith. Each closes their eyes in prayers, and becomes blind to their differences and appeals to the same God. Each partakes of water and fruit from the same tree of which none solely own. Each knows humility and hope, as they kneel and rise again from the same earth, toward the same sky. Each blessed with differences, unified in their preaching of peace.
The energy it takes to wade through the morass of facts behind law and justice, depletes us of our morality. This creates a drifting world, of victims and perpetrators. Until every perpetrator becomes a victim and every victim, a perpetrator. My we regain our reverence for stillness, and silence and mystery…and but God. Such a silly thing is a thing such as God, unless It is still and silent and a mystery in your heart. That’s how I shall be first, that’s how my children will be first. We will not raise our voices until the wind comes from that Pristine Abode in our hearts. Then shall we speak.
I wrote to her sacrilege
Toasted haram
She, an idol among dregs
I, a totem in her palm
Love lifts on rose scent
leaving petals to quiver
all between us once, rent,
only kindling to give her
Hence, I turn to death
which best knows life
and set fire to my nest
For guiding torchlight
to illuminate the path
on my way home
to weep love ere I die,
For writing this poem.
NOTE:
Go down dark and deep beloveds
it’s good to go to those dark places within,
it’s there that we burn
and into that fire,
we dip our torches
to light our way out again.
go blind in your own light
and descend,
for many a stirred soul
will sway and rustle
in the same divine wind;
and all this
to fill the spirit’s silent wing
by which your voice ascends.
Love’s letters clatter in currents
Winds curl to stillness,
in a talus of potpourri,
Season totem, a cluster of hope,
waiting
For one match pulled and struck,
To scare the ghosts from the pyre.
In a choke of smoke
from sweet attar,
Loves heat fans
the embers within
the hearts own fire.
So many words
wrenched from mouth
and wrought from hand
Contortions,
twisted spoken grip,
we strip the evergreen needles
from the bough
and let them fall from the fist,
Sprinkling fir
To the earth as grist.
Had not a sentence stretched from
pulsing ink well
by plume to parchment, or
from warm breath of lip’s beseech
What then of our night would say,
And of our day to listen.
If we do not dare with deeds to fly
Then the falling never ends,
And poem, eternal, ne’er to begin
Loves expression, not its desire,
Is the cachet
to which both life and death aspire.
We knew too much to continue our lives
and into the darkness we fell
A poem was written, we reviewed it,
but realized we already knew of the downfall of men
so why continue the poem,
but it was beyond the end that the sweetness came.
There in the dark waters of the poem, a star fell in the distance.
It’s ending burst into a haunting arc of light that rolled light in the wake of it’s ripples.
I could see the …
I was in the hall of mirrors… and could see most clearly the unfathomable depth of what the poet meant.
The secret to the poems ending is not with the poet, but his reader.
Our failures are not defeat, they are oceans waves rushing the beach
I’ve sent you many messengers, each here to disrupt the status quo
The javelin of knowledge is thrown by fools
To land in the hearts of wisdom.
(What was written above came to me on the barely waking edge of a dream…and on this edge, I was compelled to write it automatically. I was not in control and I cannot bring myself to “edit” it.)
