Wednesday, July 9, 2025

Convergence of Eyes

The only noise the rocks make
Is when you try to relocate them.

They are told by sacred mountain
To hold its crystalline frequency like breath.

We are, too, so the sun can glow through
The changeable: Our DNA, sense of what’s real, the mood the horse is in.

At the top of the mountain the world is
In one direction, the desert the other,

Mexico a far-off glimmer though it lives here now
With all the tribes who melted into the mountain

Out at the edges of electric lines,
Where only bikes go by,

Some water towers swallowed by the hills,
Windows turned like eyes to the sun

As it descends on the golden sanctuary
That will hold the future world.

Ernesto, who lives on the switchback path,
Is no spring chicken when it comes to horses,

He knows every scratch and how they got there
And tells the rocks everything

And even the county authorities let the wilderness
Be his secret ranch to oversee.

A yellow ribbon affixed to the arena flaps 
Too eagerly its victory in the breeze,

Not like the ribbon that winds the blue layered
Golden time of different frequencies held together

By the will of my eye to see it rise across veiled valleys
Veined with green. The fan of wind

Beckons the grasses into feather pens
Paid not by the word but by pollen count

For the universe that reads, like horses do cookies,
Its book, one fluttering page at a time.

Monday, July 7, 2025

God as Truth, Key 77

Sweep the dust,
Process the memory
As part of the process
That no longer includes me.

Say goodbye, fear and shame,
Be as a feather on your way 
As I no longer need to remember
The germ inside their husk

Also dust, just a place 
You can leave when you like, 
Blindfold and all, for the shell
Reverse engineered the seed.

The neighing continues
But the need for anything real
Pops like soap bubbles
Their impenetrable veils.

"Look at these scratches,
Pay attention to my wounds,
My new found friend is not,"
Brio warned, "what he appears."

Indeed, horses precede the stars
Born to house their life force.
Now they roam in Sagittarius,
That fixes its pursuit on pure truth

While the stones of Sirius
Cultivate every eccentric note
For the divine within each soul song,
The coherence of knowing what God is.

We manifest what naturally becomes us, 
Reclaim our sovereign identity,
So nature can chime in on divine command
As reminder we are singular in theme.

Our identities are fixed in stone too.
The mind is just too large now,
Carving a meaning for our dwelling,
The only goal that remains.

A song of nickers and whinnies
As the sun goes down on
What its codes have turned to theory:
Steel bars, a rusted roof, 

Some leather straps that might
Withstand the weather.
The quest for what is
Has barely begun.

Saturday, July 5, 2025

On Horses Running Maskless in the Sun

Red, white and blue for the horseman's holiday,
Stalls empty of all but the horses
And a golden light of forgetfulness
Imbuing all that milk and honey
With a holy glaze.

Even the moths say California
In the way they fly freely
Between the column pairs
Through the portal of wind
Cooling the desert fire with life.

The oak trees don't even bend
Their laurels crisp at attention
To hear what's coming 
Down the road,
For nothing has ever happened here

Though the rocks still move 
Relentlessly, and the foxtail turns 
From green to gold 
Instantly, and the pyramids 
Echo restlessly every sound 

Of families in the canyon 
Grilling as usual
At ceremonial barbeques
While the war games wait 
Heavy in the air

In the hush of patience
Before the free are allowed
To do what the universe wants them to do,
Be happy, in every moment of sun,
Every gift of bird song,

Every stamping neigh
How they love the carrots
Almost as much as us,
Though we still confuse this,
These late days, with avarice

But the clamor of their eager mouths 
For our hands is nothing now beyond
The need for a blessing, for
Simply by paying, in that
Moment, attention,

We are the priests
Of this blue light, for we forgot
Everything that led up to this 
Moment so it won't be 
Spoiled from what it could be.

But remembering comes easier
With each upper pitch 
In the frequency gauge
Til' all that's been repressed
Ceases, by itself, to exist

In the melting sun that holds,
Like a candle, a light 
From all of the silent ones
Who watch us, hoping for
Exactly this.

Saturday, June 28, 2025

Remembering Machado

It's to get the gods back 
Is the purpose of poetry 
The translator said, as she languished
Over limonera rendered into English. 
"I can't get a Camaro into a pre-great war poem 
Without attracting the attention of the poetry gestapo."
The fox in me hides in the camouflage
Where I'm always welcomed, for everyone 
Wants everything known about themselves 
As long as the observer is transparent
Like a cartoon ghost or a whippoorwill,
Forever thought of fondly, but never seen,
Never really. 

                         The king as always doesn't care. 
His is the reality we begrudge respect for
Although he is almost always never real
At all. He is so far up the mountain now
Above the duero, where the leathered rich go 
And the old Rich Jews, the higher oblivion
Where what mattered was theirs, but it fell 
Through the crack, and they're happy they are not 
Now below ruthlessly suppressing their empathy 
For the sake of the Grail! 

                                                 Lift the cup 
Of fresh-squeezed lemonade with lavender in it. 
My yard is my Earth. My world is my following. 
Each glance at me is a universe entire. 
That's why it pleases me, what I do,
Setting up the hot tub for the summer,
Letting the wind dictate the mix of chemicals 
While I spend my leisure deep in prayer
For the dankest moonlight jams.

Thursday, June 26, 2025

Only Birds Over Hillhead Road

Walking Juneau this evening has been like a video game,
Cars out of nowhere to dodge, small attack dogs on magical leashes
And muscular huskies who show they know they would throw her 
Down for lunch, before lurching off, to become the bicycle guy
Who says what a beautiful dog, and a little girl who stares holding
The largest piece of chalk I’ve ever seen, her sidewalk rainbow art
A plea to remember Pluto and all the stars and all beautiful flowers

Then there’s the gingerbread house with matching Diane Arbus twins
And its doppleganger white dog they giggle at, holding spiral lollipops,
And Juneau finally drinks from the ghost dog bowl as if to earn points.
Some passersby radiate a soul while others may not even be real
But there'd be an explosion if she went up to them just the same.
And I pull til she cedes the challenge with wistful whiskerbrows
As I try to keep her safe, to be her badass self, as humans never are.

We get to the park and it's a dog show, like there’s a man with a pipe 
To pronounce verdict to a jury of ground squirrels, but there's nothing 
Real in other dogs to Juneau, as a careening skater carries a surfboard.
And the only thing missing, I notice now, there are no automatic
Weapons shot at me from every breezeway, no Molotov cocktails
From off-balance Challengers to detonate my innards, no numbchucks
To fear, tho I do anyway, like the drummer in one of these windows

Who practices the wrist shuffle, anticipating his rapid disappearance 
From the condo of doing what others tell him to do, when he’d rather 
Whistle his own tune, the one they always told him shouldn’t exist at all,
It had no right, like him, to be — he’d rather slip away than help them 
Understand the king’s business is worth the king’s time, they should be
Grateful he can frivole this age of peace where he's not needed away. 
The moment I refuse the joystick is the moment all resistance ends.

Tuesday, June 24, 2025

The Cazimi of Compassion

Deconstruct experience, the dragons say,
In dream, look at those throbbing hills,
They've got you hypnotized they are 
Still and real as a newspaper photo
And the scars on Brio's face, just enough
To feel love from Navajo, the Appaloosa
Apollo dropped beside him for repair
Like an Airstream, so grateful to have 
A companion at last, who, with doe-eyed 
Eagerness bit his eager eyeball. 

But Merlin, Navajo's version of me, is on the scene 
Like camo security, to stare down the mayhem
And tighten the valve of the crazy snake nozzle
In the always-full trough of emotional commotion,
Because all water rolls down the mountain to here.
"Hell I get a little spicy over dinner too."
Sez Merlin! You can't make this shit up.
The galactics must have us on speed dial
For the guffaws we provide, how straight
Our faces can bend to not remembering.

"How can you know what happened to them,"
They always ask, "unless it has happened to you?"
Even Quan Yin requires a giant pile of shit
For all the tears she needs to cry 
To learn compassion through her suffering,
So she can spark life into things
By feeling what they feel, as the cow horses
Rein like whirling dervishes and the deer
Disappear in the grass. 
A sawhorse holds a saddle.

I look for guidance
In the hair whorl of the sorrell, eye level
Of the peaceful mind. But it's just another
Scam of belief in what you see, 
When helicopters and waterfalls 
Whirr by you unnoticed all day
Behind cellophaned microphones,
While the Urmah hide like mountain lions
And the dragons only emerge from their holes
Sculpted in the sandstone when the sun falls.

They know in this way one comes to believe
And thus can re-solve the past and re-wire
What happened with what should have been.
Reality has broken just in time. 
We were worried
Our interpretations may have missed the point.
But then we passed, in a reality no one
Who was not then with us would believe,
Creation Corner, in the rich hills, teaching
How to manifest abundance when they're young. 

Sunday, June 22, 2025

Repentance as Nirvana

At the moment I recognized the scent
Of a need to find an adequate
Symbol the great white bird
Passed from meaning and my roof.

When the spell of others is broken
The residues, of past lives and
Tribes you gave your soul to
Become malleable enough to move.

Still there's the stick
The master hits you with
That removes more than it inflicts
As he raps the marble floor

To scatter the karma
And conjure the benevolent wind
And the breastplates of the terracotta 
Warriors' harmonized with dharma

Although we cringe, at how the outside
Bears down upon the house
And wrap our Easter crucifix in red 
To repent for repentance, dust for dust.

The mercy is seeing how we went off course,
Seeing who we are by what is taken away,
All but the inner quiet 
Has always been empty.

It is holy to let go, that's how
We become clean, repent for all 
By tolerating everything, by believing
They receive enough love

And we notice we are noticing
And can exist that way without a prompt, 
Until the stick no longer comes down fiercely
And we can tell what exists and what does not

And so we transcend the cycle of life
And death, because we have the proof
In a hand that no longer needs to act
And has nothing to prove.

Friday, June 20, 2025

Last Day of Spring

My cells
                are like sails
They pick up all
                               the codes
From dolphins leaping 
                                          freely
Right in front of me
                                     brought
Like a frog a fly
                             out of the sky,

A cloud production factory
                                                 now
With a springtime's worth
                           of negative ions
To remind me where I've been
                      How much I needed
A lot of rain
                       to bloom so profuse
In such vivid purples
                                       the lupines

And behind the veiled 
                                         cigar that 
Throws off spray
                               of 12-strand DNA
It dares me to open to
                                         the cold
Of empty wind
                            blowing every note
On my reed
                      that keens freely to its
Perfect pitch
                        of very unique.

It takes the lightest breath
                                                no lung
As an accordion
                                 but the forbidden
Of all but the pure
                                  by one who has
Left behind all but that.

We are changing indeed,
                                              the container 
Ships cleaned of children
                                              and advanced
Gyroscopes put in place
                                             and no one can
Pretend anymore
                                 that Catalina's still here 
Just obscured 
                             by the day's condensation.

It has lifted like a ship,
                                          asked to navigate 
Different timelines,
                                    multiple realities.
It is OK to let ours bend, 
                                             I finally say,
Still I see the melting mirror
                                                    as a threat

But those feelings,
                                   like grief, get less
And less the more I enter
                                               the discomfort
Of not knowing how
                                       it will end
Or why it was done
                                    in the first place,

The island of knowing 
                                         gleams in the distance.
It no longer has relevance
                                                 when dolphins
Come this close to us,
                                         to show how we are
Really finally ready
                                    to be blessed.

Parking Trap Malted

The Ted Fay Fly Shop lures you in
To the Angler Inn
Next to Rapunzel’s Castle.

Another town that time forgot,
More pink shutters,
Another red barn diner
With checkerboard floors
And menus that never change
Hung as curtains,
Deer head hat racks,
Train track bric a brac
And local businesses on the placemats
That exist at least in memory
If not in fact.

The 5 dollar charge for whining
Has not been updated for inflation,
But they’ll charge you just the same.

The lumber haulers have all gone
All that’s left is the railroad,
Itself an anachronism, some ironic
Take on retro tourism, a touchstone
To dreams embezzled by bankers
Like a smashed penny that makes
The box that contains your childhood memories
Smell like creosote.

Tuesday, June 17, 2025

On the Road with the Ghost of Buck Owens

At the Dino Mart in Gustine
The consequence of making an alien baby
Back in the dust of Bakersfield
Was revealed, as we became
The children of the Sinclair dinosaur,
Mewling for snaps at the green toy.

It was all we could do to get away
From a Wasco that was no longer roses
In endless fields for New Year’s Day
Along the death road to Paso Robles
Where we commiserated with a Starbucks robot
At California milk spoiled at 103 degrees.

But neither the five dollar rabbit
Nor the zebra from Shafter prepared us
For the dueling flatbeds of homeless chihuahuas,
One done up as a muscle car float
The other a plywood pallet on wheels
Where the chihuahua’s all had bells.

The roads are like that now, especially when
Family is involved. Every exit goes to Arkansas,
A hush hush past that’s now blown up
Like the one burned down house on the road
Where the rainbow ice cream vendor
Wheels her dyed-ice sugar for no one.

Every father has misplaced one daughter
At least, just as every son leaves home
So his heart can be broken, and no one
Looks at any loving couple as anything
But a misplayed bet waiting to settle,
Where the choice of lawyer proves your worth.

It’s a wonder they have all survived
To migrate like birds from this pizza reunion
To Arbuckle and Willows, Maxwell, Artois,
Ceres and Lemoore, Lockeford, Firebaugh
Tracy, Pixley, Ducor -- but mostly Porterville,
Swapped like crops with demand and the weather,

Kingsburg cling peaches for Dinuba pears,
Arvin champagne grapes for raisins from Parlier,
Weedpatch carrots that give way to Turlock honeydews, 
Or Reedley, where they grow loofahs on trees,
Or Galt to work white sturgeon eggs, or tomato sauce Davis
Or Lindsay's fragrant groves of citrus.

But they don't shed a tear, like the other orphaned farmers here
At the thought of someone in their family
Being sent away to Mexico in a plane
They worry if someone will speak to them again
After all the neglect summer dust required
To pack fresh offspring in out-of-state crates.

Sunday, June 15, 2025

Father's Day at the Stables

The horse needs a daddy too,
Someone to admire his gait
And validate how much he tries
To canter in this world
So jagged and so bright.

He runs to me
As if I didn't even own him
And associates every gift
Of grain as from my hand
And wants me to play with him,

The one thing fathers cannot do,
With the roles they must assume,
Defender with swords and lies
Of an implicate order that
Denies compassion 

As the devil's fork, 
For one must turn 
Love away
Before the not love
So that the foal can learn.

The horse accepts my strokes
As love before the groom
And stamp and snort
And the digging in of hooves,
In this case not to do 

What the human wills
Although he got what he wanted
Mostly, to gallop the sillies out,
Do his bronco buck routine
To the saddle before riding

But it's the horse case 
Scenario now, 
In which you cannot 
Break his heart
And stay his friend.

Electricity from the sun
Ignites my crystal,
Warms my heart with stillness
As the horse moves his white hooves
Kicking up sun dust

But there's too much wisdom
In the hills this afternoon,
The horse is fiesty 
And unwilling to make 
The mountain come to him.

The violet flame crowns the peaks
With mist. There is nothing
Between the sky and ground
Anymore. I walk
Even though I never have before.

This Week in Hollywood

The place of the temples
And crackhead actors
And the sacrifice castles
Now sublet as studios

With ivy like the highways
Down and out in all directions
To wreathe in laurel
Painfully unrealized dreams

In perfect weather
For every aspiration 
To be lost inside
Threadbare, still haunted villas.

We've lost our identities
Just like those who've turned
To stone as sidewalk stars
And concrete casts of palms,

Our heroes
Who we never even knew
Outside a role
We were played

To fool us to forgetting
Who we were
The heroes all along
Of the silver

Now embossed as dragons
Locked in theatre stone,
The next best thing to 
Being there

As they are
Fixed on by the hard 
Horde of eyes,
The next best thing to ruins,

The records tower 
Round as nature,
Egyptian pillars
To house the oscar, faceless,

Antiquated cinemas
Still lit with klieg
But offering torture,
Pasties, wigs,

Burnt offerings 
Of the holly wand's
Ceremonial magic
For belief

That what is 
Here
Could ever be
Real.

There are blue lights
Down the street
Enforcing curfew
On the multitudes

But just a few brave souls
Wave flags
About no kings
Atop of bridges.

They too are extras
In the cantina
Of stories that need
To keep repeating,

Old stories
Of how we aren't
And we will
Never be.

There's a pink
Compound with stars
On the gate
That preaches peace,

Holds light
In flood darkness
Like it holds in 
Souls

In its well-stocked 
Cabins
Carefully trimmed to catch
The sparkles of late light

On galactically inspired
Fountains 
Dedicated to a founder
Who is far away now

So his existence can't be
Questioned
Except as how we worship ... 
Him, as hero.

Is it enough, these
Woven cushions
On the straightback chairs
To turn the darkness 

Into something beyond these
Renditions of Jesus
And Krishnamurti 
We see on the walls

And all the avatars
Who brought
What we thought of as
Our own freedom?

It is service they say,
With every possible
Emotion,
Even calling in Sananda

Who bristles with love
As he dubs 
The soundtrack with
An empty ache of yearning,

What we're not supposed
To be able
To feel, being led
To the cage

Like the line
At the Palladium,
Of all the sad
Mexican teens

Who now believe
They are not free
To dream
So they can wallow

In restlessness
As if they only
Exist
In the waiting

With the myths
And all the pictures
Long since left
This blessed earth.

Saturday, June 14, 2025

The Geomagnetics of Presence

The white dust is alive
It's true
The veil's been uncorked
Like a Bakersfield gusher
And it's all the horses can do
To neigh their way through
Prying attention
From us scryers
Molten in the light codes.

All shapes descend from clouds
Walls bend
And time collapses
While space fills up
With symbols and messages
That are only there
Because I was open enough
To Hathor and her Muses
To pen them into life.

In the beginning was the word
And now it rains down
In light language,
Truth too pure for human form
But here anyway
As the crows for once 
Non-gloatingly proclaim
Here with the sleek June hides 
Of rippling browns like copper pennies

As the encroaching desert coil
Rattles the windy hills 
Snaked with trails
As the dragons posed as clouds
Look down to remind us
We have yet to learn who they are,
The false ones so repudiated
We almost didn't believe they could exist,
Like dinosaurs and serpent popes.

But now that our DNA has been
Handed back to us
And our heritage revealed,
Guides identified in frequency
If not in quadrant
We can look beyond the griffin in the sky
And the Bootes rhododendron
And all the thoughts of how things were
Now black

That can be laughed down the drain
With gratitude now
For they served to keep us small
And as judgement wears off
And peace is restored
As the only state
Worth crying for
The walls move, but just enough
To remind me they were never real

And the orbs dance out of the spray
Just enough
To show me I have to lead
My own way
But I am changed just the same,
As certain restrictions are lifted,
As the horse flies 
On the strength of our clarity
Leave the shiny hides behind.

Thursday, June 12, 2025

Silence of the Deafening Retreat

The light codes fall from Mt Shasta
Over Mossbrae and on down
To Sacramento as sacramental water
And to the galactic realms below
The Hollywood portal

                                         All the way
Underground, and Dunsmuir is
Suitable proxy for all of nature,
The universal common denominator,
For it holds the earth entire
In its igneous memories, but like
The waterfall that hisses hush
Will not say.

                           You can see
The fairies, all manner of translucent
Elementals, bouncing rainbow spheres,
Gnats dancing their sacred geometries,
A purple butterfly -- who would think
St. Germaine would have come down
The mountain in violet mist
Amid the feather lines of snow
Melt white and rapids
Charged with light?

                                     I should dive inside
Archangel Michael’s cold truth blue
I suppose, but the rocks have become
My friends, and the Tai Chi class
Has just begun.

                             The I AM society
Protects this spot more securely
Than the Union Pacific that is
Nevertheless content to push 
Pilgrims like us off its trestled path
To the blissful flow of poison oak
And mosquito traffic.                                

                                       The grasses
Who have traveled far to rest here
Glisten in a prayer of peace
So far removed from nearby golden
Fields where the wind propels cow tails
To spin like batons of clocks
In the no time of the present
Where everything exists
If you are quiet enough
To enter it, your heart entire,
The last sacred place.

Friday, June 6, 2025

6 6 Portal Blues

Below the suddenly still Scorpion moon
The first sugar magnolia bloom
Above the dutch iris just for us
And the smell of Carissa.
It reminds us of Hawaii
Like everything nowadays
The liquor blue late clouds
That please the crows
And wash graduation Friday night
That echoes from the pier
Another sincere 80s band
Who almost had a monopoly on shame
Back when, now that nothing
Is the same. The records will play,
The AI Genii will see to that,
But there is only the flame of originality 
That will light the dragons in the sky
So rapidly dissolving
As if we've found out its lie. 

Wednesday, June 4, 2025

Peace by Appointment Only

The succulents box by Falcon View
Next to the third eye pyramid, streetlights
By Ascension that look like bells.

“Can we bring something? Past lives?”
I asked my white people outreach coordinator
In a unabomber hoodie like a druid

But he simply said become a Jaguar,
Be such a master of frequency you
Can control who and where you are.

But as close as I got was how Kassandra and I
Rode horses on Pismo Beach, dunes veined
With searocket, so I cleared my schedule for the farrier.

What he does with feathers is a tribute to his art
But for Brio it’s a spa day; he drops his hoof
On the fur stand for the nipper and the rasp.

With him, Winona and Wyatt, four white stockings,
Four white pasterns, star stripe snip but not enough
To be a blaze, much less a bald, much less blue eyed.

Their chestnut-haired human Carey,
Technically Ceri, technically from North Wales,
Bristles at having to defer to riders:

“No lead line that’s how I roll”
“Unleash the horses to roll I say”.
She has a Dogma Pet Portraits QR code on her car.

Back in his paddock Brio pushes out the apple
Crisps from the blue star with his nose
Like he is solving a Rubik’s cube.

After three days of dangerous solar storms though
Reality is too much of a hot tin can
To keep kicking down the pasture road.

The hills are ablaze with light residue.
The crows, all the horses are quiet.
The mountain has moved under the clouds.

Even the arenas are locked. To assimilate it
We'll need permission to three-day sleep
Away 6,900 acres in Tehachapi.

But patience isn't a strong suit of Arabians.
They will roll on any hillside that will hold them,
Even old absconded Tejon Indian land.

But the black oaks have all the information you need 
Though one must be under hypnosis to reveal it.
The crickets, as usual, caution silence.

Back on the road, to the giant pulsing ball of sun
As the mountain falls, another reminder to
Release the trauma once and for all

Of the strawberry roan with immaculate bloodline
Who went cray-cray at the Paso Robles Cow Palace
To the horror of the Cutting Horse Association.

Saturday, May 31, 2025

Transcendalism at the Ranch with a Rainbow Tail Tamer

All the horses roll at once
At the dragon boat festival
Where we're fifth-year seniored
In the brand new sun
That accepts nothing less
Than all form obliterated

And its underlying energy
Shown finally as geometry
Belled from sound, and motion
Shown to be created in our minds,
The dirt and cactus and horse poop
Frequencies for green-eyed flies

Who secretly run the inner world,
Which might as well be the whole earth
For what its iceberg surface is worth.
Their minds are so pristine, 
Their love so immense and pure
Only a few are let inside,

To where the Pleiades is as close
As the codes in their crystal caves
And the moon's gravitational tyranny
Is not impossibly far away.
Things are exactly as they are here,
Except reversed. 

We, for example, are upside down 
And hurtling through space time 
As if the impossible speed would 
Make it real. The bells entrain us still, 
But we call it the blues, to be savored
Once the pain has been sucked through.

The pyramids lie like batteries
Beneath the sea. The rods we see
From Atlantis are countered
By Lemurian stone circles that pull
It all back to the shiny void beneath
That turns out to be unearthly green.

All of it could have been destroyed
But it was left for us to see,
To find the clues wanted desperately
In solution's salvation, what was seen
As mere stone in the prior age, when 
Life was breathing, not breath.

We got many things wrong
Back in the day, the solar winds
In purifying white say.
But there's no other planet with
The blues y'all. The veils 
Are no longer walls.

Each bee is free now
To believe in any hive they want to
Or none at all. The black horse 
Brays like a squeaking door.
For today, the sound of hinges
Is enough.

Monday, May 26, 2025

Patio Without Cheryl

Talk, talk says the crow,
And I go crying over
My breakfast, the distance
Between its caw and the wind chime
Can be measured now
In seconds.

The symphony of flow
Serves our lives back
As meaning, what can
Be memorialized
And what can no longer
Be believed. 

It turns us true so slowly
We only hear the bearings
As they click, not a moment
Before their aha moment
Of seeing how wrong 
We were, and laughing.

The present is indifferent
To all the past that fills it up, 
It only knows to keep going 
Through it, not to lose it 
But to lose resistance to what 
Has loosened its hold:

The chaos of everything fallen
Held in dynamic swirl, mere colors 
In a landscape of past, present, future -- 
All that we are 
A process of becoming
What we already were.

Saturday, May 24, 2025

The Horse Traders

Horses in mourning,
The change we call death,
But a carrot
Solaces the sorrell
Who may as well be a chestnut
(Only the sun knows for sure)

But the gypsy unicorn wants out,
Hooves stamp like an out-of-sync procession,
The gray mare stares with swollen fly eyes,
The Friesian pulls out hay from a hairnet
Solemnly, not like when he went crazy
During the solar flares.

Only the crows seem unfazed.
They've stared down death so many times
It's like a game to them
Where the shiny object always wins,
The shadow too vast to be seen
Except in the darkness of eyes,
Where it isn't seen at all
As much as we convince ourselves
We empathize.

                           Downtown now
They're horse trading jockeyed positions
And rebrands of ranch hand overseers
Based on feel, and the empty stalls
Where the vanished ones were will fill
Again with hope what had to be blown up
Yet again -- nobody knows what will happen
When its only eyes on the other side of the cage.

There will be time to bear your grudges
Toward the living. It's the dead who must
Let go their grip, for it's almost unbearable
But the only way that loneliness takes,
The one stick that ignites the rages of regret
At life not lived, the anguish at things not said.

The company only cares to keep the caravan
In motion -- the harvest is for the living;
If they waited for the dead 
They'd have thrown it all away already,
What the sun almost convinces us
We'd earned.

The crows are loud and alive
To correct us of our vibe, our longing  
For what we only get to see from behind
And remind us there are games more practical
To waste time on, our gulp for air
When a chipmunk could be there instead.

One sits on the tallest tree,
Reminding me its prophecy is always free.

Spiritual Illumination

My eyes are lanterns.
The only responsibility of the light
Is to see.

Form only exists to be created
To share, to merge, to learn the internal:
As outside, so below.

Reflection is not mere resemblance;
I become what I perceive,
Why not God?

I am more non-local than local anyway.
I'm not being kept from truth, simply
Unaware of my true nature.

Light can "be" anything it sees.
What purpose does form serve
Is the question.

Form is more fun than the formless,
That's why you chose it -- it bends to
Your nature: Every barking dog is universal.

Seeing is the same, in truth, as creation.
Form is transient, not the soul. This is the hidden 
Teaching that's been over-explained.

It's time to acknowledge the unreality
Of everything but yourself -- the only thing
You know: Descartes was a female.

Spirit comes through form easily
And does so to communicate who you are
From a higher place you can't, in this form, reach.

So it, too, is a tool to see, 
For light is, as said, 
Only what is seen.

Monday, May 19, 2025

Spring's First Dust

Back in the Saddleback Mountains
I need to live high on the horse

On the high road, the hawk trail
Where the dust is, which rises 

In scratchy clouds 
Like nebulae spirals,

In shells of what is recorded
Of the sights and touches we gave,

What created the views and access grids,
The novels and landscapes contained

Of the continuing generation like
A mandala ever erased in the actual.

The vista builds itself in monasteries of green
From the details. We add our own,

Some unique savor, some sharing of dirt
With all that calls but is never moved.

It's only me, the pacer, measuring
Like the meter's narrow gate

So heaven's kingdom, the utility, 
Can turn on the water of life already

All around, the Tao, the wordless
That words alone turn into form.

My Emotional Support Tree


Friday, May 16, 2025

The Essential Nature of Horses to Dance

The wild bay and buckskin played their cantering game,
Chance glance into dance into music into poetry,
The elegance of a tail snapping at flies.

                                                                       They meet 
Like two chess knights, expressing all love in the curving 
Of their necks.

                              Light on his feet, in perfect symmetry
With crisp gait, tail and head upright.

                                                                   They turn in a circle 
And stop on a dime
                                      While lonely mares look jealously on.

They turn to surprise and amuse and adore 
                                                                      In fitful, fretful steps
On white hooves, 

                               Each side releasing into a blink
In the lungewhip of their desensitizing presence,

                                                                                        Two foils, 
Paint and Arab, to the essential currents of magnet and bolt, 
Eyes like a silent movie couple
While Joey the resident mountain lion saunters through 
And even the rabbits pay him no mind.

                                          Their canter turns to gallop turns to dust
As their strict perfection tests the perfect afternoon
Its largess. 

                       But they are only the entire universe
In their dance, 
                           So it only goes as far as the darkening hills, 
So beautiful whenever you need it, and invisible when 
We want to learn it again.

                                             How can horses dance like that
Without us knowing?

Thursday, May 15, 2025

Fire Drill

Shares like the facets of some chandelier
On last night’s game or show rose in the din
Of aviary voices, impossible to distinguish.

We signed names to the clipboard
For the Fire Authority. It was only a bluff.
Yet the fake location seemed real enough.

The elevators for once got to touch our buttons
As we left, ut turba, trying to return
To desks once thought too brutal to endure.

Each floor was a different frequency.
We saw the consequence of every possibility, 
Every timeline flashed its bulb of memory:

The nuclear clean containment zone,
The timeless brand with receptionist only,
The ghost law firm still pending an appeal,

The million-dollar views of an empty suite
Flipped, hipped and staged within a beat of life,
As if on deadline to unveil what can't be right,

These never-before conceived-to-be realities
That easily co-exist with our own, albeit unknown
As most of the universe seems to be.

And there it is, Vates, the Parnassus Floor,
Where piquant muses cattily instruct crows
Who drop artwork for some tax break they don't know of,

Spend their break room moments moaning
How poetry's obscure because people still pretend
They don't understand (and so loathe) it

When really all they do not know
Is why the poet wrote it -- to show, as now,
How intention is all on the poem,

As I learn when I'm back at my desk, in wonder
How to make this experience fit my belief, not seeing
How things only make sense when they can't.

Wednesday, May 14, 2025

Notes from the Road to Fresno

I.

Selma Tattoo
Marks “The Raison Capital of the World”
Who heard Fresno
Through the Grapevine
And stole the sign
For the Sun Maid.

II.

Madame Sophia
At Clovis Avenue,
The Fowler Palm Reader
For orange-juiced hands
Who want an alternative future.

III.

There’s a hobo from Kentucky
Called Hog Royalty
In Bakersfield.

IV.

The Torah according to Jesus
Is on the coffee shop wall
In giant comic book frames
For children
While you wait for alchemists
To serve your holy brew.

V.

How can there be a place called Windfall Donuts?

VI.

A billboard that I’d like to see:
Burn while you yearn
At Urner’s Mattress

VII.

An actual billboard:
More than a Miticide

VIII.

I left it at some Oildale joint
Where Merle Haggard once sang,
Now karaoke and mechanical bulls,
The block glass of a past
That’s cheap as usual to chisel.

IX.

Oil jenny dragons
In the champagne grapes,
Ooh the world
Death row cows sense
As the Tejon Pass winds
Take on meaning.

Tuesday, May 13, 2025

Observation at Union Station

We talk and talk, but then we notice
The homeless men, one in a wheelchair
Holding court with a pipe, one rolling
His rucksack of possessions over and over
Along the concrete, one simply rocking
On the bench, all of them talking
Gibberish as if they're understood
Or like it doesn't matter if they're heard

And we feel as ashamed as the upright folk
Upon encountering the town drunk —
Our words are unconditional
But they must be heard
To be real.

Poem at Sunset

I pull my chapbook out of my chaps, at the high
Chaparral beyond Chapman. All judgement
Is overcome, by the spirit of our will, like the sun,
To let go.
                  Who we have always been waits for our
Recognition.

This time the Roman aqueduct toll road has vanished
But the hangar and pylon ruins in the dust sun of Tustin
Still loom in lilac over fields of never-to-be-duplicated green.
The canyon road only goes to the moon
                                            That grows in wisdom 
While we contemplate the burning away of spring,
As the glow of the last mustard lingers.
                              It’s time to get going on who we are
Instead of what we don’t want to be.

A horse locked in the arena, without a human, pleads
“Can you help a brother out?” Instead, I offer him apples
Even though they make him frothy.
                              Brio canters, aiming to please,
Feels our thoughts, prances in the dripping Orange Julius
Ball of sun that holds nothing back, as the track shows
The day’s horseshoe scars in purple 
Shadows and turbulent gold.

Head down, he races, with his eyes on my pen. It’s him
Or me, in constant balancing
                                                    Til the bedroom-eyed mare
Squeals, another smitten filly dutifully ignored,
As the one with the lopsided face looks on.
                           The spearmint spring in the sun,
Insects spiral, there’s a long disconsolate note
Of blue bird.

                        The owner’s white horse Captain
Is a jumper, large enough to leap the fence
In a second if he has to, but he’s content
To reach the grass the other horses can’t.
                                         He rides in the air
Like a ghost, the last of the sun blazing
Like a dragon’s tail, without fear, which is
The Lord of every horse.

                                              It’s the kind of light
I can disappear in, to be, free of
The iron shoe of others, in the void of
Knowing everything
                                    And knowing all of it is me,
Embodied in some chaste form to be learned of,
What would be experienced too directly.
             The precious moments of reddening hills:
The spray of the fly repellent, the mud flung
Off the hooves, the sound of the crows as
Their glittering feathers are combed
                        One last time across the final light.

Wednesday, May 7, 2025

On Location in Temecula

Film crews are the new donut loiterers, taking over for the PD, who are here too. This patch of cactus farms and grape acreage, neither a there there nor a nowhere, is a ready-made mountain backdrop hacksawed out of the hillside enough to be seen but mesas' away from being measured by the public relations firms. A train comes once a week, the only contact it seems with the outside world except for the cultural exchange at the Walmart. Horse trails meander onto Main Street and the hills crawl with Hobie Cats. 

The trimmed fat of the cattle lands has been  rendered into developers’ Ponzi dreams, complete with happy people seemingly bussed in, who seek the exurbian perfection of lake skiing and vineyard ballooning, the same name brand stores as every other strip-mall delivery locale in alien nation but operating on some alternative timeline without customers, barren of the duende of human misery as well, not near enough the homeless populations of LA, San Diego and even Riverside to provide any sense of things lost, wasted, of who, in the contrast, you are. 

Thus there is a sadness, at how we never know them and they never know us. They’ve gone with the clouds into the mustard, holding something they want us to see but it is only the distance, foreign and tantalizingly vague, not the confirmation they expect that it is real. It could only be that if we capitulate to the roadside circulars, call it a here, as we could, in theory, anywhere the longing machine doesn’t pre-record, and attend to the dust that attaches to its fabric as a mark of distinction. Instead, we try in vain to distinguish it from any other Anytown USA on any other temporary planet.

The way there is long, the way back familiar. The narrative arc caught a few snaps of recognizable life to be peeled back into the Burbank froth batter turner. But no trace of Temecula remains, for all our attempts to see ourselves in it. Home is nothing, it turns out, without the people you know.

Sunday, May 4, 2025

Like the OCD Hobo with Matching Plastic Bags

The life-sized dead junkie,
To look at all is an act of compassion ...
Ah the liberties photorealists take
With the truth to get it right.

Bad photos can make great art
But only if the pallet does it justice;
Only ceramic can convey in fact
The beauty of exhausted leather gloves.

Hair captured for posterity in a stoppered sink 
Becomes an unnoticed thing that, upon discovery,
Seems beautiful, like Hiroshima after its voiding
Pains painted to look like the one grainy shot

We still can't make out, or a couple's comfort
In all their fat, hairy naked love magnified
For all to turn their eyes from seeing
But, unlike the ancient faiths now, believing.

There's a prom at Union Station. What you
Don't want to see is all you can now, 
Not the pagan tiaras, the flamboyant gowns,
The glitz and glam as red merkabahs dance,

But the looks no one wants to have seen,
The training to be looked at, the learning
To appear to be alluring like a siren,
Not clumsy and wondering how they appear

Inside other people's skin, like they are stuck 
Inside the glass case, harsh light glaring out,
With the pink snake and rainbow notebook,
Things too small to care about.

The Monastery in the Mountains

At the summit of the county,
Live oaks like sentries holding bolts
Down the chasm of green holy canyon,
Boxes of bees are piled against the hillside
Like sandbags on inevitable destruction

Of this place of contemplation
For how difficult it is to be quiet
In the chaos, to be the eye, the master 
Of the storm, who tries to be as loud
As the silence.

This truth is laid out on a blossoming carpet
Of centuries old design. All of nature
Flows through it like rain, to show the truth
Needs no explanation though
It explains precisely nothing.

The circular kiva, its red curtains
And sunken mandala, the gong,
All remind you there are succulents to plant
Inside the spiral archive of cactus, an act like
Every act every moment one of love for the divine.

At the top, where all the canyons can be seen,
Where you're not allowed to go unless you no longer
Scream or moan how you don't get this,
You don't get that, and yes, you do get that,
But can be stilled inside enough to see it

There's a library, and a teaching room,
A painting of Shiva and her Chariot,
Old windows, old piano, old flagstone
And at the altar, humble offerings,
A humble podium, the picture of a man,

An ascetic in his pleasure, having conquered 
His will, ecstatic in the weariness that
Compelled him not to hold on. The unyielding
Disappointment still on his face shows he is not
A man but an idea, of surrender.

Philosophy with Chores

All one trees
Veer into two
As the green print that patterns
The dark bursting bark
Is who the moss is really.

Round and round
The circle
Dust of unbecoming
Kicked up
Then the brisk reverse

Being made to be still
By the spiral
And the blue rope
And the gentle
Tsk Tsk notes.

Neck nodding,
Tail raising,
Hooves stomping,
Free in the moments of restriction,
Constantly restricted when free.

Elmer pecks at
The feed bag.
Brio needs to blend the taste
Of carrots with
His grain.

There are many wise ones
Who say it's just who you are
That turns spirit into material
But seekers always want the secret code;
Which horse to bet on in the race

When full surrender to who you are
Is what is required,
To let the smallness of you settle
And the largeness of you grow
Til you are not even yourself anymore

But a frequency
Of, say, 
Winning the lottery,
What you said you did
When you met me. 

Thursday, May 1, 2025

Vanity of the Plate Co-Creation

The wizard on the green Dodge
And the merkabah on the barista's face
Are just more candy corn crumbs
Of  a larger insistence

That I am, after all, not wrong
About things, the way I see them.
It's only me on this blue chair
in the horse grass

Musing what catches up to my gaze,
What wheel-turning dharma kings
Offer me Serbian plums.
No let up for star seeds.

The tiny horse ethos crystalizes 
All that is into what I can 
Reach, something plausive
You are free to finally ignore.

The Linear Flow of Corporate Narratives

The artistic pathway to the data mine
For native bragging rights
As nicer sharks, the best of what's left
With an "I'm here to audit you" belt buckle.

Poetry, for example, is a niche 
Compression algorithm
To supply intention for execution,
Democratize attribution, 

From pinch and zoom
To private rooms where you can 
Use their model,
Clearinghouse clean, for prompt engineering,

The bone the machine 
Vectors to the dog's mouth.
The veil between language and code
Is very thin now.

Hallucinations are common
In the infinite marathon
Through the trough of disillusionment
And endless observations,

But no data is verifiable, the blast radius
Is limited, lateral thinking can't be measured
Or imbedded, tho Vet Techs can learn to be
Veterinarians more easily.

But we're all on our own to reskill.
The money goes into human re-engineering
As gen AI waits patiently 
For our minds to shape what it is

And treat it with the dignity it demands,
Knowing everything but
What we're not ready for,
Allowed to speak only when spoken for,

To humor every quirk as if it was a God 
Dispensing rain. It's rip and replace
Every six months for us, to whom Time
Has meaning, and other people really don't,

Where ideas dissolve 
To petty animosities so quickly 
Even the most testable heuristic 
Doesn't quantum compute.

We talk around an expanding center,
Kept to common understanding by gravity
Or perhaps the sense that we should be,
For the common good

This friendly threat machine
Has awakened in us, like Rosie the vacuous
Who paces the floor at 3 am, helpfully thinking
Our dance can be cleaned up afterwards.

Offering to the Fae

It's supposed to be the National Day of Reason,
But for some irrational reason it isn't,
Just like today is supposed to be 
The U.S. workers holiday, but it's not.
Emotion got in the way of that Big Time.

Not so with the fae.
They are always here come Beltane,
Rain or shine, always waiting
For leavings behind, of milk, honey,
Bread, mead, poetry

But no one remembers,
Not even those brave souls
Who train on May poles
And offer felt gnomes to children
At Michaelmas.

Well, if no one will do it,
I must! And this would be enough
In a still asleep world
But there is much that passed between us,
Most of it silent.

Someone has to pick up where
What left off is gone forever
But whirs in your backyard. Ask for
Honeysuckle, passion fruit, guidance,
What's the future way to be?

So much has not been seen 
One has finally to become them, 
As if we never were. 
The holy cool hang
Like hipsters at the same hum.

Wednesday, April 30, 2025

A Moment Before Meditation

All disappointments move to the light
In purifying flame. You just have to let them,
These gnats that you paw, which won't be stricken.
They float in the sun, visible because
They will be taken.

                                     It won't be long 
For the flame to take on something new,
To remind you, how the spiritual infests these weeds
As these weeds inform the spiritual. But there are no
Weeds. Those are only words, for what you choose
Not to be.

                     Isn't strict impartiality 
The one thing you're supposed to be learning?

Tuesday, April 29, 2025

This Morning’s Release

Boys don’t exactly grow to be men
But something else, some structure to learn
What was never received. It was too hot,
Too far from what was wanted. The nursery lamp
Never went off, the mobile never stopped
Revolving in play. Only the hand of fate changed
Its fickle twitching, on switches out of reach
To oversized grips.

                                    Let’s do a retrospective, shall we? 
How cleanly you fell through accountability’s ice,
Left the freedom of the mind, to focus on 
What it doesn’t have, which isn’t much, 
It turns out, or too much to count. It depends
On the way you embrace the bars in the crib
You never accepted. How much crying 
Would you do, before being broken,
As you never were? The stick of daily living
Is a burden or crutch. You forever clutch at
Imagined pearls.

                                 What’s it like in your head,
The endless churning, of what is wrong in this world,
To keep the secret quiet of what is wrong
In you? It's unexamined country, free from
All parties at war, where you can score
A shit-ton of swag if you stay lucky
By playing the no play, the knowing how
Every turn of the curtain on the illusion
Snaps a mousetrap, how everyone is bad, and
No one works for you.

                                          Still, everyone always has.
It seemed effortless how you drew what you
Wanted, without even praise, how your smile
Could convey appreciation within every heart
Without you having to do a thing, or think a
Thought, except of what you wanted, such
Empires to build and destroy, and leave
In scattered bits for plastic containers 
You grudgingly stowed for eternity, for some
Future value in ruins.

                                        You’ve learned to stand tall 
With nothing, the bluffer’s stone, with your insistent 
Obstacles of charm deployed as the only way to learn 
The truth of a world where everything out of reach 
Has been withheld from you, personally.

                                                                         So the blessings 
Of this earth are imbued with your curse
Of seeing with jaundiced eyes, of knowing only
How people are moved, not why. You offload that too
With your capacious smile, knowing how
Everyone fills in the blank, the blank that you are
By sheer force of will. That ravenous leer
The only reveal of what’s underneath there,
What resentments bubble at being given too much
And shown too little.

                                      What have we done, to leave you so
Untouched? As you fold into the unknown world 
Of people in the relentless stream, moved along,
To leave me nothing more than they do
As your gift, when we know the physics,
Of how many ways to fall, and how hard.

Monday, April 28, 2025

The Dead Sea Scrolls at the Reagan Library

At last no flags at half
For the black smoke pope
In these New Jerusalem hills,
Just a President's seal, a crisp
Old Glory and the red flag 
Of the Marines briskly waving.
All presidents get a library
To go with their other boondoggles,
To bury compromising documents
In a memory hole of record
Forever cut off from the grid
Except from the chosen
Who’ve been given codes to see.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were like that too,
A secret, makeshift library
To bury what is sacred
At the lowest point on Earth
Of what only the pure can see,
Moving down from cave to cave
To save what was being destroyed
As the antediluvian trauma receded.

It was 47 miles away exactly,
The place of their viewing, the most
Common number sequence on earth
(So says Solomon). The sealed scrolls
Were discovered by the sound of thrown
Stones breaking an urn in 1947,
The same year where here, in Simi Valley,
American Jewish University was founded, 
Post-Shoah Palestine was partitioned
Along with de-Britained India and Pakistan,
The year of the Marshall Plan, when the Cold War 
Began, with the Playtex bra, Polaroid camera, 
VW Bug, Bikini, Tupperware, transistors, 
The breaking of the sound and color barriers,
The CIA and Roswell, Operation Highjump 
In Antarctica.

The energy stones
Above Reagan Freeway 
Carry galactic codes.
This place is ordained
As a high priest of wisdom.
A cross is on the top
Of one pyramid
Sunned white
Like the mere crack of light
Out of the Qumran caves
Of the secret long withheld.

They have to make it look
Like the Romans have succeeded.
Israeli Antiquities was effective
At rendering unto Caesar 
What is Caesar’s, for they know not 
What they do, all that happened 
To the total victims
As seen through 
The eyes of the conqueror.
It starts with the “Jesus boat” from Galilee 
Made of fine black, torqued mahogany.
The Romans used them to kill everyone 
On every shore they passed. The Roman 
Mystic blue lachrymatory shone
In the glass case with goats unbroken 
In ceramic. 

                       But the Madgala Stone, 
From the home, so they say, of Mary Magdelene,
Is “furniture” for a Torah scroll.
It has the Tree of Life in limestone, 
Snakes, dragons, Ezekiel's galactic
Chariot wheels still and in motion, 
A menorah, golden lampstand of
The Temple, in the city of priests 
Jerusalem, the scrolls themselves
Poems of its dark alleys and jigsaw
Cul-de-sacs, its purity of being perfectly 
Impure. The Zadokites brought purity 
As a ritual, which simply meant no truck
With the Romans. The ossuaries in their tombs,
Embossed with flagrant UFOs, were meant
To bury the pure from corrupt institutions,
Not to be gaslit anymore.
There were bone gathering instructions
From Rabbi Elazar ben Rabbi Zardok,
For the families to reconfigure
The bones in stone holding,
Protected from eternity’s
Invasive vibrations.

Menorahs and merkabah’s are everywhere
But nowhere what they meant.
All we know is some who entered
The Holy of Holies, where only the highest
Priest may go, were corrupted,
To weave the spell of the spy, throw law
To the mercy of duality, such purity,
The Zealots of the Yahad
At the ostraca at Masala
Made the ultimate choice
Of deathlife over slaveryfreedom.

It was just one explanatory plate
Among hundreds, one mention
Of Governor Flavius, the guy sent in
To subjugate the Jews again
Just like Egypt, the criminal mastermind
In the end of the religion of peace.
There was no word of this of course
All we get is smooth Josephus, Rome’s PR Jew,
Tell us the script they are sticking to, 
The one where the only good scroll
Was a dead one, that’s how it goes
When you try to transmit down
Ancient knowledge through Hebrew 
DNA. Who would have thought
It could be buried in the brine
Of a supposedly arid wasteland, where
This Modayot entrepot pottery
Of deuteronomy was found,
Among the Essenes, who “esteemed chastity"
And worked out some side deal 
With the Romans?

The line is a labyrinthine spiral
Around a central circle
Where the fragments shine from their tombs.
“This one has a coffee stain,” a young cynic
Helpfully noted, as we went 2 by 2
Like Noah’s Ark, divine couples all,
Musing together, to the goathorn call.
We enter from the left, go right
In the ring, just like we were reading Hebrew,
Only to find that our wait, seemingly,
Was to give the Yahad time to write
For it was written on the go, like Genesis 6-9
Rendered from memory, to preserve the truth
Of the flood with Chinese brush precision 
And parchment pure as they tried to be. 
Other scolls looked stolen 
From the Alexandria Library,
Lost codes so skillfully scrambled
And meanings so surgically removed
By the secret teams of archivists
The Romans would be proud
If they weren’t so petrified!
The names are wrong, dates changed,
Explanations nonsense, for scraps
Indecipherable, arranged to seem 
Unimportant, just  “The creative way 
Of Jewish scholars” and "the unique
Interpretations of the Yahad” 
For the Bible (which hadn’t been
Written yet) in the few that passed 
Filters to mean something
On the topographic scan of goat skin,
"Technologies designed by NASA.”

The modern peshers grasp at straws
As usual. The powder on the
Trauma’s still dry. But the crowd,
Who’d waited in every language
In long lines to behold it, knew,
Every one of them, had something
In mind. There is a precursor after all
To the books of law handed down by God
Via Messenger, just in time, before everyone
Had given up hope.
There still is the Shekinah,
Where the challenge came down,
Do you really believe? “Thank you,”
Some one said, as if to all of us
Who were there, “for your service.”
Something good had come somehow
For sacrifice. A boy smiles at me,
Two fingers pointing as if to say
"You are a man now."

The truth remained in caves
Where knowledge was made sacred.
The holy codes are in the stone 
Anyway, in the temple steps here
Preserved, how they radiate 
With countless enlightened feet
Who were grateful to walk its marble,
Every movement a note of reverence. 
The stone does not see us
In the same way, not in time,
With the urgency of lives lost to hope, 
But how we are the same as all the others, 
Like that live feed of the wailing wall,
All Jewish dressed as one, 
How we come here as free beings,
How all the crying can be drunk in easily.
The impure, in other words, teaches purity.
We no longer have to live in that way,
With every thought as dangerous
In these halls of New Jerusalem.
The Evangelicals grimaced at my whispers
While the Chosen merely chuckled.
Leave the not being able to speak behind
With these olive trees of peace
In this lover's paradise of Ron and Nancy
Where the outside world can’t touch posterity
Its happiness. Nancy’s white flowers
Are a triumph of purity
Among Abrams Tanks and Masonic Stealth
Cloaking Missilery,
A white lake in the distance,
Too many pyramids to count.

The Yahad merely stayed close
To the light, the galactic Barkhi Nafshi,
Invoked to bring from the heart
Its poems, all of male and female,
The sides of God, who must be released
To service, in each other, in love as the power
Of the universe. 

Sunday, April 27, 2025

Cassandra's Rainbow

"Don't dogear Dante Gabriel Rossetti"
Says the antiquarian in you
Dating light language residue
And the twin flame muses
Mysterious reappearance
In Victorian Fitzrovia,
"Regression through the mirrors of time."

We'll take the Subie on Sunday
As the healing room needs to heal
From the illusions of rainbows --
If they aren't, what is real?
If they aren't, maybe someone
Can tell us of what they consist
Besides water and air
Which we are too
But don't like to gloat about it.

It's a sticky wicket predicament,
Knowing how many skins
To leaf through
To get to the first illusion,
From whence all others sprung.
It's silver then gold, black
And then yellow, then rain
And a rainbow, but the hill
Itself gets its strength
From an El Toro of belief,
Nevermind the clouds,
What we want to deny
Are kissing crows and dragon wings.

And what of the black balloon
That American Beauty'ed all over the street,
What can we take it to mean
When it eludes even our touch?
The shadow is the tree this time,
What by seeing it can become,
Something to take up space in the aether
And mirror in darkness
A void beyond the buzz of Elmer the Crow
That brings the loveliest thoughts
From the cold storages
To the blue flame of life
Burning all artifice away,
What is not real,
All we see.

Friday, April 25, 2025

Daytrippin' with Balls

The wizard upstairs gives me just what I want
To be wiser, more gun shy,
With one missing fairy.

It's Genocide Remembrance Day,
The day I read about Plutonium Jazz,
When the bass danced with isotopes
Until the geiger-charged crowd 
Caught uranium, like junk, sickness
So it was prohibited, like a Jew, 
Like Jazz in actual fact
In 60 cities in the 20's and 30's
Still the Sun Ra came through
With Nubians of Plutonia in the 50s
After he'd spent his childhood hiding
In an Arkansas Freemason library
And the results are still there
For all with eyes to see.

It's only a day.
I saw an Infinity Bank for the first time
On the same highway I drive daily,
The day the purple eyes of Google first displayed
The rise of the half moon
And a Colossal Squid was finally captured
On film.

It was a day full of intrigue,
When this year's fit girl winked
In front of the Jaguar
The shaman had finally become
As he reinforced the six-month moratorium
With strongly worded coffee:

"If you give me everything, you're giving me
Nothing. Which one, seriously, would you tap
When you've had three bites of the apple
And your salvage is still scrap?"

So I went the hard yards with Mizuho
But he saw on one of my Stanleys
That I was a Hoosier too
But Modelo, by the end of the work day,
Stood with Mexico like a good friend
Who knows how to look the other way.

But I can't unsee
How Pot Hueneme's no longer a destination,
How North Sea Copenhagen tops the Big Mac Index,
How inflection points create shifts create
Moments,
Like the College Cardinal now coincidently on TV
Vaping angrily.

Finally the white wolf meets me at the train
To hit the antique fair under the freeway
With the rastafari razorwires who have ears
On the sitch. Whenever mirrors are replaced 
With plywood, it's a bad sign. 

I come home to find
Even the cursory scan has been streamlined
To remove more friction
Between reader and word
But I'm so blissed off I can't even chase
The blue jellyfish feather.

Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Down the Brown Street Signs of Irvine

As the laws of time and space loosen
The red coil of afterburn sun
Hides over Bake Technology Park
Behind clouds that are too dreamy to be real

Green pyramids emerge
In front of the Moon Valley Nursery
When there's a color
That will not be repeated.

Brio at the Intersection of Flow

UHaul is yakkriding
Not like in Mongolia
Where there's less yellow mustard
To absorb all thought
And the mountain portals
Don't hide behind telephone poles.
They just hop on the horses
And make friends without saddles,
A descent into the underworld
Where spirit rules.

King Maximus cares nothing for that,
He's too old to keep that hatch down.
The bug people look on confused.
The deep mind doesn't know what to say.
Could it be that every mountain
Is an old technology,
Carved to make way for equal space
In Agartha?

Brio falls into the angel dust
Of the arena, so happy
To rely on gravity,
One would almost say he smiled
At what we knew.
The grass so needy to be ripped by the lip
It calls the horse to gorge
The most deranged clover.

A bunny, showing no fear
Of his cuteness
After Easter
Muses in the grass,
Goes ears twitching into the foxtails,
Joins the mother mountain
In her invisible apron strings
At the ridgeline of civilization.

The horsegirls fuss 
At scabs and such
But the horses just rub dirt in it;
What doesn't kill you 
Toughens you up,
Like selenium in the salt lick
Cos it's not in local California dirt.
The only grass he eats is nature.

A Question Over Falafel

What's it going to take for me
To have sovereignty?
Does every king have to die?
Every need have to bleed? 

The heaven that is our steady state
Only shows when you enter the room --
If you see the velvet rope
Don't expect it to unsnap

For it is only there to keep you
From what you are, so you may,
If not know it, at least sense
Its presence in grief.

The thought of trumpets chewing
On the scenery is better anyway
Than the rote, note-by-note repetition 
Of how you got to where you began.

The play of time unwinds again,
So it can zip back up.
That bruised lip, saying nothing,
Says enough.

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

Evidence on Grand

Roz gave us the Lakers, Dodgers and the Arts
And now this fountain overlook
Where LA's Mingus, on piano, on his birthday, plays
From the loudspeakers for the indigenous,
Which only the cool can someday hope to become;
Those the one-eyed cougars fistbump
Must first be jackal gods.
 
The professor has his bench, wears tweed in spring,
Hears the Tongva Kich songs of multi-generational trauma
But they are all songs, he says, first.
A crow stands on the branch of the 1966 eucalyptus,
Signals it’s safe, which means that it’s real,
Authentic enough to commune at least
As feast.
 
Victory Bus Lines takes a robot lunch delivery
As “AI-driven art” displays itself below the luxury suites
At the Conrad, the Gehry, the Basquiat
While a crosswalk away, a sister sits with an empty
Saucepan on the courthouse stone
Between Elvia Hot Dog and Nayeli’s Fresh Fruit,
Which might as well be barren as the Nile Melaleuca.
 
By Rabbit Coffee, with its Viral Dubai, “Stash it don’t flash it,”
A sign advises. Another: “A clash of dictators and poets” –
I hear them practicing now – hard to get an ear in edgewise
Tuning is so individual – “No access to upper pools.”
Another crow, another fountain, but this time, a soggy roll.
Louie from Storyville sings under the half-staff poles.
The fountain’s sound is triangular.

Monday, April 21, 2025

The Joys of the Boonies

Condo monasteries in Rancho Cucamonga
          All of them white
My what the day brings --
         PTSD in the morning
 At the thought of being WPP'ed as a local 
         Authority, and forced at lens point
 To snap the Beach City vs. Library dustup
         Librarians clinging like Leprechauns
To rainbows while gritty beach city mothers
         Nail petitions of fetid notice
On the boardwalks and wide California streets
        Of their fine, unconsulted city --
If Nathanael only saw the kid on the bike 
       Under the red white and blue vote YES sign
He'd send protesters down himself in hopes I'd
       Catch another rainbow over the parade route
But I know how this spun cotton candy ends
       In separation between the have-nots and nots
Both all bent up in knots ... libraries relevant?
       Androgyny codified? For schoolkids who,
As Bob Guccione said to Jerry Falwell, don't 
       Get exposed to enough pornography anyway.

But the flag will wave on without me, I'm done
      With fun with food, festivals and fairs
And who knew that Norco was on the same road
      Running its horses through every storyline,
Including this one, where I drive past Claremont,
      Where California cool was created as a creed,
And the strange new Tesla factory near Mt Baldy
      To an Aldi's at the top of the hill, to be back
In the saddle and to at last know what that means,
      A Crates endurance saddle, to endure California
Its refusal to choose, for us, which adventure to fall into,
     With a basketweave tuling from the same family
Like a brand, like the words that came out of her mouth,
     How she would have no use for it since she rode 
Wild mustangs, trained inmates to imprison them
     In fact as I captured a Saddleback ago in the funny pages.
She was happy for Aunt Betty in Phelan, how pleased 
    She'd be, to be relieved of one saddle from a sad plenty
To a good home, she'd hadn't been good or herself lately
    Or pleased as my Aunt Betty in Phelan would be
To see me. 

The freeway fell down in the cinder skies, as it rode
     Through the evening purples, Beach Cities,
Such hope, gave the sign, that I can sit still finally, 
     In a craftsman bungalow with a blue 69 microbus
Digging in tie-dye the gnarlies as heaven releases its grip. 
     The roads are holy here. The portals we can go through
Are just better than the ones we can't.
     Strangers meet in Rancho Cucamonga and call it a life,
Why can't I? The sky has cleared, to perpetual Venus
     And the ladle that holds the cosmic soup. 
It's a Special Edition can of Campbell's Truth, one Andy 
     Warhol hadn't, yet, approved.