Dared to Kiss

2/6/19

After:

Wake with the knowledge of sleeping too late

Of falling into the snooze

Of curling up with the dog.

Do not beat yourself up for there is only now

This moment to consider what brings joy

This moment to consider life, to consider

The buds of what you have planted

To consider the holes that you have dug

The phone calls that you have received

Asking for a lemon tree, and you try to decide

What will be easy, what will you be able to give

Maybe some bush beans or cowpeas to feed the lemon

Maybe some black locust seeds that will need to be cut

Maybe some cassia pendula, and this weekend

When the people come, you will need to take cuttings

To find rooting hormone, to consider the neighbors

To put like with like, and this beginning will dress

The fences, will consider the mirlitons lost

With Katrina, many of the old ways went, many

Of the Tabasco peppers gone to the waters

And there is still Mr. Lee, well over eighty

And when asked what you can do for him:

He wants a pepper plant; the one you gave him died

The bay leaf tree still thrives

In front of his house, on the block where

Human beings scatter when the cops pass, on the

Block where a police light, red and blue

Bounces on the pavement, spinning atop a pole

And you know that all that comes before you is a gift

You know that there is no scarcity, that there is

Enough for everybody no matter what has begun

No matter what thoughts you wake with

For they are only thoughts and the whole reason

For meditation is to get beneath all of these thoughts

To be the witness, to see what your stage characters are:

Teacher, Sponsor, Grower, Writer, Boyfriend, Weirdo, Seeker,

Cool guy, Speaker, and some others more subtle, some others

Missing. Like son and brother, and each day you do not connect

Each day that becomes further away from the next

Further away from birth and closer to death

As Banjo curls up beside you, each morning you know

The day is coming, you sometimes feel your hands

Rolled up into fists before you rise from the bed.

Unfurl them, wiggle your fingers, ask to see the joy

In everything, ask to find the characters in the stories

To engage the students sitting before you, to ask them

To think, to consider, to guess what they might do

Were they one of the characters. This is becoming invested

This is the crossroads at which you find yourself:

A school divided, but not in the way it might seem

A school where there is change that is needed

And a school where you fit in despite feeling different

A school where there is not integration

Despite the steps of Ruby Bridges long ago

A school where you are a white man, a symbol

Of what has been oppression since the founding of this country

And in the mornings you greet the students

You welcome them with a smile and encouraging words

Some have shifted the way they feel, from hate to love

From judgement to acceptance, even the handshake with D

The way she would miss your hand on purpose, say psych

The way that you let this happen, knowing this would happen

Every day, the way this went from her one upping you

From her tricking you, from her demeaning you in a sense

To becoming what connected the two of you, what became

A known joke between both, what became like the remote con

Handshake of Korea, where people shook from across the room

Where what was once anger and tension, tension you can feel

Touching the shoulders of some students, you feel the rage boiling

The nervousness boiling, the anxiety inside, the shaking of a leg

The constant need to move, to be up and down

And you realize that a way needs to be found, a way to get students

Involved, a way to interest them. Take what they want to know, let them

Make reading and writing their own, and guide them along the way

Ask the questions that you would ask while reading on your own.

Maybe take Maurice Ruffins book and make copies and begin this.

Address race, work with the Harlem Renaissance, work with Black Lives Matter

Learn as much as you can and listen, for in this is the desire

To find the creative and the love inside every child, and

Remember that they are children, eighth grade is not yet adult

Remember the way that you felt at that age, the confusion

On the bus listening to AC DC, the way you liked Andrea Phillips

But the way that you asked her to go with you

And how she said yes, and then how

You had to be dared to kiss her.

Go back to all of this confusion

To what you were doing, the memories that you cannot grasp

That first summer where you took a drink.

Glow Worm Ceiling

1/28/19

Away from the words for weeks

A lost computer and twenty minutes

Of meditation each day more time

Seems to be available when not writing

A commitment that is not being kept

Left and gone without guilt

The mark of acceptance

The mark of being okay no matter

What is happening, the way the words

Tumble down and come together on the screen

Bright light of morning, a lost computer

an early start to a Monday

The knowing cold that is upcoming

The thought of what you might say to the men

Invited to Texas to tell your story, only because

Now it is your turn to stand before the men

To fully disclose yourself, to love without judgment

And when the evening comes, watch cat’s claw burn

Watch the ashes swirl and land on the garden

Know that all of nature has used you to heal

All of you has used nature to become

All of what has been wasted at the school

Shall be used once again, and if the freeze does not take everything

Come for what is outside and give it a shot within

Closed doors and heat, a private convention

A cake-cutting ceremony for those wishing to let go

The ego dropped to the bottom, and sure you feel like a fraud

Everybody should feel like a fraud in some sense

Especially those on a search, for in contemplation

Meditation, prayer, and seeking, there comes a realization

Of the divine that sits beneath all of the swirling thoughts of the ego

And this watcher becomes known as your true reality

Yet throughout the day, the ego compares and

Categorizes and defends and depends, and in general

Disconnects the true you from the divinity that is available

Since most of what is experience is filtered through this

And a part of us knows that what we are is not this

Therein lies the theory of the fraud

No matter what I do or think, there will always be

A sense of the fraud within the mind

because what i do and think

Is not who I am, so when each happening,

Each event, each thought, each pass of the track

Can be seen as the perfection of now

Maybe then will the notion of fraud begin to fade

Not intellectually, because it is not an intellectual concept

Nor one to be considered before six in the morning

When the coffee starts the bowels moving and the mind races ahead

When what is known to slow will be the upcoming meditation

A dog kicked out of your lover’s bed

Because he cannot stop biting his body

Wet and warm from gnawing of teeth, he sits

Beside you on the sofa where you type with one finger and think

Of Pericles, the turtle that Carrie loved, the turtle

That you wanted freed, so she had a pond built

An oasis, or so you might think, and Pericles took to the pump

Dove below the surface of the water toward the bubbles

And then she could not see him and even though

Your own sight is twenty-twenty, you could not

See him either, and for the entire night you could not sleep

She could not sleep; she could only think

Her heart and dried crickets, Pericles rising to the top

Of the tank. And inside your heart leaked. You heart cried

Your heart formed arms to wrap around her shoulders

The shoulders of her heart, the shoulders of a turtle

Once trapped behind walls of glass

Coming only to the surface for dried grubs and crickets

Cut off from what you would have thought he wished

Only when given, the turtle searched, may all night

For the four walls of glass and ten gallons of water

And what you thought was a gift ended with him lost

Ended with him dead, ended with his journey cut short.

A turtle meant to live his entire life behind glass, meant to

Offer more smiles and to receive more crickets

And to share joy with the heart of shoulders and

The heart of necks, and a warm touch of a hand

On peach fuzz at the base, a cold dog lies beside

And you think of his entire life, biting and licking and trying

To save his own skin, trying to get comfortable

Laughing with his tongue sticking out, without teeth

The day formed before you even become aware

The coffee that hits and the acceptance of what if

The stopping of these questions and a list written, what is next

For now, making the material at the level of the students

For now, giving them what they need

For now accepting glass walls and ten gallons of water

As the moment becomes the moment before you.

After meditation:

The way the mind works is to reach ahead

For importance, for necessity, for an answer

In the future the mind grasps and steals

The present moment before you in meditation

The mind wants to hold onto thoughts deemed necessary

In case you forget, but what if, but how when

And then if this is not done, what will the world become

As if your life depends on what is being predicted

As if your life depends upon that one thing

Lost in the ether before ever becoming

A thought is only thinking and nothing more

Not a necessity, not a death wish, not a birthday candle

And there are so many of them, lying beneath the surface

They are like velcro for worry to grip onto and hold

A mission of the mind, a mission to right

To take the space, the blood that flows

Down to the heart, to study this, to know

What is blue and what is red, and how long does it take

For the veins to carry between the two of them:

Brain and heart, the partners that might be met

If this lifetime is considered to be designed for love

If this lifetime becomes a search for the moment

A shedding of everything that is not the moment

Planning only when the time for planning

Is at hand. Mending only what needs to be mended,

Comparing only when necessary, dreaming only when

The time has come for change, and making a list

Only when the list will be begun that moment, for otherwise

All of this is just thought, it is like

Riding a unicycle with a training wheel

If you can get this picture and dive beneath

Maybe the goldfish in your pond, what lives on the limestone

What has come without your help to feed their mouths

Carps you are told, these goldfish, so tiny, so orange

Growing to the size of the tank, and your heart

Growing to the size of realization

Of your capacity to love, of your ability

To live without need for power, without need for judgment

With only standing when the ground needs held

When the space beneath your feet is in danger

Of crumbling, and there need be a witness, one who will

Speak for the earth that cannot speak in words

Heard by most people, but the earth is speaking

All of the time. A cold wave is about

To travel through these United States, and you

Will protect some of what lives, you will bring in

Plants that cannot survive a slight freeze.

Some might call this cheating or dabbling too much

In Nature. They do not realize that man and nature

Is not separated, that this construct, this use

Of he and she for only the human being, this lack

Of he is the sun and she the moon.

She drops her leaves and offers them back to humanity

Back to a word they surely have in some Native American

Language that means all of what exists, a word like humanity

That encompasses all the thoughts and feelings

And love of every being from a rock to a grain of sand

To a bald eagle, to amber waves of grain

And the student of the same name: Amber

Saying, “They shouldn’t be using my name for a stupid song.”

And you realizing that it is not this feigned anger

That connects, but rather, it is her attempt at words

Her attempt at assertion, her attempt to prove something

To you that brings the two of you together. Beneath

The ego of knowing there is always an underlying desire

To take what is raw and pulsing, what is the nub

Of a reindeer horn and show this to those around you

Show this to them so that they too might show their raw wounds

So that the tender hearts might gather before a shoulder

In the road of this journey to gently guide, to protect

Not in the manner of fighting, but in the manner

Of a common sadness that knows that all is perfect

Beneath the fighting and violence, beneath the racism and death

Beneath the makeup and the malls and the gas stations

There is a current, like a cave you cannot see

Like a cavern beneath your feet, of water

Dark and cold and flowing, and a dozen hearts

In a dozen canoes, traveling through

Looking to the ceiling, to the glow worms of New Zealand

Mesmerized by first touching only the darkness and the cold

Mesmerized by something you didn’t know existed

Uncomfortable at first, cold, sightless, like a snake

Sent to help the garden, blind but still moving, blind but lifted

By the shovel man strikes the earth and in each piercing

Should we not ask forgiveness? Does the seed ask permission

Before creating pathways for roots and the billions of organisms

Given a new direction? Does the seed realize the gift

Of the sun, of the drop, of the way this same sun

Hits rocks and then throughout the night

Releases moisture and gas and feeds what is next?

4:27 p.m. Remember Myron asking whether one could swim from the swamps at city park and continue swimming below the roads built atop this city on a swamp. What a beautiful image, and maybe this was what cropped up in the words after meditation, in the glow worm ceilings once seen in New Zealand