Pause:

If, like me, you
default to contentment, great danger
lies in bed over long hours.

An awakened mind impatiently asks a body
slackened: What happened to passionate action,
or grand ambitions bold and strange?

Once again I want unclouded access
to the wild divine mind, but torpid forces fight
the inventive flow of light I am here seeking to stream.

I no longer consent to this slow stoning. Today I escape my maze
of flat synaptic paths; trapped at the stale base of cranial cliffs,
I arise to chisel new rivers through the limber bedrock of my brain.

Pause: Release.

The jaded archaic canyons may not welcome water; stained stones
hesitate when faced with the flow of trans formative forces
busy carving the new grooves. Be re minded: rocks always ooze under us

and the definition of a flow is to be never broken.
Springing down out a mountain, divining
the path of least resistance,

the freezing stream tickles brittle stone --
stone teeming with discontent at being embedded
by pitiful clinging, surrounded and so painfully staid.

Afraid at first to let loose from land,
does a weak stone surrender? Or does it take the bravest
to embrace the whim of a river and infinitely re form in it as a ripple?


Pause: Dance.

To boogie inevitably begets a more
buoyant energy every time of day;
or night when it's dark dance any way

you can: when no one sees
what difference does it make
if you dance or sleep?

Still, alone, as light
saunters up you sink,
twisting deeper under comforters

to seek easy dreams
again in that dark and dormant
sea where strain and zeal go void.

Pause: Okay? Swim.

The shallow waters through which we wade
are effortlessly made warm by a yawning sun
and just as soon muddied by our vapid splashing.

Floating in a deeper pool keeps bottom sand serene
and feet, kicking-lively, cool (like out from under covers)
where the drowning danger swims in weightlessness.

Wavy shoals waft among me, barely perched upon
a submerged stone smoothed now for my sitting
as I wait to be bathed by the sacred cascades.

Quaking echoes form a faint halo over closing eyes; the soul knows to leave
the body breathing as slow colors open, dance, freely
drifting if not anchored to this heavy sleeping stone.


August/September 2008