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THE UNBEARABLE EXCITEMENT OF BEING

They’re there every morning – the ones you don’t
Want to be


And before the sun reaches its crest
Something has sprung
Morbid and murderous
From an angry breast

No cure.
We’ve buried the key
In tangled banks
No antidote for certainty
We’re at the interstices
Life Vs. extinction

Trapped and sordid
Beings fighting
Pleasuring ourselves
In tears and blood

They’re  there every morning – the ones you don’t 

Want to be 

And before the sun reaches its crest 

Something has sprung

Morbid and murderous 

From an angry breast 

No cure. 

We’ve buried the key

In tangled banks

No antidote for certainty

We’re here at the interstices 

Of life and extinction 

Trapped and sordid 

Beings fighting.  

Pleasuring ourselves 

In tears and bloodThey’re  there every morning – the ones you don’t 

Want to be 

And before the sun reaches its crest 

Something has sprung

Morbid and murderous 

From an angry breast
 

No cure. 

We’ve buried the key

In tangled banks

No antidote for certainty


At the interstices 

Life Vs. extinction 

Trapped and sordid 

Beings fighting


Pleasuring ourselves 

In tears and blood
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To Dorothy Day: MY UNCONQUERED SOUL 

I don’t get the God “CONQUERED” Redeemed                                                                                               There is no light that dazzles me                                                                                                                      If I was made in His image seen                                                                                                                                            Why the question of my right to be   
                                                                			
If His is the sway of circumstance                                                                   			
To cause suffering and cries out loud
I’ll take my gamble with luck and chance
Off my knees my head unbowed

Don’t fashion a heaven amid sin and tears
An afterlife to counter man’s evil
Hatred and destruction – are things to fear
To battle now – in righteous upheaval 

I’ve seen the Road straight to the Gate
Detours aren’t mentioned in His scroll
If He is the master of my fate
Then why the bludgeoning of my soul?
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LAND

Land is language

 Flowers trees its catechism. Mountains its religion. 

The Weather its politics. 

Land – ignorant of ownership

 its fealty only to nature – the one solitary truth.

Enter man – the animal- his imposed hierarchy of language

Slick flowery flawless cloak despising dirt: his slang, the poetry of the weed. But Earth laughs at the concrete towers replacing Her trees. Cement sidewalks She cracks for the flower. Mountains that retaliate in anxious subduction as Weather – in convocation with wind and water, declares sovereignty; redistributing Earth’s wealth – the python in the Arctic; ice in the Gulf. 

Ownership, fabricated in the shadow of Earth’s smile

 Guns of deceit ordering Her children

to sing in the chains of servitude. 

It happens that momentary distraction;

Earth’s innocence rendered tooth and nail.  

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HAPPY NEW YEAR – 2022

January 3rd and the Sharp Shinned Hawk has returned to the feeder 

Dropping into the cedar bush waiting for an old, slow dove

But it’s the red squirrel who drives my husband crazy 

Rick and his wife Judy have taken a winter

Residence in our walls. Their bedroom quarrels

Legendary in the ceiling above my husband’s office.

I know the nights have been rough when I lay abed

Long into the morning stirred from slumber at the loud mutterings

Of my beloved below

“Fuck you, Rick!”

Yes, from the man who marched under his

banner of long hair 

Fighting for a hopeful harvest for the world

Fighting against ugly forces intrinsic in warring hearts

My peace man

The silhouette against all those night fires

Set to capitalism

Arms always raised in righteous revolutionary anger

Never in surrender 

Now sits at his desk perusing

The hopelessness in today’s headlines

Wishing the Sharp Shinned Hawk

Took prey larger than the dove.

G.D.F. 1/3/22

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PANDEMIC POLITICS

 

 

confetti

What is there to make the heart swell

Against those ungovernable desires?

Wars; showdowns at

The corral

The jungle

The beach

The half-learned lessons class

The thin stream of info-wire

Signifying new battlegrounds

Sneaky. Anonymously mean

And wrong

Stabbing at our rucksacks

Full of unused Gods

           •

What poetry can hold

What it can’t

Anger controlled

By rhyme or meter

Impolite bluster

Baroque or scant

Edgy words on pages teeter

Sweet noises overrun morning thunder

Evening song diminished in

Skeins of days torn asunder

                   •

May November carry our souls

From a hell lined with poetry stole

From that Shredded Parchment,

Now lying in confetti baskets,

To be strewn in ignorant rapture,

Over brides, babies, and caskets

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OF TIME AND DREAMS

cropped-full-moon-in-june.jpg

What is that time called

Just before sleep fully takes over

When the night-mind, in acid-etched clarity

Lines up the day’s matters

Forcing them to kneel in pain’s shadow?

What is that time called

That sounds its claxon for battle 

Swinging the Damoclesean sword

Slashing away

The nubile dreams of the innocent?

The time just before being delivered

To the mercy of that clamor

Accompanying the onset of dreams

That time when heart and brain come

Together each with its own music;

Sharps and flats dueling for supremacy

Offering a clarion call sometimes

So lovely as to be taken as anthem

Shepherding the heart

Through sunsets,

Births,

Deaths,

Success,

Failure;

The basic drawing-and-quartering of life.

What is that time called?

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STAYING POSITIVE WHILE STARING AT THE BODY COUNT

IMG_0394
Venting frustration
Failed attempts at normal
But normal, escaped, is now
Free-range
Arranged on social media
With intermittent WTFs

 

I’ve overheated
I’m angry
It’s Florida

 

Housework –
I’ve ironed clothes that wrinkle
Wishing life and virus could be
So smoothed

 

A Grocery run –
New hunting and gathering ritual
Homemade masks to protect
From the angry uncovered faces
Staring at my NY plates with disdain
As if my name were Wuhan
Rather than Hot Mess

 

With five-o’clock wine
I watch the sunset
Tossing its diamonds
Upon the waters of Newfound Channel
Week five:
Quarantined in paradise