Poetry Collection

Selected Poems from Publications

Dead Crow & the Spirit Engine

1. Birth

Why? Why here? On this planet?

Creation’s womb swells

with stars

colliding—

black blood drop

falling through space

is blessed by light

and becomes thought

without form.

And falling

into Earth’s atmosphere,

thought is blessed by air

and becomes feather,

to skiff the ponds of heaven

and eventually

become wings.

And falling through cloud

wing is blessed by rain

to become body,

the strength to rise up

out of Hell

and ashes.

And falling

through snowtipped wind,

body and wing

are blessed with breath

that they might speak

and continue living.

And landing

on the topmost branches

of Ararat’s ancient cedar,

Crow is born.

3. Arrival

Wing blessed by rain becomes body…

A word to the wise. Never

let yourself go at a banquet

of the gods. You’re bound

to end up the goat to somebody’s

trickster, like I did. I’ll never

get that goddess’s laugh

out of my head! Inanna, Aphrodite,

Madonna—I’ve loved and lost them all,

every one. I never

should have looked into that mirror.

Next thing I knew,

I had a whanging headache

like a hangover on speed,

and found myself here—on Earth—

hurled in a heartbeat from the sun.

How I got here from the other side

of the galaxy is a complete

conundrum. Still, as planets go,

this one ain’t bad.

Plenty of water, trees dropping fruit,

dead bodies everywhere.

I see their spirits rise

in morning mist.

It’s what keeps me alive, this beak

that can sniff out the dead

from forty miles away.

After my first year or two

I began to see what the dead see—

silhouettes of energy

a tracery of frost on glass.

But hell, what’s my mission here?

To scratch off the days

foraging for clues

in a holocaust boneyard?

To chew on blood-raw liver

in the desperate hope

it’ll spit up the omens and cures? Besides,

who listens to prophecy anymore?

The two-by-two of paradox

makes poor food for a Crow.

Listen, I’ve been around.

I’ve stared into the water long enough

to see what’s on the other side.

Doesn’t make me a genius. Just means

I know how to pay attention.

You think this world is everything there is?

26. The Day After Covid

They had for their king the angel of the abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek Apollyon, or the Destroyer… He seized the dragon, that serpent of old, the Devil or Satan, and chained him up for a thousand years; he threw him into the abyss, shutting and sealing it over him, so that he might seduce the nations no more till the thousand years were over. —Revelations 9:11, 20:1–3

The day after Covid, surgical masks

lay dead in the gutters, so many leaves

riffled into history by the collective sigh

of billions—breathe, O breathe free

at last! The lie laid bare, the masks of power

cracked, blue-backlit screens split open.

Shaggy-horned demons scurry, still

sucking the world dry—O hunger, circling

the drain, fill, fill these beasts that they prey

upon us no more. Strap them into the SpaceX

express and fire them into the eye

of the sun. Failing that, build them cages

made of gold, that their bloody forked tongues

lick clean daily from top to bottom,their cells far, far away from the living

and sealed like a nuclear bunker

with the warning: There be monsters here.

Trespass at your own risk. The Angel

of the Abyss, shining lancet of Revelations,

will stand guard, stanching infection

at its wormy roots in the heart, where dreams

dark and deadly take hold. Fear not, O you

who tend the sapling and mend a broken wing,

for this guardian is an Angel of Dance,

who skips off the sun’s corona as it crests

the arc of Earth, spirit-sails the spiral arms

whose galactic milk stains the summer skies,

jigs the ocean for its shattered jewels

and sheds us all of our Earthly chains.

6. Storm Year

The year crept in rainy

and feline, black as lung tar,

as if you could feel the snarl

crouching in the hedges.

Now that we have banished demons

and angels, debunked water diviners

and spirit mediums, we are more afraid

than ever. Lived apart from the wild

too long to recall the sinuous

darkness we breathe awake.

But it’s not about us anymore,

if it ever was. Gaia is awake,

and unlike us, doesn’t discriminate.

All who tasted the banquet then shat out

plastic in my oceans, raided forests

for toilet paper or stripped mountains

to bare rock, all will feel me roar.

Your poor and your starving, your weak

and your powerful, all will feel me roar.

Do not dare close your ears to me.

I can feel the garden soil tense, waiting.

Garden of Pomegranates

For three days after the transplant,

she wept. Her fingers

couldn’t keep away from the purple scar

on her breastbone, her sleep

a garden of bulbs

in freshly turned soil.

In her dreams,

a young woman’s pale arms

hold up a soft clay bowl

brimming with tears

and the dust of roses

sent by ardent lovers.

Her body carries the aching

of another soul’s memory—

unfinished writing on a page,

half-developed faces on a strip of film,

unkept rendezvous

in coffee-steamed cafés.

Questions are surfacing

like hungry trout in a pool—

When winter turns in your breast,

will my voice lay its wreath of snow

over yours? Is this gift of mine

a mute pump of pistons and valves

or a garden of pomegranates

pregnant with the red, red seeds

of the sun?

The Heart Is a Stray Dog

The heart’s been called a lot of things

in its time, but it’s really nothing more

than a stray dog

curled up in a corner—its appetite

dozing in your blood.

It follows you around, a matted,

rancid cur, whining at your heels

about how sad and hungry it is,

hoping you’ll give it a home

but the last time you took it in,

bathed and brushed and tried to train it

you found the leash

around your own neck. You think

maybe if you ignore it long enough

it’ll just go away, you even

drive it to the edge of the wilderness

and leave it there

but somehow it always returns

and you know, the minute

you turn your back, you’ll find its teeth

in your bones—

its ragged body turning three times

in the darkness

before falling into a deep,

troubled sleep

Pole Shift

–I–

If it seems to you the world

is upside down, north is south,

and south north, then it is.

Trust your intuition, it seldom lies.

No longer is Hell “down there”

somewhere. Dante’s

Seven Circles of Hell now

spiral upward, while Heaven

barely clings to the soles of our feet.

The dust we shake off our shoes

all that’s left of the angels

we exiled to irrelevancy.

This is what happens

when we cultivate the Lucifer

inside, elevate ourselves

to be the “Shining One”

at God’s right hand.

The prayers of billions

try to lift the dead weight

from our brows, to no avail.

This pole shift moves, quick

and silent on snowy paws,

thirty-five miles a year, headed

for Siberia. The clawprints

of its hunting track pull us

behind—human souls

so many iron filings

to a magnet.

Catalogue of False Narratives

“The universe is made of stories, not atoms.” —Muriel Rukeyser

Any story that doesn’t ring true in your gut.

Any story that won’t discuss itself.

Any story that has a vested interest.

Any story told for the sole benefit

of one person. Any story told for the sole benefit

of one nation, state or race.

Any story that doesn’t hold up

to cross-examination. Any tale

not told with gusto and panache.

Any shanty that doesn’t sweat salt

and stink of the sea. Any yarn

not spun of midnight’s black silk.

Any ballad sung in a key that fails

to open light on the world.

O tell me a story—let it be false,

let it be true. Let it be sad,

let it be joyous. Let it be impossibly

beautiful in the face of ugliness.

Let it be a lushly watered valley

death has never known except

in passing. Tell me a story as old

as the sky, young as the Earth.

Feel every cell hum to a note

that has no beginning and

no end in any galaxy.

Blue Communion

Blue Communion is the moody colour of a world in trouble. A human world that has forgotten it is just part of a larger world full of souls, both seen and unseen. That wants desperately to save a world it barely understands, or seldom walks barefoot in. A world of souls crying out to us. Lions lying down with lambs, to quote the Bible. Dolphins asking our help to be freed from fishing nets. A brave Orangutan challenging a feller buncher machine all by himself, the ultimate mad but pure Quixote. The voices that most speak to me in Blue Communion are animal voices. A ladybug who visits me in my studio, “…hopeful / our broken telepathy can be repaired.” (“Emissary”) It’s Little Bear, stumbling exhausted into the yard, dragging a broken leg, knowing his fate is sealed. It’s those “birds with street smarts,” the common sidewalk sparrow, so ignored yet somehow so noble, so determined to survive, “cocking a polite glance at our muffin crumbs and tea.” (“Sparrow Crash”) Yet even their survival is not guaranteed in our sea of electrosmog. It’s those majestic miniature airships the dragonflies, lacquered up and borne aloft by blue- sheened tissue paper wings:

jeweller’s masterpiece

on the waft and lilt

of afternoon.

Turquoise-flecked needle, soft

stitcher of summer gardens.

—“Dragonfly”

And it’s no sentimental ode to Nature. It’s both sides of the Tao in one:

Hummingbird spiral

too fast for the eye.

A hawk’s sudden,

slashing caress.

—“Words on the Wing”

And Blue Communion is human voices. The voice of an age. Voices raised in rage, voices struck down by grief, voices desperate to find meaning. As we too often forget, they are voices blended with the voices of the natural world around us. If we listen. It’s all too easy to get lost in the Hall of Mirrors, the digital wilderness of self, spread across the photons. “Escape, escape—the new / biological imperative. Survival a bit / player in Late Empire melodramas.” (“Skins of Paper, Skins of Glass”) It’s the spirit howling to be fed in a culture that deliberately cultivates the Hungry Ghost. The walking dead are easy to control. “You will come aching—stomach / a gash in the body of hunger.” But as that realization pierces your bubble, in with the next breath rushes the strength to face the unknown: “You will come on all fours, paws / carrying hidden reserves of power.” (“Summer of Fire,” Part 3) Every great hero of every great story must cross the threshold and face the monster that is themselves. In any other direction lies purgatory. And Earth, like a jilted lover whose heart never entirely left us, gives of herself with cleansing water:

“Rain finally creeps in

on mink-furred feet,

hesitant, as if to say,

Do you mind?

—“Summer of Fire,” Part 4

Blue Communion is a wake-up call from the trance. A call to rejoin the biosphere of living beings. The place every hero returns—not omnipotence but humility. For all the striving to do so, no mind can hold it all in, no science explain it all. No technology can replace the real. We forget that to our peril. We must be the masters of our own inventions. Sometimes that means admitting they are dangerous failures and abandoning them, like the fictional society in Samuel Butler’s 1872 novel Erewhon. And by our newfound humility before Nature, we fall back into the arms that are everlasting:

Earth flexes and sighs,

shrugs off our attempts

to understand. Waits patiently

for us to sing her songs

of ageless, unwavering faith.

—“Spring’s End”

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse