Writing: Poetry Samples

The Spot in Time is Burning

The Old Redwood explained to the Reticent Dissident the nature of the book..

‘When you are on fire, you will write the book. This is arriving. Having arrived at the Spot, you will begin into the distancing. From here, words will grow large. The lines between the sentences will grow wide. The density of trees will be given over to the new dweller of the forest.’

‘All this, unless…unless…unless you refuse the confines, refuse the orders, the sides, the walls and arches of it all, unless you keep to the road with the wide eyed sky overhead. But even this will include a distancing, a drift. This too is leaving, a kind of retreating for you can and cannot stop the pulling.’

‘And so what? You must make way make way for the new riders, light their course, and at the same time continue to run into a thing with the force of the body for energy waits in the connecting. Be as one with your tools always and forever regardless of your position to the sun, regardless of the age of the day.’

Having said these parting words, the Old Redwood grew silent, began into a leaning, a subtle shifting of its trunk as though the weight of all that man had done, all time’s destruction of his brothers and sisters had finally taken its toll…

But the Reticent Dissident was not done. The Reticent Dissident had more questions… ‘But…but…how will I know when I have arrived at the Spot and when I am leaving? How will I know the turning? How can I resist and not resist at once? How can it be that I can and cannot stop the pulling?...’

The Old Redwood stood still in its silence, leaning subtly into the distance.

Somehow the Reticent Dissident knew that the Old Redwood would never speak again, why his bark had changed in its florescence, in the way it refracted the light of the day back into things just as the other smaller trees howled into the wind and the night sky rushed in. He looked up at the mighty branches that had once held back great tides, that had once sheltered him on his road. He shed a tear and began in his walking. As he walked, he thought back on the Old Redwood that was fast becoming legend. He hastened his step adding a certain deliberateness, a certain force and then he too vanished over the horizon.

Another kind of light in a time and space of cooperative labor vital in the 1940’s against the days' war compromise,

West Oakland cooperative since closed as part of a one-time working class stretch

THE LATE LIGHT OF FREEDOM

I was adamant in my certainty as to calm.

Hell bent in my defense of tolerance.

And when the clan took in one young man not born to the code and line tho’ having succeeded initiation and rite I, like the others, smoldered in our confidence, basked in our magnificence, great was our open stance and our upright embrace.

When it came to voice, I stood adamant behind the representative, I marched to secure his seat regardless of the day or the week…

Again, I basked in an exquisite comfort: He wanted nothing but to see me rise up and I knew nothing, after all, that was more divine if not saint-like other than first entering the world and then the word.

Someone asked about the clan of station, the voices united of position. They said it was this in between that I missed, that I was wed to myself, the heavens and little else. But of course they did not understand the complexity of progress. I smiled at them hoping for the best and brightest in their future for what was tomorrow if not one more stallion in the sequestering of light. Again, I stood there tall despite my height, smoldering despite the weather wishing I could impart the furnace of my belief quietly thankful for the grace of giving.

I imagined radiance seeing only the clear blue sky and the bright day. Winter, spring, fall, the one-time expectations of seasons ceased to make sense. How was I to know that the same light was, from a distance, another kind of dark, another word for darkness?

The Wall - Being Erupting Against Time the Mother Ship

It’s been awhile since my original paintings were displayed in local cafes. And yet, an evolved style has developed and again, paintings can be seen in local cafes and galleries.

The years were folds that took me in even when I was sleeping while too feeding civilization feeding on civilization. Here children had come of age and were on the edge of teaching the new youth and children come again where time is held by the mother ship, space, cradling wish.