30 Poems In 30 Days: What I Learned

So here I am on day 30, reflecting on the endeavor. What have I learned?

When we are forced to find inspiration, where do we find it? When we are allowed to let all the “floaters” (as I call them) – ideas that stream past us constantly - to get pulled into our field of vision, inspiration seems to come out of thin air. It’s nothing short of miraculous.

Perhaps “writers block” or the inability to be creative is nothing more than our inability to be fully present.

Someone once described the creative process as being like a radio receiver, plucking out ideas like radio waves of thin air. This experience has reinforced this idea for me.

As to whether any of these poems are “worth” anything, that is not my job to perform. In fact, that was not really the intent of the exercise. The path is the process.

This exercise has shown me everything begins in observation and this must be done alone, and finally in silence. For this gift of silence, I am eternally grateful.

Michael

November 30: Warrior Code

We must establish brand new homes
that have no geography at all -
As fresh as any coinage minted
With such great, relucent light,
Right for the hot, fresh blood of the young,
Rife for all thickly muscled laborers in the garden,
Unaware of all the years left to be worked.

Our grand future incubates in what is unspoken
By clumsy tongues unfamiliar with the poetry
that is our birthright, that bubbles up
around and in every one of us.

Where do we find the courage
To mine all the riches that lie buried,
Trapped so deep within our hearts discordant?
What nourishment must we take to find such strength?

As for me, I choose
To cradle dreams like heartfelt thanks.
I choose to nurse all the dying parts
Back to full strength.

We will train to become
The warriors this world needs
And we will deal every minute,
In every way, in every flavor of forgiveness.

November 29: Blame The Dreamers

Blame the dreamers for the puddle of color
In the west every evening,
For the delusional crackpot
Who seems to perform on the subways
Speaking to friends no one else can see.

Blame the dreamers for the delicate clouds
you see overhead,
Those fingerprints of the ones gone on before us,
Leaning lacy against a cornflower
Field of blue on any afternoon sky.

Blame the dreamers for the music that strengthens us,
Spirit-like, carried by notes, thin and as light as air.

Blame the dreamers for the wall paintings of Lascaux,
In the damp, dark caves, under flickering torchlight,
Dreaming the bison in such vast numbers,
Thundering across their hearts
To stave off their fear and hunger -

Blame the dreamers for love
Which has no other function than to lift
The soul so close to the galaxy's center.

Blame the dreamers for those other places
Where we may also thrive,
Places not as pinched and cruel as this one,
Where the empty parts of us feel easy,
What dark matter calls "home",
Full of what was left behind at our birth
When our bodies and souls merged,
Forcing their way into this strange world.

November 28: The Spelunker

The spelunker died just meters below
A surface that crawled with loved ones and news
Media, never quite aware of how
Close he'd really been to cool air and a
Graceful blue sky before anoxia
Took hold,generously providing the
Visions that led him deeper by hand to
His eventual demise.
                                             Exploring
The darkest places is never without
Risk,chasing shadows like tornados is
The edgy stuff obsessive thrill seekers
Are made of. He left family above
As deep in grief as he was beneath tons
Of rock, and just as inextricable.
Held firm by stone that claimed him for its own,
In lightless rooms too small for eulogies,
Or tears and rites that were foreign to him
In the dark, he sought purpose - fought for it,
In this, his final stand to claim his space,
In this, his all-consuming resting place.

November 27: Praise

Praise to dark November sky
To morning in its infancy.
Praise to the gray overhead
And the trees, naked and shy.
Praise to silent words
Coaxed from being alone.
Praise to the rain and wind that blows,
Praise to snow and angry hail,
To the warmth of my bed and the
Luxury of late mornings.
Praise to breakfast of warmed over pie,
For leftovers the rest
Of a day that refuses to rise
And brush her teeth,
Or bother to get dressed at all.
Praise to pajamas
And to coffee and tea
Fresh brewed and steaming,
Praise for this tiny house that cradles us,
Warm and fed
On the bread of love.

November 26: November Tale

The farmer walks around his field in muck boots
So slowly, his lumbering gait betrays him deep in thought.
He has worked the land and it has worked him
For generations, as far back as he can recall.
Even his childhood memories are built upon
Thanksgiving walks around these same fields with his Dad
Silent as monks, the two of them.
He is remembering his wife, now gone ten years
In the blink of an eye that to this day
He recalls like a punch in the stomach,
How it made him weak in the knees,
How even today, he cannot conceive of
Mornings without her.
He recalls the birth of each sheep and cow and horse
With as much clarity as every one of his children.
The panic and exhilaration that eventually gives way
To the boredom and fear that is raising a family.
He learned the hard work of farming,
Not believing there was any better way to make a living.
The thought of simpler ways of doing things,
Of not having to get up so early,
To always reek of manure and earth,
Of worrying about money and doing
The precarious dance of getting
Food on the table, and the kids dressed
In respectable clothing and sent to school.

He feels the mud give way beneath his feet –
It is a cool November, and this Thanksgiving
Morning is as raw as his heart as he
Remembers, he observes the sadness
Of his farm just before the winter comes –
He was used to cycles, so he understands
How it is that his farm looks so
Lackluster to him – it happens every year.

He turns down roads scarred by large tractor
Tires that leave criss-cross treads
Resembling spider webs deep in the mud.

Down wind, he can smell the turkey
Already cleaned and stuffed and cooking.
There would be the turnips to boil and mash,
Potatoes to clean, string beans to slice.
There will be pies to warm over eventual sliding
Mounds of ice cream later – the pungent odor
Of cooking fruit would tease him all day.
There would be the alchemy that coaxes the
Smooth comfort flavors of gravey from turkey fat
Gravy that he will pour liberally over
All the other side dishes as well as the meat.
It is his wife’s recipe and he smiles
Remembering that fact. The scent like loving arms will
Overpower everyone in the kitchen in
Just a few hours, when his kids and he
Will sit around his long marked up
Table just to say thanks.

He is tired, but his body is made of the clay of earth.
It all from the deepest parts of him - the loss and pain,
The love he knew and his kinship to death,
The hurt and the hope for all his children.

It is the greatest thing a man can do
To be something solid, like rock, something
That life can stand on, make claim and go forward.

November 25: One Thousand Little Hiroshimas

Every time we cross paths
Worlds collide –
Matter and anti-matter clash
And it makes such a mess

Everything we do is like
One thousand little Hiroshimas,
Living in the shade of the multitude
Of mushroom clouds scattered about.

Everyone tells us to use
A big stick to correct our neighbors
Faulty way of thinking,
When all we really want to do is to
Vaporize everything around us.
With such righteous heat
As to leave just their shadows burned
into the concrete.

I cannot imagine this sort of loneliess
To be the one left standing
In such a world.

November 24: What We Need

Just more softening
A little more space
Some blurred edges,
Filed dull and round,
Not quite so sharp.

Some quiet discourse
Or maybe a touch without any words.

Show them the hurt
If they lack the imagination –

Less victory, fewer champions
And more conversion, more of
A seasonal heart that melts
From ice into water.

Just more charity
And the simple wish
Of a tasty dinner
In secure and loving arms.

November 23: Two Trees

Naked white birch seem to shiver
without the dress of flitting leaves,
They are tender, anticipating the
Snow that has yet to fall.
They are ghostly, almost animated,
Fleeing the brute force that is
A winter nor’easter in New England.

I tie my destiny to the
Courage of standing pines,
The elders in the world of trees,
Which sag beneath the weight of snow,
Which point upward to milky moon
no matter what their burden
dancing with north winds.

We can choose to clutch everything
Around us that makes up a good life –
Or we can point skyward like the
Pines, where our hearts have always ached
To travel, and face this moment
With unparalleled bravery.

November 22: The Great Release

This, the first of the frost
(a "killing" frost, they call it)
Throws sunlight off grass like a diamond
In the very hard chill and lazy silence
Draped over the morning so casually.

I hold warm love in the folds of a soft chenille blanket
Beneath the belly of a curled up cat
Snoring her most gentle feline breath
With the ease of the day that is ours
If we only wait for the great release.

November 21: Thanksgiving Earth

It is the beauty of the earth that calls me out,
That asks for me by name,
It seeks solace deep in the inner parts of me,
Wild as river gorges
Or lazy as some backwater stream
Where dreamers make wishes.

When will the tide of human arrogance ever recede?
Will the earth ever be family to me ever again?

When we are present and willing
To share from our need,
To be dependent each one to the other,
When we know everything as alive,
Then we can sit around a table
And truly give and receive
Thanks in full abundance.

November 20: On A Marriage

It was a love grounded in arrivals and departures and then arrivals again.
It was a relationship of discovery and great dormancy,
Of periods of joy and bleak despair, of slow growth and wild stagnation.
It would skew off course, out of kilter into such unnerving loneliness
For what seemed like centuries to both of them.
Except for their need to hold each other on occasion in a gentle embrace,
They would have been done for; finished, ended without hope of remaining together.
But it was the soft warmth of each other's bodies that helped them
Find their way back to each other time after time.

It was not natural at all. It could not be studied or replicated.
There was no name for it, nor could it be cataloged.
In many ways, it was contrary to the idealized vision
Of what a “good” marriage was, but, they found,
It was all that they had going into the new millennium
With growing children moving off and soon away to leave
Them alone to fend for themselves. It was a fearful time.
They learned that unbeknownst to either of them, they
Had grown so hopelessly intertwined, like strong knotted root,
Like the tight weaves on a complex pattern of a loom.

All of their common causes, sick children, trips to the hospital,
The onslaught of bills and job losses, all their set backs,
In their common language of sacrifice and amid all
Their fearful heartaches, it was the loss
And the endurance, and perseverance, it all acted like
Some powerful acid that melted away their superficial shells
Leaving only their sad, wounded cores remaining,
Still and at peace in the presence of one another.

They exacted politeness when speaking to each other,
And moved with reverent gestures,
Even when arguing - especially when fighting.
It is not that they stopped fighting altogether but rather
That they stopped trying to hurt each other, little by little –
Over time, until they re-taught themselves the purpose of laughter.
They always seemed to find that path back to each other
Like orienteers, compass and map in hand, with sharp
Machete chopping through the overgrowth of years of being lost.
At home, they laid out acceptance for each other,
Like a dinner placemat, as a standing invitation.

Some would think this sort of marriage a sham.
Some would argue that these were very desperate people,
Clinging to the fear of being alone by clinging to something else
But this was not true at all.
Over the years, they learned so much about being lonely.
They explored every contour of that dark terrain.
They knew it better than anyone else ever could after all these years
Of walking these trails, much more so than when they first
Were married, when they were first dating,
When their marriage was going to be the gold standard
For every marriage yet to come.

In the end, they simply learned that each other was all they had
To face the uncertainty of each moment.
It was only each other keeping them from the black night,
From the volatile shimmering of all things,
From the great tentativeness that life really is.
In the end, it was their bed of forgiveness in which
each turned to the other as a form a refuge against the day.
Like the gradual ease of darkness that gives way to light, this notion
Gradually graced each of their lives at the same instant,
Independently arriving at the realization that their
Lives were illumined by the simple fact that after
All this time together, they were able to learn once
And for all the kind of stuff of which their love was truly made

November 19: High Wire Act

The truth of things is not in the thing itself.
It percolates upward to the surface from within, it bubbles up
To guide us, though the choices are never easy.
It is death-defying
Like walking from one of the Twin Towers across
To the other, on strands of wire, thick as limbs,
Insane to onlookers who secretly hope that he will fall
All the while, the walker stepping through air as if he were painting.

What if life were a live art and each one of us, an artist,
Lost in our own form of madness,
Surrendering to beauty whenever possible?

Your greatest work lies just ahead of you,
Foot over foot on the wire that is yours,
In the dim gray possibility of tomorrow.

November 18: Allow Love

You do not need to be anything to me
Other than what you already are.
Stop trying so hard and maybe then you will see!
Leave pretending in the pockets of your pants
And we will do the laundry together – twice!
You do not need to come to fruition before my very eyes
Or even write in complete sentences.

There is so much room for all of your disasters
And still be the glowing ember I know you are.
Anguish wrings the very love plumb out of us
Just as it is the poison that the peacock drinks
Which makes her feathers shine so bright.

The point is this:
I love you without chance.
Without hope of extraction,
I love the parts of you that you only guess at.
I hold you deep as breath,
In how much I wish for your freedom.

We are bound together as
Stubborn as the roots of a fig tree,
Against the drought that life can often be.

Allow love that asks for nothing, -
Allow simple love, relentless as the rain.

November 17: Rail Haiku

The rattle and shake
The satin hush of rolled steel,
Morning is like silk.

Lives parallel
Like rails, as long as my dreams,
Earth toned, infinite.

As day drips along
My train window shows me scenes
Of joy and sorrow.

Rolling, I cannot
Escape the laughter of sky
And sheltering clouds.

The woman shrouded
By the light that never dies
Holds out open arms.

The ten year old will
Not recite the famous pledge
Until justice reigns.

November 16: The Portents of a Winter Unseen

I am wistful of the green shade of sleeping branches,
Mourner to the russet tint of dry aged leaves.
Birds and small mammals have stripped the berried bushes
Cleaned like scoured bones of some animal remains.
Creatures wear the haggard mask of their hunger yet to come,
While sculpted mountains draw a charcoal line
Of thin smoky black across a distant horizon.
It draws a circle around our valley, like loving arms,

Not all life will be driven out, in the winter that is to come.
Just hold out,
There is power in the perseverance of things that grip onto life
With both hands and teeth and prehensile feet,
All throughout the death that winter will deliver.

In stillness, all things recall the source that animates them:
The squirreled seed,
The loitering bulb,
The sleeping skunk,
The stern blue color of river water as ice,

Even all the love that sleeps with one eye open
In the quiet hope, dormant in the deepest bear cave of my heart,
Just for you

November 15: With What Shall I Keep Warm?

The trust of you,
So inexplicable,

In forgiveness,
In the greening of spring
And the graceful surrender of winter,

With dandelion tea and a song
left in voicemail -
With the justice of bread
With hard work, and warm blood.

When cold threatens the core of me,
Shakes my faith clean to the bone
When I am left afraid, and barren, and in harms way,
Will you remind me of the embers deep i me
Left burning, that once were
Ignited, withflame too hot
Even for poetry to control?

November 14: Look

Look to the earth
The mud brown of tones
The green of spreading forests
That seems to stand alone

Look to the soil
And rivers coursing blue,
To pale moon tugging oceans wild
That opens up the sailor in you.

Look to the air
That is your very soul,
That moves the trees and sweeps the grass
That mends the broken into whole.

Look to a gentle heart
That holds enormous pain,
Look to the days of orange joy
And to the largesse of quiet rain.

November 13: Ode To The Great Eastern Sun

We possess the vernal waters
That sluice through the empty holes in us
To deliver life into the dry desert parts of us.

I aim to fatten you up on trust and pasta
On hope and - god-willing – truth
But just in case, know that we always
Face the great eastern sun, we
Open to the world like steamed mussles
Frozen wide, like a receptacle, ready for wisdom
That will shed our hard shell leaving only
The soft guts and briny water that is us –
Wanting the Other to love, just like that,
Without compromise, without change.

We listen for the breath that speaks to us,
Glistening in the very shine of all the love we
Nurture for each other stored in pools
Deep as a moonless night
Held in the shy promise of silence.

November 12: A Realization Late in Life

For all of my life, I have always thought of being alone
As something to vanquish.
I’ve always imagined a great wrong being done.
All of my life I have been so wrong.

It is a kiln that fires the dull clay of my soul
Into a vast vessel, capable of holding everything –
Even the seductive kiss of silence as a lover.

It is the beginning of green lush living.
It is the start of what is feral.
It is the germ of wildness that thrives in each of us.

November 11: My Morning Prayer

Take this moment to wish for the silence
To enter our homes and our lives
Our hearts and our heads –
Let us carry it like bread
Each to the other and then to ourselves

Inhale peace the way air fills our swelling lungs,
Let it be song and bring spirit with it.
May it fill the ears of all around us
May it infect them, too,
May it create song where once there was none.

Let me find new ways to trust.
In the music and the dance, in sitting down to a meal
Made by my own hands -
May I always have the good fortune to feed you.
May we always serve each other with reckless abandon.

Let joy hover with kestrel grace in our time together,
Let it reach into the knotted lump of deep muscle.
May I always find the friend of you
In the most hidden parts of who I am.

November 10: Raking Leaves

I was sitting all day at work
thinking that I would go home
To rake leaves before dark
but now the sun has disappeared
(and probably my will to rake)

November 9: The End of the Mystic

Before moonrise, night is like ink,
Disorienting to even the most settled soul.
There are the dark places everywhere that catch us off guard,
Things that keep us from the damn certainty of a saint.

Will tomorrow ever arrive?
Will my child get home from school safely?
How could a good and just God ever allow this to happen?

With an expanding universe, racing away from us
At unfathomable speed, where is the mystic?
Out into the void, wonder exceeds our grasp.
It is the about the hows of things now and not so much the whys
We are incapable of the art of “perhaps” and
We believe that kindness is a sucker's bet,
That will most likely end us up in jail.

You ask if we are strong enough to be mystics these days
But I ask are we poets enough?

November 8: Waiting

You cannot rip open the bud of a flower
To get at the beauty you seek,
No matter how good your intentions are.
No matter how far along the path.

It must happen alone,
At its own time, to its own schedule
Full of starts and ends,
And with maybe decades of no motion at all.

Like the fingers of my clenched hand,
Only when the moment is needed for the salvation of everything,
When beauty is demanded, when I finally awaken,
Is when I uncurl my fist.

November 7: My Computer has A.D.D.

My computer has ADD.

While I sit here, trying to be present
This computer is a whirling dervish
Of feverish action.

It clicks, and it moans,
It hums and it tickles
Its deepest parts in motion
From hidden places, speaking to me, but
Like a ventriloquist, it never once moves its lips.

What sort of enlightenment does it seek?
What sort of grace is it hoping to receive?

Like a child it pulls at my sleeve
It wants so much more of me than I am able to give!

But this is just so typical of a computer.

November 6: Moment

The buds in spring open each one distinct from the other.
Each moment opens to us, so unique and never the same,
But we choose sometimes to treat them as one thing.
It is not who I am that rides in on my breath.
Nor is what I possess that rides on the out,
Both of these things are true of me.

It is that in silence between the in and out breath
I am there, complete in that space,
Vacant but lush with possibility.
And that is where I hope to always be.

November 5: Candle Love (A Samhein Love Poem)

This morning I lit candles
And died a million ways in oozing gobs
Of liquid wax.
A viscous blood drips floral color
Of soft juniper green or rose petal red.

It is putty soft, round as a woman’s breast,
I stroke my finger along a silky length
And dream of candle pleasures and gelatin love.

The promiscuous light that flickers
Like a whisper masks my eyes with moving shadow.
The resin taste lays deep in my saliva.
My throbbing lips so near the flame
Ache for just one Samhein kiss,

That once a year forbidden kiss,
That trick or treat and ghostly kiss,
That heated blade of fire kiss,
The urge to consume and be consumed
The way that solid heat gives way to molten love,

Aches for that one Samhein kiss.

Later, I snuff the flame
By licking my thumb and pointer wet.
Here in the certainty of the night I sit alone,
For the candle dance of light is gone.

November 4: Eternal Monument

Etched into bark gray as dusk, curled like paper,
Are the words: “Beth Loves Rene”.

Here, In the cool mountain air among all the decay
Of fallen leaves and rotting wood,
I measure silence with the tap of hunters’ shots.
It is late and I lean into the slope of tired light.

I seek un-fossilized fragments of love in everything.

November 3: Cold Morning On the Connecticut

The deep part of the Connecticut River is
The dangerous part that you cannot see from the surface.
Its suck cannot be heard,
Nor is the magnetism of its pull measurable
Except by word of mouth and the stuff of legend.

The buoys bob, bounced by the waves,
Moved by the wind
That brings the clouds, that
Makes the rain and makes the river deeper still.

It is here, that I try to pray.
I am broken down and humbled
Into one billion moving parts that make up
This universe of water.

I exalt the chilled air around me,
And the warm breath that swells my lungs -

My heart is the deep part of me –
The dangerous part that hides from view,
That thumping drum that always aches
To make its way back to the start.

November 2: November Shadow

Beauty rains down upon me -
It is color, bleeding November.
It is earth trusting me with the quiet
Of a single leaf as it wends
Its way to the ground.
It is incandescent light burning
Through translucent branch tips
Placing bark and trunks of trees
In the deep dark solitude of shadow.
Silence is the language of rainl.
It traverses mammoth fields, shy as fog,
Holding the open secrets I tell to no one.
It has arms to embrace me,
and holds me tight and even calls me by my name
It calls out to me
And it is because of this
I know to whom I belong.

November 1: Big Enough

I am big enough to hold everything
So that I won’t spill out everywhere and embarrass us.
I am big enough to hold my New York-ness
I am large enough to hold my disabilities
and my greatest strengths.
I have space enough for good things to happen to someone else.

I am even big enough to hold the obnoxious
Traits of a teenager and still be loveable.

Sometimes, Raven needs to caw loudly at me,
To remind me that I must choose to live more curious than afraid
And that my heart is a Macy's Day Parade balloon -
Always capable to hold the hurt and the healing,
So capable of anything.