a cup of stars

Hand raptured melody ; like a fragment of a memory ; sleeping on top of my roof at 16, the September I learned what the stars looked like from on top of my house ; lay on the cement, slept with pulled blanket just next to the edge, never rolling off, and we stared and talked about boys and wondered what our futures would hold ; we wondered what sex would feel like ; we discussed the song that was playing in the van when you made out with that senior during free period and the thought of him was driving you wild // Somehow now the tears singe my eyelashes because friendship feels like a cup of stars you cannot hold ; a couple little girls lying on a rooftop in September waiting for the phone to ring ; the chill bell of tomorrow waiting to ring ; your wedding bells waiting to ring ;; and I miss you sharp incision of wit, cleverness and wilderness, I distain the way we grew up and lost our flippers and fins // the boldness of reverie // I disdain time and what it has taken away

The leaves are still emerald but the cold comes whipping through soft air, the high grass, the lily pads, and the branches drifting in the water like lonely soldiers ;; the yellow dots the roadways ; the flowers pluming up in disarray ; the curled conscience of the world

the first Red leaf

As long as you feel the air around you, you are fine / as long as you feel the day around you, with its tendrils, its curling spine, the wandering light and the peak of cold dipping in between the shadows, you are fine ;; focus your perception on the senses around you ;; your wild ears that get to hear the birds call, the grass whisper, and if you are so lucky, a body of water that sings back –– if you are so lucky, sing towards a new day — collapsed words, endless day, crease towards branches that are still buried in the muck, in the marsh of summer –– carry your sadness as a totem around your neck, march towards tomorrow with abandon ;; what have I done to deserve this endless day

The communion, the way things all touch and touch back –– the way it is all of the things : the whole forest all together at the same time, and each singular piece and its own existence as well ;; each leaf each tree each root and all the same entire mountain all together

Because everything is a relationship ; a way of interacting with the world

Fall in love with the world over and over again / fall in love with the world a hundred times over / fall in love with the fresh, first breath of air in the morning ; with the first Red leaf that falls from the trees in September ; fall in love with the small rocks on the path ; with the moss covering the ground in shades of emerald ; fall in love with the bark on the trees ; the eyes that look through everything ; the conscious Forest ; the bones of the mountain pulling up out of the ground every so often ;; the whole beast of it, and that we get to enter into this world // how alien to be formed / what a gift to be formed –– I get to feel so many things, so many wild, insatiable things : but the wind and the clouds and the roots perhaps know not of the horrible pain, the exhaustion in the back of my spine, the wild and wonderful thing it is to exist in a body

the sacred is just a seeing space : a clarity of mind
the recognition of the sacredness of every single thing around you
the divine is just a set of eyes

september welcomes you with gentle, warm rain pattering on the roof and a still languid chorus of insect chatter

be gentle with yourself, the world is still a spinning web trying to find you;; the hearts of insects still beat in the night, the fluttering wings of flowers still are yet to open — curling days sit on the edge of the bathtub with you, everything sits in silent splendor at one moment or another — and yours, truly, is always here; is coming endlessly; a silent train on the endless tracks of rubber and steel that forge their way across the roots of this country; or any country; any wild moon will thump through the evening’s mist, but this one today is everlastingly yours

cambridge, maryland

River blossom marsh water, in the squish of it, along the lines of curving pathways — the houses cobble together old pillars and silent wood frames , to arrange themselves an the ornamentation against gravity. On the Chesapeake Bay the water laps against our boat and we sail past small islands, seaside houses — opulence betrays the eye, the oysters hunker themselves at the bottom of the Bay; waiting; depleted; filtering what they can through their small and stony mouths ;; the bay drinks itself through its own tongue, lungs gasp at the jellyfish; we walk along the dock, three quarters wrapping around the brightest lighthouse on the eastern seaboard, it seems; the twilight comes to meet us as we walk towards it; and night comes to sit with us — the echo of something grandiose and wild laughing in the light tapping against the dock, pearling in the boats, the sails touching the twilight colors as well; the drift and bounce of the rock as they sway, a lullaby enough to sing the last fireflies of August to sleep. You run desperately to catch them – a poem in your own feet, laughing, and a gentleness you have now learned to approach these bugs with — they settle into the grass, tired now it seems, from a whole season of dancing — they too want to slumber now, tuck in and turn off their lights; but the horizon still glows on the edge of the dock, and you still have questions to be answered — and I will always try to answer them by showing you the light reflected on the water — answers enough for anyone

historic courthouse, centreville, maryland

Hollowed out firmament of Justice; bricks painted white , stacked by hands whose ash now billows about the roots of these structures : these structures that never deteriorate , the perfect path lined with green grass , the perfect lilies placed around a statue of Queen Anne ; the endless monarchy and oligarchy of something we come to pray to :: the precipice of judgement whose hand sits in gavels long-since hammered away ; hammering away sentences, not paragraphs — just sound bites, not full context — just pieces of pieces of lives lost; and laws held and upheld like a handful of marbles jangling, with all the light that passes through them, and all the air that sits at the edge of the spherical shape;; the way we hold on to history like a sack full of old coins that no longer hold any value — but the sound of the jangle pleases our ear so; the jangle of the jail cells ring too; the clink of old metal and salvaged chunks of wrought iron that once brought the iron fist to some wishless land;; the wish-list landed on this lapping shoreland; this Plymouth Rock-edged cliff; the sound of the jangle observes us observing it; and continues to sing

acts

The river of eyes sees me and I see them :: another mindless shooting . we put the word mindless in front of it as a way to lessen the blow it seems –because we cannot grapple with the mind , the conscious beings set mindfully in action ; acting and reacting to the system, the concrete infrastructure which does not shake the illusion of separateness , which keeps us bonded in separate cells , the cells of our body which want to quake awake ; which want to shake our fists in fury – and yet the fury does not come — cannot come, because we don’t have the emotional bandwidth for it , because we have put all of our mental space towards surviving , towards keeping our dopamine levels high enough to not sink into this sludge pool of a timeline ; this swamp bottom of a country – the ones that care more for their own escape plan than for their citizens ; for the backup backup generator when the world ends as they know it — for the cash lined pockets which must remain lined ; less the line between the oppressed and the oppressors gets any thinner at all ;; the barricades between us now no longer physical, but a list an imaginary numbers stacked an virtual bank accounts , piling high , circling around the circumference of the earth — the amount of inequality unmatched in human history ; the pyramids of Giza proving to be a small, ornate and obnoxious sideshow compared with the type of wealth we deal with now ; secret ; in the shadows ; unspoken of , and somehow sickly glorified :: the sickness in ourselves which continues seek out this glory , this false prophet of profit ; the false reality that rings with an endless chime, yet never awakens the slumbering: the obvious right in front of your face, but the line never gets drawn back to the slave conditions which create the objects we obsess to possess : it’s obvious : it’s in our face and we know it and we cannot keep it in our minds : we cannot be mindful ; we must keep falling on the word mindless :: mindless violence that we perpetuate with our mind – less – ness — the mess in not cultivating mindfulness about every participation our feet are walking in — and more so, that our bows and arrows are not drawn higher :: that we, dare I say, mindlessly attack one another stuck inside the infrastructure :: all of us ever clamoring towards the top //

we all know it : we all know the horrors of our modern world now, what it takes to make our clothes, to mine our batteries, how much wealth inequality we have, how much poverty there is in the world, and how much wealth is being hoarded at the top:: we have heard it and yet still remains disconnected to us : we must be reminded of it and even then it falls on deaf ears , it becomes a trope, a cliche and even that in and of itself was a successful spin :: to somehow not allow our brains to accept the novelty and horror of the conditions of this timeline / what a wild and magnificent feat has been accomplished here in late-stage capitalism : to have been so brazen, so obvious, so out in the open : to have gotten everyone to be so submissive and complacent with such horror, such global exploitation — and to have it become so commonplace to us, to feel so helpless in changing the system that we dare not bother to care anymore, or worse, cannot afford to care, in an effort to not drown in depression or fall behind on your bills — to have manufactured consent to such a degree that we do not even realize we have consented , and we continue to perpetuate, glorify and sit idly by ;; to fail to recognize ;; to fail to understand ;; to endlessly fail our brothers and sisters of the world ;; by never even framing reality with enough reality in it ,, another mind-less act of violence ; another mindless act of violence 

with a capital C

The rhythm of the algorithm pulling words like taffy ;; tweets towards the endless horizon of flooded feeds seeding one another; feeding one another , hungrily, but no welfare here – no we’ll all fair just the way we will without any help — heaven forbid we forbid the top from sucking the bottom dry , in the middle of the stagnation of our nation : the driest lands sparking fire , setting ablaze – towards the hearkening of a new world that does not want to dawn, but dons always Donald’s endless tumbling tweets ; McDonald’s on the horizon pulling the McFlurry out of the fire , the flurry of California covering itself in its own ash –– plumed with prison labor ; languid languishing never relinquishing the slave chains on the chain of events that chink people behind the metal bars – the finality of a sentence with no period. the period of time between stock investment and yellow vests,, firing down the stockades, the stock aids, the capital capitalizing on itself – corruption with a capital C, creation with a sea of capital :: the only way to get things done is by pillaging, they say — the only way to get things done is by doing it ourselves, it seems — the helpless being helped less than the crumbling infrastructure, the bridges which do not carry us over, which do not arc towards justice, but teeter with old metal and rusting wire;; the bridges we marched across, old history now, while our policy peels personhood from place, nomenclature from race, identity from grace ;; now we lie only as the outliers facing down the lies — the big mac with fries — the big oil in disguise ,, the special-interest ties — tie us up in more endless war, the frightful gore we forget to remember ;; the torture we hid behind the wall we never built, the justice we never built, the coalitions we never built — the bridges we burned, the forests we burned, the redwoods that sit burning — the roots deep, thick with indigenous stories we do not bother to know — the trunks wide, the teeth of our nation bared wider still ;; the redwoods burn, and the thousands of years which rest in their rings, that we do not own, curl into our own fever dream ; the leviathan cracks but does not salve our drought ;; we have cast aside the storied names, the mythic games, we are alone now — we face the drought alone, the one we made alone, we carry it on our back – black sisyphus injected with syphilis — we did it to ourselves, this rock we must endlessly roll; manifest destiny manifested a curse — or is it just called consequence

leaning towards the sublime

august coupling itself against the air; the tide of the horizon; the sea of roots that swarm themselves under our brain cells — entwined with the wine of the waves of branches that burn towards the breathlessness of light — the sun of sensation ;; the curtain of every day which blows against the open window —- time, or a rattle clock shaft of wind that wants to only dance around the bundle of weeds we are — incorrigible humans ever growing, a thousand cells in symphony, in harmony together;; we all, the summertime leaning towards the sublime

you show me the rocks you found, glowing the brightest smile;; shining from the tips of your toes with this pride ;; the most beautiful rocks you have found — the most sparkling of treasures;; the infinite glory of the everything around us;; the shining glow of every small thing :: this is why children are endlessly and exponentially better than adults ;; you make my life magical, you make me remember magic every moment of the day;; and i want to live in this presence everlong

new memories

And more upon more : new memories still — scouring the aisles of Lowe’s by myself, figuring out propane regulators, tubes, funnels, pipes, lights, deck stains and screws all by myself,, dragging 50lb bags of gravel myself, heaving chunks of wood, pushing carts full of lattice, spray painting, priming, figuring out, piecing together — trying things I’ve never tried before – carpentry, plumbing, electric, googling, searching, finding, piecing it together, creating of a whole new sort, designing, in a whole new way — fumbling, budgeting, carting solar panels and generators and tires and water jugs and cement blocks — doing it, doing it, and making it work, by myself,, paint swatches and hydraulic jacks, caring, caring, caring for it, drafting the plans, crafting it, banging nails, trying, failing, trying again — questions to Lowe’s employees I’ve never asked before, like where can I get 10 feet of insulated tubing? What wrench do i need to unhook sharkbite fittings? Will this explode? Figuring out how long I can make my battery’s energy last ;; the thrill of the smallest treasures, new bars of soap – my soap,, my own forks ;; the immense joy of mundane tasks made anew – washing for the first time, pouring a cup of water, lighting a stove ;; everything new, everything new, everything new

and the august sounds, the symphony of insects, the curtailed bottomless peak of purple peaking over the horizon, the endless stars catching me ;; the wide open door, the tv splayed over the entryway – letting all that summer air splay its hands and feet in through the door, letting the insect choir chirp their way through a movie, letting the smell of grass curl its way in around the window frames — letting the swell of heat and sweat bundle its way into my home, warm every small thing with aliveness — live in to it, live in to it, let the ceiling fan twirl me around like a dream — live in to it

soft now, the light will break faster than you, if you let it — soft now, the world is turning just the same, the air is learning, the courage of burning is still a glow — you, you are still aglow; fear has no home here

the ground is still under you, your heart is still inside you, your wisdom is growing ;; that growth is still worth growing all on its own, that nothing need to be for show, that there is nothing to prove to anyone, that your body is a miracle just in existing , that your own beauty is a riddle that will forever keep unfolding — what a miracle is this ;; the grass rings with a new day, and the sky is still above me, the sea is still ever blue and wandering through the summer — I am okay, my chest says. Life is a strange dream ,, and one day the mountains will meet me again, in all their rubble and their glory ;; how do I become a better person? How do I ascend my own riddle — how do I bless myself , who am I to bless?