ravenous

i float through spring on my eyes
chartreuse
red, purple

and
gold

errant, precious dandelions, i adore you

grape hyacinth, moss, catkins, i witness you like reverent time-lapse, like it’s my last spring / is it?

i listen for chorus frogs and woodcocks at twilight, i heard you both tonight

i watch deer roam in forage for hours/ i watch for owls for hours, praying for their roost here – til there’s no more light and i strain my eyes

i am enchanted, propelled, wild and debauched by the sounds, scents and sex

of spring

no one’s here to call me in / and i forget to eat til i am

ravenous or ravishing (my favorite malapropism)

but the mud, my knees – and my hips

remind me
that i am also

moored, cold and full of aching longing

4th sunday of lent : refreshment sunday

There is something we were never told, and this is that there is a tradition of no tradition.

A tradition of Wild Mystics or Wild Gnostics, that don’t fit into any theological or academic classification: A tradition of spiritual nomads that would not be shackled to any system or scripture; that would write their own myths and stories with the blood of their own experiences, which source can be found within their own entrails, within the marrow of their bones; within the dust of the grave, beyond what can be called experience, but that comes within their every breath.

These mystics recognize and borrow everything that speaks true to the reality of their bones without binding themselves to the rest of their traditions, but most of all, they speak with their own voice. Their voice cannot be classified or pegged to any known tradition.

tradition is violence

As soon as a scholar thinks he or she has found their source, another scholar finds that they were mistaken; for scholars, as St. John of the Cross said, argue long but never leave the ground.

Scholars speak of Gnosis and of dualism and try to explain Gnostic writings without ever having experienced gnosis, and therefore, gnosis remains unfamiliar to them and to their poor mislead readers.

Their arguments are filled only with words and a reasoning that can make a case, but that fails the source and has no substance. That is a tragedy, for they not only don’t know, they don’t even know what they don’t know, and that they don’t know.

— Tau +Rosamonde Ikshvàku Miller+,
Ecclesia Gnostica Mysteriorum, 2018

Continue reading “4th sunday of lent : refreshment sunday”

clinician

i’ll never forget
how when my heart was breaking
you went to see a foreign film in the suburbs with your family
like it was nothin’
the next day, proceeded to tell me about Korean film and
K-pop like an old man who was just hearing about it for the first time in 2022,
like someone who never knew anyone and who traveled to Korea, for a semester abroad or to teach English, or anything, despite your worldliness and AAdvantages,
like someone who never heard
of BTS, Map of The Soul,
or Carl Jung
it was then i realized how
ignorant and insular,
and Lechter-like you were,

you eat people to feed your ego,

and i was a fucking feast

your heart rate never rose the whole time

but your dick sure did

siphon

drove past the new plasma store
they’re buying, not selling
do you need to know more?

old cars fill up the vast parking lots
that pristinely fresh concrete,
marred by oil and brake fluid spots

this is a tale-of-two-river-cities,
white kids don’t sell platelets here/
this is no college town
this place was known
for Black boys, kidnapped and drowned

this fucking joint, is it never empty/
how many times can they draw blood per person, per month/
is it just two times – or twenty?

Freedom Plasma: there’s still Black blood to be drained!
24-7 audacity and
not ONE DROP of shame

[a mint by any other name, would smell as metallic, or seem so profane?]

Black families stay siphoned
but even this act’s communal
offering their bodies, their blood,
for some food for their children
for used work boots at Goodwill

white folks, “donate” for good effect and for “good will”
see, both their lifesource and red cross donor cards are near-filled/
and by the way, “I voted”, but that sticker fell off
“I want you to know:
I punched straight “D” — but, of course!”

/ tsk, tsk: “you know, “they” blew through their child tax credit refund already!”
but thank god, The Feds made certain:
Tech banks are liquid, and crypto’s steady/

dear human, woman,

if you are acquainted with nearly every star in Orion and Canis Major in the Southern Night Sky from the Northern Hemisphere;

& Castor and Pollux have glimpsed you both in and out of your blue pyjamas;

& the Moon spotlights your face like you’re the star of the show, while asleep in bed, insisting you wake up and be both worshipped and worshiper

through your bedroom windows, overlooking a wet meadow, a dirt road and then some trees,

from a ramshackle, old green house that effortlessly called you in, to hold you, and to hold you down

on this good Earth,

for a short while/

then, dear human, woman,

you are doing fine,
you are fine,
it’s all fine

nothing gold can stay
except your own treasure of a heart

you, above all, know this

so, all you need do,
is keep

keep, keep, keep

lying in bed, 4:59 AM EST, March 15, 2023
Continue reading “dear human, woman,”

3rd sunday of lent

We don’t decide to become Gnostics, but we discover that’s what we were all along. We don’t adhere to beliefs or views imposed from the outside, but our worldview comes from our inner experience. Sometimes that experience comes with the sound of cannons. Most of the time it happens quietly and gently but nevertheless is life altering, even though most external observers won’t notice the difference. We are un-made and remade from the inside out rather than from the outside in.

~ Tau +Rosamonde Ikshvàku Miller+,
Bishop, Ecclesia Gnostica Mysteriorum, 2013

Neologism: Amscape

Amscape : (noun) [ am-skāp ]
(am + scape)

The exclusively self-knowable inner landscape encompassing the psychic and pneumatic terrain of a person;

the complex of inner consciousness, metacognition, and intimate, private and transcendental experience that comprises the deep self of an individual; a human being’s interiority as distinguished from one’s outward persona, personality, biography or physical identity — and as distinct from the familial, professional, interpersonal, or social psychological evaluations, analyses, perceptions or stereotypes rendered, imposed or held by others.

Your amscape is the “you” that only you can explore, traverse and know.


This neologism is inspired in part by the late, Irish poet, philosopher and once-priest +John O’Donohue+ , who himself was inspired by the 13/14th century German mystic Meister Eckhart, speaking in his final appearance and in one of his last interviews ever, on On Being with Krista Tippet, before his untimely death in 2008. It is a compelling, life-affecting and -affirming conversation.


“That a person believes that if they tell you their story, that that’s who they are, and sometimes these stories are constructed of the most banal, second-hand, psychological and spiritual cliché. And you look at a beautiful, interesting face telling a story that doesn’t hold a candle to the life that’s secretly in there.

There’s a reduction of identity to biography – and they’re not the same thing. I think biography unfolds identity and makes it visible and puts the mirror of it out there … but identity is a more complex thing.

[As the 14th century German mystic, Meister Eckhart wrote:] There’s a place in the soul that neither time, nor space, nor no creative thing can touch.” And if you cache it out, what it means is your identity is not equivalent to your biography, and there is a place in you where you’ve never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. The intentionality of prayer, spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.”

John O’Donohue

from the Online Etymology Dictionary:

am (v.)
first-person singular present indicative of be (q.v.); Old English eom “to be, to remain,” (Mercian eam, Northumbrian am), from Proto-Germanic *izm(i)-, from PIE *esmi- (source also of Old Norse emi, Gothic im, Hittite esmi, Old Church Slavonic jesmi, Lithuanian esmi), first-person singular form of the root *es- “to be.”

landscape (n.)
c. 1600, “painting representing an extensive view of natural scenery,” from Dutch landschap “landscape,” in art, a secondary sense from Middle Dutch landscap “region,” from land “land” (see land) + -scap “-ship, condition” (see -ship).

Continue reading “Neologism: Amscape”

Carl Jung: if you become radically vulnerable and true to yourself — through your life’s expression, you will attract your people


“Neither propaganda nor exhibitionist confessions are needed.

If the archetype, which is universal, i.e., identical with itself always and anywhere, is properly dealt with in one place only, it is influenced as a whole, i.e. simultaneously and everywhere.

Thus an old alchemist gave the following consolation to one of his disciples:

“No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.”

It seems to me that nothing essential has ever been lost, because the matrix is ever present within us and from this it can and will be reproduced if needed.

But only those can recover it who have learned the art of averting their eyes from the blinding light of current opinion, and close their ears to the noise of ephemeral slogans.”

– Carl Gustav Jung: Letters, Volume II, p. 595


p.s.

this phenomenon has been affirmed for me as both the attracted and attractor

residuum II | collab with Yeats – he only died 84 years ago

pushed to the margins
hanging on by one stressed thread
to toxic or barren fringe-lands

when the once-verdant centres could, and did, hold

us, all/

“Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.”

while now, all about it

reel shadows of the indignant [shore] birds

harkening

one day soon, you too, will be residuum here


what remains: gulls converge in a chasmic rain-filled pothole in the parking lot of an abandoned mall, Benton Harbor, Michigan

An ephemeral asphalt pond after heavy rains in the parking lot of an abandoned mall, long-infested with gulls, as testimony – not merely to the inorganic evolution of consumerism, but of the intersection of NAFTA and other free-trade agreements, American soft segregation and hard apartheid, and the inherent discriminatory and predatory migration of US and Western global capitalism.


Continue reading “residuum II | collab with Yeats – he only died 84 years ago”

poem for poet: Warsan Shire

drink


her voice, delicious, spiced rum
her intellect, clear, Russian vodka
her truth, painful, white lightning
her beauty, full, Mourvèdre
her medicine, holy, mezcal

intoxicated and wrecked

you will drown willingly
soberly denouncing air,
pulled into the depths of her luminous current


and for women, womxn, womyn, womqn – who are difficult to love, click & hear

this


have mercy, also hear Warsan Shire here, and here.



Continue reading “poem for poet: Warsan Shire”

dream[t] poetry: goodbye, hello

this poem was inspired by and derived from a dream that occurred during the morning of March 2, 2023


some of us are there
to say our goodbyes/
after all these years apart, i’m still jealous,
i always wanted to be your nearest, dearest, to be your favorite,
it’s still true

you weigh all of 80 pounds, less, maybe
how much do the bones of an adult human female weigh

your hair’s gone
your long, beautiful gleaming fountain of chestnut hair, your crowning glory
all tender scalp with patchy fuzz, now
all the vanity’s gone from you
and you’ve never been more beautiful

what happened
lungs, lungs, lungs
you cough and vomit, several times
as if to prove it
i thought the treatment was working, hindsight, out of sight, 2021

Continue reading “dream[t] poetry: goodbye, hello”