Presence

a path moves
like a contradiction

my feet forget
that it is up to them,

one step at a time,
the mantra of presence

there is nothing
the mind can predict

though it will try
to bend around the

corner to outrun uncertainty
so where there is walking

let your hand find me,
slow me down so I can see

the sun bleed full in the tulips
stop often and let

the world race by
see how the shadow

withholds the light
and the light beholds no shadow

all textures
in your searching fingers

that speaks
a language of patience

Who Killed Terry Jones?

I awoke to him, that boy forty years gone,
saw him standing slackly with his thin arms
and slow-eyed gloom
A haunting there to serve some karmic justice

What does he want, that boy we all knew?

Feeble-boned and layered with threadbare charity
A mouth breather disposed to snot-slickened cuffs
and the palsied whisper of his rueful tongue
Unwitting to life that snatched his blithesome days
and delivered to him a world of snapping dogs
fanged for ridicule and the soft pink flesh of his neck

That boy whose brother fought us on the schoolground,
bled for him to arrest his dying slowly
But impotent hero before the teachers
who leaned toward him with such enmity,
dreadful witches casting derisive fingers at his lassitude
Terence! they spurned as rank piss pooled below him
and there he sat until the school bell sounded at three
and the last children gone, rose stiffly and cried

What does he want, that boy we ruined?

He came to me, moved me to look at old team pictures,
black and white, where I held up the silver bowl
Triumphant among my mates
And there he stood, Terry Jones, beside me in every pose
as if he already knew that I would tell the world
how the good boys placed their fingers on the trigger
and squeezed a little more each day
Killed him and thought how sad his death

Mother's Day

every day incomprehension
in the faces of the dead

terror seeps into willing hearts,
there is danger of petrification

we could break at any moment,
fall to our knees, broken identities

will someone gather
the shattered bits of us?

it is just too hard, wars and
calamities, the kids at school

don't bother, we have no future,
put me in the trash

but there is always someone
willing to put us back

you know her, the one who smiles
and tells us that it's going to be alright

how did she learn this resiliency
when she still suffers alone?

we wonder if we will
have that strength, the might of her soul

 a mother's words come to us like blessings
down there on the floor

she'll tell you that she's been there too
and no one to lift her

No Time

days slide, come and go
but never arriving at the one
I want, so silly this game
I play, a little drummer boy
trying to stop the clock
by beating the world with
past and future,
dizzying methodology
to arrive at something
that you cannot reach

A Mother's Song

I can still see the sage hills
and I know it pleases her

I have her eyes, you know
and what she lost,

a pain under the ribs
that doubles you over

She sings in the early morning
and I like her disguise,

with the jaunty sparrows
that captured her flight

And I have all this, everyday
and she does it for me

and of course, my brother and sister,
she is there now lifting our father

Okanagan Falls

A town slept and I climbed
a rover's trail, ladder steep
through the creeping down
of golden grass

Shale slipping under foot
and a quail alarmed
and flighty
on a grease-bush stick

Cactus blooms shriveled
crepe-paper thin,
my fingers tracing
the parched folds of summer's fire

A rock face, ore-stained,
an enduring likeness
of primal spirit,
the vigilant one

There I sat and watched the birth
of days like a monument
of flesh and bone
needing nothing but to breathe

Hope

A light brushes my cheek
and I cannot look,
a warning came too late for the
thousands melting in the streets
Every day the same chill,
the same terror erupting in the hearts
that will not give in

We all saw the bloodied face
of a young girl who believed
in the morning
Now the world rains ashes,
crimson tears that have seen
too much in one day, a lifetime

Every cause runs back to the sea,
and every hour peels back
the layers of our greatest fear,
unconscious men with guns

Go down to the waters edge
and sit awhile, let the sand
sift through your fingers
And when you turn at last
to something new in the distance,
let it be the sun