A Warning

     It seems to me we should let the events taking place
in Syria, Iraq & elsewhere to serve as a warning
regarding a certain blind spot in the human psyche-
     That across history individuals are willing
to abandon their personhood & subsume themselves
to the ideology of a larger group
(sometimes referred to as 'brainwashing')
     A group often bent on Empire
with its own stripe of ideology
designed to give witness & promote
some transcendent Doctrine
     Rendering non-believers, pagans,
infidels, heathens, lost souls, apostates,
those dwelling in darkness and must be converted,
     reformed, instructed in the Shining Light
Or, failing that, dispatched

descent into Cabo

sudden down-draughts
   cause the passenger
      to weigh nothing

Lainey

Found in a book
Shelved years ago
A snapshot of Lainey
Long-gone Lainey
For a page-mark

Squirrel Wheel...

The squirrel who lingers in morning sunlight

Admiring the float of clouds & frolic of finches

Is met with the reproach of squirrel wisdom,

The squirrel-wheel empire:

"Get busy Maxwell-

Time is Acorns!"

road-sharing

Bill driving the curvy backroads
     coast range near Fort Bragg-
"Watch for these country yahoos
     they take their half
          out of the middle"

january

Late afternoon

    in the low brassy sunstream

        midges by the hundred

            dancing a delight of incarnation

-chester st.

religion?

     I'm not sure what any so-called 'religion' really is but I'm pointedly wary of anything that projects some 'next' life as more valuable than this one.  A dangerous tendency.

space & time

     Space & Time are always forms of extension- starting from an arbitrary point of reference.  Without extension, without a reference, time & space converge to where you stand- the "centre without a circumference"  -Emerson.

Day After

After a morning of cold steady spritz
How the universe of green pine-needles
Shines & dazzles in the new sunlight!
It erases any whisper of the past.
Thousands of pendant raindrops
Twinkle red & green like prisms
Before a slight blush of cold air
Sends them through the forest
With more shinings.
Ancient baptism,
But speaking one sublime word:
New!

-Nevada City 2014

fading

Faded wildflowers
   in a blown-over soupcan:
      the windy graveyard