Odd faith

• Give without more thought
• Accept with no further desire
• Be in what's wrought
• Exhaust but don't tire

                  when another is struggling              is struggling              when another won't see                 won't see
                              when another is you

                                      when another is me

1. Trust enough to
2. Trusting entirely though
3. Trusting will do
4. Trust even so

Each hair on our heads, each cell of our being,
Is almost certainly loved,
Eyes closed or all-seeing.

*♥

My prayer today
was along the lines
(by my typically circuitous means)
of love;
not sentimental
soft T-shirt
warm bed
quiet Sunday morning
love
(although I know where that love is indexed
for near-immediate reference)
.
My prayer today
dealt with the leaden sky
and the pendulous clouds;
it had some genesis in not hearing the birds
and seeing the daffodils bowing
and sensing the damp wind
and loading the woodstove
(which occurred to me, briefly, as preposterous for the record)
.
My prayer today
is that your kiss will forever be
vastly more grand,
illuminated and heralded
in my mere consciousness,
than any of the dusty
sleeveless volumes,
tomes of iniquity and granduer,
of vanquish, anguish and exhaustion
(ebullience notwithstanding)
.
My prayer today
is to meet your lips with mine
ad infinitum
without regard to time or understanding,
to share with outrageous abandon
this thing,
this intimacy,
this mooring to this
soul's vessel
that you carry in your heart
and your head
and I pray in your kiss
(still the same prayer; tangentially germane)
.
My prayer today
is that what we share
only ever grows,
only ever gets wiser
and stronger
without interruption
for the ever of forever
and before
and beyond
and in between
(if you know what I mean)
.
My prayer today
kind of wandered a bit
but it really simmered down to
the matter that
I love you so very truly
with every particle of my being
now
and every shred of whatever's
me
anyway
and if it involves a soul
yours and mine
(I'm still talking about souls, by the way)
need to be intertwined
evermore
because I need you
I guess more than I ever stopped to consider
(and I guess that sums it up for now)
.

Lanugo

Almost May.
Not nearly as warm as our truer hopes,
"but the garden needs the rain"
state the hollow voices
from the miasma of our earlier rendition.

But the mist in the cold
in the yard where we stand
clings with odd alacrity to our arms, our hair,
gleaming as they do.
They're perfectly round.
Perfectly.
And just look at them...
Behold them:
alive, expectant. 

And this,
this!,
is their diaspora.
This excited convergence
is their momentary departure
from themself(ves). 
This is why they twinkle,
this is why they possess joy.

And maybe, too, this is lanugo.
Today, of all days,
to be cloaked in whatever is
the Lord
and wonder and
wander
and maybe this, this mail of gleaming perfect spheres
is a shroud of infinite significance
and nothing less than a perpetual valediction
to our questions,
our perfect questions,
gleaming with anticipation
of answers that we cannot now know,
only quietly sequester the notion
and the hope
that this is our only diaspora.

Not longing

I find I'm not longing
for that familiar consumption tonight.
I'd been pardoned
to gaze at the garden
in an unfamiliar light.
○
The patinæ of fears
or whatever traverses the mind;
the greaters, the lessers,
get lost in whatever
when in witness for a first time.
○
I can shave my head,
a releasing of what I have feared.
But time is a warning;
seems every morning
I find need to contend with my beard.
○
Beliefs uncontested
like any ideas or conceptions,
if merely devices
matter not if incisive,
are broken even from their inception.
○
I am grateful at heart
if not in ritual devotion.
Would you know I care
if I said I get scared
when the hours stretch out like an ocean?
○

Night

Knowing

And you, night: I recognize you now. Every day, from Court Street to beyond 125th Street on the ACE and often back, after walking atop the bee hive vibration of a hollowed out spine of earth and iron, I see you. In that soot-patinæd steel projectile we sway and lurch in perfect unison, eyes never once meeting, for years?, but our shared space and witness to humanity at its pinnacle of mundane, to labor, to rest, to labor again.
Maybe you were sad

one day.

I couldn't have known.

For all that we share

in the vacuous space

under the dirt and concrete

and asphalt and mortals

whirls in tunnels and passages,

wet and dank and unseen,

silent but for the ephemeral gnashing

of steel on steel,

hastening ever.



Maybe you don't want to know,

and perhaps

I don't either,

the depth

and meaning

of events and news and wonder and droll.

Maybe I do.

And maybe that's why

I feel...okay

hurtling, as we do,

seeing you there

every day, from 125th Street

and beyond Court Street on the ACE,

and hopefully back.