The Spiritual

There was a time when I loved
The fantastic fabrics of the mind.
There was a time
When I lived my life
Based…

Midnight has come and the great Christ Church bellAnd many a lesser bell sound through the room;And …

Ultimately everything
          Becomes boring.
Even great miracles
          Become boring.
Even the tremendous powers of…

God of Nations at Thy feet,
In the bonds of love we meet,
Hear our voices, we entreat,
God defend our free…

Within, without the cosmos wide am I;
In joyful sweep I loose forth and draw back all.
A birthless, deathless…

Frank is a
young boy
asleep in
ancient
Tibet

what you
thought was
your life is
really his
dream

he may
wake at any
moment

O transient voyager of heaven!
⁠ ⁠ ⁠ O silent sign of winter skies!
What adverse wind thy sail has driven
⁠ ⁠ ⁠ To dungeons where a prisoner lies?

Methinks the hands that shut the sun
⁠ ⁠ ⁠ ⁠So sternly from this morning's brow
Might still their rebel task have done
⁠⁠ ⁠ ⁠ And checked a thing...

How easy it is to lose oneself
in a kelp forest. Between
canopy leaves, sunlight filters thru
the water surface; nutrients
bring life where there’d other-
wise be barren sea; a vast eco-
system breathes. Each
being being being’s link.

Broken Earth
Year of Release: 1939
Running Time: 11 minutes
Cast: Clarence Muse and unidentified boy

I am the sick boy in the shack when the camera opens
On the sunrise and wispy silhouettes of the plow
And the fool mule and my father working a...

I used to pretend to believe in God. Mainly, I liked so much to talk to someone in the dark. Think of how far a voice must have to travel to go beyond the universe. How powerful that voice must...

A stream in a forest and a boy fishing,
heart aflame, head hush, tasting the world—
lick and pant. The Holy Scripture
is animal not book.
I should know, I have smoked
the soul of God, psalm burning
between fingers on an African afternoon.
And how is...

The wish to climb a ladder to the loft
Of God dies hard in us. The angels Jacob saw

Were not himself. Bramble is what grows best
Out of this man-scarred earth, and I don’t chop it back

Till the fruit have ripened. Yesterday I...

i.I am in the middle of “The Fourteen Poems" by Sun Bu-er (“Clear and Calm Free Human”), Taoist and one of the Seven Immortal Sisters who took up the Tao after she turned fifty-one, after her three children grew up,...

        The heart, it hoards—
how I know this—

The small, strangled
        shining room Keats lost
his life in—and to—

beyond the window sunlight
        arranging itself
on the Spanish Steps

while the poet watches.
        Outside, snapshots
of the tourists

& teenagers tired
        of what they don’t
know yet. What will

become of us? Ash.
        Unasking. The...

        #

Listen to the children
who know their way about the forest
and return with stories

which the thief steals
exchanging them
for a kind of music.

        #

Listen to the music
which knows its way about the forest
and returns with...