Home (i'm trying my hand at songwriting lately)

i swing on the swing set
at sunset and wait
for some childlike hope
to overcome me

like waiting for you
who i have not met
some hibernating love
yet to wake me

from a dream of bright color
that i fear will fade
like a love for which
i cannot find faith

here will you find me
home that i long for?
where to find you
home that i crave?

i've built you & moved you
and felt you & soothed you
and now i need you
to find me, be brave


i've built you & moved you
and felt you & soothed you
and now i need you
to find me, be brave

bushwhack bakery

I bushwhacked and baked and finally made it to another one. There's no one I'd rather be with right now. Just me. The burnt horizon and lavender sky. I can sit here in the dust and love it. And miss nothing. The oft companion - the tender belly of nostalgia - can't compete. If I can get here in old age, I don't need to fear it.

It's not quiet, though I might mistake it. The cicadas quake. The National blares. The light lends me perfection. It's not the fresh sweet bread this time. Or the pungent holiness of basil tea. Sure. We ransacked the forest of its light. You always had better lines than me. More raw. More real. Tight. But this gorgeous wasteland perfects me. I don't need to turn you on from here. I'd like to stay. My mother's sweetness still matters to me, but this emptiness is exactly what I need, and it's such a relief.

This needle can still go down and ride the groove. Someday my own music will spill from this place.

Tender Belly

And though we fled the flaws of it all, I see now perfect design in the moment of his body. Perhaps that's why nothing comforts me like the perfect honesty of the body, its complexity & contradictions & refusal to leave anything unattended. It care takes the metabolism of every stimulus with painstaking thoroughness. It holds every dream unthought, every unsung wounding, every fancy of longing, every deep whim passed by, every cherished silence, every fullness, every emptiness in its cellular weave of blood & tissue.

Why should we begrudge its pains & aches when they are such a selfless favor, such a generous grace: embracing without judgment the ink of every stroke. The endlessly gracious body does not know the limits of our attention. It carries everything for us & waits patiently as we pass it by. And if we listen, it will tell us what it feels with the wisdom & frankness of a child. It will take us on a treasure hunt to some corner of expanse. And yet we insist it is the body which is limited and the spirit which stretches across galaxies? Perhaps the mind discerns (only that which is conscious, or close to it), but it is the body which is enlightened already. The body never left a single thing unattended. It never left a single thing behind. It loved every detail. Every crumb along the way. The seeds of democracy lie in the body. Its attention treats all as equals.

And this is not to disparage the mind. it plays & twirls & somersaults with the sweetest feet. It dives & dashes and hides & flashes. It keeps us company when we cannot comprehend & comforts us with tales & ties us with tethers that help us feel safe. And when the body wants to unwind & unravel, sometimes the mind even cooperates. Sometimes it takes its long, slender fingers & looses the tethers, wipes away the dust, lifts up the shirt and touches the tender belly of the body until blood is a rushing river and heart is a pulsing sky. And perhaps even, the mind looks upon the infinite stories of the endless body much like a man just released from prison drinks in the star-filled night. Light older than his sentence and fresher than his newly cleaned skin. And nothing more real than the breeze on his body and the cold in his lungs.

Because the infinite cannot survive without the earth.

And then the breeze is gone, and the lungs that fill and sigh & the skin that chills & the hair that falls on cheek. And the fingers that touch tender belly are gone.

And even the persistence of the spinning earth does not dwarf this disappearance.