Idiot

There is no legitimacy to be found in me.
My words vomited from the stomach of poverty.
Music from my hands created from abject illegitimacy.
“No academic training?
Good god, please stop expressing this trash.

Your voice rings boorish.
Apostraphising, plagiarizing, bastardising the mediums beyond recognition.
Incapable of discerning a sonnet from a haiku…
Worthless.”

Can the path tell the sojourner
Where to go?
If my shoes once belonged to my brother,
Am I now my brother,
My identity stolen by mere words of another?

To be handed low-status beginnings
Pot-holes waiting to be filled
Is disqualification by the masses.
An existence rubbed out
By conservatives in liberal clothing.

This calamity, this inadequacy
This stupidity claiming to hamstring the runner
Is indeed my bulwark
I am too irrelevant to realize these things matter
And I just continue to speak

Tragic

(multiple exposure photograph by me)

There was once a time in my life when I lacked confidence. I listened to others who looked to criticize and not critique and let it color my self-respect. We have all been trained in something. If that training leads to arrogance, then we have performed the most egregious act against that training.


Webs and Goldenrod

There are secrets on the trail
Quiet and subdued
A certain color
Or refraction of light
A specific scent
Sent to trigger memories

It looks like dirt
Or dead leaves
Stagnant water waiting
For the rush beyond
The strength to withstand
Revealing old newness

All those things
In us
About us
Through us
What we are
What we are to become

Trust

Hollow words
Fall like leaves
Orange and yellow
Vibrantly dead

You won’t use them
With me

Traveling to the sea
I left you sleeping
Looking for answers
To unknown questions

Standing in its power
Wishing I could be swept away
Under its power and might
My fear bleeding into the undertow

It haunts my dreams
This body of overwhelming force
Its understanding, just beyond reach
She beckons me
“Come to me, and just let it all go”

Emptied
I journey home
Hoping to find you
Watering potted flowers

Some things you trust because it has been earned, other things you trust because it has the power to consume you, but gives you the opportunity to release your anxieties…without asking much in return…and you walk away the better for it.
I will never fully understand what it is about the ocean that makes me feel whole. Perhaps the beating heart sounds of the earth, or the salty taste of the environment….like sweat, blood, tears….amniotic fluid. She is both my mother and my father in my dreams, depending on the context and what my gut is experiencing.
A lovely strangeness…a mystery to enjoy, never to be fully revealed…a love affair experienced for anyone who ventures behind her veil.