...spring

ironman
They say it takes as much time to deny your love as it does to give.  All that work tryin' to hold it all back shreds you down to ragged bits. 'Cause you know your love does its business like the moon tide--it comes and goes, will not be ceasing. So go ahead and try yer might... Use your strength, oh, to break it so. Use your strength, oh, to let it go. I know your manhood rests upon the thought you won't be weak in your pride. Your fear chokes up around your heartache. It takes control of your righteous mind. All that pomp and red faced yelling, all that dammed up beautiful need? It seeks to break your heart in pieces, to multiply Love like a seed. Here's a truth about that tight grip, that Ironman who fires your fright. He's a child that knew no better when his world tanked before his eyes. You are grown, you've got your arms now, to hold him tucked beside your side. So go on now, apply that muscle, wrap him up real close and cry...    

hole in the concrete
Rooting through the darkness of their ground, in the concrete. There’s the multitude that wills its way to found, through the concrete. In the spaces where it's all been broken down, just the concrete...I’m gonna stoop my head to hear instead the sounds, in the concrete. The hope song sings on it’s broken wings, though many holes, pock their sunbeat roads. I could name each soul, that yearned to grow, inside their pain, to see the day. But its up to you, to see it too.  It’s through your eyes, you see truth or lies. Every step you take, you see what I say.  The concrete breaks, under wind & rain. The earth won’t stop it’s pulse to grow.  What  makes you know our soul won’t, though? Each grain of earth, nurtures what’s in its dirt. The self-same seed, lies in every being. It’s been clear to me that we have a duty, to do what’s done, inside an author’s love. Let’s begin to see, the moss, the green, the flowers that know, where to find their holes. It’s up to us, to tell stories of, how we each transcend with only grains of sand…

...summer

love is working now
I finally found the words to say, when I pass you by; I used to feel so damn bound onto my tongue, hog tied. You can dangle there on your spider’s web, yearning to cut your Fate strings. I’ve watched you writhe inside your pain, but I finally found what to bring. Because my love is working now, it’s full up in my heart and its beatin’ out its sound. It's pounding out to you on its weathered skins, a drumbeat of earth that wraps us all as kin. I’m learning how to walk in its rhythm's road. It's reaching out to you, without reaching out to you, it’s what it do. The impulse to reach and steer your stride, to rescue you from your life has found its hands inside my heart, not on your shoulders so tight. I can speak the words, I'd want to say, and let them rest on the breeze 'cause I know they'll find a place, by travelin’ on what's unseen... Oh, now I see what’s between you and me, these sounds that cut through space-time. As I tap it out in the code I've found, I'll whisper it's love so quiet and send it your way, across this divide, some pollen-dusted hope seeds. Some will root. Some will not. And this is how I now reach...

camped fire
How to hold this fire beside me when I return back to the other side? Here this fire flies and ocean tide breathes.  How will they fit into that reg'lar life? Oh, Here, Come home with me. I hear myself think better  thoughts in this wild air. Aneomed  of need in the  flotsam tides that clog up in my glazed over I speak,  my tender rils ebb and flowin' just right. Barefoot and furred legged in this stick shaded pine grove, it's coming real clear how this is island time. Because of the healin' that even shows up in this crowd, all you have is your soul by your side. I know who I am when I wander through this place, the shadows and tree beards that nestle in tight. Just hear the tideswell that rises inside me whenever I walk here inside my mind's eye.

...fall

the shape of a heart
You trace the shape like this to reteach the loveliness. You arc it ‘round then back down to its other half.  A symbol eons old, its story stays unknown. Yet, I know it when I see it shining back through me. It’s hidden where we look the rocks, the grass, the wood. The shape of flower’s bloom. Sometimes it’s fruited womb. It can be what we discard or what we’ve held too hard. A curve that pins your eye to the wonder you’ve passed by. But more than its true shape, it’s how it lives inside a day. Like granite it won’t yield, to the poison that you wield when you tally all your wrongs, embattled inside that throng.  When you forget your name, it leaves its trace upon your face.  

time to say
The needle's dropping along that tired groove where the people refuse to move. What they can't see from in their chicken run? It takes more time to say it can't be done. Oh, King warned us how time does never bring an inevitable release of the matter of all our hopes and dreams, it could care less about the what we see. You've got to    make the thing you hope will be inside each action that cuts your teeth. There's no come to pass and no just wait and see, it up to how you be, so be its seed. The time to do right is always here we hold it gently inside our hands. To be believing whole-heart its opposite that there's no hope so let's not give a damn? Well, that's the saddest part of  this here life, that we refuse to plainly see that each moment unfurls accordingly from the choice you make inside its seed. Then she comes cantering to the heart of now, making fractals of what's to come. She says the Changing don't ride no highway lines, it circles round its stone, its ripplin’ sun. So every moment that you’re not quite the where, you rather like yourself to be, then find that fragment of your radiance, and let it emanate from you it's seed.

...winter

salt run
The Salt Run’s left to sand but its path’s still clear at hand. Your eye lines its arroyo spoor, you relish what’s in store. This chance to go where you’ve never been to break the ground of your being. You’re running toward what’s now begun, on the cusp of this Salt Run. It’s one foot and then the next, only you can get this done. A wrong thought you once did hold is losing its control. The dead skin of your fragile mind splits down its own fault line. As you hatch through to this newer you and look back on what you shed...You’re here now in what you’ve done, in the heart of your own Salt Run. At the ½ way point you start to skid and panic at what you did. Trace these points of no turning back, caged alone out here in its track. Ain’t no one else to do your do, it’s all on you to pull through. You’re here now in what you’ve spun, in the midst of your fullout Salt Run. By the time you see the path will end up just around its bend. You’ve traced inside all your cannot dos that now sing each step of you. A blister there, a parched tongue here...not a single breath of your fear. You’re wrapped inside what you’ve undone at the close of your own Salt Run.  

dark strength
what you’re still too young to know…is that what doesn’t kill you, helps you grow. there’s been scores of others like you that fought their own way through. harnessin’ dark strength, the kind that’s invisible to the eye; harnessin’ dark strength, the kind the makes you realize... that when you keep your quiet faith, set your eyes upon your prize...you can make your life into all you long for when you cry… there’s that man you already know, the one you call the Coach. before he’d looked Timo in the eye, his family kept beating down his pride. with slaps and words and blows, but it never destroyed his hope. now he’s standing so tall, teaching others to keep their eye on the ball. harnessin dark strength, the kind beats inside your heart; harnessin’ dark strength, the kind that keeps you from falling apart...there’s the rest that you’ve yet to meet that ived just like you in their teens. when the terror came to lay at their feet, they locked themselves up in their dream took their mind off to that better day and saw themselves strong and brave yeah, they trusted and never gave way to the fear that this won’t go away. harnessin dark strength, the kind holds up all your dreams; harnessin’ dark strength, the kind nobody else can reach...so when your  life comes out and knocks you down and your hope is lying on the ground, keep    finding ways to tell your story loud, to anyone who’ll hear it from your righteous mouth. you have the courage to choose a different way to heal from all this heartache. you will love your people always, even when it comes time to stand tall and walk away. harnessin dark strength, the kind that’s building up in you; harnessin’ dark strength, the kind that will always carry you through...  

...spring

measure of life
The measure of life is not the what that you see, what you manage to do arrives invisibly. Sometimes it is true, you will see what you do. But stop trying to say what you did here today. Stop bein’ so ashamed, of bein’ ashamed. Does the delphinium arc its head so low in its sun? It simply grows its height toward the warmth of the light. Where the blooms will swim so free, under its shade canopy. No purpose can be served, trying to account for your worth when the ruling sticks are made from The Man’s ruthless blade. Go on, let this all go or he wins. Yes, you know how to call his rank bluff, that you’ll never be good enough. Simply take care of you, make that the work that you do. At the end of the day, look in your mirror and say, “Where these hands felt earth, did they make room for rebirth?  Did they push and they shove? Where were the acts of self-love?” So make this what you count:  How many times that you found yourself when you lost your way through the fog . That’s all you can know from what is  reaped and is sown— is how you fostered the space, for more amazing grace.

black feet
...a love song for the teachers, paras, bus drivers and staff that found themselves the equivalent unemployed in the spring of 2020...having to slog through the motions of a job they felt called toward, but for all the world, could no longer do.  

As we walked these lonesome hallways bare of the laughter and light we share, it grew harder to stand and harder to see the places that you used to be. We could bang our heads on each brick wall as the breaking shattered us through, or we could taste the shrapnel as it fell and let its burning heal our wounds. We will be shattered and unbreakable this school of life will teach that to you. We can be shattered and unbreakable broken hearted and unbroken too. We steeled ourselves for yet another no-start; already battered, scarred up & bruised. Our feet so blackened from the coals of burnt joy that we’d walked on to try to see you. They say we cannot hug, cannot breathe the same air, squeezing shoulders is off limits too. It makes no kind of sense to my burnin’ broke heart— that’s the work I came here to do. Once this Crazy torched up the common ground that we used to share with you, we were restless scheming in our sleepless wake of how to say goodbye to you. So when you showed up in your driveway there with your flowers, your signs, and smiles...We knew no matter what this hateful world would throw our way, we were unbroken inside these miles.

A teacher’s five stages of grief for a fractured school year:
‘I miss so many things: my students, my colleagues, the good days, the hard days’  By the time [our governor] announced that schools would be closed for the remainder of the year, I had already gone through the other stages of grief: denial that we would be affected, bargaining (otherwise known as begging students to complete work), and anger that so many inequities were being revealed by this crisis. On April 21, I was simply in depression. Although this closure was inevitable, I feel nothing but sadness. I grieve the loss of 70 or so precious days spent with my favorite teenagers. I grieve not being able to see them in person to make a quick assessment of whether they are OK emotionally and mentally. I grieve not being able to pull a student aside when they are not OK and finding out what is really going on. I grieve the loss of being taught by them far more than teaching them.