[3]: Skeptic’s Mantra.

When I first began the poems that I loosely bind by the title “I miss the old, blue sky” in 2013, I intended to express my unending wonder at and reverence for the small moments of beauty that you find everywhere in nature: wind across cold water, sunlight twinkling around leaves, the gentle lives of those unobserved. But I found all these things to be deeper, more difficult to grasp than I imagined, once I looked into them.
~

it is cruel & gruesome to speak of knowing
and a harsher sin still to know –
the grains in wood
are not going anywhere, but wherever
together they go;

a kiss
through the eye
& back again

[2]: for Alan, once.

This is a poem I wrote in 2013, when I was thirstily reading and listening to everything I could find produced by Buddhist teacher and intellectual jester Alan Watts. One night, I dreamt that Alan and I sat in a treehouse from my childhood, playing an odd harp, composing ad hoc limericks, shanties, and meditations.

This poem is not lifted from or referring to that dream. It is more like a letter thanking him for his company upon waking.
~

before I was
told & taught to eat sleep sin fuck talk walk grin think look see
& look away (& how) – to say ah and
say I, I
pumped my heart, I
grew my hair, I
shaped my bones, I
bit my teeth, bit
the words “my teeth,” chewed,
swallowed &

became, through careful study,
only what I permit myself –

this time &
every time.

[1]: Three Prayers for Water.

I wrote these poems in the spring and summer of 2015, before I moved about 4,000 km to make a new home on the West Coast.

That summer was grey and wet and, clinging to the idea that I should keep something of my old identity to furnish a new one, I prayed that I would find some continuity in water falling from the sky.
~

stones thrown in the sea
settle, pass many lifetimes
returning ashore.
~

proud, senseless rapture,
holiest cacophony –
promising nothing.
~

patient rain never
rushes – falling bodies are
never falling home.
~