The Path to a Healing Heart

I sit and drum I yowl at the moon, sometimes the sun, and sometimes a cloud. If the energy like sap rises. I carry noxious weed and a walking stick stained red my hand's blood caught on a jagged moonstone. I shift words and worlds with my vision, laugh rarely but when I do it's full blast like the rains that fall in the Catskills. Birds are my brothers, trees my sisters and mothers, and I've got my Daddy in heaven who is leading me, dreaming me. I drink in manna and dew, food is foraged, skirts in tatters, hair under cover for no one but the Shechinah - my witness. I sing for chills, thrills and then pause to listen to the silence that stalks the night, letters forming. Stumbling, walking in the desert 40 years of bringing up the end with flocks of black sheep and sacrificial kids. My face cast in the shadows of water in night's reflection, mirror correcting memory beheld and memory becoming illusion.

we pulled in air thunder from the mountains when we imagined ourselves immortal from every angle we drifted to endure trials of floating fire and nocturnal desert wanderings sought to be rescued in forgiveness we rode higher but still we sunk low in our passion inferno Early August suns tempered hotter than Death’s cascading breaths the 12 cursed ones while Heavens mocked senses silent no passion could shield and Father showed no mercy for Two children not yet healed

The Photo I remember January 1964, Brooklyn was post assassination hardening, lamppost froze finger, snow piled thickly forming mounds of multi-shades of blacks and browns, and trees were close to snapping. Cars slished by with gaseous fumes down the Kings Highway with honking hurrahs. The old brick synagogue on the corner of East 18th Street was old even then. There were patches of mortar missing and the doors of entrance stood frail and skeleton-like akin to the very men who came to pray within. I aimed to sit at the foot of the stairs the five brick iced=over-cold-to-your-tush stairs. Sat and posed with Corky my limping Border Collie warming as ever with his presence but more so on that January Afternoon. A Sunday? Smile, my mother said. She held the boxy Instamatic in leather gloved hands. Smile - the word half frozen as it sparked suspended from her lips. Chinese Red or Dragon Fire Crimson, hard to remember now in the Fall of 98, what mood she was in. I trembled then wi...

Fourteen I laid my hand on my mother's shoulder in a stance of solidarity i shied away from getting too close to the lion's hold in the glint of my eye you could see fear and dark spells in hers the helter-skelter jangled cocky look of posing for posterity the flash couldn't erase the lines of brittle holdings we shared in that instamatic capturing. These are 40 years walking since and now smirks just fall to the wayside blown to the winds of time and lenses capturing innocence are shuttered away in redundancy.

"The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him... a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - - - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating." -Pearl Buck-

the bench angled the small part of my back liquid brass bay washed in blue grasped me still so that if even one eye shed single - that was reverence. still in that place of murmured tickles carnival ferried sisters the same summer it was love though foreign ships had sailed off and over split horizon shores of Sheepshead. undoing memories as quickly as they etched onto our licking salty faces to buoy silent drifting steady whilst the sea filled the sky's empty places.

Lost soul walking the line drawn in the sand grooves get deeper with every footstep its like im flying soul said im not alive not dead somewhere in between in the world unseen where the sea split and the rod raised and the sun stood still and the cloud descended and the mind shattered and the breath taken away lost soul carried a step, dragged many pushed, prodded and blown toward its destination no power to continue no compass no innovation no machination a lump of light growing dimmer by each dawn straggling in its disintegration not to yield yet to oblivion and final annihilation. In a final gasp of parched survival a guttural sigh of the depths of emptiness everything infinity cosmic clashing of worlds collapse of a star implosion of a galaxy scream of silence thrashing of rhythmic resonance help me and the worlds collided entwined enjoined and souls were merged with their selves once again. Hallelujah.

Living in a cave carved from stone with a spoon replaced a thousand times no matter how gently I used the tool it somehow got whittled down into a weapon of mass destruction. But still, in the eye heart and neck of the cave in which I sit the air is cool the light is dark the sound is silent the view from the opening broad, wide, mountainous blue and the birds of every color come to alight on my perch seeking morsels maybe but more I think because they are curious to see this human fowl stranger to its own kind I practice the walk but my legs stumble and my gait unsteady at every turn peril at every resting stop I collapse in a heap like a marionette awaiting a pull from above and my heart is on the verge of stopping in the midst of its marathon, it keeps time with the battering winds that chase the sands from the crevices and dig deep canals, tunnels and cliffs from the landscape, and the heart is a flutter alight on fire, stabbed, crushed pierced yet alive it too grooved with time du...

What you get 60 years after. Burn on. broken down cities, fires rampaging, too expensive to collect the piles of rotting debris, so burn. Pollution killing off lungs, cars ramming into each other on someone's wet dream on utopia in the guise of demented planning, cement now covering what was Nature - Beauty - all for the sake of *appearances* but the insides are putrefying. In the streets, in the homes and in the hearts. And the poor go hungry, the homeless freeze, the stray animals poisoned, jabbed with a needle to the heart to languish in the pain and impending deaths, while MK's clink their Baccarat glasses with Germans and *dignitaries* that will eventually sign another dirty deal to carve the land up yet some more, sell WMD's that will destroy millions and make pacts of death that cause only more destruction and suffering in the world. And now it's time to *celebrate* all that. And give the final finger to the people. Because after all, it's not our land anymor...

Headless pens I organize for once, in red lidded boxes pressed from the clandestine polluting low-brow factory that works under the veil of night every night as if the authorities don't know I know - I smell but I get beyond myself here. Sleeveless books go together. Well.. with the decapitated pens and the slivers of paper that lie fettered fat on the desk, in the bag, on the shelf papery whisps I'll never use still use me. Relics of trees, trees, trees, relics of me standing in line, counting time as it passes with each slow stroke of a bored beyond coma lady sitting behind infra red Calling out my total sum. Last years famous deal 2 for one and nocturnal churnings of the plastic factory inhale, exhale, I cough wondering will this be the end of my lungs? And if not this - maybe the diesel chugging around the cul de sac called rental home will. Here, let's down another clear cup arak the fennel, seeds distilled, Lebanese style trying so fucking hard to forget why I even ca...

Nearing the fall, the onset of wet slumber weeds lustily plucked twisted dank red lumber. Raked soil scored shaped and measured, edges brown, black dung weathered. Brazen bristled roots coiled sway, tiny underworld caverns give way. Zigzag ragged rays lit in earthy veins, and wood flakes churned in wet rapid drains. Spores of hidden tucked away green, empires that shift asleep and unseen. Below the crust, the overturned mile, straw lumps hang limp like flax of the Nile. Marigold-woven airy mats strewn and curled in like cats. Coaxed silver spangled mottled roots, dappled clover's gray green shiny shoots. Northern flocks core the sky steady, a breath inhaled, gulped and ready. Earth cracked, mud gaping and hallow, yield only a sigh in the year of the fallow.

Fall Before the (UP) Rising Global Corps don't represent ideology The IDT or the DDT or the ATT or the BBG. It's all a crock and a bust, a quick hit and a slow plunge without a rope to hold or a prayer to hum, the night shadows, the scavengers, the jackals and polluters. Their metal towers, crashing satellites, cellular phones burning DNA, structures within collapsing, suited jolly micro management, skirts and smirks, fast-talking, gob smacking, lip wetting entities chained to desks and plastic, cables running through their veins, with threats in their throats and broken connections on redial. Phoney phone meisters, I know your number is zero. Plundered, you're shocked out of orbit spinning on a solar flare implosion of the heart of your ersatz matrix. The Hand will rest in Judgment for all that your technology wreaked on bodies and earth. And in that time your name will only be a memory of what was known as tower of Babel. And all people will once again speak face to face ...