Lonely is an animal

I have always missed you

I sat alone in a hot trailer

The New Mexico night wind

Popping the tin roof

I was drifting as a small animal

In a sea of sand

I have always cried for you

As a child does, I dreamed

Of soft warm paws holding me

I was afraid of god and hell

This was never supposed to be

Some psychological mire of dark truth

Never meant to be an occult moment

I was a boy, sick with grief

And lonely

I could not imagine the love

And so you became

In your many forms

Animal hand holder

I lie in the bed sweating and crying

Missing a you that I could not find

Promises of an eternal love

A Christ love

I didn’t want

I wanted the big rabbit friend

The dog who would dance

Under the moon with me

A rat to have coffee with

A cat to hug and tell me I’m easy

But I couldn’t find you

my heart ached

All the world makes so little sense!

Little raccoon, kind badger

Oh how I prayed

I was already gone

And you were hands I held as my own

One in the other

Death shakes us

And this world demands blood

I scream for it to stop

For some mercy I can’t reach

No more sickness

Don’t let her die

Don’t let it be bad

In the story books and plushes

I find that love

You’re not quite there

But it’s close

I call you close, in some dim sad light

I capture pitiful squiggles

That can only hint at you

Your handsome kind faces

Your elegant pose

Your ways you are here for me

I drag my years of it

To some hotel in Texas

And some man

In cat costume hugs me

maybe he doesn’t know

Maybe he does

inside my own rat costume

I’m crying

Because he feels like you

How I dreamed you would

And it’s too much

The spirit takes me

Not in church

But in some hotel in Texas

And so in the broken tooth language

The only one I know

I draw up some shaking structure

And in the ways I was trained

I worship

I call you by the moons name

And think of you as cinnamon

Not because it makes you more

But because I want you

In everything

I want

Like a wet wash of watercolor

To bleed into you

So that when I smell chamomile

I see rat eyes

When I taste basil I kiss badgers

When I read stories

I feel the tree of the page

And know it was touched

By paws that look like yours

At some point or other

I spin this story, in wash and word

Until I see many animals in many things

And the lonely boy isn’t crying

He’s a purple eyed coyote

Who sang the creation song

From the dark empty

The place of hopeless lonely

The empty house

He sang me into being

Not that god or those men

He did

That boy

And I can

With my silly mirrors

And other set dressings

Angle my spirit just so

So that I am a rat

Who came to him

When all was lost

I am that animal I miss

And I still miss that animal

I am that animal

FOOTBALL CEMETERY

Saturn Came into the house at midnight:

The Lights are on out there, bright and flooding, silver,
illuminating the field

The field? The very one? The Cradle and Womb?

Such intoxicating abundance and radiance of energy and life, Surely this is coyotes birthing stage.
A view point from the metal cool bleachers, to watch these actions, is this not a perspective window indicative of Fox?
And there behind its bleachers, shockingly, oddly, unexpectedly….on the outskirt of that fields parking pavement, lies a small quiet, overgrown cemetery, is this not an empty house? Is this not Wolf standing still?

What juxtaposing startle! What stillness and night and mystery and silence and duty when compared to this grand stage of youth and fertility and possibility and action and breath!

The silence of the cemetery is profound yet fragile, it exists in its saturnine, solemn “cup” of place but it is not purely morose, just as the field is not purely celebratory.
The cemetery holds its contemplative peace and the field holds its frustrated, fiery passion and overwhelming tears and fights.

The cemetery, its sighs and stillness, decision and responsibility, sickness perhaps, obstacle and learning, here is contemplation and experience.

The field its arousal and stimulation, its desire and wanting its elation and physicality its body here is doing and being.

Both share though, in their own ways: Love, fear, awareness and loneliness.

From the heavy darkness of the cemetery, within its growth entangled chain fence, there is a stirring.
A solitary, dim street light casts a faint yellow glow near the rod iron arch that bares the cemetery name. The light barely enough to reveal the headstones within and sickly glints off the bottom boughs of a giant flowering tree towering near the entrance …..there are flowers in every space here and silence and from this silence comes the glitter of yellow eyes.
Scents of alcohol, flowers and decay of every kind, faint and sweet. Smells of surgical gloves and books, soil and perfumes, teas, coffees, must and dust and incense and roses and roses….swirl round this ghostly gray figure who goes slowly slinking and pirouetting between the stones, reading every name and wanting and wanting.

The Blazing light in the dark, the field shines, pristine and clean
round its lights swirl a myriad of winged
The yards marked clear, the End zones looming and Impressive
On its far side sit, lit inside, dark outside, its locker rooms and showers and bathrooms.
down in its center a figure stands
Youthful, large, powerful.
He
The epicenter of the cheers and tears
and in return his own cheers and tears go out
His body is motion and action
strength
in his heart there is dignity and meekness and humility and honesty
he is effort
and he sweats and cries and works.
The cheers are thunderous and his body thunders down the yards with them.
Smells of the body, of semen, of food and beer of peppers and musk, of showers and sweat and cologne and breath and spilled urine and grass and heat.

At the gates of the cemetery wolf stands under the still, flowering tree.
From the stands, fox holds up a mirror like a cheer sign.
Above it all, in its chaotic air of heavens and hells
the center encompasses it all
from the center the coyote laughs.
 

Lunchtime Walk Appocalypse

And as I walked, a copse of trees rose before me

And from beneath them spread a darkness

But not as darkness I have understood

Not a darkness of horrors

But the darkness of the house of sleep

And as the boughs unfurled

I saw there beneath them, great Badger asleep in that shade

And I was afraid

I feared because I did not understand

Oh, Badger was not awake to instruct me

I was not awake to hear

No matter my will and effort I could not grasp it

It poured up and away like a mist

And from that darkness came a still silence

And that silence instructed that in me which makes no choices

To unhand my will and thought

But oh, how can I? How can I?

I watched then as Rat walked into that deep shade

He laid his head on great badgers belly and fell fast asleep there.

To surrender my will to this house of sleep

To allow the silence of animals and rest with them

I ask them: "Brothers will we wake again?"

There is no answer from the sleeping, there is no knowing

And there in lies the pull of every will of evil and greed

An attempt of control of that wakeful time

Demanding more of its honey

When my Spirit knows that the bees of those visions make honey in their own time

And no other

So I stand before the shaded spot of naptime animals

and watch them sleep and that is all.

A small aside:

A friend of mine across many waters

Knows the secret of animal flowers

In tincture they brine

Till chamomile and hyssop have breath like bears

And rock rose, dogwood, heavy magnolia and iris smell of Badger semen, silver and bright

Onto the embodied, made bodies of inspirited animals the tincture is passed

Until standing, they dance round the room laughing

And sniffing and grunting and growling

The scent of flowers sending animals scurrying into beds and fields and dreams and dreams

And when my friend leaves his house, Oh when he leaves his house

It is as a floral beast, wrapped in the odor of foxes sighs and wolf laughter

One day I suppose, on all fours he will go down and start off down the path with a new nose

and claws and claws

One day this will all be over

One day I will be gone

Perhaps on a grave will lay bestial flowers

My ashes might dust the rodent daffodils

But what could truly be less my business than that?