Somehow the resonance for me during the entertaining of this title as an abiding albeit background theme for the poems, was the perfect crime of our existence: perfect because created by a perfect Creator. A crime because we get up to such malfeasance all the time, at the lower end of it, and a crime at the higher end in the sense that the Sufis often mention, that any existence of theirs before Allah ta'ala, any flake or residue of their self-ness, is a crime, a flaw, an obstruction before the Light of God. Only when you have known a saint (wali) of whatever spiritual practice do you the...
Somehow the resonance for me during the entertaining of this title as an abiding albeit background theme for the poems, was the perfect crime of our e...
These poems consider (sometimes wildly) the inventions that are our lives, and their Inventor, the Divine Fashioner of ourselves and our actions, with passionate imagination, surreal humor, and abiding focus and love for that Fashioner, in all His manifestations.
These poems consider (sometimes wildly) the inventions that are our lives, and their Inventor, the Divine Fashioner of ourselves and our actions, with...
The luster of a glisten is/ enough to elicit bliss// The gleam from a beam/ enough to confound the intellect// The crack of a rock in a creek/ can take us back to where// we lost track// The whiff of a sniff can lift/ even the most morose heart// from the hotbed of heartbreak// All these phenomena/ splinter and splatter in// this world to focus from the/ unseen world onto this one// some hint of the high rainbowing/ laughter to come...
The luster of a glisten is/ enough to elicit bliss// The gleam from a beam/ enough to confound the intellect// The crack of a rock in a creek/ can tak...
A grand outgoing, heading directly into the puzzlement, the puzzle, puzzling it all out... Poems of search and devotion to the One, through labyrinthine manifestations... self and its various sheddings.
A grand outgoing, heading directly into the puzzlement, the puzzle, puzzling it all out... Poems of search and devotion to the One, through labyrinthi...
This poem was suggested in a flash by a paragraph in Michael McClures book, "Scratching the Beat Surface," in which he quotes Ernst Haekel in the words used here as an epigraph, "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." He goes on to say, in explanation, "Haekel meant that the individual, in his growth from meeting of sperm and ovum at conception, lives out, in fetus, the growth and evolution of his tribe; that first he is an amoeba, then a colonial organism, then an invertebrate, then a lancet, then a fish, until at last he is a mammal and a human." Reading this brought together for me various...
This poem was suggested in a flash by a paragraph in Michael McClures book, "Scratching the Beat Surface," in which he quotes Ernst Haekel in the word...
Here's the classic tale of Ala-udeen (Arabic pronunciation, meaning The Glory of the Way) and the well-known genie (or jinn) in the magic lamp, with all its smoke-blasts of wondrous mystery, swift mind-boggling transformations, heartfelt love-longing for the princess of the sultan, innocent good versus evil (with good triumphant against black magicky dark forces), and in modern, narrative rhyming couplets for today's readers. Everyone's invited for this new version of the ancient Muslim wisdom story from The Arabian Nights (Alf Layla wa Layla), or A Thousand Nights and a Night, so well-known...
Here's the classic tale of Ala-udeen (Arabic pronunciation, meaning The Glory of the Way) and the well-known genie (or jinn) in the magic lamp, with a...
Try to describe light and it's hopeless/ Nothing can quite catch in words luminous nothingness/ Hold something up in light and it's revealed in it say a/ miniature Easter Island head now brought out in its/ full strangeness by the surrounding illumination/ But how can you hold up something like light in light and hope to achieve/ the thing the flash the flat surrounding splashy airiness of brightness/ in whose beneficence everything/ including us is revealed?...
Try to describe light and it's hopeless/ Nothing can quite catch in words luminous nothingness/ Hold something up in light and it's revealed in it say...
This is a series of imagistic and light-drenched poems written each day or night of the fast of Ramadan, 2011, here presented in consecutive order as they came. Their purpose: to get nearer...
This is a series of imagistic and light-drenched poems written each day or night of the fast of Ramadan, 2011, here presented in consecutive order as ...
This may be a secret among only a few of its recipients, but cancer is a direct and positive gift from God. Its chemo and radiation therapies wrack and ruin us... and its alternative therapies may bewilder us with the arcane and often whacky character of their methods... I chose the traditional medical program of three chemo and thirty-five radiation sessions, begun immediately after diagnosis of my cancer, and I praise Allah for the doctors who treated me with their medicine chest of tough love. _________________ Redemption happens the way/ water falls/ Forgiveness is air/ let into an...
This may be a secret among only a few of its recipients, but cancer is a direct and positive gift from God. Its chemo and radiation therapies wrack an...
There are among us luminous beings who maintain that what we might taste of the Garden of Paradise and what we might suffer of the Fire of Hell is right here in our present earthly and mortal existence as well. The imaginal truth of the Spiritual Path that points to the Next World after death is perhaps indisputable (however some might vigorously dispute it) but our lives, upon reflection, sometimes thrown overboard and barely making it to shore, sometimes buoyed up very high and slammed down very low and hard, are a living proof of the this-world tasting of the Next World experience...
There are among us luminous beings who maintain that what we might taste of the Garden of Paradise and what we might suffer of the Fire of Hell is rig...