THE SURFER

Take the chorus you know

and turn it into a river.

Make it move, dance 

like Dionysus.

You are its Euripides.

The current 

is the commentary, 

the song

that will sing you

like a surfer. 

CAUGHT

Anger is a wild animal 

in a bear trap

Sometimes it would rather 

stay chained to pain

than chew its own 

leg off

in order to

free itself

 

THE STRIPTEASE*

There’s no pronoun

for the body

that’s undressing 

itself. Its audience, 

though, is a we,

an us. It’s

you and I.

We are watching it

strip down  

to its skivvies,

then down to

nothing at all.

We are looking at it

without all its

adornments, all

its accouterment

of story and legend

that we have heaped upon it

by way of our

projections and judgments.

It has disrobed itself

of all these encumbrances

and is now standing 

with its body electric 

laid bare before us 

as Presence itself, 

raw and butt naked,

as naked 

as can be.

Seeing experience

entirely unadulterated,

“as is,” as it were,  

is about as sexy

as sexy gets.

*Inspired by the writings of the Stoics

SPINNING YARNS

Wrangling cyclones

with a lasso

makes as much sense

as trying to stuff a genie

back into its bottle.

Rope just ain’t up to the task

of taming twisters.

That’s all there is to it.

Our think-in’s no different.

We can try to wind our way

into being some other way

than the way we actually are

but it never really works, does it?

Our thoughts are just more

tempest-like turnings.

Just different kinds of twisters, is all

made of the yarns we tell ourselves

that we get caught up in.

Better to just light out for the territories

bareback and embrace the big country

and the badlands and the storms

that are sure to weather us

one way or t’other.