The Faces of My Colleagues

On a Zoom this week

Face-to-face with colleagues

Close up to grit and grace.

What an honor to see

The unvarnished fight

In their warriors’ eyes.

Catching an occasional

Glint of lightness

In the conversation

Moved me most of all.

Amid this current moment

Perhaps I’m not alone

To look around

At my colleagues

And see the heroes there.

Bereft of me

For Lee Vodra, For Chris Cornell, For all of us.

The only true loss is this loss of a soul,
Where once was a person, there now is a hole.

Now the only things left are the things of the past,
With a future bereft of your voice or your clasp.

The spaces you filled in the world with your song,
Now thud dully with silence as we all move along.

All the things that we have, all the things that we do,
Have no meaning at all, in the absence of you.

This leaving alone cuts us all like a knife,
The only true loss is this loss of a life.

This piece of life

Who am I, this piece of life?
This scrap of broken dreams and joy.
This struggling, juggling, swearing, bewaring;
Having-loved-so-hard-it-now-scares-me-to-try.

Who am I, this piece of life?
This shard of a glimmering shattered crown,
This fighting, delighting, tussling, muscling,
Not-giving-in-till-I-get-put-in-the-ground.

Who am I, this piece of life?
This cloud of ephemeral, swirling mist,
This shouting and doubting, moping and hoping,
Wait-what-did-you-say-that-I-almost-missed?

These questions and answers I throw all around,
Are meaningless noises made of nothing but sound.
In moments like these, they are all that I hear,
But then I remember, your calm voice so clear:

"Who you are, you piece of life,
You beautiful bundle of fears, care and doubt
You crazing, amazing, living and giving,
Big-hearted-guy-that-we-all-care-about"

The Rise

Beginning in ashes,
Amid smoke and flame,
We crouch, weighed down
And pinned to the ground
By our hurt, broken hopes and our shame

It is then, when we find
Amid ashes and dust,
Small good things still smoldering
Deserving of shouldering
By effort and work and our trust.

Let us stand, let us rise
Amid others' contempt.
Grow our wings in the rising
Our brightness now shining
Resurrected just by the attempt.

Note: this poem is dedicated to Derrick Johnson, the specialist Olympic Weightlifting coach at Paradiso Crossfit and who signs his online posts with the hashtag #PhxRises.   

To run in darkness is to touch the night

To run in darkness is to touch the night.

Quiet bodies moving lithely,
Cushioned and smoothed: Reebok on asphalt,
In an unlit LA driveway,
As a down-to-the-street-and-back
Piece of this evening's workout.

And here, in this safe little patch of shadow, 

I think of what it must have been like 

To run in the dark a long time ago. 

With lives, perhaps, dependent on

Your hard, striding effort and breath hammering.

Feet slipping, enemies closing.

To run in darkness is to touch the night.

I see you

Yesterday,  two women told me,
'I see you',
In unrelated conversational moments of candor,
Amid the intensity of discussions,
About work or about love.
A colleague and a friend,
Both brilliant,
Two separate well-placed bodyblows
To the act that I carry
That no-one knows me or sees me;
No-one loves me;
And no-one cares.

A takedown, sleeper, blitzkrieg move,
Came waiting at a light,
This morning on my way to work.
I spied and honked a friend
I hadn't seen in months.
She rushed me, from the street,
Through the passenger window
And stretched across the seat,
To kiss me, mwah, against my cheek.

So that later now, as I walk to lunch,
With drafts to read and check,
Across this parking lot,
I stop, winded and reeling,
As something inside tears and breaks,
An iceberg cracking
In this act that I carry
That no-one knows me or sees me;
No-one loves me;
And no-one cares.

And thinking of my friends,
Who know I have this thing, this act;
I think that I should stop
And write this down right now
Before I forget and start to think
That no-one knows me or sees me;
No-one loves me;
And no-one cares.

I am a point mass

I am a point mass
Swept up in the flow of folk
Conducted by boys in blue.

Do drops of water have take off their shoes, I wonder?
Do they become strangely uneasy when others move faster than they.
Do they make idle conversation, loitering in tide pools?

I am a point mass,
One amongst many,
To be shuffled and sorted and guided.
I regain my humanity only when I arrive.

The Embrace of Iron

Here, amid the cold flat solid shapes,
Of plates, and stacks, and grips and bars
Of movement, knowledge, effort and breath
I feel safe, at last.

Here, judgement lives only in the weight and the strain
The heft and the shift and the breath and release.
The iron's hands embrace my own as I pull and lift and push
Learning through mass and gravity

It never condescends, it never confuses
It promises nothing other than itself
Exhaustion, strength and peace

Step Outside

Let's step outside this too rich place,
Where all our thoughts are bought and sold.
Our eyes and ears bombarded with,
The catcalls of this branded world.

Let's sip creation where we can.
Drink down its strength, imbibe its scope
Let's dine on any tastes we find,
To move our hearts and seize their hope.

And then, and only then, we may
Possess the wealth we use and see
By knowing all the bargains struck
For creativity

Yoga Practice

These field of wire, that intermeshed,
and joined to loose-limbed bones,
Pull in swathes of fibers,
To wash these limbs in force.

The tissues of this jagged form,
Discover geodesics in its grain,
To coruscate with breath like
Crops under summer's breeze.

    Thus, coiled uncoiled,
    I move unmoving.

Every final goodbye is a killing

Every final goodbye is a killing
Even when one softens the blow
The kindness you showed me at leaving
Is nothing to those in the know

Since there's nothing left for the future
Just another door closed with a slam
Soft words are all empty and heartless
A deflection, a lie and a sham

And I don't understand all this meanness
Surrounding my deeds and my acts
When all that I said was just what I felt
And all that I did was react

But that's just not enough for you, is it?
I say the wrong thing and you're gone
No discussion, no wisdom, no patience
Just anger, goodbye and we're done

Kingfisher's Wings

Bright and blue, glittering flashes,
They hide behind your smooth eyelashes

Swoop, dive and flutter in flittering dance,
They rise and they soar in your every glance.

Rare and elusive with glimmering light
You hold, in your eyes, Kingfishers in flight

Dancer Dancer

Sparks of light uncoil from you
As, moving, you unleash a grace,
That swirls and cascades through the air
Weaving poetry in space.

The cadence of your movement,
The flutter in your spine,
Are far more simply eloquent
Than these poor words of mine.

Since I can only try to please
With clever little rhymes,
But you, in flowing elegance,
Breathe life, make love, stop time.

L.A. Observatory

(first impressions of the evening view from Griffith's Observatory)

The view seizes my breath
As I glimpse this city's too vast soul.

The sky is a gauze, bathed by photons,
Washing out the distant raging stars,
With a net of rising light,
Cast by fifteen million souls.

The earthbound constellations glimmer through ozone.
They ignite and die in a clicking of switches.
The ground seethes and shimmers
And the Universe, upstaged, is devoid of stars.

Why am I not surprised?
After all,
This is L.A.

A thread of gently falling stars is strung across my eye.
A queue of Boeings,
Sparse along the border of quiescent heaven and boiling earth.
Each mote of light is three hundred lives.
Like me, they await their immersion in a sea of bright and seething light.

A stunning video of Nightfall over Los Angeles (By Colin Rich)

Cyclone

I had my eye of calm quiet space,
amid confusion wildly hurled,
in which I used to watch and wait
as about me whirled the world.

And looking up, out of myself,
I saw your face amid the bustle,
With calm, bright eyes, and lucid health
Your thoughtful voice devoid of hustle.

And I leapt out, into the wall
Of shifting, moving, whipping things
It caught me, threw me, made me fall
Just like a bird with broken wings.

And now when I have no defense
When I can quietly stop and see:
All the things you said make sense:
The only thing that moves is me.

I am the wind about my heart
That shreds and flays my confidence
I keep me wild and set apart
I treat the world with violence

And so, right now, I have to slow
This frenzied, whirling, crazy spin,
To search and find what I can do
With this, my strange cyclone within.

And Let Me Be

And let me look with bright blue eyes,
on beauty's heart, on beauty's face,
and let me feel her breathing sighs,
with all of true love's style and grace

And let my heart not quicken so,
when shadows crawl across my eyes,
to darken and disgrace my sight,
with unknown fears and useless lies.

And let me be someone to trust,
who will not lie, who does not hurt:
someone who is not ruled by lust,
but loves to laugh and dance and flirt.

And let me show that I can be:
a man like no-one else or other;
a unique soul who lives for truth;
who loves the world and is its brother.

And now I know what I must do,
in life, in love, in work, in play,
and all my thanks must go to you,
for simply showing me the way.

---

I think that I'd like this poem to be written on my headstone when I die.

I wrote it in 1999 for someone who had a surprisingly strong attraction to. She really didn't reciprocate,  and even then, I found a powerful emotional driving feeling at my core in the small hopeful act of falling head-over-heels for someone. Although I was seeking a deeper emotional connection when there simply wasn't one there to have, the poem was a wonderful end-product of this process.

I took a 'transformational life-training' course at a company called Landmark Education in 2001, which had a really profound and beneficial effect on me. This course was all about personal discovery, self-realization, breakthroughs and re-charting the course of my life. It consisted of about 200 people and was lead by a remarkable Australian woman call Cathy Elliot, who must have lead this course to literally hundreds of thousands of people over the course of her career and I was determined to make sure that she remembered us, the people from our course, out of all the hundreds of courses she's participated in.

So, I wrote out this poem in a frame, and read it to her in front of the entire room full of people on the last night of the course. I then asked every single person to sign their name around the border of the frame to represent how the sentiment in the poem was true for everyone else as well. It was just a wonderful night and I filed it away as just one of those fantastic moments for posterity.

About 3 or 4 months later, Cathy sent me a small note of acknowledgment for this: the postcard shown below. This was really a small gesture, but is certainly a token that brings me a remarkable amount of pleasure and satisfaction to see.

And now, as I sit, reflecting on my current experience, amid my failings, the seemingly impossible challenges I face, and the unquenchable thirst for suffering exhibited by my shadows and my fears, I think of this poem. I think of how, at its heart, these few scribbles on a page is a true expression of who I really am and of what I really stand for in myself. Perhaps, we all need such a declaration to seize on in troubled times. This is mine.