thirsting for water
a roadside bookshelf
offers direction🪶
Two Roads
Category Archives: Writing
Where Now Your Story Line
Begin with a thought even if it’s a lie or emerged from a morning dream
Think not of anything but the scratch of lead against paper
Are you one of those whose fingers do not know the feel of a pencil
or the echo in an empty room free of all inspired distraction
Go ahead or run behind but hover always in the moment
for it takes just half a breath before it’s already too late
What have you done with all those memories
abandoned behind a bedroom door when you made your last move
Turn down your light or you’ll alarm the wild life
You’ll need them if you ever want to get out of here.
Spring
Winter earth
Hints of Spring
Ice sings a ripple song
Refuge
in this way you find separation
paths familiar yet unmarked
wade into tall fragrant grasses
caresses soft as spring butterfly wings
nature’s choir harmonic tuning
humming from your chest
test your equilibrium
one leg raised for motion
hush your paradiddle heart
chin anointing clavicle
closed eyes filter morning’s sacred light
home home crescendo
sustain your hallelu
hold it close inhale inhabit
invest your all
linger with your knowing gaze
you may never feel
this ready
so alive again
Stories Less Spoken
Do you know yet about this little jewel of a podcast that features ordinary and extraordinary creatives?
NATURE
You can tell
looking through the hole of life
You can predict
what may happen
You can change
but only for good reason
You can slip
so easily these days
You can cry
though no one may hear you
You can wish
though no one may care
You can change
but your steps leave footprints
You can slip
so easily these days
Frame
Photo tilts left
in the room of messy flowers
Light splashes shadows
these old silenced walls
Rest your head
for an evening
Lay it down, you wandering traveler
Everything yearned for lives
out of reach but still in sight
Boots on at dawn
Turning page, young seeker
Toss those maps over the ledge
Step one, you are ready
eyes bright with colour
Black and white was just a crack
drawing you in
Your beginning
Shifts
I am far away now
from everything familiar
It’s after sundown, dark
The air smells of smoke
heavy from bamboo smouldering
Crickets are singing, or katydids
And something else
A woman’s voice rising out of the darkness
Over there near the fields
we rode bicycles past today
She sings
or keens
The melody is in a minor key but
I don’t understand the language
Perhaps it’s a lullaby
I am lying here in this hammock
a young attendant just brought by and hung for me
It’s in that army camouflage pattern
In the courtyard, I saw samples of bombs
grenades and land mines recovered from the landscape here
I am looking at my familiar from a distance
From another angle
This location in the world
I am reading Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
I read it before, a long time ago
It seemed like brilliant fantasy work then
Science Fiction, a Fantastic Tale
It doesn’t seem like fantasy now, this time
I’ve felt the breath of Possibility.
Have I changed so?
Or has the World changed?
Maybe I have been sleeping
Maybe I’m just waking up.
Love is a Blank Stone
found your declaration
sprayed passion on stone
wondered as i passed
hands in pockets
if you scrawled that one
below
before or after
In Memory of The Woman I Never Knew Whom I Have Known All My Life
Her house for sale now
real estate sign face down on the lawn
implies more than declares
No one, I think, has checked for days
She has gone from there
I don’t know when
We mind our own business here
in quiet neighbourhoods
No matter we exchanged no words
I honour her now—-trespass sometimes required—-
I honour her now
stand before her house absent of her there behind the drape
I step across her early morning lawn
photograph this birdbath in spring sunlight
imagining she loved it once
enough to place it precisely there
equidistant from window and sidewalk
the private the public
and we smile our smiles
Talk is not needed here
the water has all gone to vapour.
Pencil Notes 