I came here three months ago.
A little child,
27 times around the Sun
with a backpack full of sorrows that not even the whiskey could swallow
a trail of accomplishments
let go like kites and windblown hats
from the sides of a train.
These last nine months,
I have scattered the letters of my soul
across 7,000 miles
and nineteen States
on the rooftops of Piggly Wiggly’s,
behind the Valero dumpters,
on the couches,
and blow up mattresses
and floor spaces that make up
what I called Home.
I drew a thousand lines
on a hundred maps
that all meant something
but none of them meant anything.
Another name, another place
another soul wandering
just like all of us.

I came to the Forest three months ago.
Stepped on dead oak leaves
that reminded me of my Father
with barefeet
lived in a teepee
and smoked cigarettes.
I woke up everyday
just to watch my eyelids peel open.
To let the Sun come in.
To put Rosemary on my tongue and say prayers to the Great Spirits.
To fall in love with a girl
I still don’t know the name of
but who puts a fire in my eyes that
not even tropical storms can put out &
causes my feet to dance
 more like a marionette
and my words to flow easy.
Here,
where every night I am thankful
 that the Forest Shaman
makes a circle with her hands
and says “be still and listen.”
And everybody,
even the rebel hearts,
 with their rebel yells deep in their guts
the talkers and the chatty kathy’s,
they all listen.

I am thankful we were all born with different ears
to all hear different things.
Some hear the bird calls
 up up above us,
the kitten meow, the cracked branch, the rooster crow,
 the procrastinating screen doors open.
Some hear the fire crackle.
Perhaps because they built it
or because it is building inside of them
the little green center light
or their stomachs rumble as they think on food
 the heartbeat of the hand they are holding.

Some nights I hear
the deep slow sigh of a lover from across circle
or the train call.
It makes my heart race and my bones groan undearneath me
because I have known the road
and it tastes like iron and glory dust
like
riding suicide on a 53’ and loneliness
with a grin bigger than the Great Turtle
or the Mother Tree has ever worn.

Here,
there are cat men, cowboys, Pepper Kings and ‘comin in from..” brims
that took this small thing called a man
and gave it muscle.
Told me to shut up and sing
or write,
or cock-a-doodle
or put all the hippy shit soft speak down
 and let a roar out
when I feel the tempest inside me.

Here it is:

Let me be the Forest Shaman tonight.
Be still and listen.
Please, forget my words
only hear their trembling.

I have seen your eyes - little windows
the ones I call family.
I have seen your drunken behinds
sway like wind-torn ships and sails
on the dive bar dance floors of Brunswick.
I have fallen asleep in your box trucks
to the sound of kittens and trees falling
saying “everything will be alright.”
“everything will be alright.”

I fought the rooster and neither of us won
because we have an understanding.
Like brothers on a brawl floor
-not just the blood ones-
who show their love
through bruises, sore necks
arms and ripped toenails.
Now everytime I pass Pepper
I puff out my chest and our windows look into each other.
We both know the sacred songs that the Grandfather Roosters
used to crow
the ones that come from our bellies,
Mine
just below the tattoo of a bird she hates
and loves simultaneously

I gave up riding rails for riding trees
all the way down.
I bit the snake back that bit me
because I believe we are equals
and he taught me to crawl on the ground
no fear
to watch the mycelium running.
And like unfolding maps and atlases
the fables you have taught me
led to careful placed steps
fox walking
making sure I observe all the creases.
That I hold the Space.

I’m a bit bigger now.
Wings clipped once
but grew back.
Tomorrow gone,
but never leaving,
with a lover and two cats
to scatter the Great Drum beat
across this country and all the others
to tell my stories
of feather covered darlings
delicious food every night that kept my belly full
and me
howling open mouthed terror love filled
at the full moon breeze
and stars - all kinds - and their constellations.

I have become the palm fran,
the bull frog,
the red headed woodpecker
that shares half my last name.
I stand tall now
though my bones are still brittle.
I breathe deep now,
it fills up all of me.
I gave up the clock, the dollar,
the roof, the bed, the carlo rosi jugs
to find myself here.

I do not cry in front of people.
Then the storm came
and these last three days have been spent
crying
watching a cowboy with blue toed shoes
Who, if he stood next to my twin,
I could not tell the difference between how my heart feels towards them.
I cry at the cat man who was sent here to teach spirals
cover his body in coal and protect the underworld.
I cry at the Lasagna and the pizzas and the pots and pans and
drunken pantry laughter of the soul of the soul kitchen manager.
I cry at the boy, more a man than I have yet to be,
who takes our deposits to a field and plays Taylor Swift
in the evening. Who has dreams of becoming everything.
I cry for the One who was brought here
not by accident
to break rules that I broke and
found great love by accident - if you can call it that.
I cry into a forest fairy’s eyes and soul
 without words
and she cries back.

I cry when my lady bird darling
leads a dance that everyone dances to
and we all become G-d long enough to know what it feels like
or when she prepares my last egg lunch
from these chickens
that I have grown to love as much as future children.
At every baby rooster cock-a-doodle -
little necks stretched out to touch the sky,
and lonely Oscar, Little Luna, Neurotic Wanda
and the crazy coo coo of Cob Hen.

Tomorrow I will not cry anymore. 

It came with this storm,
just like we all did.

Now the Wood Buzzard is leaving.

I came to the Forest three months ago.
Tomorrow,
I am taking her with me.
And, in the thankful circles that follow,
please listen closely,
because on nights when the wind
and the calm and the all of it
 are just right
you will hear my cock-a-doodle do from the miles between us
and the corners of your mouth might turn up
 towards those same stars from which we all came from.
I love you all very much.

Aho.

That will do.

I stare at the skin of cedar trees
& wonder how it grew so big and tall,
figuring out how to twist
turn
and root with the Earth.
I am not built like cedar trees.
I watch the Luna Moth,
the Monarch Butterfly,
the Swooping Swoop SawEEEEE Swallow fly off the dock
and I will not fly like that.
These are not those wings.
I have arms.
I got feet.
Pretty ones covered in mud
and scars
and bites from the hungry mouths of Fire Ant Kings.
I use more capital letters,
these days.
They are to signify G-d.
How the everything of he/she is all of us.
How the moon comes in
and the tide goes out
or some such something that I’ll never understand.
I only know that there is an army of crabs
that bring out the Moses in me.
That if we lift up our hands
to all that blue blue blue
we just might touch it.

That will do.

I am writing tonight
for the drunken astronauts who have forgotten how to fly,
for the cowboys that have fallen off of their horses,
but found love.
This is for the woodpecker calls that perk the ears
of the woodpecker lovers.
This is for the ones that wrote 13 lines
of the most beautiful sonnet
and told they had fallen short.
This is for the three legged snapping turtle
who lives in the Altamaha Delta -
though he would not shake my hand.

I am not sad.
This is not broken.
Where I to recite verses memorized and hidden
back back back
in my once soul
I would say,
“my cup runneth over”
maybe even “hallelujah!”

I am writing because the typewriter keys
 were rained on in the flood.
Some boys, now men,
still don’t understand concepts like rust
or structure,
or theory.

I am writing,
because I am caught between the sentence finished
and the silhouette of it.
Because,
some fathers remind me of how I forget my father.
Some mothers have my mothers hair
and cause my heart to hurt
though I would never tell her that.
And,
somewhere in all this syncopation
 I keep seeing G-d and angels and devils and fairies
and wide eyes mixed with teary ones.
I keep feeling the earth shake
from the train 2 miles away
and my bones groan from the weight underneath them.
I use cliches like I have never heard them.
I still have not sewn my clothes.
The kittens are sleeping.
The loverbird is sleeping.

And, bad writing is better than no writing.
All writers will tell you not to write about bad writing,
so I continue to do it.
Refer to the cliches above.
Do not write about bad writing.

The ocean of G-d is your eyes.
It may even be the eyelids peeled back
to reveal the soul
or the veins
or the tremble underneath them.

If I stopped typing on rusty typewriter keys,
it is possible I would forget these things
and have to start all over again.

Lines and Letters

We slept under old growth Cedar trees,
tracked armadillos in our sleep
and kept the two cats close.
In our free time,
we practice naming them
opening and closing our mouths
to perform kisses,
sing with the chickens or count
out loud
the ways Rumi taught us to place lips&knees to the ground.
When the rain came
and the lightening fell
we pulled out the pens
and the typewriter
and took turns writing letters to hide
under Palm Ferns and Blueberry bushes.
When we awoke,
we repeated these things,
just the same.

The difference between day and night
is mostly in the number and shape of the lines and letters.

Writers block 5 days straight…

They kept calling out for G-d,
with those tongues they were born with,
like they were told to.
With all those words they learned from
their little years,
consumed by love and tears and better days
when the eyes weren’t veiled to angels, fairies and hidden things.
Then they grew those flower fingers
that river heart
those opal eyes and gravel throat.
The singing a little hoarse and tired.
“We will sing tomorrow.”
They took to the road tomorrow.
Long black lines with smaller yellow ones upon them.
Railroad ties and the iron moving with the river bends.
They found the bottom of the bottle,
opened the half-penned pages
and instead of writing,
they hid their faces
so Father and Mother wouldn’t read the lies.
Quickly becoming ghosts,
they slowly learned to speak in tongues
not here or there
but somewhere, I believe.

“Caw-choo Ca-LY Shelo-MOON QUE-yote!”
Then they slowly moved their feet.
Oh there you are, Peter.