Desert Pictures, Desert Poems

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No story, just pictures and poems. Read at your leisure, and don't forget to click "Additional Photos Below" at the bottom!

Desert Balad

What is this perilous attraction to your

Rolling dunes and

Barren horizons?

What draws me to miles of unapologetic

Nothingness?

Oh desert, enfold me in your sandpaper pages,

And whisper me silent dramas of wind and sand,

The untold epic of the ages!



Would that I could take roost

On a stalwart desert tree

A stoic desert bird

Flying distances which no one shall measure

Singing songs which shall sail through desert night

To no ears' harbor.



Oh desert, bump me onto your desert back

And march me to the stretchless horizon

March until I know not east or west

But have arrived at your center,

The hidden center of the world

Where I shall sink into your wind hallowed crevices

A certified citizen of sand,

A happy devotee of dust!



Oh desert, you are the world's inception and

Its denouement.

You are where wandering finds itself

And lostness loses itself.

You are the timeless master of extremes:

Heat, cold

Stars above, sand below,

Vast distances of tinyness .

I go to you then, knowing this going is a

Coming, and that out of barren straits of nothingness,

I become full.

The Poet and the Moon

Why write poems when

The moon writes poems just via its procession in the sky!

Take a lesson from the moon--

It understands the art of reflection

without mistaking itself for the source.

It even takes a brake once a month!

Submerging itself totally.

Listen: you cannot be a poet (or anything like that) if you commit yourself to writing poems.

That's not being a Poet, but an employee.

Being a poet is not a job in your life,

but your life turned upside down,

poured clean through a seive,

strained thoroughly of its clumpy inessentials.

The precious drops that come out become ink in your pen,

which become words on the page...

But don't think for a moment you've written anything!

You're a talented dancer,

But as soon as you think of yourself as choreographer

you'll fall.

The author of your poem

as blind and anonymous

as a bud silently blooming.

There is less here to do here than you think!

The more you write,

the less you get done,

That's the kind of space this is.

Don't write into a somethingness

Write into a nothingness! Or,

Better yet, let your pen be like the moon:

Dancing silently between them.

True Love

True love demands a run through the guantlet,

A trip thtrough hellfire.

Otherwise, if you are sleeping when this train comes by,

it'll leave without you.

Don't think you can have This and That,.

Can you split your body and send one half North and the other South?

This demands total surrender.

You've been wandering through the desert your whole life. Miraculously,

you make it to the ocean, but like a prisoner used to his prison,

you are wondering if it is OK to stay on the beach.

The beach is just as far from the ocean as the middle of the desert.

A prisoner isn't free till he's stepped beyond prison walls, determined

not to look back

So douse yourself with This,

and

don't even let a single strand of hair stay dry.

Speech and Sound

Speech is never just speech,

but terminally lyrical.

When we forget all speech is song,

Then we plunge our heads down

Instead of singing buoyantly into the air.

The Word divided night and day

but it did it with a song, a sound--

Not the meaning inside.

That came second. The wise are

conscious of the musicality of their every utterance,

even their actions and thoughts are hymns instead of

sculpted meanings

I would have you sing nonsense!

Before making a perfectly sensible speech

That insists on its own un-musicality.

Read this in a single sound and you would understand my meaning.

Divide it into words and I can only

Point you in the right direction.

Don't Take It

Don't take it;

that is all I have to say

Pass out of that

into This

Fall and fall until you learn to fly

Other birds will say you'll hit the ground hard

But you say:

"I'd prefer one shot at Freedom

to a life of folded wings."

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