a ritual to start the work week
Two eyes flicker between disparate suns,
drawn away by the gravity of days.
Fluttering lashes wipe clean double guns,
aimed and re-aimed by my fiery gaze.
Stretched beyond peripheral bounds, I won-
der how each route loops into the same maze.
Behind stone facings, stitching never done,
the mind weaves old threads into a new phase:
Strands twisted infinitely into one;
the curl of smoke emitted by two flames.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
As the night rises in the valley,
Listen, friends, for the water.
When the howls itch at your spine,
Feel its weight return you.
As the fire lights up the mountains,
Listen, friends, for the water.
When the smoke tears up your eyes,
Feel its weight return you.
As the streets tremor in the city,
Listen, friends, for the water.
When injustice crumples your skin,
Feel its weight return you.
As the bedsheets dampen with fever,
Listen, friends, for the water.
When your hand can’t comfort and grasp,
Feel its weight return you.
As the dawn whispers of new life,
Listen, friends, for the water.
When it drips and streams and rushes,
Feel its weight return you.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
Our center crowded out by clouds,
I carried my own sun with me,
a small flame to focus on and
find within me, tethered below
the surface, reaching up and out.
Driving through rain past weary heads,
I chose to laugh and not to weep,
lightness in my chest to carry
me onward to a grind that can
not shatter, simply reshape or
refract it into a fine mist.
I take and remake it with each
breath, press its resilience into
letter after letter, spaces
to hold our hope, recentered here.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
Warrior: one whose depth hides her strength and
readiness inside a broad brush-stroke, ink
lifted up skyward by thin bristles while
deep-rooted. Warrior to her troops: set
on your prize, hold steady, invisible
behind the foci of your aura’s wide
ellipse, taut bow-string. Warrior, three
points guide you: holding you one-footed in
the lead-up, reaching your fingertips far
into the future’s fog, yet rooted, still.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
Whether or not you can muster the wherewithal
to plug up the rain, blow back the stampede of clouds
and hook your extended arm ’round the sun, dragging
it back to bask under and to share in its warmth,
find your own smoldering log first. Feed it with breath,
guard it with resolve, learn its heat and its dampness,
where it ashes and flakes and when it catches in flame.
Focus its light. Let it lead you through your feats,
however Herculean, and let it reveal
your follies, too: firework and many-hued balloon.
And if more simple tasks await,
still find and feed, inflame, inflate.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
When we say “love wins,” we mean it will.
We speak some ultimate truth,
with eyes that reach past the horizon
over the dense treetops that
crowd out light from the forest floor,
follow the sun as it floods
far-off hillsides, imagining its splashy
yellow and juicy orange as it clings
to rain-soaked meadows, and
feel its warmth at our backs
as it rises to end another night,
many mornings from now,slowly warming the chill and
urging us forward: a spell
cast in open hearts, that much
easier to entrance. To share.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
The breeze swipes my cheek and brow
nudgingly: time to begin,
it sighs, a gentle demand.
Shimmying leaves fuzz around
my eardrums, fizzle my gaze
and frazzle my synapses.
Like snow meeting flames. Like tears
evaporating on hot
blacktop. Like gasping. Like Mars.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
Can it be, when faced with walls
of thick fog rising and falling,
sliding into each other and all around
us, that we rise with them, billowing?
That we slide underneath, equally
uncontainable and swirling?
Can we use our pace — each frenetic
and rushing, yet slowly expanding
as one — as our power, eke through
cracks to widen, expose, and glow,
beckoning? Can we plume like smoke?
Hiss and slip, reach through pinholes
and pour, forever slipping over each other
to fill new expanses, do we dare?
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
The alchemy of gathering transforms
us from within: little switches flipped and
mutations gained. Skin pressed into muscle
and muscle pressed to bone, palm in palm and
aura to aura, we grow with each squeeze,
compressed into something new. Come change me,
my loves. Embrace me into my next self,
guide my evolution with your caress,
my growth with your closeness. I crave the heat
of instability, reacting to
your you-ing with my me-ness, gaining and
losing, trading blocks to build new castles
and empty old moats, yearning to be grown
and held, reshaped by magic all our own.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
Frequent flutters and a constant sizzle,
something like fuzzy electricity jumping
across imperfect connections or
the seventeen-year cicadas screaming
into summer’s stink, crowd me out,
do not hold me, do not embody me,
do not necessarily nudge or nuzzle,
yet always push and pull my gut and
gizzard into inhuman acrobatics:
my brain playing chutes and ladders
with newts and adders, doubt-addled
and mistruth-splattered without
taking root, just blind branches reaching
for ghost-light, any sign of room to grow,
any word of acknowledgement
or shadow-sliver of home. No, don’t
fill me up, you frothy frustrations
that urge painful gestations through pesky
garbled permutations too eager to check.
You are not me, so not of me, sow not in me,
grow not, own not, knot not around my mind
nor tourniquet my heart, lungs, spleen,
clean thyself of me by sifting and sieving,
crushed and squeezed by holy tendrils,
breathed out like filthy droplets into
utter innocuousness, untethered and free.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
The battery in the old clock next to my desk
is not quite strong enough to push the second hand
all the way through the thirty-fourth second of the
wrong minute of the wrong hour. And yet it does
keep tick-tick-ticking all the same, counting nothing.
The thin black grid of the window screen boxes up
the greens and browns of two treetops, their uneven
branches reaching into each other, out and up,
and the wispy white cloud that slowly slides eastward
through soft blue skies, pixelating the gradient.
love notes
a ritual to start the work week
