For a forest friendGoing quiet in the forest is exhilarant living.Leave your sugar frosted lattespeaker phone in airplane mode.Choose wild cherries and passion flowers.There are thrills in trills in the trees,the slow dance of coasting birds,frog song conga lines at dusk.Go quietly and with someonewho stoops to toad stools; stops, looksand listens with hawk-sharp senseswhen birds swoop and sing…

When my decades in remission  bipolar came roaring to the fire after Hurricane Katrina / The Federal Flood and my ugly divorce it was easiest just to let the demon take possessions and run the streets with Mr Hyde. He was a fun guy to be around except for the roaring hangovers on far too little sleep, waking next to strangers.What’s hard, as it comes creeping back after almost 10 quiet years, is…

Is it wise to give away some of my poetry on META?  The act and art of poetry is inherently wise:  discerning, crafty in every sense; if the reconstructionists are correct, emergent from a deep, proto-IndoEuropean root meaning seen. It is a visionary act at once as cloistered and as public as the Delphic oracle. The old book’s prophets did not hide their lamp but swung it noisily in the street.It…

I was raised from childhood to place my hand in the Holy Roman wound and found it cold and hollow.  Now I am waiting for that Pentecostal moment not in a close room but in the wood, for green fire like leaves to descend, teaching us the words of the birds and the subterranean language of root and mycelial dialogue.

I want to salt my hands in sand bits of silica diamonding themin the blue green Gulf glareaway from concrete monuments to misunderstood Jimmy Buffett—where pelican and heron at reststand still and permit me to passon the hard sand at the surf line—two shore creatures in our element

I’ve got more issues than all the Marvel and DC comics ever published  but I’m also colorful and entertaining.

mania(n.) late 14c., “mental derangement characterized by excitement and delusion,” from Late Latin mania “insanity, madness,” from Greek mania “madness, frenzy; enthusiasm, inspired frenzy; mad passion, fury,” related to mainesthai “to rage, go mad,” mantis “seer,” menos “passion, spirit,” all of uncertain origin, perhaps from PIE *mnyo-, suffixed form of root *men- (1) “to think,” with…

Walking is meditation if it enters into sudden  birdsong and kaleidoscopic green. Not stillness. Not transcendence. I don’t want to escape this world. I don’t want the lotus unless I can wade in to admire it.I want to enter into this world as a duck enters water, as a towering  tree enters the earth, to wear moss instead of clothes, for birds to land fearlessly on my arms,  to find antlers I can…