Fractured Images

Posted on June 9, 2025 by J

There is always a burden, of course–a sadder or heavier side to all the ecstatic dancing–a wound to the healer, a spider bite to the heel. Something, in us or in the universe, requires balance. Dancing was never an escape from the rest of life, although it could be a relief from it; I always went more deeply into anything that was troubling me. And the entire existence of myself and this world troubled me! It never even occurred to me to try to shut it out. I often had a lot to process while I danced, most of it altogether mundane. The privileged insights came after the toilsome business of life.

What that means is not vague in practice; I am trying to describe some kind of neurological processing disorder, and how I dealt with it. Again I refer to an important dream, a very simple one in which a kindly but authoritative man told me I was ‘eidetic.’ He showed me myself dancing as a child and explained that, instead of seeing the world around me like a film played at the proper speed and showing a smooth continuous scene, I see it as ‘a series of fractured images.’ I soon realized it was true. When I danced, I could re-view the day’s scenes at the correct film speed and only then make sense of them. Before that, I would appear to be processing normally, and most of the time it didn’t matter too much. When I tried to play or even watch team sports, however, the trouble appeared. I could not track multiple moving objects on a field and make sense of what they were doing. I knew instinctively that I could not drive a car safely but, being American, I had little choice but to try. My instincts were correct. After a few white-knuckle years, I let my driver’s license expire. Not driving pretty much ruined any potential I had for an active, useful life, but it drove me deeper into solitude and seclusion so that my work benefitted.

Apart from not driving, I also have to avoid any situation where I am expected to think on my feet and make quick decisions. I’m sensitive and reactive enough that every moment is a continual flood of physical and other sensations. I can’t sort it out and make sense of it in real time. My first response is very different from a considered one–usually because in the moment I am a bit tense and sensory-defensive, and need to get past that to the substance of what has actually happened and what it requires of me. Then I can be both more far-sighted and more empathic, and act accordingly. Most people need reflective time sometimes, of course, but–I can’t drive! No one has ever yet been able to make me understand a football play! It’s not a subjective personal issue. I could probably shift it if it were.

The dancing that allowed this ‘eidetic’ person to make sense of the here and now also allowed entry into any place that trance could sense and locate. It was how I recognized my peers from the Imaginal, and was able to enter their songs as if they were actual multi-dimensional spaces. More Net of Indra is shooting forth everywhere as I write this! That was what came through so clearly as I spun and raced. After the little questions found answers and the little hurts were soothed–after the chores were done….

All the years I danced and read but did not compose a word I was creating a vast repository of songs for the future. I still draw on it now at night when I let lines run through my head. I don’t feel any more of them need to be written down. All the while I have been on this poetic path, I have also followed non-dual teachings. An awareness of the Dharma runs through the work, a knowing that even the Lovers are samsaric at last. I sense it is not yet time for the songs that will come after the Lovers, but something will succeed them.

Until then, I am a friend to the Flower Fairies, and making and releasing their likenesses. I’ll tell you all about that before long….

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The Lovers Encore

Posted on June 9, 2025 by J

After sharing the texts of One Week of Nights and Days, I realized that the story of The Lovers would lend it more meaning to most readers, and recalled that I had already told the story of that life-altering vision of years ago in this blog. My first thought was simply to link to it from here, but then I reconsidered. That post went up five years ago, and is more germane than ever to what I am working on now, so I am reposting it in full.

The simple truth is and always has been that we of the Imaginal are in love with beauty, always longing for more beauty than we can find or keep in this world, and so we look elsewhere. In a strange, sidelong but powerful way, it is always there to be found.

15 December 2020

The Lovers

Many years ago, when I was first really struggling to enter my full vocation, I had a vision. It’s been recounted before but, briefly, I was shown armies and then two individual soldiers fighting–who then resolved into lovers coupling. The Wheel was placed before me as a clock-face, with the numbers representing a soul’s journey from departure from the All to return–from amnesia to anamnesis. At the point of return, the soul and the home-love it was longing for are reunited–the Lovers–but even such bliss as theirs becomes stale after a while. Story-telling, through dreams so vivid they become lost in them, becomes their way of keeping each other awake and aware of each other. Thus, no matter how terrible parts of the story, a satisfying ending is assured. The end in the beginning. So I was shown!

Last night as I lay awake, I thought of the vision, and how different everything is now than when it first came. I always trusted it, or tried to; now I understand it in a way I don’t have to think about. Work never required much effort, except for that needed to quell my own self-doubt. Once that was out of the way–I’ve always described the sensation as flying, or skating, or dancing, with word-flow. There’s no making anything happen; there’s only the letting it come through.

The resulting work has usually been met with a respectful but confused response from readers, so I don’t give much thought to anyone reading it after the fact. It is all addressed to the soul-home, and when it reaches its aim, I can feel it. Sending and receiving, to and from a place beyond clock-time–learning how to do this has been a story in itself.

There is one thing I can gesture toward as a sort of starting-point for readers, but it is controversial with me because that point is Rumi and I am not entirely an admirer. He comes across to me as someone who learned the patterns intellectually first and then practiced using metaphors until he sounded credible, but even so, mysticism as he represents it is similar enough to our source-garden to help with orientation here: The soul feels lost in the world, missing something–someone–and searches, crying out, until whispers in return finally get through: I’ve been here all along!

Be thoughtful of the simple dynamic that what you are searching for is searching for you, and so much falls into place. The kingdom of heaven is within, and here are some maps of the way you need not go because you are there. But have fun on the journey, because we know you’re going to go anyway. Be sure to bring back some good stories! And remember–everything always means more than one thing. And retrieving true lore–every bit of understanding that is real and useful in more than one world–appears to be a great part of our purpose.

Here is today’s work:

15 December 2025

Their Tales to Each Other

Sometimes, when they spiral around in the dance, they get lost in their thoughts for a moment, but soon–

alone on a platform, the coil of the rope like a crown that has fallen–no shadow at noon

when the signal is given and presto, she’s down, at the end of her rope, twitching out the last beat

of a heart so enamored of music, it’s waiting to greet her–in waltz time, and rose-honey sweet.

.Bees gathered over their honeymoon flowers and ferried them forth to the sea beyond shore.

This was a lyrical flight, exegesis not needed; they knew what they’d been sending for

when they opened their mouths, either side of the bee-loud divide between stations and serial lives

they had patiently prized from their earthly foundations and built into beautiful library-hives,

and they knew where they’d be when they’d reached it, the dreamt destination of all of those lives and their sleep.

Little by little tears falling from eyes become signals to follow upstream, where they keep

their best inspirations recorded forever in hope of the visitor each used to be.

Into the source of the fountain that warded off drought and maintained the arcane inland sea

where the sailors who venture are hardier spirits than these airy lovers, who float in mid-air–

down by the waterline, reach in a hand; if a sea-monster bites it–they won’t really care;

they’re infected already with far worse contagion; they’re bound to sail on till the lovers onboard

have been tossed off the side as a pair of dead bodies. Now pearls that were eyes line a sea-monster’s hoard.

They only remembered that passage themselves after feeling their own eyes roll back a bit far.

Rubbing a slow thoughtful hand on the scars of her sore rope-burned neck, she sighs, how fine you are,

and how blistered with infinite sunlight and rage and the flames of the pyre when my blood would not burn

my poor carcass would be, but for one healing salve brought from far overseas in a white marble urn.

There’s always a bit of residual magic that lingers where ashes have changed into dust,

the pain they once knew so entirely forgotten, the spirits they danced with can generate lust

with their most graceful motions and send it off flying with ribbons and pennants like petals and leaves.

They never look back–but sometimes when they have, they’ve been sad for a while for the lover who grieves,

having somehow forgotten he’s not in a memory now. She’s not absent; she’s not in her grave;

she’s not in the flames of a pyre nor the depths of a tearstorm at sea in her own drowning wave;

she’s advanced in the treacherous zone of red roses toward the broad orchards and gardens he’ll find

in a moment–the moment he’s slipped off the traces of rope-burn and salt from the pit of the mind

that’s been lining its library shelves night and day, making ready for such a strong spirit to light

that he’s finally sweeping the floor, throwing open the windows, and airing his clothes in the bright

new moonlight and making–arcane preparations for her, who is certainly present in more

than any one room–when at length from their bed they tell tales to each other–more love is more lore.

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One Week of Nights and Days

Posted on June 6, 2025 by J

I have spoken of kundalini–that is what runs through all this work. The following pieces are very special to me because of the circumstances that brought them. Pamela was a local midwife who had never had children. I first heard of her when friends spoke in front of me about her recent diagnosis of uterine cancer. She had just had her uterus removed, with a tumor that was ‘just huge.’ After that, she had quasi-menstrual bleeding. We became friends through the same mutual friends, and as she neared death, I thought of her and this work resulted. She seemed to be at the focal point of so many intensely female functions and experiences, including the worst and hardest. And to be a medically vulnerable woman in such a misogynistic world is to know and experience far too much.

What could be powerful enough to approach such a situation? Nothing ordinary. I danced into as much energy as I could, and let myself hear what I would want to hear someone saying at a fully fraught time. Orgasm is ‘la petite mort.’ I saw the Lovers approaching La Grande Mort, and eavesdropped as I am wont to do. The process took one week, hence the title of the sequence. Please read very slowly.

One Week of Nights and Days

16 June 2001

When the Lightning Strikes

At the brush of the storm-lightning’s miracled essence, my body vibrates with a sympathy so

deeply felt, I can only begin to address its least wholly ineffable aspects in slow,

halting measures whose syllables question their meanings the while they are forming. The word on my tongue

at this moment—but here is the crackle of keen and swift lyrical passages already sung

of themselves long before they are uttered. Most shining of presences, here is the sound of your light

as it blazes through me with a speed that aligns the most disparate planes of reality quite

without effort on my—or your—part. In the hand that is held out before me, a network of veins

branches out like the fire of the sky in its grandest display, when it comes down in rivers and chains

and illuminates world upon world in one instant as I strive to capture the flow of the force

that comes rushing toward and beyond me. I wince at its brilliance, but quickly move into the course

of its purposeful fury headlong. Once inside it, a quiet descends in which eloquence wells

almost slowly. A drop of song-blood forms and glides from the tip of my finger. Its rich color tells

one approach to the heart of the story it carries, and so does the salt of the sea in its taste.

Its soft fluid warmth that congeals—this too bears a perceptible message. My mind would make haste,

but the vision is stubborn: just one clotting drop of the most mortal substance. I shift my long gaze,

and the strange lightning strikes more directly. The top of a mountain is in its idea; it says,

‘The roundness of these curving sides shows the next level nearer the music that vibrates alone

at the true secret heart of the source of the heavenly gesture that reaches for you then is gone

far away in the background as you have crossed over a threshold you’ve come close to capturing here.

Your own body whispers—this time you have not lost awareness of what it desires as you near

the fair goal of your spirit’s sweet errand this evening. The leaf-shaded breast of the song-island’s heights

is bleeding a slow carmine tear for the grieving attendant whose lonely lunarium rites

must take place in a shift that is stained by a past in which pain gave no quarter. The Moon remained new

through a thousand ordeals while a light that would last but an instant by plain day-world reckoning grew

to impossible magnitude, only subsiding in slow graceful waves as your heartbeat turned round

and the fury that brushed you became a confiding affection that blossomed forth rose-red.’ The sound

of its voice in my heart—this is why I am singing. The lonely lunarium priestess—she—I—

am happy inside to be present to bring this occasion to bear as mere worlds flutter by

in transparent, identical layers. The ache in this body—this fullness is song that knows all

with a love that exceeds words, and yet it conveys itself here through these lines. Do you not hear it call?

17 June 2001

You Are Air to the Body of Song

In the world I shall celebrate, lovers are mortal but love, the immutable essence of song,

the inspired and enlightened one, flows through the course of their changes, devising new meanings and strong

modes of alternate insight by which they may travel through stages of time flesh is wont to recall

as a vestige of shining desire that unravels the moment it seeks to reveal where its all

lies enchanted and wise. To the ones it would signal with news of its beautiful endlessness, dread

very often attends its appearance and triggers a frantic withdrawal to the semblance of dead

useless tissue, a rank self-deception that festers with secret life-sources within its damp snare.

That seeking to enter this world with a message and that seeking ways not to hear it thus share

a remarkably similar tenuous nature. A singing voice measures the distance between

these expanding, contracting, most fragile creations. It gathers a long breath that knows where it’s been:

in the bodies of those who have numbered their series of waking and sleeping dream-lessons as ones

followed closely behind by processions of zeros extending beyond the horizon that runs

through the heart of the universe. Dizzying figures, these beings that waver through veils of their own

helpless making—until they perceive the song-signal that needs them to hold the least trace of the tone

that precedes its full glory a long enough moment to let dread subside without struggle. It will,

as the mind whose idea took on that unholy disguise shifts toward its sweet change. Fair and ill

alike hunger for love’s solemn essence to enter their questioning ken. This is music, within

and without—the inspired turn of lonely lament into praise of the magic that touches the skin

of the body of infinite dreaming in finite appearances, over and over again—

the music of love that is breathed into shining terrestrial forms as they transmute old pain

into strength that is so finely subtle, so strangely capacious of gentleness, can it recall

the sad network of tissues their mortal derangement once told them comprised their entirety? All

will be brought within love’s singing compass—all truly resides at all times there. Delusion feels strong,

but dissolves at the first welcome touch of the beautiful body that breathes you, the body of song.

18 June 2001

Roses Foreshadow Song

The flow of sweet flowers of endless red longing away from the place where they’ll no more abide

in the darkness and silence of eyes—this, my song, is the terrible grace of their being denied

nothing anywhere now. They are fruitful in crimson desire, an elixir of life without end

in the instant before it achieves full dominion. Their pure arcane properties fluently lend

a slight tinge of their nature wherever a passageway opens to welcome their presence and loss

and the change that remains in their wake. They are asking so little, and yield so much joy as they cross

the foreshadows of mystery, holding a lantern of deeply invisible light in their waves

of slow ecstasy tenderly rising in slant rays of wakening insight. From out of the cave

of disaster emerges an ordered procession of star-borne reminders of gardens and seas

that are flown on the color and salt taste whose messages run without number toward the rose-trees

of a world that is knowledge in blossom. Direct and benign in the first overt gaze they allow,

divinely inspired of song’s mind in the second, entirely your own in the third—this is how

you will come into clear understanding by way of their petal-formed lens of strong saturate red.

A far lambent glow through its darkness, the grace of an oncoming quickness that runs through your head

until all inessential intelligence yields to its hugeness of beauty while that which is real

and incisive is rendered much wiser—you steel yourself needlessly, knowing the imminent feel

of its touch will be lovely, as if you would heighten the flood of relief that the moment will bring

in which all your false dreams fall behind you. A sky of astonishing clarity hears itself sing

through a million fine patterns, the bright constellations of home, where the gardens of real roses flow

in an ocean-wide river—the mortal attainment of layer on layer of petals of slow-

motion fragrance that winds to a soft final heartbeat of such aching depth, love itself must respond

with a power that fades into silence so dark in its brilliance and magnitude, what lies beyond

its soft influence sways, all-pervading and gentle, a seemingly little voice rising in waves

from the throat of a lover whose work of relentless desire has attained you this side of the grave.

19 June 2001

The Hue of Heart’s Blood

The bead of live blood in the palm of my otherwise empty right hand—as I struggle to tell

how much love I have gained the long while I have suffered uncanny dimensions to enter and dwell

in the widening scope of my heart—that dark blood is a peerless reminder of how I was born

to a world of immaculate wholeness that flooded my senses the moment I knew I’d been torn

from the veil I had clung to, my shield and my tenuous armor against a material curse

of my mind’s tarnished making. I loved you whenever I could, between lessons and tests that grew worse

over time—that pretense of omnipotence. Time and the thickening loneliness cast by its lack

of essential enlightenment staggered me. Finally, I drew a very faint line at the crack

of a doorway, then gathered my courage about me and entered a radiant sphere where the night

shone as sparklingly crimson as one ancient house made of crystalline rose petals flooded with light

that I reperceive now as pure fragrance, an air so alively enveloping, all that it holds

becomes brilliant with promise. So strongly aware of the meaning of all it portends, vivid golds

and vermilions come singing to life in the body I still carry with me, though flesh is so far

from my thoughts I had almost entirely forgotten it, I feel increasingly near where YOU ARE,

and that feeling allows me to cross the next threshold away from the sad tattered veil I once grasped.

It lies two steps removed from me now. Shining pleasure you mean to me here, be the one I have clasped

in the most sacred visions and dreams of my being through all of my travels, down all of the ways

I have sought love’s enchantment, among all the leaving and loss that has led to this moment whose praise

I shall never recant. Be the work of this journey made vividly whole to my heart once again—

as in truth I am rapidly, happily learning to know you cannot have been otherwise. Pain

once appeared to envelop me; now it is only a ghost fading into a far-away cloud

as beheld from a place beyond time’s hopeless groaning. Your eyes are my universe. Touch me aloud

in the words of your love’s most exorbitant power, and I shall be able to echo its flood

in a voice I’ve possessed all unused till this hour: a song of the beautiful hue of heart’s blood.

20 June 2001

Through the Flow of Song

A widening circle expands all around you, the work of your purposeful movement through space

with an all-alone air past coronas of flowerlike presences, petals arrayed on the face

of an ocean that swells into silence, a blue-black and diamond-bright purity holding your heart

in its powerful reaches as lightly and coolly as if it were all and not merely a part

of its very own substance. Flown out of the circle and into the everywhere-nowhere of still

void immensity, why is a little thought lurking about just outside full awareness? Until

you invite it, it cannot come forward to tell you how lovely it finds you. Its place in the song

you are slowly beginning to notice has held you within its committed embrace all along

is a moaned sweetness calling you into a deeper and more acute mode of perception in which

its unfolding designs will surround you completely with what you desire as a boundlessly rich

lyric passage flows upward within the procession of tones that are nearing a terrible bliss.

For a moment you feel the onset of distress that might tear you apart, but the song perceives this,

and insinuates gentleness so very softly, its tentative lightness of touch meets with no

real resistance, and you are now joyfully fraught with its being within you, an opening slow-

fading traces of dreams have relinquished entirely and love has surrendered on meeting its own

most impassioned existence’s origins. Slyly—because the full meaning of this has been known

to your true heart since lyric enchantment first flooded its most sacred chamber, awaking the will

that lay sleeping in formlessness into the blood of a wonderful body where song would distill

its best essence by way of the fire of the hunger for music wherever it happened to find

its uncanny way forward to take on the sung-into-flower-light circles surrounding the mind

of its timeless emergence—oh you, who are nearing the source of my boundless desire for your word,

your passion, your power of seeing, come clear as the diamond-like ocean of all you have heard

and have learned to be one with. My heart and my reason for singing this night through the widening core

of the love you are now, I shall hold you and be you through wave upon wave of eternity more.

21 June 2001

The Lay of the Secret Sun

Your touch is so wildly electric and yet so elusively melting, the heat of your hand

reaches deep into places I’ve always protected as if they were fragile—but now they expand

all around you like heaven’s own opening vistas, permitting a vantage point I shall enjoy

through your mirroring eyes as the delicate list of my most sacred mind attains true equipoise.

That mind is now seeking to hear the sweet measures whose rising appears in your eyes amid mine.

My love, do you know what this means? Make a gesture within me, that I may receive the bright sign

of your wakeful desire in a manner so heartfelt, my bloodstream will carry its mark everywhere

all throughout this, my body of song. I am part of your everywhere now. We are all that we share

when we mingle, and very much more. Look around you from where you are touching me furthest inside,

and dream with your eyes locked in mine of the sound of the voices that marry their musics here. Glide

all along their uprising harmonic devices with soft breathless silence inside you. The hush

that attends this reception affords greater license to enter new series of chambers where rush

solemn words in which quickness of magic conveys itself, fully developed, toward the degree

of astonishing potency love will attain with your hand in the mystery offered as ‘me’

and confer on your beautiful presence with all-seeing, fervently yea-saying lack of restraint.

You are all that you ever will be, mine completely. Inside you I hear not one word of complaint.

In the resonant field of our singing thus wildly amid such a noble refinement of fires

of enveloping brightness of sound, a delightfully plangent reply to the one who inspires

indescribable rapture to pass the far threshold of bearable joy may require to be heard,

but its pleading for something like mercy is less a retreat from the heights than an inside-out word

urging deeper, more serious heart-penetration. To form the next word, draw a very long breath,

fall beyond all return through my eyes, and be sated. Your love has exceeded the limits of death.

My longing for you and the numberless moments in which we will find ourselves joined in this way

flood through a pure bloodstream I know I have opened and entered forever for you and this lay.

At our heart shines a holiness melted horizon-wide, heaven arrayed where a secret Sun glows

with resplendent assent to cessation of time. This is love’s secret sign: Music here has no close

22 June 2001

Ease

After so many strivings toward a great moment of meeting, a soft pall of weariness flows

all around you—a blanket, a comforter. Knowing how safely you rest in the heart of the rose

that first opened through several slow stages of redness and heaviness, bending the stem’s pliant spine,

and how gently the love still surrounds you that led you to find your true place in its timeless design

as the stain that would later be petals unfolded—this knowing has carried you into a sleep

in which satisfied longing transmutes into gold all the dreams that were nightmares and shows you their deep,

everlasting nobility. One with your essence at all seeming ‘times,’ they are visible now

as a volitive grace of the mind that has tested its courage and sought out the luminous brow

of its counterpart dreamer and braved the true mirror its dark eyes provide. As you drift there, awake

while asleep and completely at rest, you are hearing a silence that you have inspired, a calm lake

in the midst of a universe-ocean that knows you as part of the flow of its purest love-song—

part, yet somehow not less than the whole, as the lake of your being contains it. Come singing along

the contours of a huge, sweet idea, if such would delight you, and feel it as if it were skin

on the form of a being whose answering touch will awaken a wondrous desire to begin

further lessons in love in this instant, or lie with its presence a peaceful while longer: Your choice

will be honored before you have made it. Decide even nothing best pleases you—there is a voice

beyond all comprehension that needs no acknowledgement: Merely to be and not be as you were

and will always not have to remain is its calling. The soft zone of roses whose breathings confer

solemn mystery even while gently withdrawing away from their heart-aching blossoming forms

is a substanceless door ever open. You saw it in visions a world-wind away; you saw storms

that electrified love into limitless passion; you saw and still see what the lingering trace

of desire that might yet in some sweet way unmask you would venture to show you within its own face

should you turn even now and your eyes meet its beauty to find its mild stare drinking in the still sea

of…Exquisite the flow of this silence’s music where love is so easy to be and not be.

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Standing, Look to the End

Posted on June 6, 2025 by J

When I was a girl, Swinburne became my favorite poet because his sounds and rhythms were headlong, and because I sensed a powerful erotic mystery behind his words. He was a publicly professed atheist, but his poems were so pagan they fed my early stages of entry into the mysteries. He was no stranger to those mysteries in action, as I knew that for a certainty when I read his friends’ descriptions of his behavior when he was writing. He would shake and jerk about and–dance. Kundalini a century before the 1960s.

I lose track of what I have shared before and where I have shared it. This may be familiar to some. When I was 18 months old, I watched my slightly older cousin make himself dizzy by spinning around, and I imitated him. My imitation quickly turned from spinning into actual dancing. I did it every chance I had, and never stopped. When I was an older child, around seven or eight years old, I heard a mocking reference on television to some outlandish people called ‘Whirling Dervishes,’ and I knew in my bones what I had been doing. It was sacred to me, too. I could go much, much faster, though, because I was always alone. And I learned how important concealment was when I discovered how men responded to the mere idea. The only one ever permitted to watch, briefly, was a songwriter who composed music for the dance. Performance was not and could not have been part of my life. The curiosity of others disturbed me to the point of shutting down.

For twelve of my most active years, I lived in a single large room where I had a 12-foot dancing circle and no downstairs neighbor. Every other thing about that room was uncomfortable, but dancing there was bliss. Though others were around, I was not worried about noise because the music never needed to be loud and never needed to be insistent. Those who can dance to ‘dance music’ confuse me. I never danced the percussion because I hated the feel of it. The rhythm is in the time signature! I danced the lift of the melody. I can’t tell you how many times I danced to Sul y Blodau, which is more or less a dirge, because the melody has lift I could lean into like a strong headwind. ‘Uplift my spine,’ is what I always asked. That applies to both body and mind. As I became more mature I had less time for shallower music, and from then on it was Dorothy Love Coates.

Until age-related issues caused me to retire from dancing a few years ago, I began and ended every poetic composition by dancing, first to enter the poetic trance, and then to review what I had written down to understand it better. It’s a mysterious process, of course, and one I still don’t know how to describe. It is absolutely not channeling, as I must be closely focused on each word and rhythm, but I cannot account for the actual images and the meanings that I sense as they appear. Whole phrases and sometimes lines come to me intact, but I must still gently coax them into a coherent form. If I could not feel that I were in a particularly receptive state, I would never trust the words; too much opportunity for ego to do its damage, I fear.

The interior place where the real work occurs is the Imaginal, as I have discussed before. It is a shared space. Recently a series of podcasts online about non-verbal autists called The Telepathy Tapes has become quite celebrated, or scorned. Young people who do not speak have expressed through facilitated communication their ability to sense what others are thinking, very accurately. They describe a place they call The Hill where they meet with other non-speaking friends by telepathy. Those familiar with the work of Rupert Sheldrake will perhaps be reminded of his theory of Morphic Resonance. We are all connected to each other, all the time, a human Net of Indra; mostly we block it, but sometimes we see through. The Imaginal, like The Hill, is not available to all; one must be able to focus on its precise frequency in order to get through. Artists of the Imaginal communicate with each other there. One might go an entire lifetime without learning who one’s Imaginal peers are, but I know at least four of mine in ‘real’ life.

After dancing ended, I continued in the poetic work I was accustomed to do, and did not miss it as much as I had expected. I can hear singing in stillness. I do miss it every day as part of my process for getting along in the world, but there’s a story I have told before, and no doubt will again. For now, only know that though I have slowed down, I know everything I have ever learned, and it will all be shared one way or another. Stay tuned for news. Magic is afoot!

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Always Easter

Posted on May 11, 2024 by J

Here is another late-night instant lyric. The Christian imagery is plain, but so is something pagan running alongside it. Poetry meant so much to me when I was young, obsessed me so entirely at times, that I swore to do everything in my power to approach the place true poems come from. Now, after decades of dedicated labor, the poems are telling me (among other things) about the same place from another angle.

It is always Easter here:

10 May 2024

A Lamb Lay

A lamb ate strawberries all day long

and then lay down. This little song

entranced me as I watched it die:

A cloud out of a rainy sky

came starlike, glimmering, flashing wild

to bathe the grey-eyed twilight’s child

who in God’s sight lay down dyed red.

I AM–oh love–the sweet lamb said.

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Tail-Biter, Explained

Posted on May 9, 2024 by J

Here is another ‘tail-biter’–a species of poem in which the ending rings round and reveals the beginning in a different light. Go back and reread, and it will be a different poem that it was the first time.

These poems are pretty spontaneous; there is definitely no forethought. After making so many, the form and style become internalized and minimally conscious. The intent is to capture and elucidate the space between words and thoughts, where images form before coming to the fore. As a dreamworker, I learned to witness the formation of hypnagogia on the threshold of sleep. I actively sought out experiences of liminal states because I understood them to be where real poetry was to be found. I wanted to visit that world’s temples and libraries. This is an artifact:

8 May 2024

This Page in Green

The lilted-edged and high-lifted leaf

that sang and sang through a clot of grief

appears like a vividly emerald hand,

its fingers splayed in a welcome spanned

by veinwork so tender and so complex

it offers itself as an anti-hex

that swiftly negates the once grievous harm

that sounded its carmine aghast alarm–

and turns it to fluid and limpid green–

that through it you’d see what you’ve just seen.

P.S.: Of course I would say ‘ouroboros,’ but I grew up where lamps are best hidden under bushels!

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Lonely Working

Posted on May 7, 2024 by J

‘Here’ is a little story of how I came to be.

Late at night and quick as lightning:

6 May 2024

Your Lonely…

She came dressed in a robe of such shimmering colors–

look at the state of my arms’ little hairs!

No one reminds me so much of my mother–

her noble regard as she strode down the stairs–

and then she gazed over her shoulder at someone

about to materialize. I grew faint.

I too am so like an angel, I shimmer–

but I am no angel; I’m your lonely haint.

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Slippers

Posted on May 5, 2024 by J

It was late at night, as usual. Lines started running through my head. A bit of whimsy slipped through, although it’s serious too. We are slippers in the sense of ‘time slips,’ slipping into the Imaginal:

4 May 2024

In my silver slippers for dancing all night,

I knelt by the path to retrieve a lost light

when under a petal I spied a small man,

and we shared some small talk for a very small span.

He held out his hand, and he opened it wide.

In it a sky lay–a whole ocean skied

with a firmament starry as all Heaven’s mind–

and I knew in my heart I had found my own kind.

My slippers fly under and over the Moon,

and though I am poor, I am wealthy in shoon–

for One flies beside me. He isn’t a god–

he’s music itself being lunarly shod.

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Old-Fashioned

Posted on May 3, 2024 by J

Everything I make is at least a little old-fashioned, but this tiny lyric is especially so. It came to me after a friend shared some verses about flowers:

2 May 2024

Whose Heart?

Your heart describes a fairy-ring

where all the shivered moonbeams sing

in circles in the mushroom grass,

inviting me inside. Each pass,

each beat my little feet dance there

describes a silken web, a snare

that rings you round–It’s moonlight-clear–

who you are now that you are here.

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Beltane

Posted on May 1, 2024 by J

Lately I have marked the ten-year anniversary of my partner’s death. This came last night, after a long break. We shall see what follows:

30 April 2024

Still Beyond Telling

Clear through the midst of the storm as the air rose in columns then swiftly subsided in rain–

a whistle came shrieking. I heard it again and it broke half a heart that had healed wrong again.

I listened with all I had in me and when the wild keenings combined in my hearing insight,

their shards reassembled and showered their blessings on us and all round us. It’s raining tonight.

The needle kept stitching the thin sheets together. Whilst plying itself, without fiber nor hand,

the raindrops that stained the pale page gave their essence, and soon lines appeared that held meanings a planned

departure from deep cosmic space once made fecund with ominous portents and signs from afar–

the marks they were meaning to make as they flew through the eyes of the seamstresses we were and are.

One on each side of a frail bit of tissue, with nothing between us but what will hold song.

Look at me, leaves round a spring where the wind blows with echoes of storm and the raptures of wrong,

mournful measures that used us and then flew away in the merciless manner of petals stars shed.

Look at these, leaves round a sorrowful countenance born to give birth to what’s already dead.

Sometimes when the risings and fallings come fastest, a blur of wild words springs to mind–though words pale

as the flow renders everything round it so musical, muted forgetfulness mouths its sad tale–

till it happens again like the lightning the first time. Numb and then tingling, then pain too entire.

I’ve let it swallow whole lives just to taste it and now I am shining with vivid desire

for a silence the storm keeps in locked rooms so vast but so hidden, their whereabouts cry like a bird

with a rip in its side and it’s leaking and little red elements shimmer and soon I’ll have heard

what I came for again–but I won’t; I’ll have failed it again because sleep’s been a dear friend to me,

and I’ll drown in my bed before leaving it ever to walk through a night where you’ve long ceased to be.

The windows are open; the curtains are swaying; a few fallen leaves meet the dust on the floor

where no dancer will send them airborne in a circle till all they land softly elsewhere. And the door

is wide open as well, for there’s nothing inside that’s one hint of a secret; that secret’s been told

to its death, and its circling about in its coffin and still there’s no dancer; there’s only grave mold

and the storm that won’t end and the flow of the river of song through the bodies as well as the throats

of the ones who were called by the ghost that is poetry wandering between lightning flashes that floats

through an air that is shrieking as if it could never convey but in pain of its own the bird’s cry

that you knew you were leaving alone with a needle without any thread with its throat half bled dry–

before it was made to be woken alive under shadows of leaves where the rain dripped and fell

and you knew you were shining and I would admire you, but where were you headed? I still cannot tell

the beauty that rose up so strangely, so holy and perfect its fragrance grows keen and then cries–

a coldness in columns, a storm drenching lightning–a word of unbeing–a tissue of lies.

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