Excerpts from RV trip to Adirondacks, Cape Cod, New Bedford, Acadia National Park (Maine), Niagara Falls and more:

   
     Acadia!

     Acadia lets out a deafening roar with its ambient movements and unimagined meditation - mountains like waves rising up - but instead of crashing down into the endless pools and bays below, pausing in admiration with a proud stare - reaching upward - shine!

    
     Jazz is a miracle in the long, roadside grasses - saxophones and trumpets interacting with precipitation and sunlight - grasses growing up in a flowing consistency, forever - with infinite detail - longer here and longer there - wild weeds and flowers mixed in - some hidden, others random and expressive like a passionate improv jam - wheat grasses with their large heads swinging - reacting to the passing traffic, an inspiration forming music - turning up earth for millions of seeds, eventually trees - an unannounced miracle - we don’t know how much humanity alters with its movement, but can be certain it doesn’t matter - conducting jazz across the landscape - for the infinite moment.

     Sometimes I wonder - while watching trucks pass by this window - after the temporary blackout and metal wall of movement - will the world that existed before it take a bow and - as the truck vanishes - so lift the curtain on a new world? The metal passes by and presents a red space - a red pulsating space musically invaded by soft falling colors - it’s a visual world with unmeasured sounds and beats - tapping - tapping - trickling - the colors are cold - a peace beyond imagination that could only be real. Blues and greens -  

     Somewhere east of Syracuse, the earth decided to rise up and scrape the sky - heaven is pouring down - the only thing keeping Utica from complete greenout is a bare trunk, exposing the pages of 100 years. The Mohawk River chasing us for a short while, as 100 miles or more flash in a matter of meaningless seconds. I want to drive forever - the Adirondak Mountains act like giants to our east, ripping through the landscape - a majesty greater than any high. Stone walls - shiny black rocks - canyons above our tiny trail - even the moment is reduced to a speck, as everything learned shuts down. Rust flecks in the vast rolling waves of mountains - delivering us to Albany and into the Catskill Mountains - twisting - rising - syrup in the sky and stone faces looking down - tunnels of heaven at 65 mph - Boston hanging somewhere in the distance, I think, as the Massachusetts Turnpike finds itself in a slightly more meditative air. The mountains are tamed by an inviting taste of the ocean - still some 100 miles away - but already washing us of the pulsating landscape and bleeding sky.

     The houses are weathered along the main drag - sprinkled with parks and immaculate, yet real, fortresses - gardens in all directions - and the scent of purple flowers searching for their red and yellow and shy white friends across the way - an American heaven, detached enough from itself to ignore white picket fences and offer prayers to the ocean. The ocean is silent - or as silent and accepting as the most dominant force on earth can be - it’s wisdom is a pillow - carrying on and on and on to the unseen mysteries.

     Seated on a rock ledge - looking out, over reproduction - endless happening - movements - silence - activity and rebirth - formations of proportion - some left to imagination - songs of living - inhabitants and ghosts - sticks of simplicity and crowded lovers making room for thickness and passing admirers - indulging in curves and shelves - islands of nomads - nomadic soil - moss at thousands of feet - silence to the wind and breeze - parallel between the ocean, it’s love and the carpet of mountainous sky - drifting together in a single existence - I and my breath - -my humanity at a loss - I can feel myself drifting in two directions - one swallow - one blade of grass - as attached and floating as possibility …

     Cleveland in our rear view - a moment turning into Toledo - somewhere straight ahead - the Ohio Turnpike and its ticketholders - racing by barns with awkward angles and charming values - the trees stand large and sometimes otherwise - over fields of this and that - beans and soon-to-be corn and everything that roams the outskirts of the midwest - Toldeo is somewhere among this consistent hum - spots of red on either side - inspiration to photographers and wandering roadside musicians - rows upon rows - a lighted way to modest diamonds - and a waiting Chicago.

     A seamless world, lit by dirt paths and stationary healers - the dust of drum beats opening pores - each breath an entrance to the opposite side of my eyes - flutes out of the canopy of blue - reverence - I am everywhere - here is there - there is here - an echoing cathedral - breeze in the dust of the setting sun - sunlit tapestries following the infinite shadow - breathing ...

    ...breathing

     Ears are void and the silence is thunder - flies screaming miles away from mankind - lost in everywhere - lines and trails - stones - life is stationary and nomadic - the weeds at my feet simply are - shadows descending on peaks of wisdom - green and transparent - solid arrows in harmonizing tribes - silence is awake and I am sleeping - sounds in the breeze become feeling - hovering low above the ground - descending into clouds - backward is forward again and never seen - experiences through the juice of paloverde - step by step - the light divided - I am the eyes above - my breath touching distant saguaros - the rocks beneath me, breathing upward - it is me and I am everything - where is my water? I tap the sky - breathing - breathing - breathing

 

breathing -

 

the smell of forever is beyond the silence - leading.

 

     I am screaming in my silence - clouds and dust and myself - my leg is numb and feeling is listening - eyes painted yellow on tan horizons - bare trees feeding simplicity - resting gods.

 

     Legs dangling over everlasting silence - stillness beneath - distance, a perception of my being -

     majesty is real in the call of circling hawks -

     a meditating earth -

     acceptance -

     death is soaking in pools of life - green and growing - white and spreading without movement -
     forever is - staring through the sun.

 

     Phoenix flickering in the distance -the sky is black with pink - I'm standing among the silhouettes - soldiers of imperfection - blasted in black - saguaro silence -

breathing -

slightly bending -  walking through a dreamy photograph -

waves of black standing in rows - leaving doors for the sky -

wind is walking - waking - and now it's here, and gone -

like a dream - sketched and smiling - the endless waves -

black in the absence of the moon - between a second roar of the wind and silence.

 

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      Excerpts from Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota

     Speech is loud and there are no words - a thick air squeezed between the silence of ringing ears - heaven moves above my eyes like an infinite shelf, with holes through blue certainty - my eyes are found and searching - my pulse thinning into the heat and air around me - movement through stillness - serenity through absolute - millions are watching - and still, perfect silence - harmony - like a splash of orange that swallows a stroke of earth - and exhales a mist of life into oneness.

This is solitude.

 

    
     Stillness is love across the migrating fog and bedtime waters - the call of the loon echoing off walls of purity - a song breathing in rhythm with the air it’s entertaining - rings of movement as gentle as the next and anything - sound is the same as white with different colors.

 

     The water has a heartbeat, sketching pink on the horizon - below the edge- where white makes black and white again - the light, aware of what my dreams and taste have mentioned - curiosity is resting, soaking in the morning muse.

     The day is a variation of color, with pigment in the air. I can taste the sky.

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     Excerpts from Miami, Key West, Calica and Playa Del Carmen, Mexico

     Out of the clouds and into Ft. Lauderdale – visions of roadside San Juan - spirits and tin and dust and weathered, behind walls and spray-painted fences. Junkyard movies and acceptance embraced with smiles unknown to faces beyond today. I feel San Juan out the Greyhound bus windows, with my baby staring silently and wide-eyed into the blue of smell and the red of a foreign reality – coated in laughter and uncertainty through blue eyes and lashes preserving innocence.

     Overhead, darkness again – wrestling with the force of gravity and wind and absolute nothingness. Energy in the absence of friction is mezmorizing. As I stare at this notebook through the bottom of my empty glass – staring through the plastic, unsure of which moment, which day or what reality the focus of the next word will become. Hemingway on my mind as I look to Cuba in the night from my seat aboard the invisible Fascination. The mighty ship crawling through the wonder of the world. How can you not let all resistance fly away violently in the breeze? The constant breeze above my head …

 

     The lights on the shores of Calica, now reduced to my memory or whatever that stands for. Calica and the wonder of its never-ending forest – trees, tangled forever – my first view of the Yucatan.

 

     Heavy machines and industry – limestone rocks with sweating bodies under an unforgiving sun. The reality of it is awesome. Humidity welcomed with eyes into the tangled, aimless expanse of forever forest – and hints of Mayan life. A few scattered tin roofs from the height of our bus – rolling over a narrow stretch of cement road through something between a Mexican jungle and the rainforests of my dreams and lost imagination. The Mayan people living hidden, miles into the tangled web of trees in absolute simplicity and respectability – struggling with my eyes. An ancient culture.

     Into the streets of Playa Del Carmen. Young men mixing cement in storefront openings. The charm of one shop to the next, open to the interlocking stones, cooled by overhanging balconies and red flowers and a tropical canopy of streetside vegetation. Women with yellow fingers, tapping across canvas – creating their own livelihoods for tomorrow. There is an instant love moving between the native restaurants – far beyond the invasion of American influence. Who lives in the rooms overlooking this harmony? Do their windows swing open as their bodies absorb the hallucination of perfection and enlightenment? I will think about these people for days …

     The green and blue of Del Carmen, crashing over bare feet and crying souls. Aloe falling from the sky and speaking lightly on the Gulf, moving inland through the cracks of life and wandering souls. Every moment, I feel embraced – a stranger in familiar love. I can smell Belize in some direction but I’m not sure which. As I stare at each individual star with clarity, through the breeze above my eyes.

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Writing from Wichita, Kansas during River Festival (summer 2007)

An earthquake of green bleeds across the sky

explosions of yellow, red and white

as a stampede of humanity crashes the intersection of Waco and Douglas

color and flashes from beyond the moon bounce off the historic Broadview

downtown Wichita poetry

hundreds of windows

watching thousands pack the streets

green and pink and thunder, cracking blessed silence in the Saturday evening sky

 

Tents and tarps pitched across the banks of the Arkansas River, pronounced Ar-Kansas

because Kansas owns this day

loud with everything

laughter and dust lit up in cracked warehouse windows

thousands in the shadows of a symphonic tribute to Ella Fitzgerald

families watching from the open-air, second floor convention center concourse

and the sound of Deep Purple somewhere near the masses

 

Wichita crowded against the blockaded Douglas Street bridge

eyes on fire with weekend laughter,

nothing like my perception of what I’d find beyond the rolling green expanses of a surprising Oklahoma 24 hours earlier

 

… quiet streets in the aftermath of the River Festival

stacks of amps and stage crews

feet passing left and right as I made my way down Douglas in search of the Broadview

building after building

and a certain charm and what tomorrow would bring

every step as exciting and unfamiliar as the last

people shuffling in the darkness, ducking around corners

traffic lights red and the glow of the occasional street lamp on silent roads

I wonder what’s beyond downtown Wichita

 

… quaking, green again

relentless and an applause that deafens the night

spirit thundering

smoke falling above my head

I want to run through the downtown streets with eyes closed,

imagining the color of an exploding Wichita

and her twisting sculptures.

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Writing from top of White Rock Mountain in the Ozarks of northwest Arkansas (April 5, 2008)

Footsteps into yellow consciousness

with soaring wings above my head

moss breathing invisibly, purple rising modestly

mudmen to my left, an aimless roadmap through the air

lungs creating wildly

at peace with the unknown river

 

The nuances and sounds of intricacy

buzzing, gliding – like cotton mountains

laughter moving prominently

layers of rock and layers of thought

consciousness in a pool of tan disintegration

 

Moss breathing invisibly, purple rising modestly

 

Yesterday’s leaf, submerged in tears from the sun

bathing in the sounds of every direction -- and the particles between

lungs creating wildly

at peace with the unknown river

 

White and wonder

the songs of unconditional freedom

pillows beneath my boots -- and the echo of a single woodpecker

somewhere among the tangled web of fingers

guiding moss to the light of day

 

Breathing invisibly, purple rising modestly

 

Yesterday’s leaf, submerged in tears from the sun

bathing in the sounds of every direction -- and the particles between

lungs creating wildly

at peace with the unknown river

 

A yellow butterfly and salt-stained trumpets

dangling like daredevils above the mysterious green patch

like a grain separated from humanity

as the white, wet foam hikes down the mountainside

surrendering its path to gravity

bathing the Ozarks in the feast of tomorrow

 

rising modestly.