I have known Chris since he was born.  In fact, I had something to do with his being born in the first place – I am his dad.   Chris has always been a total joy for his dad.  He is a beautiful, sweet and smart bouncing boy.  I guess cutting his umbilical cord was very special for me.  His birth was an incredible experience I will never forget.  He will not remember that of course.  Chris and I just enjoy being with each other.  He never gets enough of cutting up and playing.  He has boundless joyful energy.  He is a very sensitive and caring little boy.  His teachers at Flat Irons Elementary School called him the “lover” because, even though tends to be bigger than the other kids, he was always helping them with little things and was sensitive to their needs.  I always say Chris, and his sister Melissa, were like the sun rising in his dads life.

Mark (dad)

Heights ablaze in god-fed passion.  Wild whispered wisdom not-yet mortal.  Ancient meadows, bathed lovers with serene ages not human…and we who stand on peaks cloud hidden may glimpse a gusting, time-interrupted remnant of another sun filled glory that is not our sun, our time, but draws us up towards a day yet to be…

A Christmas message from the gods and goddesses high atop ‘ol Sugarloaf…

Judaism asks us to welcome the stranger.  Buddhism informs us of detachment.  Christianity tells us to believe in light and love.  All seem lofty and high but they are not.  It is simple and children have been telling us all along how to do it – Pretend!  Children make up games to welcome with eager expectation what is not visible.  They revel with excitement and expectation.  We indulge their imaginations with Santa and presents under the tree because we know and love how it lights up their spirits.  And so, we as adults need to remember to pretend and welcome with great delight beauty, truth and grace.  Gravity produces weight, heaviness and age.  Passivity is the spirits response to gravity.  Judgements, negativity, depression, withdrawal are identification of the spirit with the frailties of the body and the heaviness of gravity.  Passivity is attachment to death, decay and age.  It is the spirit welcoming it’s own darkness.  But the spirit is intrinsically free and detached.  We can welcome truth and beauty.  We can pretend there is light even if we do not see or feel it.  We can hope against all hope.  Our spirits can soar with eagles.  Blessed are the poor in spirit for they can choose an otherworldly light.  The spirit can not only be detached from gravity – it can envision beauty and flight.  It can revel in height.  It can suck in the beauties of vistas that are not apparent and pretend.  The funny thing is when one’s spirit pretends there is lightness and beauty with great delight and eager expectations as children awaiting Santa one finds that at some point it is no longer necessary to pretend.  The stranger has arrived, Santa has come and one fly’s in heavenly realms with the incredible lightness of being full of beauty, truth and love.  We are detached from everything and free to choose to move in and out of our high places.  In this way our spirit chooses a new kind of youth, a youth that never ages or deserts us, a lover that has become us and in so doing releases us from gravity, the endless cycle of death and rebirth, we become the saviors of our universe and move on to cloud hidden heights!  I wish you all the best!

 

Mark

All these voices play in me

(Not to be confused with multiple personality

Or…maybe, to be

Or not)

 

 

Boulder told her

Told us all

Suzanne’s frozen

In us all

 

Jon Benet

Left the fray

Boulder told her

Y’all have to stay

 

Smokin that cheap beer

No fear

Kids no longer dear

Slurpin, burpin

At a quarter ’till three

 

Flaming rage

Up on the hill

Boulder’s finest

Feeling ill

We all wake up

Feeling ill

Where’s my pill

So I won’t feel

 

“Something strange is happening here

What it is ain’t exactly clear”

 

So much rage

So much sage

Sassafras tea

And murder me

 

Sinkin on a stinkin bubble

 

In alpine’s gate

We need a break

 

For mountain wonder

Makes you wonder

 

Hell, guess that’s why I live in the mountains

 

 

 

 

 

My soul will yearn for the other

Your soul was the other

My soul cries for the young love

Not the one too young to love

Your soul was joined to all as youth

Not complete with your old soul

 

His heart will grieve for the one true love he never had

For the moment when all is new and possible

 

She filled her years with sun

She sang her loves for one

(He was married with kids)

(She was single with an adult kid)

He knew her before

She toyed with his old soul

She called him from beyond

He moved her in ways she knew not

 

Then, for a moment, as one-other

 

(She knew her kid was a lie)

(He knew his old love was gone)

Years dripping with her spring loves

Springs to come wet his soul

Heavy dew-moaned leaves

Glistening sun-promised buds

Her leaves too old for love

His buds too young for love

(The past recedes)

(The future opens)

 

She longs for the past that never was

 

He longs for the future that never will be

 

They dance

In and out

From and to

Heart song is spirit flight

 

 

 

One sweet day hovering over the highest peaks

My son and I shared a sacred moment only father and son know.

We sat on the high deck in the high sun and sucked and slurped watermelon.

We drenched ourselves in its juices

And delighted ourselves in its sweetness.

We ate with no thought of being full.

The sun shone.

We eagles soared above our heads.

We bathed ourselves in the sweet juices of life without inhibition.

We touched the face of our eternal love

And he said, “I like you daddy.  I like mommy and I like sister – nothing can hurt me.”

By this then I knew that my job as ‘dad’ was complete.

 

Sweeter than honey

My darling sweetness

Sweetness that is not me

Sweetness that lights up the world

Liquid sweetness that takes you out into the world

You flow as future, your future

I marvel at your life

I live in a secret place

That death will not erode

That place of your beauty

That place of your joy

That place of your hope

What you are illuminates world

On you, world renews itself as I fade

But I fade content in your beauty

Content to have seen and known you

I have seen the face of the future that is not me

And I have loved you to my core and beyond

I have touched the face of God in your sight

And your beauty leads me in ways you now know not

Towards another

Towards the hint in well crafted words

Towards the gleam in youth

Towards the rustle of showering yellow fall leaves

Towards what only touches us tangentially

But informs us of what we now can not know

That guides, informs and measures

Worlding and Horizon

By that which is not

Worlding and Horizon

You are that my child

And I wonder and marvel at how you are that

And not me, my thoughts

You are the possibility of the impossibility

Of the not me that nevertheless baths my soul in radiant warmth

And calls me beyond my life

To future without future, without temporality, world, horizon as mine

But in your sweet face

A future not mine unfolds

And I kiss my ground that gives way before you

In love, I welcome your way into the world

As you welcome my way out of the world

And for these precious moments I am touched by the trace of eternity when I touch you my sweetest Melissa.

 

Who is this ghost that moves through my bones,

This ghost that stirs my entrails?

A flavor of something forgotten that never was.

I long for a love that never was and never will be.

My securities hinge on the unseen,

They long for the unborn.

My fears paint this phantom with shades of terror.

What threatens the center of my universe with its dark vortex?

What shakes my soul with its beckoning call?

The promise of new love is like the threat of dying of thirst in the desert when the coolest of lakes is always just over the next dune.

Only love can entice the old soul back into the light, into the forgetfulness of youth, into the threat and promise of the new.

And yet, love musingly hides.

It plays with our affections and disappears.

Its most erotic moments are as real as the sun.

When it leaves it ushers in the dark night of the soul.

It creates day and night all the while no one knows it.

It makes the young old and the old young.

It wettens the driest, most parched spirit with its juices and then returns its voluptuous, paradismal creation to the desertous night.

Oh ghost of my longings,

Oh breasts from which I long to feed,

How can you define my day and night,

My years from birth to death,

And yet – I never knew you?

Oh ghost from whom my soul rises and falls,

Oh phantom that plays in and through all my exteriorities and creates my interiorities.

Love is the ghost that never was but always will be.

 

Something mighty moves through flesh and bone and star and galaxy.

Whatever it is that fixes the stars in place also fixes the one true love in our hearts.

And if that one true love does not recognizes us

We live in the shadow of tragedy

We die in the moment that never was

 

And yet beauty and truth

With a still, small voice call us

They comfort us

They entice us

And we have no choice but to live

Live in beauty and truth

And yet die without our one true love

Such a life is hard to overcome

Some cruel trick

Some other movement that can’t be moved to

Silence

Moments

 

Our days are filled with beauty and truth

And yet some movement that can’t be moved

Moves in our souls

And yet some movement that can’t be moved

Moves in our souls

Again for this life

For these moments

That fill us

And she walks past me

Knows me not

Cares not

 

But universes speak from my heart to her

Galaxies spin for her

Yet she knows me not

She is not

I have become the unmoved mover

My spirit moves over the face of the void.

 

Something beyond her calls, beckons

But that something can’t be kissed

Can’t be touched or touch back

Like only she could

She marks the place of my birth and my death and all the moments in between

And she knows not.

My place, she, knows me not

And yet speaks with the beauty of the universe

And the truth of love.

These things only fill her absence.