April 4, 1974

I’m thirty-four today. And I’m so much more than I’ve ever been before. I love so much more than I’ve ever loved before. And the pain, it surfaces when I’m alone, when there’s no one to hide it from. An antenna of emotion I am. Sometimes, filtering music or literature through the channel of my soul, I cannot hide it even when judgment is mere feet away. Perhaps it is my most valuable attribute: Empathy. I didn’t ask to be able to feel this much.

But I do.

“So I walk up on high
And I step to the edge
to see my world below.
And I laugh at myself
while the tears roll down.
'cause it's the world I have known.
Well it's the world I have known.” ~ Collective Soul


Those might not be the exact lyrics but there the ones in my head right now.

Love, James

That Feeling

Original energy encompasses
the senses. As the universe
suddenly opens her eyes

every follicle on the body becomes alive
every hair is stimulated, stands
receives signals

like tiny antennas of emotion
absorbing yet radiating
simultaneously

so that it’s the spirit from within
that connects with the skin
that opens up the pathway

to the light
so that all
becomes

one.

She Cries

She cries

in her car
alone, actively listening
to the song playing on the radio

She participates
expresses the words
entering her mind
then bursting from her lips
instantaneously

the music penetrates
layer after frozen layer
until it finds the inner-most
realm of soul, still as warm

as the day she was born

and it is from this solitary place
deep within the nucleus of herself
behind the closed doors of emotion

that she cries.




I cry in the car
all the time. Sadness
is my closest companion.

So, I channeled the poet for her, whoever she is.

I’m working on another piece that explores
the connection between music and the depth of our souls.

Perhaps I’ll put it up for a day or two.


Thanks for reading, and for being my friend.

Love, James.

Stand in the Light

Stand in the Light

Even though
the cold lies
just beyond this window

on this side
winter wanes
as my face and chest are revived

revived with the warmth from millions of miles away

my stomach, too, warms as I lean in
closer, over
the kitchen counter

paying no mind to the
few greasy forks
and baby bottles
that protrude from the soapy sink water

I glance into the eye of the sun
swear I see the wingtips of a light angel: stretching
blinding me with the brightness of an ineffable beauty

and I look away
close my eyes
and turn back again

lean into illumination
further into the light and absorb
absorb the light from millions of miles away

and something calls to me
to stay, to stand in the light
of this cold January day

Morning

Morning

Fog rises
Sunlight
falls upon the mountain
snowy white

And the darkness
of night
hides
once again.

In the Morning Night

searching corridors
of night, I find Truth hiding
in a darkened room.


the bad time is here.
the cold time.
the sit in the kitchen
with no shirt and absorb
the cold time. the
brain of pain time.
writing with a black ballpoint
pen time. the no real light time.
the dark time. This is the bad time.


out here, in the morning night
3:00 a.m. finds me again
waiting for the sun

while praying for clouds
and wishing for a peaceful dream.




Good Night.

Her Name: Bright as the Sun

When she would go to the edge of town, peeking up through the sea of tall, golden grass, he rode his strange metal horse, but instead of four legs, it rolled on two wheels. As he would pass, she would raise her head, just above the tassels of grass, so that the deep blackness of her eyes watched his feet, shoed in brown leather, peddle his bicycle down that dirt road with dust streaming from his back tire and into the air, trailing behind him like the unseen scent-cloud of a defensive skunk, and sending out a signal with her quiet laugh. Before he could turn his head, usually so fast that his funny-looking cap’s bill would spin to the left side of his pale but extraordinarily handsome (so she believed) face, she would submerge herself beneath the surface, leaving only slight movements of grass that could easily be described as the wind.

And so, twice a day, every day for more than a week, he traveled, on his bicycle, down the same stretch of road, trying to catch a glimpse of whom it was on the other end of that entrancing giggle. One thing he knew for sure was the sweet, soft laugh had to belong to a female, goddess of the planes. ‘Perhaps, she’s a fish who laughs and swims through oceans of sparse brown grass, awaiting to kiss me, alas, she will smile, alas,’ he wrote in his journal one day, while contemplating her existence and stopping to eat a sandwich, underneath a gigantic oak that shielded him from the harsh heat of that dry summer day.