The great misfortunes of our time involve losing places we love to our industrial specie’s lust for more. What is enough? In moments of candor I know I can’t answer that question honestly and apply it to my habits because our whole way of living in this mechanized world involves no temperance. That way lies … More A #poem about #despair in the face of our lack of limits
“We glide along the ecliptic” We glide along the ecliptic,realizing and apprehendingthoughts that crawled, bloomed from birth. Become conscious. Be consciousness.Possess conscience bewildered cynic,from God’s viewpoint in your skull’s chapel. Imagine, you, Rodin’s ThinkerSit: chin to fist, elbow to knee –viewing your own Cartesian theater. The dual internal habitatDrive with will, with appetite, care,push a … More When you don’t believe in God, where is our beauty?
This emerged from the simple thought of wondering about hemlock cones. “Wanderer” Peregrineplucks hemlock conespauses then ponders,Who is not here?
Sometimes a poem just comes from some small inkling. One day I got stuck on thinking about blood feuds, grief, and the dry taste you get in your mouth when you become outraged or cry too much. Or both. This is the fifth version of this poem. “In This Land We Call Home” i. … More In this land we call home, where do we go?
I wrote this after traveling through the Badlands a few summers ago. The landscape confronted me with the obviousness of my limits as a human person. In one moment I felt keenly and very painfully aware of many of the things I’ve done or experienced that made me feel like a solitary and disconnected person. There … More “Day Passes Day”: A paean to loneliness
What do we do? What happens? What should we do? Most every piece of good evidence points to the conclusion that industrialized humanity’s machines have changed most of the biosphere and altered the planet’s physical systems. Homo economicus has altered the climate enough that the atmosphere, the oceans, and the living Earth behave differently than … More Feeling #climate change, knowing it, writing #poetry from it, and thinking about #Hume
This poem has too many parts to parse. Each line a morsel. And it’s on its 8th or so revision. Still, as much as I can’t parse it, and you don’t want me to parse it, I have to say that when I watched the Oregon coast and ran along it from sea level to 1000 or … More When I ran on the cliffs I thought that freedom lives in pelican’s wings
I posted the first completed version of “The Rites of the Living” earlier. And I’m a compulsive reviser. Poems leave the pencil of fall on the keyboard curtain and then I immediately start playing with them. They grow in the sunlight of my imagination, sometimes getting horribly tangled and messy with arrows going here, scratches … More The joy of revising a poem – “The Rites of the Living” again and again
Yesterday I posted a piece on lovers called “Your Fey Mane.” Lately I’ve been reflecting on love and lovers a lot. Sex, our acts of sharing hands and lips, the bonding of our bodies, they captivate me. Us. I’ve come to a place where I think of all of our ways of sharing ourselves as … More The Rites of the Living – Love, Nature, Sex, and Affection
Lovers are the most captivating things of all. “Fey Mane” Coquette, you chew your lip and shake your head,surprised by these moments,still smiling a nose-curled invitation. Lavender drifts through cool air.Mahogany irises back away, toe to heel to wall.Your fey mane, brings cheeks out in relief against white walls, a dark living frame. Do I … More “Your Fey Mane” – A love poem
Peter Walks for Democracy 