Hiro Protagonist

The man who never alters his opinion
Is like standing water
And breeds reptiles of the mind.
--William Blake

Sometimes there is nothing like reading haiku that a friend has written.

Under the Harvest Moon
by Carl Sandburg

Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.

Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

"The optimist proclaims that
we live in the best of all possible worlds;
and the pessimist fears this is true."

-- James Branch Cabell
from The Silver Stallion, 1926.

In the stirring climax to Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, the whaleship Pequod is sunk in an epic battle with a giant white whale. Contemporary readers, however, might not realize that Melville's fiction was based on an actual event: the 1821 sinking of the Nantucket whaleship Essex by an enormous sperm whale. Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex details the Essex's ill-fated journey, illuminating a terrifying drama not included in Moby-Dick -- the fate of the survivors after their ship went down.

Five Weeks without rain
Dust, fires, smoke make skies hazy
Come rain, dance for rain.

Wild Horse

I'd like to call you my wild horse
and feed you silver sage

I'd like to paint my poems
with desert tongued clay
across
your back
and ride you savagely
as the sweet and southern wind
through a green and wild Kentucky

I'd like to make you my secret sun
blazing dark and red in the orchards
and I would steal away
to watch the way
your silver belly bends
and bows beneath me

I'd make you my wings
in the foothills of Montana
my lover in the oceans of the world

I'd make you my many calico children
and scatter you
across
the green memories of home

I'd be your hungry Valley
and sow your golden fields of wheat
in my womb


The Bony Ribs of Adam

I left the bony ribs of Adam
for the fruit
of my own
personal desire

Its scent still heavy
upon my flesh
my absence still
thorn
to his side

But now how my belly
hollows and aches
      craving seed
      craving kisses
but outside the road hisses

and I find myself
packing girlishness
in an old leather bag

love stepping lightly
away from the door


"a night without armor", a poetry book by Jewel

BUOYANCY

Love has taken away my practices
and filled me with poetry.

I tried to keep quietly repeating,
no strength but yours,
but I couldn't.

I had to clap and sing.
I used to be respectable and chaste and stable,
But who can stand in this strong wind
and remember those things?

A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself.
That's how I hold your voice.

I am scrap wood thrown into your fire,
and quickly reduced to smoke.

I saw you and became empty.
This emptyness, more beautiful than existence,
it obliterates existence, and yet when it comes,
existence thrives and creates more existence!

The sky is blue. The world is a blind man
squatting on the road.

But whoever sees your emptiness
sees beyond blue and beyond the blind man.

A great sould hides like Muhammad, or Jesus,
moving through a crowd in a city
where no one knows him.

To praise is to praise
how one surrenders
to the emptiness.

To praise the sun is to praise your own eyes.
Praise, the ocean. What we say, a little ship.

So the sea-journey goes on, and who knows where!
Just to be held by the ocean is the best luck
we could have. It's a total waking up!

Why should we grieve that we've been sleeping?
It doesn't matter how long we've been unconcious.

We're groggy, but let the guilt go.
Feel the motions of tenderness
around you, the buoyancy.

      --Rumi