hey canvas,
I’m gonna make a sail
outta you. or a painting,
or a pair of pants.

canvas, you say
you’re material.  I say
I love you more than
the material.  spirit says

god made you bleachy-pale
for the writing upon, tough
stitchability, force a curved needle
to do that and it’ll punch my hand,

don’t care.  god’s impersonal enough
not to care about you if it’s better
for me to make you creation-ground.
I’ll get my blood on you, canvas,

and no backtalk, no ticktock
or ripsnap when the wind gets at
your back.  mine, canvas, you’re mine
and I’ll sail you wear you cover you

in vision and oils maybe all at once.
I can do anything, says god.  not yours,
mine.  thank the bastard of my head,
he’s on my side.  canvas old buddy,

you’re never gonna know what hit ya.

This is how it happens: your voice finds its word
and it’s suddenly bigger than you are.
You’re carried to the top
of its eruption…

now you’re lava,
ash, sticking to cars and walls
of compounds in tropical plains
at the foot of the word,
it builds a cone
so steep, you’re going to slide off,
become a refugee fleeing it…

then you stop,
dig in, be honest and ruthless
with yourself: you were always
a nascent chimera, embryo dragon,
you roared but didn’t know
how to breathe fire or how to be
your combinations, here is your chance to learn
as you tumble across
smashed landscape of home,
your backpack full of notes, letters;

and you craft the next word
now, your voice so shattered settling
like Atlas moving a little to make the weight
bearable, now you are blackwhite crawler on moonscape,
first time visitor to naked rock: perhaps
traces of past natives, but who cares, you’re here…

and now it is fire and now it is a sea boiling up ahead,
and it’s time for the next word,
you’ll coin it
for the pinpoint bludgeoning of the rolling soil
cooling to blue now, red now and again and after,
roads melt, glass melts, salt melts,
the sugary drug of not caring where the word goes
and how the voice roughens around it;
for you know now you were never
just a throat, a lung,
you were always more
than a bearer of air in a vessel
you didn’t build.

You’re a damn good pure sight to see
for those who flee this, looking back at you
surfing your voice on that word,
riding atop the archaic spit
of the mantle below the crust
making new land
that once tilled will be rich.

Whenever it stops killing
and smoldering, wherever it stops,
that’s where you deepen into your own.

That when you
can claim it.  Call yourself writer,
story teller, poet.  Call yourself
volcano surfer.  Call out the name
you choose for it.  Pick the next word.
Call up the fire.

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations