A mass of sorrow mixed with blood

My mother is calling
and I never tried to hear
all my life I have lived in fear of fear
seeing only red
the color of blood
watching only for the rain
to cleanse everything with mud
I have been waiting for so long
just to find you here
waiting so many years
wanting nothing but to torture you-
into loving me....
my deepest , darkest fear
is that you will not know me
that you will pass me by...
and then my eyes will cry
but not me....
for my heart is not a heart at all
it is but a mass of sorrow mixed
with blood...
and now I am waiting for the
filth cleansing mud.

CLJ 1997

Somebodies old socks have torn

Somebodies old socks have torn
and I never meant to be a bag
with a hole in it-
not the least bit of cares
but a worry undutiful to the mind
with your beefcake junksters
riding in the passenger seat
and you hit the gas
no movement as you jerk the wheel
across the road your dignity ran
(at least you know you had it)
but as the wind sweeps
and the sun goes down
a tiny tear is used to wash my cares
and I find a rose under the stairs
it has my name on it-
like a hero from the movies,
a none other than comical character
I see that I have been born
and my mother eats panty hose
to keep her warm in the winter
my sisters all laugh
and my brothers aren't alive
(I never had any)
so as I cough up integrity
I try to close my eyes
without shutting them
and I chase away the worry
and I don't complain....

CLJ 1997

Feeding in Progress

Tiger
Came to me in Dreamtime
Last night
Such
Presence, Will, Intent

I was close to tiger,
Yet Aware
Of its immense Power
It took my right hand
Into
It's mouth
Playfully , gently, with teeth
Penetrating gaze
To tell me
Remind me
I had not fed it, in a long time
I knew it could rip my arm off
If it chose
But it was choosing simply
To alert me
Of my neglect

I remembered then
All
Of it
Wistful that I had let it go hungry
Trying to remedy
The situation with
Meat

And the proximity
Of this fabulous beast
To me
To my knowing
The seemingly Tamed Tiger
Pacing
Hungry
A force of nature
Being released
From my own psyche
Awoke
My primal Will

It Was so obvious
That the Feeding
Was Now
In progress

9-20-2021

Recipe for biocessation

A long slow slide into degradation…
shuffled into the perfect
recipe for biocessation
Everything that you have been taught to fear
Is backwards
The swords of discrimination
Are lacking more each year

Prepping you for the greenhouse
You’ve been potted
In depleted soil
For the smart dome that invades
Your biome
And becomes your home
It’s almost here
You’ve been prepped and steered
Along the abyss
The Judas kiss
From the many tiered
Mirror
Of your fears
Here

Create panic , hide from the sun
Straight into the blue light of the floodlights
That mine sight and tie your eyes
Too tight
To run….

You are a brief elaboration
Of a tube
That stretches mouth to ass
Filled with steller mass
There is a light show within
Your skin
Inside
Where life begins to dine
On photons
And digest the Aeon
Trapped in time

biology uses light’s duality to sculpt life
What are you being sculpted into
In this blue light haze
A maze of fading dreams
Owned now by the real
Estate Agents of Virtual Things
That occupy your inner life
And nullify your Imaginal
Mind
Running from the blind
Minotaur
Hungry inside his circuitry
Waiting for the tender feast
Prepared
Carefully
And risen like yeast
Inside the meat
Suits
Who no longer need
To bleed.

9-9-24

Turning Point

👁❤️👁TURNING-POINT👁❤️👁

The road from intensity to greatness
passes through sacrifice.
~Kassner

For a long time he attained it in looking.
Stars would fall to their knees
beneath his compelling vision.
Or as he looked on, kneeling,
his urgency's fragrance
tired out a god until
it smiled at him in its sleep.

Towers he would gaze at so
that they were terrified:
building them up again, suddenly, in an instant!
But how often the landscape,
overburdened by day,
came to rest in his silent awareness, at nightfall.

Animals trusted him, stepped
into his open look, grazing,
and the imprisoned lions
stared in as if into an incomprehensible freedom;
birds, as it felt them, few headlong
through it; and flowers, as enormous
as they are to children, gazed back
into it, on and on.

And the rumor that there was someone
who knew how to look,
stirred those less
visible creatures:
stirred the women.
Looking how long?
for how long now, deeply deprived,
beseeching in the depths of his glance?

When he, whose vocation was Waiting, sat far from home-
the hotel's distracted unnoticing bedroom
moody around him, and in the avoided mirror
once more the room, and later
from the tormenting bed
once more:
then in the air the voices
discussed, beyond comprehension,
his heart, which could still be felt;
debated what through the painfully buried body
could somehow be felt- his heart;
debated and passed their judgment:
that it did not have love.

(And denied him further communions.)

For there is a boundary to looking.
And the world that is looked at so deeply
wants to flourish in love.

Work of the eyes is done, now
go and do heart-work
on all the images imprisoned within you; for you
overpowered them: but even now you don't know them.
Learn, inner man, to look on your inner woman,
the one attained from a thousand
natures, the merely attained but
not yet beloved form.👁❤️👁

~Rainer Maria Rilke, trans.by Stephen Mitchell

Vagabond Rambler

Vagabond Rambler

I am the pupil in the center of the eye
I am the pupae in the center of the sky
I am the purpose of the moon and the mind
I am the purplepink lustre of the rotting rind.

I am moved not by your manipulation
I am smoothed not by your capitulation
I am removed from your observation
I am soothed by your undulation.

But what does this mean, what does this mean
Where does this lead me, the silver queen
the rampant wanderer of time and rhyme
the vagabond rambler through moistened minds?

And where does this take me, what forgotten land
what does this make me, and by whose hand
where will I lay my weary head my friend
when the path that I tread winds to the end?

Charleen Johnston
2005

I fight the seizures that shake me

(Old Modeling photo San Francisco 2001
I fight the seizures that shake me
make me into
another plume
it takes all I have sometimes
to free the lines
that have been subdued
...placed in tomb
below layers of rotten cocoon.
I am squinting,
the brightness of the lightness
and the tightness of the room
seems too much to bear
today
in my grey...
I am born of flesh, enmeshed
and torn from the silvery star
that beckons me
reckons with me
it'd be better where we are
if we could find
that place
that face,
that sunny stream of shining lace
that surrounds the
space
inhabited
by you...

4-11-2002

)