Poetry
With well over 4,300 poems written over a 50 year span of life, only a tiny taste is given here.
Seven books of Blake's poetry are available on Amazon
FALLING WITHOUT FEAR
I loathed myself for many years.
How could I ever deserve the freedom of sunlight
being so shamed, so broken?
But the sun didn’t seem to care about faults and frailties:
it just kept on pouring out its gift — being pure gift —
being raging radiance.
Slowly, my heart softened to the gift giving
of star light, of planets,
of each heartbeat, every breath.
What might lie on the other side of grief
when it is finished, when the Phoenix arises
in a wild forgiveness of flame?
This is beauty… falling without fear,
effortless, sinking through sky,
into the infinite softness that catches,
into some other world.
INTO THE SILK AND CHERRIES
Into the silk and cherries
a woman’s magic smells.
Ah… the feel of melting minds
in the hot and soft,
in the sweet, slippery close,
in the perfumed breath,
in burning breathing.
I close my eyes into
a cloud of sparkles
and my budding, swollen body
drips droplets of cinnamon
and cream.
OPEN YOUR DOOR TO THE WILD
AND BLUE
Open your door
and let the blue sky pour through
all over you,
let sunshine splatter you gold
and blue, and a foamy
silk of cloud caress you.
Let the curious fragrance
of summer flowers
come creeping
out of snow through a cold, clean door
to soak your skin as you,
clothed in a shimmer of blue,
dance to the rustle of leaves
that conspire to cloak your mind
with a latticed lace of green shawls.
And all this Love, we drunk drink,
flashes wild and wordless:
though some see it sassy in sky,
or clear, hear laughing showers
of water and wind
that tumble us awake,
and spin us round
until upside down
we laugh it bright too,
like a shiny, shiny gem
on the soft white breast
of sun-splashed blue.
WHERE THE FLOWERS FALL
There is a room in God’s heart,
where all is Pink and innocent:
where flowers fall;
where sunshine lives in everything.
There is a delicacy here
like a lamb’s quivering lips,
like a young girl’s shy smile.
It is in God’s Light that we see this Light
for God is as clean
as a sunlit glint off polished silver.
Once young roses fall
all over you
from a high, spiritual sky
you will know
what this means.
OUT OF THE BOOK WITH BOILING COVERS
I have this thought that the dead are
more true
than the laughter of rain,
or that sudden silent smush
of ripe sunlight
dripping on my bedroom wall.
In the apartment above my head
someone groans in a bathtub
full of barbiturates.
The drug company just listed
82 dangerous side effects
to their new designer drug…
that is suddenly popular.
I glance at a book with boiling covers
bubbling on my kitchen stool.
I put on the rooster hat a child gave me
and my coat made of glass.
Out in the streets I think I see a dwarf
dressed in rusty mail drinking grog —
but it is a stolen shopping cart.
I sadly remember the cherry-skinned
peasants I saw
selling honey and socks at a Bulgarian
marketplace
as I walk amongst dead-eyed shoppers with plastic suits at the mall.
The wind lifts old dirty posters
and makes them flutter
like white butterflies on a brick wall.
Suddenly, turning a corner
that isn’t there,
you appear as if balanced on a bridge
between two worlds,
a basket of laughter in your hands.
It overflows with red
suns and starlight.
I see by the way you move
that you too love to dance
in chocolate bunny shoes.
Taking my heart between your hands,
you slowly blow a blooming tree
into my bones.
I don’t know how you do such things
and ask,
“Which way is the door to Valhalla?”
You smile and ask, “Who have you killed
recently?”
I say, “The one who refuses to hurt
and believe.”
You lift the corner of your dress
and reveal
bare skin running like a freeway
towards the wild, pink mouth of God.
With that, I fall back into innocence
and the second world.
ABOUT THE SILVER TUNNELING TORNADO
We have no new notions
of that secret silky force
that fuses brain with Light
up the stalk of the sunflowered
systems that wallop
walls sideways
to the tired tune of the screech of brakes
while earth converses with sunlight—
like a woman rolling in covers
turns her face to her lover’s smile
and eats him — we consume!
I cry in the language of wingbeats
and the creak of bark torn
from trees. I cry with bears
who grumble in the dark,
and wolves who crack
elk bones with bloody teeth.
We have no real notions
of the silver tunneling tornado
that silently sings on the backside
of rain, or the patter
of nerve impulses on the secret
ecstatic core of our own brain.
Yet loved we are
and schooled…
in the glare-light
of a fool.
RAMBLING IN REMEMBRANCE
Why have silk sleeves secreted arms,
specialized shampoo sequestered
the miracle of hair,
a horse skin vest outweighed
the wisdom in a chest?
We know more than we let on:
but better to deny truth
than burn your whole world down
with a single match.
I must say, I love to be where fragrant
bread dough
slumps round and plump
on wooden tables,
where skinny horses pull rickety carts,
and rawhide fingers
pull feathers from dead hens.
But what’s the use of ancient ways
and things?
I mean in life BV… I mean before Visa —
did anyone really get along?
Quail thrash the morning sky
and my blood jumps.
Plumped up, pumped up,
I’m spinning like a whirligig seed leaf
tumbling.
Within the green shadows of the garden
a white mouth moves, whispering…
A smile moves, floating like a flower
made of light. She says it’s too
astonishing not to be real.
Back home, the football game
is about to begin;
the kids fingers are wildly thrashing
their game-board keyboard.
They look blankly from one screen
to another.
“Mom, I’m bored…” one says in a dead
voice.
A white-haired lady once stood by the
roadway amidst seven Bulgarian
peasant women.
She was dressed in dirty overalls
and looked out of place, for she had
a Western education shining in her eyes.
I felt I should stop. I didn’t stop.
Once you pass by, it all passes by.
You will never know what might
have been.
I’ve always been something of a madman
—dreaming.
I still believe in great souls and great love.
I still believe in blue cyclones that catch
up cows into holy worlds.
I still believe in waterfalls
made of bird wings
and flowers.
IN THE HIGH REAL OF BLISS
In the high realm of purity
all is Light, and wide open in Love.
In this realm everything flies and sings:
“La, la, la, la, la, laaaaah,
I love God and God loves me….
La, la, la, la, la, laaaaah,
and who is really who in this mystery?”
In the high realm of purity,
right here, down in the dirt,
twirling in mud—everyone awake sings,
“La, la, la, la, la, laaaaaah,
I love God and God loves me…..
La, la, la, la, la, laaaaaaah,
everything is pure, and everyone is free!
And bringing everything home
into its natural, harmonic prance,
Creation jumps alive
and shimmies in its dance
singing, “La, la, la, la, la, laaaaaah.