Two Poems

Two of My Recent Poems
(I may want to revise these further. They are both quite new.)

1) Oct 8, 2011

Like screaming monkeys clinging to our necks, 
unceasingly beating on us,
demons are real.
They’re cowards—banish them.

2)  October 11, 2011

Oh my gods, I’m seeing too many dead eyes
in living people. I’m seeing too many people 
ridden by shame and lies.

I worship a holy darkness, but this—this is 
not Your safe womb, 
Your starlit spring night-sky.
This is a dark closet that children 
are thrust into, 
this is a dark under-the-bed where nightmares hide,
this is a darkness that smiling 50s 
TV hosts pretended exists only in
lunatics’ rantings.

Keep me in your light 
that, residing in the dark,
I do your work.
Keep my light bright
that it may be a beacon—not a beacon to me,
because I am too frail to carry anyone.
But a beacon leading people to you,
My Divine Lover,
My Feast,
My holy Salvation who comes to me draped in vines and roses,
Who  loves me more than a human mother could even love her child.
Come to me.

I am tired of evil possessing souls, 
tired of intellectual escapist debate 
taking everyone’s time
so that nothing is left for ecstasy 
or for morality—
psuedo-spiritual arguments
hogging the bandwidth of human discourse,
sucking up all the air in the room. Where is
my lover’s flesh? Where is medical care
for the poor? I am poor, needing both
medicine and lover.

I understand, God, that this is nothing new.
I understand it is the age-old battle 
between good and bad.
But I am self-centered, don’t want the pain, 
the battle, the betrayals, the lack.
I think I have a right to be an exception
to the human condition. 
I want to be loved.
When I was 16 in 1966, hippie days,
I sat on a curb crying, because someone
explained that all the love I had to offer
was unwanted. “People don’t want 
your love.”
It is a lesson every mystic finally learns
if she comes down from her ivory tower.
Rumi’s students killed his lover.
Christ’s followers denied him. Then ruined
His teachings. 
Many people don’t want love. They want “a piece” of you. 

This is when the seeker can grow up.
 Do you become 
bitter,
superior,
holier than everyone?
Or do you see your own darkness,
and pray to be free from self
that you may hold God?

God, thank you for the lights in my life,
my shining friends who lift my spirits,
who know their own darkness
needs constant attention so that
It does not overtake them.

————-
More of my poetry is in The Ecstatic Goddess: Wild Meditations, Lyrical Rituals, and Earth Sexuality for the Pagan Heart.

And my latest book, which is self-help humor, is Share My Insanity: It Improves Everything. Yup, I guess the above poems are tears of the clown. 🙂