Some days are like others
And some days Richie
Havens dies.  It’s more

Than a dream that a
Guitar can sigh and take
Some lucky ones with it. 

Muddy. Richie. Robert–
Temples. Churches. BP,
They bow before the hands

That move those strings. 
Even the devil, money 
Himself, will say uncle

To one song like that. 
Art. Richie. A dream. 
Light is no more than

Fingers on strings right. 

Bodhidharma sat there,
they say, nine years, but
you know how they talk.

Bodhidharma there to
wonder why he thinks
this could be different

from that. To wonder
what it might have been
we think differentiates

one depth from another.
Isn’t that the secret?
Bodhidharma said

to the wall. You
won’t know your
self until you stop

deceiving yourself,
Bodhidharma said
to the wall. Sounds

sound, until the self-
referentials begin
to sink in. Then

words mumble. Slow.
Into the nothing that is
the walls around.

Holy Week marked off
from other weeks. Holy
Week when William Blake
returns to wail again down

owned streets,
owned parks,
owned river banks.

Holy Week when Blake sings
over the rattle of chains
forged in the mind; laughs
at the best excuses of the
“wise guardians of the poor.”

On Holy Week–marked off
to remember false
arrest; false imprisonment;
to remember courts, execution–
Blake comes back wailing

at crumbling concrete;
at muddy pits where
high-rises are seeded;

moans again at
sidewalks owned;
parks owned;
underpasses owned–
what ever will change?–

mourns the chains
forged in the mind;
chains forged in money.

Blake wails at the wise
guardians again;

morns the incarcerated,
the executed

who will rise
and die again
in the streets,

and again. Blake,
in Holy Week,
returns again to
prophesy in
the streets owned

by the guardians.
Kept from the poor.

Owned. Controlled.
Chartered.

As a good Pentecostal kid, I read the Bible. I read of a God who condemned the oppression of the poor. I read of a Messiah executed for threatening power structures. This is not what I heard from the pulpit. I could not reconcile this dissonance in my mind. I felt alone.

At college I found a small group of humanists who called themselves Unitarian Universalists. They were joyful people whose values of commitment and compassion I admired. I was not alone.

I became a poet. I began to think that all scriptures are part of a vast and beautiful human project to capture compassion and awe. I began to believe that scripture is creative writing. I began to believe that the writers of sacred texts were poets. And, like me, all were bound in understanding by barriers such as time, geography, and language.

I am a Unitarian Universalist because I believe religions are very human attempts to find meaning and purpose. The texts and practices that have accumulated over time are at once sad and glorious, brutal and loving.

We humans, all through time, have been whistling in a graveyard. And writing poetry.

“There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom.”
Frederich Nietzsche

Hard to think, perhaps,
this old man lives
in “subtile body”–

looking at my lines,
looking at my heft,
beer belly & broken teeth,

but I am;
I do . . .

Subtle body where
the accidents fall
into place because

I have seen the sacred
pattern of a life
botched, yet

all the universe gathered
to catch me in
my drunken fall.

Hard to see, but it’s
here–subtle body in this
old man, sway backed

& bowed legs
born of a child too
timorous to eat;

not enough; too much;
all I could think of. Yes,
my subtle body is subtle,

difficult to see
through the curtain of
fat and age,

yet it’s there, ashes
of mistakes, life
in a pattern

I see now, subtle
pattern in the ashes.