Category: Poetry

Near / The drummer’s fire / Will each his song at last / Conceive in heart / And breathe white smoke / Upon his youthful days; …

A metaphysical letter from Turīya—the fourth state of consciousness—addressed to the waking self. Blending poetry and philosophy, the piece invites the reader to return to the silent, ever-present witness behind all thought, identity, and experience.

Three luminous poems by Burt Rashbaum explore breath, scars, and transcendence. Includes audio recordings of the poet reading his own work.

Pandora’s Apocalyptarium: A Guided Tour And so it begins, the apocalyptic unraveling, Orwellian sleights of hand, the Pandora-like normalization of the surreal.  Hollywood burning as predicted in the day of the locust. Police in Howard, Colorado, …

Jenny Gillespie Mason’s poems traverse the thin veil between mundane medical procedures and divine revelation, finding God’s blue presence in unexpected places.

A poem, like a language, is an approximation, only a new one, and by virtue of being new and idiosyncratic, suggests and sometimes enables whole new structures of relation, new ways of engaging, dealing with, and navigating life.

Born of the biggest, brightest stars,A mighty dragon sails our world.She is several miles long, invisible.Her ears—cavernous mountains—Hear everything. All our whispers,Our weepings, and our wants. In her youth she is assaulted by strident repetitions: …

The first time I slept with you / in a Colorado Commune / you showed me how I had been sneaking around / neighborhoods in broad daylight / stealing light bulbs from people’s houses.

A poetic exploration of brotherhood by the river, where wounds are unveiled, time dissolves, and ancient masculine archetypes emerge through psychedelic ritual and insight.

Hybrid prose-poetry that imagines a museum exhibit where patrons can view a more verdant past from a time machine. Experimental and fragmented, the piece highlights the alien feeling of a different world along with fragmentation in our current one.

Haunting and intense, ‘Dissociations’ expresses the grief, rage, and dissonance of living with social fragmentation and personal loss. Zinman’s free jazz piano compositions & Crane’s drumming are combined here with mordant poetry that dissects surveillance culture and the commodification of healing.

Ganesh, that freakish deity, that lovable Barbar childish protector of puppeteers, thieves and fertility with your contradictions and your goad and your swollen belly of treats… who dost thou love?

Let this be the year. / Yes, the year / The one that has us relaxing into ourselves / And soaring past ourselves / Comfortable with all that lies within / And beyond…

Poems that explore the spiritual experience of diverse animal species. They are excerpted from the Third Testament, a text that proposes a unification of all religions, attributed to Ionian Nazari and first published at the end of the Second Exodus of the Humanitat (see The Ido Chronicles , undergoing publication via Untimely Books). These poems grapple with the nature of the divine through the sense organs and perspectives of different animal species.

Three formal poems that address a non-traditional (though at the same time archaic) subject of human exploration of non-human (especially animal) patterns of consciousness.

A profound poetic journey exploring humanity’s connection to nature, consciousness, and spirituality through the mystical lens of an ancient, sentient tree’s perspective.

In a mysterious library of life’s recordings, a narrator seeks access to his own existential video, navigating the blurred lines between perception, memory, and the afterlife’s strange bureaucracy.

In this contemporary Gnostic-inspired poem excerpted from the collection X: Revenge of the Autogenes, the goddess of wisdom, Sophia, confronts the occult worldly powers and, as always, has the last word.

The amphibian drone of another future spring echoes back at me, the certainty of sun and thaw, a certainty of his wing’s blue flash, and a quick glimpse of his eye, alive and black and wild with potential.

I have loved you since the beginning, / waiting all your life to love you more / and saying such, Death offers himself up— / his tarnished odor, silver gaze, immense.

But I am a minimalist. I would like to compare the Mind of God / to a friend who frequents outdoor cafes and loves to watch / humanity’s comings and goings and the sweet minutia of lives.

My first, Amarilla—cost me a hundred bucks, / I went hungry at that price, but she and I would pass / whole weeks without speaking to a soul… /

I sketched out the constellations in my notebooks and knew the name of every star / and when mom was home / and wasn’t busy / we’d lay on the driveway and look at the sky at night until the / light pollution wrapped it up and hid it away.

Helium three, / fuel of the age, / dust on the moon.

Ancient Heroes! / In silence / You knew absolute unity. / In the hour before the noise. // In the noise / You made me material. / The interconnectedness / of everything. / Bliss. / You thought.

I care about touch. I want evidence of the human. My paintings can be slow to see and slow to make. I look for consonance between what I feel and what I see.

You’ve been vandalized by a rummaging god. She’s become a compacted star in your cosmos, the rings through which you become, like Saturn, denser than before—heavy with shame and longing.

I give unto you the failure of the oracles I cast in the palm of spilling dust / I give you the failure to abrogate our dropping of possibility / in how even dust climbs into the wind…

Today I condensed the universe into a ball / A small, red ball that I could pick up and bounce / And balance on my head / And shove my hand through

Each salon was a zone of concentration, an improvised omphalos, and each had a life of its own. Each participant contributed their breath and presence to the spontaneous generation of its body.