VOLUME 9 TABLE OF CONTENTS

If Not God In Nature What

I am in nature and nature in me,
what other voice, what other entity?

We have no choice but to call on you,
the nature, that other us within you.

What will you do with us - experiment?
Or have we taken on that job ourselves?

My imagination, is it normal?
Did I chose to make the symbols of life
from the chosen symbols of my life?

You have raised your flower lightly,
shown me your mushroom throne,
taught me the sense of symbols
known to readers of soul and lore,

but loveliest miracle of all
you saved my life from inner storm
that washed me to this private shore.

II. Savior In The Sign

The savior in the sign is nothing to fear,
the help is meant to hurt, but
I was new to the hell or the help in the horn
or didn’t feel one rib of divine revelation
from the girl who let her flower fall.

No beast among the staves of notes
my unforked tongue played nightly
reaching out full-moon, the asylum of souls.

Out of my brass and decay of misspent days
arousal called from pistil and pollen
filled my distal brain with new-celled interest,
naked neurons quick to meet the cosmic light
divined the super string, created or destroyed,

to journey through the eye asleep
and through that vision to the sight not sought,

past food of the moon unshelled and fingered
placed upon the hors d’oeuvre tray of shadow,
snake food echoed darkly, no new queries made,
no quivering fly-trap lids to dust with ash,
no magic touch or video lamp of the world,

my skin alone and I
and only my thin skinned work of years
and one imagination streaked with sorrow,
gladly replaced by compassion,

I am master of my heart, soul of cosmic insight
ever awed by inner light, and ready to die the smaller death

and not complain about
the summer branch that slaps across the chest
the wintry cold that aches on every face
the morning’s painful sun that makes one see,

makes me aware of my presence
and all the love that is needed.

III. Do More Than Gaze

Do more than gaze and warm your wits.
Eroding rays of a savior
laze away reason, make grist of all grace.

Killed by magic and love’s worthwhile fits,
you fly from the chair of forgetfulness
hardly a flash or a sign of substance,
only the drab looking back,
the lost other, tempest tossed and gone.

In the culture of self-reeling
and god-spun floundering image
the death horse, apple drawn, ignores fire.

Stars give up their posts to aliens and mother ships
your fiery virtue smolders like stupidity and weakness
and a flash of insight due to stress
is cause for observation in the worry ward,
a bit self-strung, sometimes too tight
at times too loosely wound to hear it play.

Feature-length heaven is eerie, sustained
by pop-corn, the far off draw of comets
just before your plane disappears from radar,

but you wake from your three minute horror
your gottas and shouldas and told-you-so logic,
help to shed the nightmare desert desires

to turn from house to house,
from chore to fiery chore

and rest between futilities and mud,
but deliver the news, whatever symbolic views
head out each tip-toe, tilt and swing of seasons
chalking your length, your depth of mood
the texture and color of flags and undertone,
and number of yards before the trumpet blast.

When was your last clarinet lesson?
I don’t buy that you’ve been practicing.

Your senses aren’t fooled by marching,
hard or soft lighting, slang or lofty speech.

The song comes across to those who need it
mud clear up to the knees, music blown away.

You believe that home in gold and blue
allowing wonders, wet and whirling only
one game short of cold and drowned
is your envisioned world by now begun;

nothing gleaned from a rotten stump
except its lack of religious meaning,
even though the mushroom throne
comes back again and again.

©Jimmy Warner Design, 2001