Like Hand Claps

Your dead tree
Running down the middle of my dead spine.

Just waiting to be milled into 2x4s
for that suburban room addition
you been dreaming about for years.

I could find hope
if the ax didn't fall faster
with each passing hour
(like hand claps).

Your finger on the power button
foot on the gas, hand to god
and eyes on the screen.

Transfixed, it's hard to see
the shrinking glacier and drowning polar bear.
These things don't capture the imagination
quite like the siren song of our affluence.

michaeltawd

With Lightning Fire

These cold shadows
   Left by the Ancestors
What secrets do they keep?
Is your knowledge lost?
How should our Mother grieve?
      with floods
      with quakes
      with storms
      with lightning fire
With all manner of stirring to
Shake the virus from her
   blood
It seems as though
human gods have
   forsaken
Our Mother
Where is the good medicine?

She's become my Wolfangel 
and in that transmutation,
there is no turning back.
Only the fury of an unlocked sun.
Millions of tiny sunspots
ruin vision, create new insite.
Don't put the flowers in the vase;
put them in your mouth.
Let the taste wake you to the oneness
of what they represent:
That you can never escape your liberation.

dear brother

dear brother,

make yourself at home
in my heart.
it's all yours anyway.
reach for something
you're not even sure exists.
know it's there.
then let it pass through your fingers
like sand.

-michael tawd

I Don’t Eat Death

I do not need to eat death, death is already inside me.

A broken tide of blood washes over the stony surface of my heart.

Salt and iron dance with a sort of physical poetry,
If not awkwardly.

It is here that I find myself on the well-worn path
Of forgetfulness,
Casting about for a foothold.

Taking courage in the knowledge that in every argument I’ve ever had,
I’ve been in the wrong.

I must cast off in this little boat named
“Ahimsa”
and sail it in every direction.

-michael tawd bell

excerpt from an old journal entry

"Father have mercy. i want to write, play, scream, recite Yahweh's words in poetic verse, pray my ass off and speak in tounges. and above all i want to repent and have it stick. . . "

Existential Genocide

Existential Genocide

It’s a colossal task,
To lift this modern life
Up and over the mundane;

A bucket full of every human urge,
Both benign and malignant,
Harmful and helpful.

Weighing like concrete shoes
Or the combined mass of
Generations of historic tragedy.

Our heritage; this sledgehammer blow,
This falling piano.
Our legacy; our malevolent stalker.
He overtakes us with the violence
Of centuries of subconscious hatred.

-michael tawd bell