The Intentions Of Peace
Creating peace must be intentional
You’ll want to look your best and feel adequately decked out for the flush of sanity you’re channeling. So first you must replace the hair shirt that slapped itself to your back when the peace first left. You may have been in kindergarten then or someone’s lover or a dove. Burn off that suffocating underthing. Not too close beside the forest…don’t set the world on fire… but blow out bombs-bursting-in-air embers rising beyond comprehension. Stay ’til dark after they flicker out. Frightened and naked without your shame build a pine loom by harvesting the tallest rows where the hardwoods once stood. Thread its silicon bordered heddles with tug of war gauze ropes plug in technology with your bare hands. Pull beneath you a strong bench draped in a million rotted flags and dry petitions to withstand your efforts. The over and under must take as long as it takes, so gather around the timekeepers of every nation you know and count with each mark the tactics, orders, armaments, bloodletting and advances…the unending train wrecks and deaths that unravel. Dye those wasted egos into the fabric that unfolds like a rainbow from your shuttling hands. Take a sip of wine. Now slice with the sharpest scissors you own. The temptation to procrastinate or cut yourself is understandable — retying the warp and weft of humankind’s fucked ways is a crap-shoot but do begin. Throw every piece you’ve woven to the wind…storm and tempest will separate your craft into parchments and spears, ripe peaches, clean bandages. Exorcise industrial complexity and patriarchal blindness along the way… simple stuff. Summon your keenest witness to intuitively see the skilled seamstress…a negotiator honored with generations of peace pipes, burdens, pine needles, and fiddles born of her lap…how does she pull away safely the chamomile leaves from the stinking damaged cloth? Bring your hot iron to the task a shining mirror to reflect salted species and radioactive playgrounds so that finding the intentions of peace in any burnt inhalation will imprint and repurpose more than you can possibly know. Turn up Pandora…Marley, Pavarotti, Cohen, McFerrin…you pick. Set afire waxed candles and fortresses of chain, ribbon, and thorn and by the flame, sew your cut pieces back together with tight eucalyptus stitches that heal, invisible seams to hold up even through tonight’s ecstatic dancing. Launder your blue planet’s cape in hot freshwater — let the fibers shrink like felt and capture whatever can be swept under billowing furls to uncatalogue torture, extinguish invisible gaslights stop war and detonate that Sisyphean slavery that we so love. Dress up, head and arms folded in unison through the windows and speeches. Shake out your creation of peace spin around in what you’re wearing steady your eyes on the one standing beside you and rock this living net into pacific green oceans.
Core Beliefs: We are students & teachers to each other. Giving & receiving are the same. There’s a time & place for spontaneity. My poems = stories, unless not.