What Still Holds True
Notes on Inheritance, Power, and the Real
What Still Holds True
Notes on Inheritance, Power, and the Real
These poems come from the space between personal memory and public distortion. I’ve been thinking about the worlds we’re handed—by family, by politics, by language—and what it means to speak plainly from within them. These pieces are about lineage, both biological and philosophical. They’re about teachers, moments of vision, the aftermath of war, and the strange continuity of living in a world shaped by those who survived the last great collapse.
The work moves between story, meditation, and transmission. It tries not to explain, but to reveal. To say what is seen. To notice the structure behind the feeling. Some of it is raw. Some of it speaks back to power. All of it is trying to be honest.
These aren’t just poems. They’re records of presence—attempts to hold open a space where meaning hasn’t been erased yet. Where the body, the sky, and the page still speak to one another.
Before the Wars The clouds tonight are blue, and shades of blue, and grey, and white, and pink— and shades of pink. From my vantage they spread from the south, wispy, grey, pecking a piece of white, an opening to what looks like the fetus of a bird, or a little bird inside an egg, or a human inside an ovary. But this form, for lack of a better word, is pointillistic, effervescent, slow. Tonight, the clouds are slow. North, more pink, but hidden by the city. Two anhingas fly from the northeast— there are so few birds. Anna speaks of something I have known. Right now, I am not going through such a thing. Still I wonder: should I speak it? Will it call something to me? The baby bird becomes a wisp. No— I open, as is my practice, to speak. To let compassion be the bridge between what has been and what must be. The clouds move a little faster now. A man passes on his bike. He pauses, hears me speaking into the recorder, where this poem is being born. I go into my printed library and find a kriya— as if a set of exercises could do the trick. But I know it isn’t just exercise. It is a cosmic pattern Someone once sat and listened for— like clouds moving, like flowers blooming, apprehended and nurtured like a precious egg, Waiting to hatch in you in me—in we—in thee. This morning, I wanted to write a poem. But the café was too noisy. I wanted to say: There is a string between the Now and World War II. And when I follow it— When I look to the end of the string— It is me. It is what the war left behind. Patterns, unlike clouds, unnatural, placed like a grid on the collective intellect. We have moved far into abstraction. We have forgotten how to flow. Before the wars, they studied telepathy. After the wars, they studied it in secret. Before the wars, they studied anti-gravity. After the wars, they buried it. One day, science and spirit will merge again— because they were never apart. Everything is together. How could it not be? ⸻ I’m driving near the café where I found out my grandmother had died. I’m not there yet— but my passing of it is imminent. That morning, I had known: her passing was imminent. Earlier, in deep meditation, she had come to me and asked, “Where are you?” My aunt had hidden the truth— that my grandmother was in hospice. When we found out, the family felt betrayed. I confronted her in the most loving, poetic way I could. The day my grandmother died, I set aside my research, which had been going well, and stood with my father at the feet of her body. She had gone. Later, my aunt said that in the moments after my father left her bedside, she whispered, “Mama’s there.” My grandmother had told me many times: when her mother came in dreams, there was always water. The day after she died, I crossed into the water. Too much time in the hot tub. Too much time in the sauna. Too much time in the steam. My body was aching. Somewhere between the need for momentary grief and the desire to return to meditative clarity, I collapsed— the heat overwhelmed me— and I fell, smashing the left side of my face. For months, my face was slow to heal. As if to give me a way to understand how far I had come— how deeply I had grown— and to measure my vanity against my potential to love myself with a black bruise across the eye, and a scar. My thyroid wavered. My body added fifteen pounds— as if to protect me from what I had refused to feel. And in finally deciding to experience it— fresh, and open— my heart, needing a fireplace, built itself on the earth: glowing, and alive. A heart became a star. And I, deciding to share what had come to me in vision— what I had already declared my authority to carry— gave it away. And in giving it, the heart written on the earth Entered my chest. The Last of the Last Century I don’t remember the year— but I think it was the last of the last century. 1999, maybe 2000. My roommate let his girlfriend move in, and without telling them, I moved out. A pattern I would repeat many times over the years. I had been composing a piece— still my most known, my most performed. I was maybe 19. I walked into Perk’s Coffee Company, staring at the bulletin board. (Do you remember those? Probably not, if you're young enough to enjoy the internet.) There was a note: “Jazz club owner seeks roommate.” I called the number, walked two blocks to see the place, and moved in the next day. Rent was under $300. The room was empty, but the house was a fucking mess— pardon my French. Two blue tick hounds, a crusty old man, and M, the woman who “owned” the place— along with all her junk. The day I moved in, the old man got on a bus to look for housing in New Orleans, wondering how he’d live with a 19-year-old kid. He wouldn’t talk to me. Then one day, I wandered onto his sun porch, just in front of his bedroom. Through the window, I saw Philosophies of India and the Wilhelm/Baynes I Ching. I asked him about it. It broke the ice. We’d sit under the moon, playing with Woosky Cat— a little black and white. He taught me to reject all possessions. Told me to move to San Francisco. He had tuned in, turned on, and never tuned back in. He wasn’t a hippie, but a freak— his word. I checked out The Serpent Power from the LSU library for him and never returned it. I think he still has it. He was a scoundrel in many ways, and for a while, I learned to be the same. He was my first spiritual teacher, in a way. In my 20s, I read and listened to every available lecture of U.G. Krishnamurti— I was a living no until I found out the universe only says yes. He hated the tipi, respected my kundalini practice, and encouraged my poetry. Giver and taker, taker and giver— mostly a taker. He could eat twelve ice cream cones and not gain weight, but lost all of his teeth. His health began to fade and the house collapsed. I tried to move him into a Buddhist temple. He turned it down at the last minute. I never heard from him again. There Is Only One of Us I remember reading UG’s cookbook— thinking I could never eat oatmeal with pineapple juice. Dole. Frozen. And heavy cream. He didn’t write the cookbook. Or anything else. He cooked. Brought his kitchen wherever he went. I was so drawn to this in my twenties— to moving, to being a nomad. Between eighteen and forty, I had over sixty places of residence. The longest I stayed was in an electricless trailer on the coast of California— thirty or so miles from "the city," maybe farther south. I don’t know. There was a tipi ground. Horses. I used oil lamps. Read four hundred books— the foundational texts that made me a poet. Mostly Native. Fiction. A few biographies. Some books on environmental activism. At that time, any man-made item brought me to rage. I read about them also on the internet. Drove a blue truck with 186,000 miles— give or take— when my father gave it to me, after I got shot. I drove it all around California. Worked briefly as a trimmer. Didn’t like the clutter. It was against the teachings— but I was poor, and it paid. Then I got a job with a medicine man and his wife. They lived downstairs, ran a meeting for me: White Moon. The job was caregiving Phyllis Patterson— the woman who invented the Renaissance Faire. By then she was in a wheelchair, could barely speak. At night, her Katchinas moved around the house. Other spirits too. No one believed me. But when I fed them blue corn, the commotion stopped. I studied my Indigenous history in her home during those 72-hour shifts. Then I’d drive the coast back to my place— live by lamp, go into Santa Cruz, drink too much coffee. On the weekends, I would pray. Always had wood for ceremony in my truck. I smoked tobacco with Lisa. Ran from her bird, which nearly bit my toes more than once. Those were the best days of my life. In and out of the bones and trees, in and out— the bones stripped bare, trees the canvas-hide, the sweeping, stroking flame, the tornado, the wind, the sound of the ocean at midnight— going out to piss under the stars. There were a million and a half spirits. There are zillions more. But there is only one of us. There is only one of us. blue blue planet Joe Biden was born during World War II. Donald Trump, the year after it ended. Netanyahu in ’49. Putin, later. Ayatollah Khamenei—1939. yesterday I took the last of what I was offered from my grandmother’s home. she was born I think in 1932. Jacques Derrida Michel Foucault survived the war, shaped our thinking— reduced life to power analysis, understanding deferred forever through text. Donald Trump became a Sun King on the edge of AGI. language, thought, reason— completely deferred. nothing means anything in the world these people created. old men shaped by holocaust, by brutality so inhuman it rewired the whole planet. still beating their chests while the world begs for peace. so many other old men women & people angry on a beautiful blue planet. a beautiful blue blue planet of trees and life. we risk an endless nuclear winter over inner anger. what else do we need to let go— & love one another again? love one another again! what else is it going to take for people to love one another again?