SamadhiMuse » 1986

1986-01-02

Dennis — Thu, 02 Jan 1986 08:04:00 +0000

            Softly … come softly … come the rain
              in grays and blues.
              The winter’s wind, the closed out sky.
            I’m here … waiting … for the rain,
              I’ve been here for years
              waiting for this season to wash me clean.
            Somewhere … beyond the rain
              lies Leningrad and Mexico City,
              Vancouver and Australia.
            Time to let the rain wash me away
              from these people and places
              that tie me down in a changing world.
            I want to be a Buddha or a Saint
              or a madman … I want to be something
              no more waiting and rusting in the rain.
            Such faces and turmoil …
              cultures and insights
              wait for me … alone.
                                 gallagher
                                 2 Jan 86

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

1986-01-12

Dennis — Sun, 12 Jan 1986 08:00:00 +0000

The way a guy attacks his worklist
shows if he’s work
or pleasure oriented.

gallagher
12 Jan 86

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

1986-01-12

Dennis — Sun, 12 Jan 1986 08:02:00 +0000

It whispers around
that scary sound
of being alone

but when it does
I think of Rose
and I hope it goes

there’s nothing out here/there
but the clothes we wear
and that silent sound.

gallagher
12 Jan 86

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

1986-01-20

Dennis — Mon, 20 Jan 1986 08:00:00 +0000

I almost made some unforgivable mistake
with Rose and my children.
Almost cut us loose from each other
to drift until the ends of our lives
and not know
what we could have been to and for each other.

When I see the hand of God move
I’m never sure which side or why
and the closer passes the stroke
the less anything
resembles what went before.

gallagher
1/20/86

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

1986-01-20

Dennis — Mon, 20 Jan 1986 08:02:00 +0000

Rose, it gave me such a pleasure
to help with the children when you were sick today.
I know I wasn’t as much help as I could have been
fussing with the phone and the newspaper
but it made me realize what you do with them
like a farmer who digs his hands
deep into the soil that is his life.
You see them as life brimming, raw with promise.
A treasure of people just beginning.
A future world you can mother and comfort.
It was such simple pleasure to smile and hold them.
They saw my feelings and responded to me.
But you had already made that place
where I came to visit and open to them.
It was a day well spent and badly needed.
Somethings cut deeper than others
and you’ve found one, my lover, wife, and friend.
You nurture them and me in the sunshine
of your love and cherishing
and I see now
how you let God work through you.

gallagher
1/20/86 #2

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

1986-01-28 Challenger down

Dennis — Tue, 28 Jan 1986 08:00:00 +0000

Challenger down

A look at our mortality again today.
Life and death, spirits and love, all together.

Something in me can almost grasp it, sometimes.
The faces and hopes of these people,
their purpose and joy, their lives and deaths.

Sometimes I think we’re here,
just cattle in God’s pens.
We move, we feel, we birth, we love
but still die for purposes
far beyond our small understanding.

The best of what we love and what we are
seem so intense and so transient, at once.

The best of us die without apparent purpose,
without explanation.
I can almost grasp it … maybe I will
before I am driven from the stage too.

I hope our choices and actions
are not just empty gestures
against death’s apparent caprice.

gallagher
28 Jan 86
Irvine

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

1986-01-28

Dennis — Tue, 28 Jan 1986 08:02:00 +0000

God is everything
God is love.

Everything but man is content
to be just what it is.
Wheat to be reaped,
wood to be cut.

We should extinguish ourselves
and stop the difference between us
and the world
and we should love,
love everything,
like the water
that bubbles from a spring.

And, as we would fade,
our love would increase
until we became God,
loving everything.

gallagher
28 Jan 86 #2

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

1986-02-06

Dennis — Thu, 06 Feb 1986 08:00:00 +0000

1986 … eight years since ‘78
and I wonder what I’ve learned since then.

Woman passing by, touching me
like spirit ghosts at some improbable dance.

Rose, stronger … needing me less, free
leaving me less room to hide in her love.

I’m so much on the brink of being alone and free
and so afraid of it.

I can see now how my mother fell into the bottle
and why Bhagwan says enlightenment comes
only when you’re driven to the bitter end
and have nothing more to drop.

You can’t go to that place and hedge your bets.

gallagher
6 feb 86

1986-02-11

Dennis — Tue, 11 Feb 1986 08:00:00 +0000

What are these faces we have
but the graven images of what went before.
Every face, every feature
of strength or beauty
reflects someone who survived
in the genetic pool.

We’re so many and so sanitary now
with our educations and mass media.
But then, during most of man’s growth,
men survived by strength and brutality
and woman by their sexual charms.

Tumbling fortunes on stages so small
that the next feudal estate was legendary.

From dark ages, lost dynasties,
and forgotten lovers
come our faces that have seen
and been much.

And we wear them
and think all that is lost.

gallagher
11 feb 86
Irvine

1986-02-19

Dennis — Wed, 19 Feb 1986 08:00:00 +0000

December, January, and February

Someday, perhaps, she’ll be by
wanting to settle into the patterns
of this life.

Until then, she can never ‘just see me’.
It always has to ‘mean’ something,
be something, go somewhere.

I’m sorry, Kathy.
With you I’ve never understood why
just love and friendship weren’t enough.

So today, once again, we part.
We drop our sexual magic
and this friendship that tried
to transcend the years
and the marriages and the lovers.

gallagher
19 Feb 86

raining in Irvine and Hawiian gardens