Books published by Ecstatic Exchange

Poems of Sufi Devotional nature, infused with the lights of nature, and praising and loving Allah The God of nature, and of all, each thread of which vibrates with God's Love in nature and out of nature.

Eternity shimmers in the room among the bright solid furniture that is thefurniture of Eternity the bookcases and lamps the bed I wake from and thesound of the silence here that is its child the swirling ocean of timewashing us in its blessings in constant motion of cylinder within cylinder ofintangible turning invisible to the touch in which we age minute by minuteinwardly forward but motionless in Eternity impossible to calculate except inangelic terms whose bright silver dazzles the mind beyond its usualearthly limitations whose walls and doors and streets and skies aresweetly blasted apart by the dimensions of Eternity and welive in it unbeknownst to us else we'd faint at the pure nothingness we areand God's Magnificence always facing us beyond even Eternity's confines and paltrymeasurements to show us anything but His resplendent Face in absolutelyeverything that is in its instant of being

As Muslims who pray the five obligatory prayers each day of our lives, when able we orient ourselves toward Mecca, located in what is now Saudi Arabia, from wherever we happen to find ourselves, farflung in some island fastness, or out in desert dunes, or in a New York hotel room. There are boat people who tie up and face Mecca right in their boats, saintly Moroccan merchants who fling their carpets down just behind the counter where they sell embroidery thread to very particular customers (I am a witness). We can't get too "far out" when we stop to face Mecca five times and more a day, or in the solitude of our nights, knowing the plumb line goes straight through to the next world, and its rising to the holy heights.

Sufi poems from the love-ocean, washing at the shores of this world and the next, with God willing a depth charge or two to find new love grottos, new heights in underwater drownings, new depths in aerial flights. Contradictions? As Walt Whitman said, "Do I contradict myself? Yes, I contradict myself! I contain multitudes." And if we rub the self to its tissue-thin reality, God's Light shines more thoroughly through.

We're born in a relationship with theology. Nurtured in the womb by other than our means, born into the world at large, at very large, from our meditative seclusion, our khalwa, the Arabic for spiritual retreat (often practiced in a closet-like room just enough for a devotee to sit comfortably) we emerge into a theological world, willy-nilly. As soon as we take a breath of worldly oxygen we're in a tight relationship with the whole God-system, as believers or non-believers, until our last breath leaves us. So in the title, it's a Throne that is perpendicular, at an always angle, to all that is in our and all worlds, while still being "seated" (only "as it were") within it, and Allah "seated" upon it. And this is our present and ever-present reality, in all its manifestations. It's a way of seeing and a way of being, and everyone down to the minutest mouse, is in "theological" relation to it. Oh, that feather floating through the air, and that ant at the water drain! Yes, you there... you too!

The pleasure of feeling the poem discovering itself is always a particular joy in reading this poet -- especially so because the voyage of discovery each poem seems to make is, finally, a journey toward the light - whether inside or outside, grand and glorious or fine and concentrated and elusive and just or almost entirely out of reach... yet somehow still in there or out there somewhere, waiting to be found. (From the Preface, by Tom Clark)These are kinds of Sufi narrative poems, but not stories exactly and more like ecstatic perceptions and surreal notions leading (God willing) to Light.

This collection from 2013 continues the intended trajectory of a lifetime's work that celebrates and posits the direct perception that The Divine Reality faces us from everywhere and in literally every circumstance of each moment of our lives.In this, the world's soul envelope has been turned inside out, revealing itself in images of light. Rather than invoking metaphors for experience, my project has been to "move from the word as symbol toward the word as reality" (as W.C. Williams said about the poetry of Ezra Pound), words not standing for an already completed experience, physical or spiritual, but in the act of writing itself revealing the core, the poem's very details being in themselves the experience, between seen and unseen, with transitive imagination the active aesthetic practice, as much as Allah inspires and allows.

"...The look of love death has on its face and in its fathomless eyes as behind the burning irises legions upon legions of angels file up and down a spiraling staircase carrying love-notes and bringing back blessings and reprieves..." I'm really not sure why this particular collection of my poems is called Blood Songs, the title it has had since beginning the first poem of the book written in October of 2000, and though, as with other titles of mine, not necessarily threading a theme throughout, yet the title stands notwithstanding... and so it stands.

There are among us luminous beings who maintain that what we might taste of the Garden of Paradise and what we might suffer of the Fire of Hell is right here in our present earthly and mortal existence as well. The imaginal truth of the Spiritual Path that points to the Next World after death is perhaps indisputable (however some might vigorously dispute it) but our lives, upon reflection, sometimes thrown overboard and barely making it to shore, sometimes buoyed up very high and slammed down very low and hard, are a living proof of the this-world tasting of the Next World experience...

This poem was suggested in a flash by a paragraph in Michael McClure's book, "Scratching the Beat Surface," in which he quotes Ernst Haekel in the words used here as an epigraph, "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." He goes on to say, in explanation, "Haekel meant that the individual, in his growth from meeting of sperm and ovum at conception, lives out, in fetus, the growth and evolution of his tribe; that first he is an amoeba, then a colonial organism, then an invertebrate, then a lancet, then a fish, until at last he is a mammal and a human." Reading this brought together for me various strands of thought into one clear picture, in harmony with the cosmological picture of the Muslim saints: "Man is a little cosmos, the cosmos is a big man." And the view that Allah created the entire creation as a setting, as it were, into which He placed man, the jewel, the perfect diamond, as the seal and culmination of this creation. ________________________________________________

Somehow the resonance for me during the entertaining of this title as an abiding albeit background theme for the poems, was the perfect crime of our existence: perfect because created by a perfect Creator. A crime because we get up to such malfeasance all the time, at the lower end of it, and a crime at the higher end in the sense that the Sufis often mention, that any existence of theirs before Allah ta'ala, any flake or residue of their self-ness, is a crime, a flaw, an obstruction before the Light of God. Only when you have known a saint (wali) of whatever spiritual practice do you the sense of a personality honed to its finest before the divine consciousness, whose actions and words and thoughts are soaked in divinity to such a degree that the person is truly human in its essence and effaced before God in His ever-present and infinitely Merciful activity.

Chants for the Beauty Feast are poems in celebration of our breathing, living, daring and imaginal beauty, in this world with all its aches and pangs, and the next and the Unseen world with its intersections into and throughout this one, divinely directed. Light everywhere moving with relentless bliss.

This may be a secret among only a few of its recipients, but cancer is a direct and positive gift from God. Its chemo and radiation therapies wrack and ruin us... and its alternative therapies may bewilder us with the arcane and often whacky character of their methods... I chose the traditional medical program of three chemo and thirty-five radiation sessions, begun immediately after diagnosis of my cancer, and I praise Allah for the doctors who treated me with their medicine chest of tough love. _________________ Redemption happens the way/ water falls/ Forgiveness is air/ let into an airless room/ Even at the top of the highest peak/ we can't just step off into the sky/ At some point only God's Love has any reality/ and everything hangs enraptured from that ferocious hook/ Streams of light continue to enter us from we/ know now where/ The truth of our beings/ light streaming everywhere