Hair On Fire

You know when your hair is on fire: The questions that keep you up all night, the failures and mistakes that make of your life a fiery swampland that you never seem to get beyond, and that whatever you think, do, and create only further engulfs you in flames with no end in sight. Desperate for the light, you cannot see what is in front of you. The desperation of your wounds alert you that you must work your way through the healing that is in the wound. But what if you are one of those people who do not realize or refuse to see that your hair is on fire. You are born with your hair of fire. You fear to look for you are terrified that no one has ever or can ever ameliorate the suffering, grief, and agony that continuously throws fuel on the fire. This is so, even when you believe you are throwing water on the fire in the form of denial, spiritual shopping, or wrestling with an unappeasable soul whose voice will not leave you alone and whose relentlessness is, you think, part of the problem. You do not understand its language nor what it is trying to tell you because it is telling you that what you are doing is not working and that the truths you have lived are lies. You must listen to the voices for they originate in fire, and they are trying to tell you that your hair is on fire. You must acknowledge them and it in order to change your living. Change into the worth and value of what they and you are that you discover in your conversation with them. You must make live what is truly alive in you and give it life as the world. This is background to the poems in "Hair on Fire". Each poem burns in these long inflammatory issues. Many of them use the light of the fire to see what is blocking insight and what is beyond into ways of work with the fires of desires to lessen the suffering, wound, grief, and agony of each and every one of us. The poems immerse you in fire to make you aware of our condition and state. They experiment and investigate the state of our predicament. Many of the themes may appear to deal on matters of life and death, but these matters bring to light of white heat through coldest of light controversies and conflicts of the nature of the self, war, chaos, impermanence, and consciousness as well as the ineffable feeling and presence that we are all living the same living being as everyone and everything in the cosmos. "Hair on Fire" throws light on what one poet has garnered from the treasure of thousands of years of human experience and suffering, filtering his gleaning through his unique and common experience of desire, fire, and how begin to live not consumed by them but with a reciprocal love and discrimination that encompasses the world we live in every moment of our lives that enlarges everyone we meet, seeing our reflection in others eyes because they it is their reflection of our eyes, no different from one another yet enormously not the same.