Daniel Edward Moore | Practice Impermanence | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Daniel Edward Moore's poems have been published in journals such as: American Literary Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, River Styx, Rattle, Western Humanities Review, Mid-American Review, Columbia Journal Of Arts And Literature and others. He has poems forthcoming in Broad Street Magazine, Common Ground Review, Tule Review, The American Journal Of Poetry, New South, Weber Review, Roanoke Review, Lullwater Review, Foliate Oak Magazine, and Belletrist Magazine. His first book of poems, Confessions Of A Pentecostal Buddhist, is now available on Amazon, and his poem, "A Ghost Minority," was recently chosen by WA State Poet Laureate Tod Marshall to be included in the recently released anthology, WA 129 State Poetry Anthology. He lives in Washington on Whidbey Island.

Daniel Edward Moore's website.

Also by Daniel Edward Moore: Confessions Of A Pentecostal Buddhist A Way To Live With Lightning Without The Coming Storm Two Poems

May 2017

Daniel Edward Moore

Practice Impermanence

Practice impermanence. Hold the razor tight. It takes what it takes for each hair to fall. Naked, on your shoulders, the top of the world, does not need approval to shine. It will not spin like a drunken Rumi. It will not quake like earth's indigestion. Something old as love is bleeding here. The map of scars my mother drew with mercurochrome fingers, taping light over holes, where skin made a choice to live somewhere else, as I the boy was becoming the man she'd leave too soon to know. Practice impermanence. Let the pen tattoo you onto the page like grass on a bloodstained boot, like the slain, wet whiskers of the world on the barber shop floor of heaven. Let the candy cane lick the sidewalk's face. Let the door be locked. Let the comb be clean. As the window shade says, Amen.

I am a southern poet, originally from Selma, Alabama, who has lived the past 19 years in the Northwest. Being a practicing Buddhist I'm always challenged to first trust my own physical experience of breath and body, in the hope that grounding myself in that place I can be more intimately available for the work of poetry. As, "Practice Impermanence" attempts to do by recalling the strange, yet equally real connection of losses, whether it be my hair during a cut, or my mother from a lung disease, or pieces of my heart during my exile in the institutional Christian church, everything is constantly arising and passing, which only makes it all more precious and tender. And so I write poems to bear witness, like grass on a bloodstained boot.

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