https://vortexsutra.com vortex sutra Sun, 11 Jan 2026 11:06:02 +0000 https://vortexsutra.com en https://vortexsutra.com/Logo Sat, 02 May 2020 21:14:52 +0000 vortex sutra https://vortexsutra.com/Logo VORTEX SUTRA https://vortexsutra.com/Homepage Sat, 09 May 2020 16:57:06 +0000 vortex sutra https://vortexsutra.com/Homepage Straightway from God I come into my redeeming skin. - Anne Sexton https://vortexsutra.com/I-Hope-It-Never-Leaves-Me Sun, 11 Jan 2026 11:06:02 +0000 vortex sutra https://vortexsutra.com/I-Hope-It-Never-Leaves-Me I Hope It Never Leaves Me When the world opens,what steps forward to meet it? We are given these bodiesto move through their brief appointments. Let your hands learn the weight of things,let sweetness stay in your mouth,and let bitterness, too, have its hour. Look how the day gives itself awayand how the old one haunts the newwith a deeper blue than you expected,nothing gets saved for later. The heart lifts its faceto whatever light remains,ordained to open and never close,and love says to it,oh please, make me a waythrough your beautiful vaulted bones, like how we’ll beg a band of angelsto let us into heaven. Look and look again,look closer now. I’ll always be here parkedby the river  so cold, so fresh and awake I don’t need a pass, no living thing asks permission to want what keeps it alive. Now that you see me stand where you are it’s already too late, to be somewhere else.     https://vortexsutra.com/Butterfly-LOOP Wed, 14 May 2025 17:26:43 +0000 vortex sutra https://vortexsutra.com/Butterfly-LOOP Butterfly Loop Constrictor There are directions to go inthat have never existed in the endless tunnel of this dream a blood moon rows up the night melting the breath it touches curious atoms stripped to demons in the warm light spread like buckshot acrossthe far sky between your hands butterlfy loop constrictor my bodyglows white at the edges evenings come loose junglewinds blow sweet and passionflowerswith their wild tendrils bloom thickabove dark shapes spun out soft beyond the bend of my body  and against your sliding skin my bones blur and split to light.         https://vortexsutra.com/When-You-Showed-Me-Brooklyn-Bridge Fri, 26 Jun 2020 02:41:40 +0000 vortex sutra https://vortexsutra.com/When-You-Showed-Me-Brooklyn-Bridge When You Showed Me Brooklyn Bridge When you showed me Brooklyn Bridge    in the morning,       Ah god,       light all around you you raised your eyes and looked at me sharp“I have visions all the time”        people rushing to work       from their nice homes        clutching their coffees       nice homes but renting        anyway there go the birds    carte blanche         nothing can hold you           dues are paid       they’ll have to find you       where they find you     Mexico City       turning down           a whole lot of blow     too young when your mom      found you        on the bathroom floor     how you told me, so earnest       and I couldn’t sleep for weeks. Mad and gifted    baring your paintings to heaven        holding the light, the light drawing me closer, closer to your chest that scented heaven    good god,         like all of heaven that’s when I taught you tears     that morning on the bridge        nobody else           knew you cried. https://vortexsutra.com/The-Metaphysics-of-Flowers Mon, 07 Sep 2020 17:02:31 +0000 vortex sutra https://vortexsutra.com/The-Metaphysics-of-Flowers The Metaphysics of Flowers Imagine this I leave the lighthouse empty, not a bird in sight you emerge from the rocks as mist, with no body or mind last time you were an owl crying over my window I shapeshift into 5 blue tulips in a big vase       a business I know well I hear warnings on the radio the Atlantic moon sheds its light on you because the moon is no judgebut of course     you mistake that    for love  I say: look     news of me won’t come  after this     I am sick and  I’m leaving the coast      to be blessed on the mountain     where I was born  you won’t be able to pull my roots out of it    but you did not come to listen  you move into tempestuous sweeps and whorls  dancing like fish  on the hook you just want to be seen    you know I can’t dance, at least     not in this form  flowers stay still but they are very psychic how they lean to the sun and know when to die   flowers don’t force life to last or cry what’s left unsaid.      https://vortexsutra.com/The-Mock-Mirage-of-Astronomical-Objects Fri, 09 Oct 2020 02:23:03 +0000 vortex sutra https://vortexsutra.com/The-Mock-Mirage-of-Astronomical-Objects The Mock Mirage of Astronomical Objects Twilit rooftop in the class of young, all-american men clearingsix feet clean, swarthy tans summer bent still over their bones what of America supremewar and worship I walkyour kingdom’s line withdog-faced poems running loose in me there you stoodfixed vortex on the farmaking steady steady I seen you in three cities from New York to Wichitatwo summers passed us, nowthey are all one you glide amid galaxiestailing a phantom, tellingyou her life hung that moon huh thatgold hoop in the gu-gutterface up in the red light I fold my royal flush you talk your tongue out of motion, dead or asleep cabrón you please hauling the silver ballto my feet swirling it opens and englobes in bright glow, swift night goes psycho, while apples sweeten in the tree. https://vortexsutra.com/Dirty-Money-Sanitize Sat, 01 Jul 2023 21:25:37 +0000 vortex sutra https://vortexsutra.com/Dirty-Money-Sanitize It Slips Backwards   Come in, come in you seat me next to the kitchen window I watch you slump and divide like something I know, I know broken down the middle like silence or two halves of the moon or split-spoke wheels spinning backwardthe night I astral hydroplaned your Droptail  you called it ritual sacrifice at the villa in Corfu your best man-to-bedrew me in the grand hall  adrift in haze til I woke you til I folded down like silk  the gun up to his jaw damned in a trance, a stranger, the naked blue-veined place,  eyes turned backward like classroom clocks the same ruined scene I draw by memory it comes to my door with no place to go clocking the miles and making me pay  hold still, nobody else  just a shape and a shape how I know  what this is, I know what this is the usual miracle.  https://vortexsutra.com/Kill-Switch Tue, 19 Sep 2023 00:14:12 +0000 vortex sutra https://vortexsutra.com/Kill-Switch Kill Switch Now as a penalty for my skill, by night, I walk in the dead center of my act. If Judas go forth, providing his gifts for the altar, I come with words but no language, giving back all my nine slippery lives. There’s a switch that if you flip can show you more than you ask. Hearing the gruff knocking at the door. Lest out of spite just to come out into the light where God has gone. My brother enters my room. He draws the curtain. “You should get up. Get some air.”  I drag my eyes. Brutal stare at the glare of the day. He hangs over me, crossing into dreams that endow me. “Life is two choices, you know. You can stand roped in the ring. Or you can start to swing.” He lifts me from the bed, through hoops of hazardous half-moons, cyphers from bad oblivion, this plum pool where empires sit smug in my hand. Here becomes there without ceasing to be. He runs the water cold. Cold. How cold it got — silk gown against my skin deepening the chill. But I am not scared, ever, of this gangway that mangles the glee of gods. Let this gaudy miracle happen to me, come out to me like a blistered animal and sink your teeth keen into each brave limb. Head back to heaven, eyes closed, I cry out to a band of angels, fraying at their flawless seams, singing in retrograde symphony: “I beg, I beg, I beg.”   https://vortexsutra.com/No-End-to-Love Tue, 04 May 2021 02:09:07 +0000 vortex sutra https://vortexsutra.com/No-End-to-Love THERE’S NO END TO LOVE THERE’S NO ROOF TO THIS HEAVEN