Some churches desire
to make disciples
I desire they allow the Divine
to pitch a tent in people’s hearts

Some men believe
being vulnerable is weak
I desire they learn
that self knowledge is true strength

Some women I love
let the past win
I desire that they
feel today’s breeze on their skin

I am alive.
I am in love and I am alive.
I am in love with three completely amazing women
and I am alive; I am a fully gender-queer, pansexual, polyamorous man
and I always have been, even when I denied that;
and for anyone denying some part of themselves,
out of fear or shame or guilt, I ask you to let that go,
and be fully your beautiful alive self.
While I write this I am sitting in my house, the house that once was the seat
of my marriage, which I never expected to end, which was
at least partly, good and happy, and partly terrible and anxious and scary
and I survived that and I am alive.
I am theologically educated, and desire to share
my direct experience of the Divine with everyone
and I have the tiny little degree card from seminary in my wallet
to prove that when I am talking to people in bars,
and in spite of everything wrong with religion I am alive.
I am a church musician who doesn’t give a flying fuck
about the church but who still wants,
when I can, to move your soul with beauty,
and I am alive most completely when I am making music.
I am an ally to everyone who is oppressed or shamed
for being sexual and alive
and in love with whoever they want to be in love with.
I was kicked out of the church I served for 16 years
as a pastor for having sex as a single man
because they are so afraid of pleasure
that they can’t handle it except by controlling it,
and for promoting false doctrine, which consists
of telling the world pleasure is our birthright, and I am alive.
I love women, everything about them, their feel and scent and kisses
and minds and hearts open to me, and I have been,
more than once now, in deep like with a lovely man and I am alive.
I am alive all the way, in my skin and my muscles
and my fluids and my bones,
in where my energy starts at the root
and where it channels out the top of my head.
I am alive in this moment, right now,
and right now, and right now.
I am dom to an amazing woman who is my sub,
and Daddy to another who is my Princess,
and if you think you know anything
about power exchange relationships,
I can tell you from direct experience
that most of what you have read is wrong.
Three years ago this 4th of July I was despairing of my life,
hating being with my now e-wife,
and too afraid to do anything about it;
it took her hitting me, over and over and over,
for me to get the balls to leave.
Yesterday I went to pick up a taco
and went by the place near me
where you can sell plasma for cash
and I remembered that two years ago
I was planning to start doing that
to make ends meet, and now two years later
I have more work than I can manage all at once,
I have manifested the life
I only dreamed about ever before
and only in hindsight
can I see each little step and challenge
and barely courageous step that got me here.
I have woken up from a deep 30 year sleep
of complacency and despair
and I am alive.
I am here right now, seeing each radiant one of you in your place
feeling your energy, feeling the world,
and I am no longer willing
to be asleep, to be half-dead;
and I want more than anything else in this world
for every one of you who is asleep
to wake the fuck up and be alive.
If you have even one bit of passion
for your life then you can’t help
but have this same mission
to wake up the world.
I am, this whole past year,
for the first time maybe in my life,
here, fully present, in the moment,
and in love, and in pleasure.
I am alive. Are you?

I wake up at 3am.
It’s not the first time;
3:13 and I are well acquainted,
3:27 is an old friend.
I turn on the rain sound app,
fake thunderstorms on my beside table,
recorded rain on some other sidewalk.
My skin remembers other nights,
ones with yours against mine,
your hair across my chest, silken,
or was that her fingertips,
Pressing into my arm, barely tightening.
In the middle night, in the darkness,
all my lovers accumulate into memory;
my desire for you not exactly physical,
the connection between us not a function
of blood vessels engorging, but memory,
and in my mind’s eye,
I hear your pleasure, each moment of that,
reduced and concentrated into sweet syrup,
imagining all of you, together, heads on my single shoulder,
as rain rolls off my roof to the ground,
and sleep comes back, finally.
In the morning, eyes gritty,
I text each of you, one at a time,
Sweetheart, Beloved, Lover;
another day opens, another chance
to move closer to each of you,
and undo together all the past wounds
that make us think
there is any space at all between us.

increasingly, these words, fumbling
towards reality as they are,
cannot be simply about one love
even when they are;
all love is one, my loves
intertwined in my heart
so intimately with me
that each conjures the rest
thoughts of one leading inevitably
to thoughts of all;
so your head on my shoulder
and her head on my shoulder
are not the same but are,
and your desire for me
your desire to be only mine
at times, is her desire, and hers;
and even, at times, I would be
only yours, yet I am not,
and never really could be;
so, sitting here in another city
between work events, thinking,
about who I will next hold
my heart is thrice-filled
with all that each of you give me;
and I expand beyond these walls,
beyond this town, so that, for a moment
I touch each of your hearts together
and am at peace.

I’ve known you, it seems, always
and yet each time we touch
it’s new, it’s the first time,
and my body remembers yours,
the first touches decades ago,
and still, my lover, still,
each time I see you, newness,
stillness, your sounds of pleasure
are to me totally new, completely
filling my heart, my thoughts,
until all that remains
is the slow movement of my fingertips
over the smoothness of your skin

we look out the window,
cold, rainy morning,
of our getaway cottage,
the bed still rumpled from
the night’s pleasure,
but, my Princess, more than that,
more than the joy of seeing your face
from above, your eyes wide,
has been the growing jewel
you calling me Daddy created
in my inner heart.

Heart so full it spills out of my eyes,
we walk; I let my finger
run down your spine to the hollow
above your jeans, that last time,
too long ago, I had pulled
from the ankles, down your legs
exposing lace and paleness;
and underneath your talk of work,
family, friends, house paint color names,
Forest Mint, Early Periwinkle,
underneath I hear the same voice
earlier husky with desire, wordless,
that opens in me sensations
I thought were gone, never to return.

Each day I wake up, whether alone or not,
with the presence of all my loves in my mind
briefly
if another is in my bed or I in theirs
then my awareness descends into my fingertips
touching the small of their back
their hip, their neck, stirring them from sleep
sometimes wordless protestations, sleepy
sometimes rolling toward me, hands in mine
hands on mine, guiding, hands on me
leg over mine, heat pressing to me
and the light slowly grows in the room,
I can see your face, your eyes, your lips
and words end