UNDERWATER GALAXIES is a book of poems in the floating genres of open inspiration and Rumiesque narrative, taking a journey to Morocco, visiting Marrakech, being visited by William Blake in vision...golden bees, yellow roses...the long and winding road from the divine affirmation of our birth to the double affirmation of death and its afterlife, all its twists and turns made sweeter by serious (and often humorous) imaginal utterance.

Eternity shimmers in the room among the bright solid furniture that is the furniture of Eternity the bookcases and lamps the bed I wake from and the sound of the silence here that is its child the swirling ocean of time washing us in its blessings in constant motion of cylinder within cylinder of intangible turning invisible to the touch in which we age minute by minute inwardly forward but motionless in Eternity impossible to calculate except in angelic terms whose bright silver dazzles the mind beyond its usual earthly limitations whose walls and doors and streets and skies are sweetly blasted apart by the dimensions of Eternity and we live in it unbeknownst to us else we'd faint at the pure nothingness we are and God's Magnificence always facing us beyond even Eternity's confines and paltry measurements to show us anything but His resplendent Face in absolutely everything that is in its instant of being

This high adventure, in loosely metered heroic couplets, follows Abdallah Jones on his quest to capture the ball of disappearing-dust from the mad Sorcerer and stop the destruction of the world. He has been given the task by his Sufi shaykh, which takes him to the SorcererâÂÂs castle, where he meets Marbug the elf, Neptune, the King of the Jinn, and a collection of sweet and evilly dangerous characters along the way with more cliff-hangers and near-deaths than anyone but Abdallah should have to endure â and finally to Madina, the city of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of God be upon him, his shaykh and people from the âÂÂUmma of Islam from all over the world, and a marvelous solution to the whole caper. Black and white illustrations throughout by the author illuminate the text.

I IMAGINE A LION - Poems in the devotional visionary tradition of Blake, Rumi, Christopher Smart, McClure. Ecstatic recognitions from both within and without our heartfelt common cosmic consciousness. "In the forest of matter so tightly meshed you/can't see the weave/I imagine a lion./Sometimes it's a table, sometmes it's chairs./Lion eyes out of the dark./Lion purrs when silence descends."

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. ________________________________________________

These poems consider (sometimes wildly) the inventions that are our lives, and their Inventor, the Divine Fashioner of ourselves and our actions, with passionate imagination, surreal humor, and abiding focus and love for that Fashioner, in all His manifestations.

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.

A MADDENING DISREGARD FOR THE PASSAGE OF TIME: While we are indeed born into time, and at death we slide out of time altogether into eternity, in whatever space we might conceive, in a supreme moment we might taste timelessness, fleeting though it may be (though that fleetingness too being still only a matter of time). But there are also those whose "disregard" of the passing of time is due to their absorption in Eternity, and The Eternal One.

KNOCKING FROM INSIDE, BY TIEL AISHA ANSARI, is the journey of the human soul towards the Divine approached through a number of doorways: sorrow, the natural world, and the listening heart. We travel through both real and illusionary lands to (re)join the Beloved at the end of all paths. "When Tiel says 'God' she means it, in all her various ways and fresh poetic stratagems, in these poems in which there are many strata, and in this book which contains many gems." - Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore

I'm not sure why anyone would want to undergo spiritual training, the rigors and difficulties of a path of spiritual discipline, except to reach a state of enlightenment. And I'm not sure that the state of enlightenment would be one of grim survival, or a harsh stoicism after all the exhausting rigors, but rather a joyful and constant perception of the simultaneous multifariousness of all things, and the single Divine core around which we all endlessly circulate'¦ The Perfect Orchestra of the Real. This world's natural light is supernatural light, and even when shining on the discordant, radiates calm, back to the central chord, the tonally harmonic resolution that laps throughout the universe as well as through us, end to end, and back again.