Untied Shoestrings

Untied Shoestrings

(“Watch out, worthless shepherd who abandons the flock!” Zechariah 11:17a)

Faintly I put myself in your hands,
silently I waited for another sideward glance saying
I’m not easy to hold.
I could have been bolder,
said my piece,
made you feel the way you did to me.
Your religion inflicted more pain than
my missteps deserved. You could explain
everything that your devilish assumptions ordained.

I never wanted to be exonerated, never wanted to
skate away free.
I just wanted to be another human
who tripped over his own untied shoestrings,
taking all the blame.

But you whispered to others and
raised your eyebrows at me. You listened
to the scowls around me that sculpted my cheating
like a statue at the end of the game. I was left on an island
guarded by gunboats blasting the reefs around my knees.

I shared my shadows and should have lied.
I confessed my persistent cough that plagued me
while you blew your nose behind my back. I just
wanted someone to see
me in the dark like the moon after your eyes get used
to midnight mass. I wanted to sit in the balcony again
while a best friend sang
O Holy Night.

Now the knots have been tied for so long
I cannot loosen them. I hope, after enough time,
after I’ve forgotten every trap set for me,
that the rhymes will come easier,
the light will shine like a meteor before the
northern lights shower the deepening night.
The sun fell into the horizon too fast for me to follow.

Faintly I offered my pain,
silently I sat like a broken vase,
sadly I thought I deserved so much worse,
finally I know better, but my emotions are tied fast
to the shepherd’s rod that bruised my back.

I’ll be who I am since the pain will be the
same
no matter how close I am to the end of the trail.
Faintly I hope my words will vent, my syllables
the agents of my partial health as stars shine the
same for me as the chains are chiseled off of me.
If I could forget

I’d gladly cast off their restraints.

I Want to Take the Long Way Home

I Want to Take the Long Way Home

(“He will rejoice over you with gladness. He will bring you quietness with His love. He will delight in you with shouts of joy.” Zephaniah 3:17b)

I can’t help it,
these thoughts of dancing,
these images of your eyes flashing,
these songs with words only you will understand.
I can’t help it;
I want to take the long way home.

The moon loves to light your face,
the stars cannot wait to shine,
the sun has reserved you a place
where no one intrudes. I can’t help it;
I want to tell you everything.

We were plopped down on the water,
we learned to swim on the fly.
We were left here almost forgotten,
we found each other swimming for shore.
We had no one to tell us what all the excitement was for.
We thought the river would be deeper,
we thought the current might suck us under,
we thought we might not make it to the sandy beach,
we thought the night might come on us too soon.

But we were mistaken, weren’t we, even before we
knew each other’s names. Even before the morning
rose from the foothills we learned we were not meant
to be alone. We were not meant to fear the touch
of a newcomer’s hands. And the river hugged us
as we camped where the trees met the water in
a private circle enclosing us like love. Sleep
evaded us,
we were learning each other’s songs.

We were a kiss and breathless,
we were stories we only told each other.
We were laughter, we were hot tears,
we were puzzled, but we were not alone.

And that is why, this day and every day,
I wanted to take the long way home.

I Miss the Small Spaces

I Miss the Small Spaces

(“For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of Yahweh’s glory, as the waters cover the sea.” Habakkuk 2:14)

Hovering above the terrain of a thousand different
portraits
I wonder what the next face will bring.
Would you believe I was a dark horse?
Would you believe I’ve survived more undercover
obstacles, I’ve beat the odds too many times.
Now my inhibitions are stronger; I only dance on
command. I’ve slipped through the grasp of more
midnights than I can count. I’ve lasted
well past my expiration date.

That is not to say the world is more sluggish,
or the air full of flood and mud. It merely means
I miss the small spaces between us. I long for
something longer than hello and goodbye, something
stronger than a quick snack from the kitchen.

You don’t receive red ribbons for barely escaping
with your skin unburned. No one celebrates the days
you spend five minutes singing before the rain. But sometimes
the fog can hold you as near the ground of your being
as a day without uncarpeted skies. They all serve to convince me
my debts are paid manifold.

When the table was set there were more places than there
were
chairs. Never mind. Sitting on the floor is easier on the
back-log
of unfinished conversations. There are too many stops
in our talks
and not enough commas. Incomplete as we are,
we could find a place where words land like summer rain
instead of arrows.

Ribbons Without Rhyme

Ribbons Without Rhyme

(“Wake up, sleeper! Rise from death, and Christ will shine on you.” Ephesians 5:14b)

I’m not the same. Are you?
We look for a face that will match
the spirit we’ve always known.
But I’m not the same. Anyway,
I’ve lost the instructions that I followed
to play the games so perfectly. I knew the rules,
and so did you. And we masked everything that
didn’t line up or
kept leaking out from the margins of our mistakes.
If only someone had woken us earlier.
If only we took the sun to bed during the longest
night of our soul.

Here I am. There are you.
The air has lifted the notes that drifted
from our pens into the desert expanse.
Faintly we promise we’ll find them before
the day is over. Granted we won’t remember them;
sainted we’ll still search for them two years hence.
I spent some time looking for the words in ink
that once flowed like a midnight moon above the
hard-bed floor. I didn’t guess it. Did you?
And did we quote those before us,
or pretend we are the originals? Strings of
poetry, ribbons without rhyme, we wrapped up the
day, the shortest
day in the cold.

We could invite others to write,
we could open our circle. Couldn’t we?
Laughter has become so expensive, can we
afford to investigate all the reasons why?
Or shall we simply find another band of brothers
to walk along the riverbed, look into the sky,
smoke a cigarette or two and admit we never knew
why
anyone would understand the game we created
or the
words we weaved so seriously when

We walked further than we planned and discovered
more than the mixture of day-to-night. We would
tell the story decades from now.

The Inner Critic

The Inner Critic

(“…one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” Ephesians 4:6)

All you ever wanted was to be heard,
to be seen,
to be understood as
simply a boy who wanted to play
under the trees with half a dozen friends
who lived next door.

But you ran away sometimes,
you hid in the garage sometimes between
the musty moving boxes filled with photography
magazines.
You ate the candy you bought from the neighborhood store.
There, with a home-made crystal radio plugged into your ear
you heard
“Stop in the Name of Love” for
the very first time.

You knew you would be found,
you knew you couldn’t wait it out past
supper time. You wished you were
somewhere else where moods were quieter,
where
you knew how to build a playhouse out of
wood scraps from the back yard.
Or how to make a paper kite from yesterday’s
Herald Examiner.
Or were smart enough to know when to cry.

One day you started away toward downtown,
a half mile from home,
six blocks south where you bought your first
walkie-talkies that barely worked a block apart.
You dropped your bag filled with coins you had
saved since
Christmas and walked home to try them out
with your brother.
Nothing ever was as good as you hoped.

You made robots out of tin cans and pipe cleaners,
models of the San Gabriel mission out of shoe boxes,
and read encyclopedia articles randomly.

The voice you liked the least was the one
that critiqued everything you tried. It was
not your father’s nor your mother’s nor even
the voice of the principal at school. It was your
own
that scolded you, that told you how short you
fell below the norm. Even getting straight As
could not silence it.

The voice chased you, didn’t it, right past
the age when you married, had kids, and then beyond
the day when the last left home. And you tried
everything to make life sing the way you had
read about in those Faith Magazines.

Nearly 70 now, not 7, you rummaged through
storage boxes in the garage and drank a glass of
wine midafternoon. Some days the critic is
silenced while the divine soothes the DNA
that it damaged with its harangue demanding
perfection. The critic needed to

Feel loved too.

We Should Try That Again

We Should Try That Again

(“You, too, are being built up together, in him, into a place where God will live by the spirit.” Ephesians 5:22)

Arms-length can feel like miles away.
I’ve seen too many cornered smiles to
believe anything less than this moment.
Every space you leave between me and another
multiplies by the time it takes to reply.
And so we sit on mudbanks quilted with the
apple blossoms the rains knocked off the trees
the night before.
And we long for velvet instead of hardship,
sanity to replace excused absences from our
place in the circle. You had me on the ropes once;
I cannot allow it to happen again.

I apologize for the shields I’ve built upon the
back of fears. I’m guilty of it all. There is something that
bubbles hot like Yellowstone geysers
every time I remember
the way social lunches erupted into
debates we had no way to adjudicate.
Some people appealed to a higher authority,
but the secretary put them on hold

Indefinitely.

Then there were days, decades previous to those,
when a breeze blew through from the southern skies
and our picnics ended with frisbees and kisses.
Our babies laughed and looked for worms beneath
the gingham tablecloth. The puppies never stopped playing.
The salamanders sunned alongside the stream. I can
remember the faces even if I cannot recall the names.

We should try that again.

To Photograph the Moon

To Photograph the Moon

(“I do not cease to give thanks for you when I remember you in my prayers.” Ephesians 1:16)

It might have been luck that brought us this far;
it is hard to tell between the rain, between the mailboxes,
between the houses, and between the minutes slowing
everything down.

One thing we had not counted on was
how seldom we found the cracks in the sky.
It was our habit to number the stars at night
and to photograph the moon like a goddess casting
spells over the trees. Shadows moved in and out
of each other.

We can talk on the phone for an hour,
we can catch up after 20 years. Where are the
connections we’ve prayed for? Where are the
the parties we used to plan?

If you painted a picture of what you see out your window
I would follow it like a map.
If you allowed for just a hairbreadth inside your heart,
I would leave everything intact.
If you spoke the words you never sing for anyone,
I would memorize them and inscribe them,
I would make them part of this poem,
I would enshrine them for further review.
I would never forget how the words are you,
and you full of paragraphs yet written, tales still
untold.

I appreciate your prayers, but next time

Let me see your eyes.