HeadLong

HeadLong

(“Therefore, you are to store up these words of mine in your heart and in all your being; tie them on your hand as a sign; put them at the front of a headband around your forehead.” Deuteronomy 11:18)

I wasn’t sure it was true until I ran
headlong
into the
headlights
coming at me down the wrong side of the road.

I tried to swallow every truth they fed me;
forced down the sour, calling it sweet;
swallowing poison, singing their visions
and swore upon my future grave everything
I thought buzzed up or down my mind
was what they taught me: God was all
tangled up with me.

I wasn’t convinced I could believe until I
turned on
the song
turned down
by half the town that hated simple ballads.

I tried to perform every ditty they taught me,
reworked lyrics to frame the obvious,
toned down the volume to fit the audience,
eventually lost my words and threw the
lead sheets to the wind. I never understood them
anyway.

I memorized, not proof-text and address,
but words like dancing, rules like common sensing
(permission before fencing along my neighbor-line)
I packed my wits for the journey with pictures
I had taken along the way. It seems the portraits I
captured of my Companion smiled more often than
the pictures others had given me with their letters of
introduction.

Head-on He struck me, call me brainDead now, or
merely foolishly aging, but I’ve renewed my license to
write with His picture hanging on the wall. Like a movie
where the hero has amnesia, now I’ve forgotten every bit
of advice that kept me from singing like it came from
anyplace, any space other than
straight from my heart.