Spinning a Narrative

Spinning a Narrative

(“I know what you have done, and that you are neither cold nor hot.” Revelation 3:15)

I would listen and, knowing what others
had said they had heard,
would scar my soul over the silence that
did not flow
but was the weight of summer obscurity.

I thought my sight was blurred,
my ears unhearing the very thing
I wished to find.

Lock me in my room, and do not let me out
until I’ve spent the night in the sweetest reverie
I’ve read about from men of old,
women like angels told,
and stories unfolded by names I heard quoted
at meetings of the devoted.

I paced, I read, I played three chords;
instead of songs or lengthy prayer
my eyelids like lead scratched my waiting watch.

I was certain no one had longed as deeply as I,
yet there was only the shallow dribble of my own mind’s
constant turbine spinning a narrative that has followed from
then until now. What I believed, hope and sought was
never as glowing as
the fireside stories; of parables in street shoes
and the buried treasure always discovered for the effort.

I have chased You, only Father, not well. I am tired,
I am weary, I have gone this far on this tiny soul’s
capacity alone.

Let me rest now, my breath is shallow. The rain has beat
upon the windows through the night
and the puddles are deep in the sunken footprints

Of a man who carried a mislaid burden much too far
up the mountain.

And yet the tears remind me there is so much love
I could never be satisfied, never filled, never stalling;
for the laying down of my burden is the only action
that leaves no footprints for the torrents to fill.

Mutters and Utterances

Mutters and Utterances

(“Some magicians think they can wake Leviathan. So let them say their curses and curse the day I was born.” Job 3:8)

I was wondering when your divination would show its hand.
When the mutters and utterances under your breath
would cast their obelisk shadows across the land.

I cannot say what I wish I could. The lake is full of fury,
the river a crease across the countryside. And every moment
that looks darker than the last
is prophesied to be the final event on the calendar
that you think you began.

How many births must there be until
people give each other room to breathe.

The hospitals are riddled with shrapnel and blood,
and yet we lock our doors to the innocents for fear
there is a magician hidden among them. And Jesus never

Enters the doors of churches who do not open theirs.

It feels like a million years of crying, each birth preceded
by twice as much dying. Can I ask you for a hand before you
dismiss me from your sphere? Where did we learn to put
predetermined circumferences around our circle of friends?

I wait too long now. The songs lie dormant in an age so far gone
that the tears follow my wrinkles from the corner of each eye
along the creases in my cheeks. The weeks pass and summer slips
by; a brief breeze of someone I once knew by name.

When grief finally erupts from its deep springs, the mourning
over losses (years of love, missed endearments) obscures the sky
and I hear my papa cry, “you make a better door than a window.”

These days (no lie) I would rather sneak out of the way
than take the lumps for discovering what I had always wished

To be true.