It Was My Mistake

It Was My Mistake 

It was my mistake to believe I belonged,
my unwitting assumption that the fork before me
ahead in the road
would find the same companions still accompanying me.

They tell me I am in their hearts,
but I would rather have their hands than thrift-store
seconds. What I have learned about this
country club
is that it is more exclusive than I thought.
Thought is the currency and conformity the required dress
when traveling the lush woods and grassy shade. My
thoughts took a turn for the worst
and those I first thought would abides
slid far behind and hid their eyes from me.

I heard they were serving a banquet. I am not sure in
whose honor. All previous attempts to gain information
were blocked by steely clouds and a busy signal.
I never left a message.

But the night of the gala I circled the parking lot,
found the last handicapped spot and turned off my engine.
The pain made me limp, the pain raged like fire, the pain
turned my darkness into lightning and anger. And as I
approached the door to the great dining hall,
I saw every seat was taken and no one
saw me at all.

So I will sleep, restless and barely, anticipating a second
day (the first was decades long) where all who have been
blacklisted, all who have been blocked,
all who have been unlisted, all who have been
swapped for
a work crew who speak the national language
and call it the lingua franca, a gang who works
for wages and settles for nothing more. All
will sit and dine and drink and scatter words like
fireflies between angelic trees.

It was my mistake, I wanted to be wanted, just
like everyone else. Now, usually accompanied only
by my pain,
the days are sometimes sweeter (no prepared remarks),
always more lonesome (no sincere regards),
and always thicker than the light air the chosen inhale.

I’ll say it again; please don’t offer me your heart
if you will not give me your hand.

An Enforced Silence

 

An Enforced Silence

(“…they were prevented by the Holy Spirit from speaking the word in the province of Asia.” Acts 16:6)

Full of sentences, a pen dragging ink across scratchy parchment.
Will anyone read? A paper balloon floating free
until
the candle burns out. Will anyone find it in the
washed-out wadis a mile from the road?

Full of journeys, the dead end surprised the minstrel with
too many miles on the road. Will anyone hear? A few strings of gut
vibrate against the golden gourd until the melody comes full circle.
Will anyone see the choirs in the trees?

Full of months and years, a wanderer
stops. Fully stops. And is quiet when the
words would break out like squalls in the desert.

And the seeds are sown in the enforced silence.

A Word in the Sand

 

A Word in the Sand

(“I heard a loud voice from the throne say, ‘Look! God’s dwelling is here with humankind. He will dwell with them, and they will be his peoples. God himself will be with them as their God. Revelation 21:3)

I saw the letters left in the sand, shallow around the edges
where froth and wave had smoothed their homemade angles.
It was a long way from the dust of home.

I resisted the urge to measure my footprints by them;
even children know the alphabet withers when seagulls
strategize noisy assaults upon the beach.

So I walked around the single word traced when the
sky was afire,
and sighed I could not find its author. But I stayed;

I sat on sand still warm and waited for the tide
to erase the temporary script. My breath was

Endless.

And though night was soon to follow the last
perforation, the dusky prism of sunset,

Even the darkness ran from me,
silent in the glow that inhabits everything.

"Get Over It"

 

“Get Over It”

(“He made no distinction between us and them, for he cleansed their hearts through faith. Acts 15:9)

I remember when a friend told me to get over it,
a friend who never knew what it could be. “Get over”
the wounds of my doing or
the bullets from the guns of comrades in arms.
Get-over the masks that pretended to be pretty
until they saw
the ugly in me.

And in telling me to
get over it
they only
added to the shit
that piled high as the steeples of a
country village church.

(Although I lied when I said there were
reporters outside the door.) The only ones who knew
or wanted the truth
were those who had dropped their stones to throw
a long time ago. Their pockets now empty,
they moved through life with an ease that accompanies
the lightness of those who have eschewed judgment and
chosen love’s pervasive brightness.

Oh, believe me, I’ve gotten over many things. But some I still
burrow through. Some I need a boost; bend now and let me
stand upon your knees. While some are still a necklace of mud
drying in the heat.

Where has salvation taken you?
I remember softball when your daughters told their sisters
to drop the ball when the boy with a limp rounded the bases.
My soul is as pained as his ankles.

Though my limp worsens, I would hasten to your side,
even if you had lied about what hurt you. Be silent or
speak, without judgement I would seek the way the
Spirit talks in comfortable rhythms; She knows the path
to every lineage of pain woven between heart and mind. She
forces no rhymes, but, in freedom, in grace, in truth, gives space.
I would compose no rebuttals,
but hope to be the vessel to contain your pain
until we both are visited by the peace, the dove,
the carefree goose who saves us from enslavement
to rigid stories that require a fairy-tale ending.

My story is messy, grimy and tear-stained.
My story is painful, timely, and unstrained
by requirements of strict interpretation. “Get
over it” sometimes frightens me from the oil
that can only be poured on open wounds.
I am still hoping to round the bases with the help
of a few errors from my friends.

No Regular Work

No Regular Work

(“You shall do no regular work, and you shall offer a food offering made by fire to the Lord” Leviticus 23:25)

My mind has done all the heavy lifting,
and now will not stay silent, filling my earth and sky
with visions of places decades of spaces away.
I may rest, I may recline,
I may spend my time adding movies to my queue,
but my mind races ahead. I cannot spend any time
alone without it rehearsing something I
wish I had not said.

I would take a sabbath now, but I tow every mistake with me
to the lake, to the river, to the isolated pew
in the tiny chapel where the dew is still on the roses.

I suppose it does not matter, this muscling of my thoughts,
except they scatter the melodies that angels sing here and
only now (not then) and I begin again with days so long they
move backwards toward the dawn.

Yes, my brain is more energetic than my brawn, but it also
is befogged and hears the basso horn sounding the alarm
(but I cannot fathom the depth of the beach that surrounds the island)
sounding the alarm
as my chest vibrates with its imperceptible voice. I forget
why I came here and where my body belongs.

It remembers songs I used to sing, stages I boarded,
music I played outside on the square or inside in the
ballroom repeating a second set of jazz after people
finally began to dance.

My brain fills my days like a dirty martini,
unclear and wet; the dreams unmet leak from me
in brackish streams.

So, no, I will do no regular work today, and,
if I may,
I will offer (like a cantor) memorized words
and pieces, sentences and phrases, jigsaw pieces
of incompletion. My conceptions have gone
astray.

So, yes, I will write these words today, and,
I still pray,
they will speak to every love and friend who
knew me well enough to keep the
day tremors away.

Come Near

Come Near

(“But God brought him back to life…” Acts 13:30)

Make no mistake, I believe in the resurrection,
but sometimes, here alone with the hours crawling by me,
I scratch my head over the rising from the dead.

When the air is heavy, the room is empty,
my mind is leaden and my head sinks beneath the
horizon between earth and sky;

When no one passes by and words are weaponized,
I long to see the view from the gondola of a
hot air balloon.

Or perhaps to hear the voice (another voice than mine)
tell me it is okay this time.

But even as I try to write about the doctrine I should have
no doubt about,
everything I think I know lives on the brink of termination.

But then, resurrection never precedes death, does it?
But why has my life felt like dying for so long?
And You, who have died and now are alive,
I wish you would visit now and again
in the voice of a trusted friend
or the face of children hopping with
eyes like fireflies against the forested backdrop.

“by faith, by faith, by faith,” they say,
and I believe them. They know every jot and tittle,
but cannot fathom the pathos of the heart.

“come near, come near come near,” I plead,
and they distrust me. I know every flaw and dimple,
but cannot discern the presence of the Son…

…until the breath returns to my lungs, until the apples
hang like Christmas bulbs, until a fawn crosses my path
and watches me like a puppy unawares. Until I see

That He inhabits everything, and has before the dying,
before Adam-and-Eve-ing, before creating the breathless void
we travel on. He is the last and was always the first,
ever present before the light began.

Do Not Distract Me

 

Do Not Distract Me

(“Do not turn to idols or make gods of cast metal for yourselves; I am the Lord your God. Leviticus 19:4)

Somewhere in the distant past a nearby star
exploded to give the universe cosmic relief,
and left these rocks strewn along the river
sunning on the banks beneath my feet.

The flat ones are good for skipping,
I’ve practiced since I was a kid
and made them jump twelve times or more
before I dove in for a swim.

Others built cairns, starting with the larger ones,
balancing one course and then the next. A minaret in
miniature, a monument, an altar.
I do not know who laid these so precisely,
hunting each stone to complete the work.

I confess I have not built one; but found, they
silence me. Patience and quiet along the river,
beside the trail,
they do not speak, but help me hear
the thankful coolness of the air.

There are barely enough to make a difference,
yet we still keep pouring our emotions into
molten crucibles manufactured in a culture of hate.
Bronze or stonewall, our gilded images
prove nothing other than contempt for those
who have not squared themselves within our foursquare
temples.

I hope I can say, or will say someday, “I am addicted to
no one.” I hope you can tell, or will see someday, I have
put no one inside a cage. Do not distract me with your
false displays
of deity and spirituality.

No, I will stack my stones on the river, for,
I did not stumble this time; I had not fallen.
I was worn and I was weeping, I was sore, and
sleeping escaped my mind torn between
off-the-shelf-gods I thought I knew
and the silent one who was more elusive.

I may visit the river today, or next week.
I pray there are stones enough to pray my love in layers
to the God who speaks louder than
printed lines and stars torn asunder.
You, distant and so near to me, have
become to me the God of mercy,
the God of infinite wonder.

More Than a Minute Ago

More Than a Minute Ago

(“Cast your burden on the Lord, and He will sustain you; He will never allow the righteous to be moved.” Psalm 55:22)

I hope you will let me be honest about the things that happened
to me
more than a minute ago.
“Everything happens for a reason,” I’ve been told,
and then watched as the horned owl rolled on down the road.
“God will never give you more than you can handle,” they have said,
and listened as their voices faded into locked conference rooms
to discuss my fate.

If you stayed more than a second
you might have seen
the callouses on my shoulder from carrying every piece of granite
know-it-alls threw on my back before
I entered the queue for the next scheduled ride on
the roller-coaster.

If it happens for a reason, you would be so wrong to intervene,
I might never learn the lesson that loneliness and suffering bring.
If I can handle it (whether you can or not) you would be dead wrong
to lift an ounce from my back. But you’ll pray for me or sing me a song
next Sunday while I dry-heave like a fetus behind the hanging suits and shirts
on the floor in the closet that smells like must.

There is nothing reasonable in leaving me in the rain,
there is nothing preordained in laying hands on me again
before you go to brunch with those who can afford it.

I’m not saying you hoarded your blessings. You just thought
Jesus was enough
and forgot
that Jesus
uses hands and feet like yours.

>So I keep rolling, I keep casting, I keep throwing, I keep lasting 
for more days than even I expected.
I keep piling, occasionally smiling, I keep hiking, I keep asking
for a God who knows how

To make me weightless, to help me regress to less than I know.
And helps me take the boulders piled on me; a God who leans in to me, 
and, Lamb and Lion carries them for me.

Around the Greening Campfire

 

Around the Greening Campfire

(“But God has shown me that I must not call any person common or unclean.” Acts 10:28b)

Dreams come cleaner around the greening campfire;
splayed out in a dozen sleeping bags, our heads a ring around
the waning embers
and our legs the rays of a star being born.

We told our stories round-robin, past midnight till dawn.
Some of us knew each other since childhood,
some we had met only hours ago.
Some were impatient to sleep with day-sting in their eyes,
the rest insisted the night couldn’t end until we saw the sunrise.

All we knew was this moment would never come again;
these twelve never gathered, this fire a different color on
another planet or
another day.
We were attached to each other by the web of our voices,
the stories a silken thread stitching us like a firefly’s smoking jacket.

Some of us had seen the aurora borealis just the night before,
and swore
God was speaking on the mountain trail we snuck upon
well after curfew. We smoked cigarettes and held them in
the air like votive candles.

But the breathing fire that was our center; the mass that was
equidistant from each of us seemed touchable that night (though
none of us thought to hold an ember in our hand.) We were
baby birds learning each other’s languages, a tired menagerie
in the Sierra Nevadas, just a handful of whelps from the East Bay.

We have flared from there in every direction, as different as
we were the same that night. But the threads still contain us,
the night still calls us, and the stories are written upon the sky
in the hearts of stars that hid our chatter and occasional tears
in eternal vaults. No one is ever unmet.

This Scorched Gravity

 

This Scorched Gravity

 

I cannot describe the conflagration that goes on inside
my brain; the fire of pain, the scorching power that lays
me low and mows me down. 

I cannot describe the river designed to delight my mind
over and through the flames, never extinguishing the blaze, but
cooling while I’m burning and reaching for the name
of another friend who will look on without protection and
only see the waters pour out my eyes and 
only hear my saddest songs.

I would share this scorched gravity with you,
only for a moment with you,
just to let you feel what I know
you want to feel.
You look at me and see a face with
whiting hair,
wide mouth,
and eyes that still beg for a moment’s peace,
(but your eyes look the same).
Aren’t all eyes the same? 

I know my complaints sound like a backfire,
a premature explosion, fuel under pressure
that should have been released over time.
I know you see the outside as clearly as you can,
and, understanding less that I do,
you would reach across the miles for my hand
(or my heart, or my brain, anything to restrain
the mountains that have massed on top of the
valley of longing.) 

But still, there is a river saturating the fervor
that has turned to fire and leaves it unextinguished.
Oh that I was only a bush in wilderness, unconsumed,
a gap in the universe where God appears.
And perhaps God does, between the river and the flame,
calling the lightning and the rain. Do they speak in the
heavy ache that binds the fire to my earth-bound mind;
Do they speak for the divine?

The Preacher Loved Candles

 

The Preacher Loved Candles

(“One of them will fill his hand with the fine flour of the grain gift, with its oil and all the special perfume that is on it, and burn it on the altar to be remembered as a pleasing smell to the Lord.” Leviticus 6:15)

The preacher loved candles, the tiny vulnerable flames
that reminded him of the offerings of his heart,
barely seen by the outside world and often extinguished
by the first breezes of doubt. But he
loved they way they dotted the darkness and drew his
eye and drew his soul to silence.
He lit them often in the shaded sanctuary; in window ledges,
on altar, piano and organ. When the evening sun
breached the westward window, he would close the blinds
to know the flickering moments better.

The preacher loved candles, the way the wax filled the
air when lit and the ash filled the senses when pinched at
the end of his meditations.
Married with incense and perfume, vanilla and sandalwood,
fruit and ocean breeze, the scents swirled in a sacred matrix
of golden memory and sensual aroma that took him in and
outside of the world.

Each candle was a Christ candle from tea to taper and votives
with a million prayers cast into the night. Some were newly bought
from Walmart, chosen random in a quick shopping trip. Others
survived hundreds of evenings like this, new wax applied to the old
before the column disappeared. He thought of them as Christ indeed
and every birth, every baptism, every friend in need. When he
closed his eyes
the candles remained like angels dancing on the walls.

So, he decided on a Sunday morning, to light the room for
everyone who worshiped, to share the quiet radiance that
brought him peace and presence. And as the last song was sung,
the people between lunch and reverence, he saw two, then three,
with tears in their eyes. Certainly, the Spirit had been there
with her holy invitation.

But alas, greeting his friends, he discovered, they, unlike him,
were allergic to the scents that had been his personal salve.
Their voices were gentle, but their tears had been histamine.
And still the moment was holy.

He kept his private candlelight vigil alone.

I Saw a Silver Kite

 

I Saw a Silver Kite

(“Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” Psalm 37:4)

I saw a silver kite fly high above the crimson sky.

I saw a battle gray army tank rising from the sea,
all creases and rivets, with teeth like a shark.
It folded itself high, assigned itself heavy and indestructible,
sucking in its prey, pretending to shred them serrated
and break them spread out upon the sand.
But, once it landed like a white-capped old man
it all was water, only water, and disappeared from the sand
again.

I heard the pack barking between sea and shelf
once the workmen started building the beach house above the waves.
The hammers pounded nails while the lumber echoed across the water,
each strike a woof and cry that canines took for language.

I watched a tiny butterfly, creamy and white (not a quarter inch wide)
continue its flight plan unhindered. The breeze
lifted its fairy wings above seaweed, above algae,
above breakers mistaken for monsters. Undisguised,
I might have missed her; airy and transient. And closer
I might have resisted the urge to make her alight upon
the leather flesh of my hands.

And in my latest dream I had done everything wrong, (a common
theme). I was running from the law.
My co-conspirator, dressed like a sheriff, rode shotgun and
held a rifle to my chest. When I awoke

I went downtown for blueberry crepes and latte.

I have seen kites fighting for space in primary colors
beneath the silver sky.

The dogs still bark while green waves deceive us.

Some see the rioters and disdain their grievances,
some hear of them and invite them to dinner.
All I perceive is Jesus reaching out to them,
His hands and feet swollen with splinters.