Untitled Songs

 

Untitled Songs

(“The rock: his acts are perfection! No doubt about it: all his ways are right! He’s the faithful God, never deceiving; altogether righteous and true is he.” Deuteronomy 32:4)

It is a mystery treat.
Hometown, you remind me of the memories
inside me. There are
skeletons in the walls,
mice under the floors;
they are hidden, you don’t see them,
but they are there, you can see them on
the five-cent tour every new year’s eve.

I’ll be here, nowhere else to go.
I used to spend the eve with 30 people or more.
And yes, the voices got louder as the crowd got younger,
but sometimes silence makes you stare at the clock when
the minute hand never moves.

It occurs to me I may have bought my last guitar,
It amuses me, I will not finish the books I have bought
before my time is up, before my eyes close for the last time
to see the sun.

Hometown and nowhere to go. The lonesome has changed
since I came home. I’ve traversed the desert in pain,
dwelt in the cavern where darkness swaddled my brain.
Hometown, and no friend to find. The night time has changed
since I returned. The same stars wink at me,
the same moon sometimes laughs at my mood.
And the clouds are curtains closing the stage at the end
of the play.

I survived the darkness (thus the sarcasm of the moon),
I have not escaped my madness (the stars understood),
and now I await the faintest snow, a song to sing while the
apple trees never cry in the winter of their fruitlessness.

It is a mystery I did not retreat. Tomorrow the hills will run with rain,
the doves will take cover while a fawn or two drinks at the river.
All things are not new, all things, though, are reviewable.
And in those things, though my voice is ragged and my fingers
still,
I will sing untitled songs for friends who recognize their names.

Turn Table

 

Turn Table

(“My house will be called a house of prayer–but you have made it a brigands’ lair!” Matthew 21:13)

 

We sell our soul, we sell our vote,
we sell our best words and call them hope.
Besides, no one was home when we knocked on the door
that one time six months ago, and now I’ve lost your address
and don’t want to disturb you with a call.

We build our churches, we erect our halls,
we sell rummage and erect our stalls
outside shopping malls in the best part of town.
And when the day is over, we luxuriate in showers
hoping to wipe away every bit of clown paint from our
roles of a lifetime. Most times we’re mistaken, most times
we want another turn down the slide on hot summer days.

Many times, we choose our teams and wonder why
the boys with uncut hair and the
girls with coffee stained jeans
never ask to be in our game.
And when someone cries loud enough, hard enough,
high enough to weep for acceptance…

But that rarely happens since we’ve already forgotten them.
And who wants to be rejected twice? Save your money for
a second piece of pie. No one wants to be forgotten a third time.

How angry can Jesus be? No, really. We awake on Sundays
and crowd into the back of the hall with others who agree with us
on almost
everything. How angry can he be? Every Christmas we find toys
for the poor little girls and boys. Every Thanksgiving we find enough
turkeys to feed a dozen for free. For two months of twelve we
give away to a few and shelve the rest for new classrooms on the
eastern hall.

Some days, when you remember the aching few, do it in a month
that requires nothing of you. Bits and bytes that fly through the sky
are counterfeit coins landing sideways. We need eye to eye. We
need a friend to walk up the driveway.

It Never Felt Like Leaving

 

It Never Felt Like Leaving

(“And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or farms on account of My name, will receive many times as much, and will inherit eternal life.” Matthew 19:29)

It never felt I had left a thing. Perhaps it was how
lovers leave to follow pink cloud dreams that cushion the
harshest gravel path.

Oh, I gave up a few things: movies, wine, bread for the poor,
children’s birthday parties and overnight escapes with my wife.
Staying put felt like the biggest part of leaving to me.

I walked away from double Christmases with my mother
and kindly worded letters to my dad. I turned my back on
any false thing,
any thing but the true religion.

But on a day that took two decades to rise to noonday brilliance,
I walked away to the desert (with plenty of overnight time with
my wife who turned directions with me in a dizzying display of grace).

Winter can numb the senses like no other season,
but shines in its shortened days upon a soul so tired
it begs to find new stories outside the wooden cathedrals.
Bundled in parkas and embracing the Grand Canyon, we knew
something
about snow, about strata, about time and about Abba’s house;
his footstool and his throne.

This time I owned it, the departing without knowing. This time we
roamed and a little knowledge turned us around toward home.
I will not lie to you, not now, about how I scratched the floorboards,
tore the bedsheets, roared at the heavens, and cursed the silence when
I wanted poetry and letters, prophecy and better words than
“You’ll do just fine.” I was not fine.

I know some see my journey and wring their hands. Others, without
due consideration, dismissed my plans (although, dismissing nothing
leaves us where we began.) I never departed the Lover that first
romanced me. But his words and his houses, his princes and lords
were mute and puzzled with the discord roaring from a fearful, damaged and
defenseless heart.

That two-score day was my exodus. As I left, I met the dearest of
the Ages
in the daily labyrinth of cement suburbs where children laugh,
or the wilderness where butterflies kissed bluebonnets to take my
tears away.

Like Job, I questioned everything, and some friends suspected me of
(well, heresy). And now I write, not hearing everything. But the
turtle doves are the jazz in the background and my song has
abandoned warfare and sings
the Prince of Peace for which I would abandon everything.

I Wish I Had a River Road

 

I Wish I Had a River Road

I wish I had a river road to walk upon,
a lazy trail behind the trees to lead me
to your home.
Our faces once glowed in moonlight like
decorated pines. No snow,
just eyes that saw everything.

I wish the days did not separate the years
from each other. Though our tracks convened
in mud and asphalt decades ago,
the world still speaks in syllables of love,
the poetry of patience that embraces everything.

I weep how the roads have degraded over miles,
over time,
and the navigation is more challenging from
your house to mine. I can see it,
I can hear the music wafting from the windows
like a country apple pie. I can hear your heartbeat,
see the frost in the air as you exhale the same
atmosphere as me. Yet we get tagged, we get named,
we get classified and remain no different than
when we both agreed.

But what if birds were no longer birds,
were verbs like stretch or pinch or slobber
or cringe? What if language meant nothing and
facts are farce; no longer simple opinions
and their interpretations? It you call it pie
while others insist it is an automobile, how do
we communicate at all?

That is why I hesitate at your door. If you ask me
to sit on the couch, I do not know if I should fly
or buy a ticket to the stockyards downtown.
And further, if you tell me you have dreamed,
I may presume it is real; the ghosts, the pale riders,
the dark forces you believe have embattled me.

That is why I say so little. The more I speak the
more brittle my words fall upon the kitchen floor
where the pet dog licks up the remains.

And yet one thing never changes: the syllabus of mercy,
the portrait of long skies that undisguises everything.

As Scented Candles

 

As Scented Candles

(“The Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.” Romans 8:26)

Yes, today my mind is dull,
my heart is gray,
my eyes are glazed,
my skin is pinhole and
my mouth is locked shut for fear.

The next word could be the catalyst
for another stone lobbed in a ragged trajectory.
And when it lands only inches from my arteries
and I cry in pain,
the soldiers over the hill cry out,
“It was only a joke.”

So, you can see how my spirit is fog,
my mind is flayed,
my ears amazed,
my thoughts a foxhole and
my prayers are blocked for lack of air.

And still I mumble. Still, I drop tears like
seed grain on the mudded ground. Still, I have
no idea
where these dust-devil prayers will land. Unmanned,
I hope they hit their target and are enlarged by
the embers sparked
from the One who knows them best. And I pray
that I would be unhanded by the fingers around my
throat, that I, without reproach, could sing, speak,
write, and see without shaking. But still I stumble
over words and rarely remove the filter for anyone
to read or hear the truest words of all.

Oh, Spirit of the Holy, she sees me and embraces me
completely. When I cannot speak, she is silent within,
a silence that burns like a hearth in a mountain cabin.
And within a day, maybe two (to be honest, closer to
a week or more) she restores the clarity I hoped others
would see. She has carried my shakiest and darkest self
as scented candles lit for the Father of us all.

I Have not Departed the Faith

 

I Have not Departed the Faith

(“Truly I tell you,” he said, “unless you turn and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 18:3)

I have not departed the faith;
the faith has departed me.
Once I was a fool and did not mind,
learned love this time, that time, all others love
excelling.

Eventually though I learned the ropes and pinned my
every hope
on ladders I thought were strung to the sky; a
rapture of sorts,
but disconnected from affection or creaturely objections
to environments where mud was excluded.
(Believe me, a little dirt never hurt anyone.)

And so I called this globe earthly and fleshly,
saw the human race erased from dignity and
mortally injured. The fences kept my senses
always suspect and my inclinations always setting
like the moon a hangnail away from nothing new.

I hated tomfoolery and simplicity, though I secretly
longed for play. All was serious those days, so many, many
days, that ringing roses served no purpose because
all fall down eventually.

Presidents would save us; legislation would drive the
grayness from our land. But one win led to another,
and before we could love to clown again,
we invented machinery that ate away every bit
of humanity of any who opposed.

I should have rewritten that. We were the opposition,
and proud of the fact. We stacked our accomplishments high
upon the vaulted ceilings of faulted preachings
and wore red caps to prove we had Made it All
Great again.

I have not departed the faith;
the faith has departed me.
And now I will live a fool again,
walk down the street with Christmas lights
strung from my head to my toes
and a tiny chihuahua who has let
this grandpa fall in love with childhood again.

Inside the Loop

 

Inside the Loop

(“The words of a gossip are like choice morsels; and they have gone down into the person’s innermost being.” Proverbs 18:8)

They told me my soul was impounded;
I heard the news from reliable sources
and paid the fines plus taxes plus surcharges
plus a fraction more to unlock the door
the story-teller broke with his insistence
that no other tale could be truer
than the tale he wove.

It loomed from parking lots to garages.

The room I had saved for glorious days
was suddenly crammed with hoarded bits
I had heard
from officers-in-charge,
authors of books
and
radio hosts who swore
their knowledge was inside the loop
(the loop I longed to encircle me too.)

Those stories bloated me, leaking out the pores
of my skin
until I thought I believed in every secret scheme
that only the faithful and redeemed knew
out of tune,
out of mind.

What have you cooked up for me this time?
Shall we blame the demons, the seasons,
the curses--or worse--the fatality I was born into?

But now that sunset is approaching
I’m unwinding Once Upon a Time
from
Happily Ever After
and telling the fable that is in front of me,
and filling the table with discoveries
I have made on my own.

I’ll trust the last line, the afterword,
the seldom heard and sublime word
to the Author of starlight and verbs.

All Anyone Wanted

 

All Anyone Wanted

(“Feast there in the Presence of God, your God. Celebrate everything that you and your families have accomplished under the blessing of God, your God.” Deuteronomy 12:7 [The Message])

 

His choices once were boundless, the wideness of time and
the land spread before him like a queen’s banquet on her
coronation day.

There was nothing to hint in the air or the sky
or the pizza late night games with a dozen young dreamers
and their children fast asleep--
there was nothing to hint that many would not see him again until
he finally was on the ground.

 

How had he fallen among the dark shadows begging for longer hours
and brand new bread? Why was the daylight so slanted,
the help he was handed so ghostly, the glances interpreted
as holes in his shirts and acne in his soul?

 

From the time he hit the dirt until he accepted his
next invitation,
he only sat with children whose sense of invention
held him steady in the embarrassment that his poetry
no longer rhymed. The adults spread out in tables of eight
and he laughed with babies with deviled egg on their faces.

 

There was a cradle that held parts of him
he could not explain. There was a toddler in a playpen
babbling his name. And so he knelt in the corner,
eye to eye with one
who knew the ground as well as he.
He never knew what to say when the one adult
across from him made it two at the table. Words
were stumbling and sometimes stuck sideways
in his throat.

 

But still he craved the fire, still he wanted to go where
the flames wrapped each word with smoked goodness
and the embers never died until well after dawn.

 

He never knew what to say when it was only two
at the table,
but the food they offered, the drink they poured
opened portals of the spirit. The babies and children
laughed harder and the adults did not mind.

 

Eventually he discovered a real live giver,
another breather with his same misgivings and
realized
all anyone wanted was a meal on a paper plate
beside the kitchen door.

Wider Fields

 

Wider Fields

(“But he brought us from there in order to lead us in and give us the land...” Deuteronomy 6:23a)

It should no longer surprise me,
this mud and dirt under my feet.
Red clay from the badlands,
cement soot from the foundation we poured,
pavement dust from suburban sidewalks,
forest loam and evergreen needles,
fallen leaves on steep and slippery hills;
all under sweat, snow, sun, wind and
days that pass while the rain kisses everything.

For all the meander from city to rural sounds
of coyotes on the cliffs and mockingbirds gigging their riffs,
I’m bound inside my mind these days
(though safe, and only alarmed at dreamed
intentions on angry faces)
I still long to wander again,
to saunter past the circles of stringed instruments
who knew the lyrics to everything.

I would dedicate this to you, if I knew where you were.
I would sing my heart to you, if I knew you would hear.
I would hug the fear away from your face,
tell you it was all a mistake,
and gladly invite you to ramble again
past locked gates and lines drawn in the sand.

Would it surprise you that our feet show the
dirt from the sages before us?
Would it persuade you that offbeat is still
my favorite improvisation?
I will not detain you, but perhaps, in this
lockbox of age we will find the wider fields
we once walked upon.

They Are Not Lost

 

They Are Not Lost

(“He did not do many powerful works there because they did not put their trust in Him.” Matthew 13:58)

They are not lost, we have not hidden them;
they are mostly found unbidden within our perceptions.
And so the sun rises, and so the clouds spread their quilt
across the sky.
And so the trail narrows, and so the half-souls have
tried to understand the switchbacks you’ve taken
to arrive outside their bubbled cities and towns.

Do you see mercy in every ray of light, and the dance of grace
in the dust it brightens? Does the thunder and lightning
remind you of magnetic love that still is writing the
sacred sonnets, the divine poetry of the sky?

No longer beg, no longer moan, no longer be ashamed
of the sadness you’ve postponed because tears have run dry.
There are melodies inspired only by you,
there are lyrics with your name behind every puzzling line,
there are trees where you sat as a child,
there are bluejays to remind you of foothill
excursions to play in the snow.

There is something that lurks behind today’s silence,
there is a mother’s son that cries when you cannot,
there is a spirit that fills the void and the density,
there is a parent that fashions it all.

There is only the miraculous,
or there is not.

Of Reflections, Tears and Treasures

 

Of Reflections, Tears and Treasures

I never see my own heart well. Mirrors seem useless,
reflecting my previous view of darkness.
And though I’m told that mirrors never lie
I question the reflection that saddens the image I see.

Though I am troubled by what I view, yours shines
perfectly and brightly to me. (do the photons that ricochet
off silvered glass change shape as they pass our perception?)

It must feel like a carousel minus circus horses,
or like the icy bite of winter. Yet,
all I’ve ever seen is a fawn and innocent beauty
frightened by the slamming doors of the city.
I know the sort of tears you cry, and they are
priceless, purified.

I do not overrate it, the light in your eyes.
I hope you’ll celebrate it, even when the morning cries.

I’ve been lonely just like you
(well, not just like)
you are purer than me.

I have devised my own dark madness;
yours has been forced upon you. And still
you love
while the sounds of war whir round your days.

As I lay praying that my dreams would not feature
the meanness I have known (some I rented, some I owned)
I thought of you and wondered
if you see your reflection as clearly
as I see you.

The hours can be giants, the shadows crouching lions,
but they defy the glow and fire
in the heart of one
whose pain rearranges the mirrored perception. So plainly
I will say,
I see the pain, the tears, the rain that seems unending.

But clearer than that I see a soul who wears a pendant
hidden from the storm (a jewel, a treasure, the color constant
against the crashing thunder). Believe my eyes
if you cannot believe your own;
the image I see often comforts me
for I also rarely believe my own.

Much Simpler

 

Much Simpler

(“You have been given the chance to understand the secrets of the kingdom of Heaven.” Matthew 13:11)

Don’t say a thing. Just listen.

When some see a serpent and call him a saint,
when some see a servant and say he ain’t,
isn’t it about time we stop digging in graveyards
to find a spitting image
that conforms to our fanciful parades about living?

Secrets are not the same as conspiracies,
the kingdom’s keys are much simpler than that.
Power in weakness, tears in strength
are the earthy recipe for heaven’s width and length.

When we see a vagabond and call her a vagrant,
when we see a singer and call her a siren,
isn’t it about time we stop projecting our movies
on the of paperback
bibles that confirm our king james boxes of doctrines.

Shadeless hands are the kingdom’s first gardeners,
no darkness that complicates the fields.
Earthen and single, seeds and cereal,
the seed revives only after burial.

Don’t feign a thing. Parables.

These Days the Blues

 

These Days the Blues

(“And stretching out His hand toward His disciples, ‘Here are My mother and My brothers!’” Matthew 12:49)

These days the blues pursue me
just two steps behind my slower pace.
I’ve remanufactured time, an endless loop,
an arpeggio designed to keep me within soothing
distance of smiles I miss,
wine we’ve dispensed,
and arguments we’ve left to evaporate
once the sun makes its rounds again.

Once I wanted less pressure,
once I sought more leisure,
now I look down the driveway for
another soul, a dead ringer for
day trips on dewy hills.

Once I was impressed by counts
and recounts,
filled chairs and noise,
good reports about a preaching machine
now grounded without wings.

These days the pain recruits me
just behind my older face.
Please call me, my brother;
please ride up and remind me
why I once called you sister.
Oh mother, of father, oh family
who ate vegan spaghetti and bread.

Now I’m impressed by doubts
and dropouts,
question marks and silence,
good transports that carry my heart
on prayer and a wing.

Among the Beggars

 

Among the Beggars

(“How much more valuable is a person than a sheep! So the Law allows a person to do what is good on the Sabbath.” Matthew 12:12)

We have songs to learn, spotlights to replace,
audio to check, dress shirts to be pressed.
We have prayer and candle time, cymbals and strings
and amazing things that we find so deep in the Word
that you never would have heard it if we had not used the
sweat of our brow
and our holy pickaxes
to reveal it to you.

And now you want health care when all we need do
is scare the virus away? Now you want mandatory masks
and ask us to keep our distance when you know we are
commanded to bundle up and spew our songs up and down
the aisles? If you had as much faith as we do
you would hold hands in a circle of prayer,
grab your neighbors to make sure they are there
and expose them to the health we share in the glow
of our communal, exclusive, pay as you go, enter
at your own risk,
faith.

II.

Today I find myself among the beggars asking
for alms of science. Today I find myself outside
the windows missing the rah-rah reformed protestations
that once filled my purpose like a balloon with wet sand.

But I know more, having learned more, now I do better.
The doors are closed for a while, the instruments mute on
high holy days
only because we value the lives
of those who are just flesh and bone
and filled with sunrise colors in the image of God.

I am no longer surprised (but I mourn instantly, constantly)
by the grand proclamations: Higher. Deeper. Farther.
Wetter. Steeper. Better. Jesus broke the
rule-of-the-7^th-day because it was a day to be healed.
I will break the rule-of-the-1^st-day for the very same reason.

I will do good on the day of His resurrection.