Day Breaks

 

Day Breaks

(“Then a voice came out of the cloud, saying, ‘This is My Son, the One I have chosen. Listen to Him!’” Luke 9:35)

Day breaks in on my dreams
as the sunbeams crash through my
windowpanes. Whether born with a
knotted mind
or
twisted like that over time,
the only voice I hear frightens me,
reminds me
that I have never belonged.
(When I did, so they thought, they invited me to
their homes. We played games. We laughed and
got donuts in the middle of the night.)
But either because, in desperation, I tried
to no longer hide behind cinder block certainties
or
I simply could no longer carry the pain of a slowly
exploding brain,
many scolded me. Many, my god, who once sang
the same songs about you.

Day breaks and the light slices unreliably,
strings and waves and particles so discordant
they escape my present reality. I have constructed
a crumbling world
where floorboards squeak every time
I think someone wants to enter. If they make their
way past my threshold I would certainly show them
the cobweb rooms where others before them
had left this unclean vacancy within. No, it
did not begin with them;
truly, I did little housecleaning from the start.

Day breaks up the waves that flow from river to sea,
and, for the life of me, I cannot discern how I ended up
flotsam upon the ocean with
no way to swim to the shore. I’ve flagged others
down with my words
but perhaps the foghorns have drowned my voice.

All this to say, let me hear the Daybreak. Unwind my
savage mind.
I am a child who cannot swim, a foreigner who does not
understand the language,
a castaway who stranded himself for
want of good navigation.
Let me hear the human voice of
the Living Son,
the Chosen One.
Because the way things have broken
every word I hear spoken sounds like
just one more reprimand. I need a voice
that gently breaks over deepening cracks
like ocean over sand.