My Words Like Armor

My Words Like Armor

(“But Jesus told them, ‘He wrote this command for you because of the hardness of your hearts.’” Mark 10:5)

I wear my words like armor,
I look for loopholes in yours.
Starting from the middle I can
slide down the slopes from north or south;
I can believe I am above it all.

Or, if someone talks out loud, I can
nod occasionally, I can mumble famously,
and leave them thinking I have heard
every word.
They may even think, though I would not admit it,
that I agree.
I do not.

How many years does it take to lay down my shield,
how many decades to reshape the form that held all
I believed.
I sealed up all the cracks and the darkness stayed inside;
the light could not find me. And you thought,
like all the rest,
that I was at my best when talking about God.

I disagree. My metaphors are misanthropes,
hindered hopes that sit at the base of my spine.
Every opinion I’ve ever heard has been mine
until
I heard a love that was more solid than
the poetry I created. I cannot define it,
I can barely describe it, but there is a WE
that exists in the midst of everything. My
theories only keep you at arm’s length anyway.

My fingers are calloused but my thoughts are mindless,
my progress is timeless and the cure I was offered
only tied me in knots. But I’ll sit with you here
as long as it takes to untie the kindness we had
at the start.

We Did Not Wear Armor Well

We Did Not Wear Armor Well

(“Go in peace. We have taken an oath in the Lord’s name to be friends forever.” 1 Samuel 20:42b)

There were bottles of cabernet, a well-used kitchen table,
a couch shared with dogs and teenagers and talk that could
extend for hours.
We shared the wine those times when the days were thicker than
mud and we resigned ourselves to well-worn company protected
by in-house
understanding that the world could not enter in.
And so we would begin, whether from shame or fear,
to share what we hid most often outside those weary walls.
Occasionally we socialized (Sunday’s of course, after all,
I was a pastor). But we were clear from the beginning:
Friendship was why we were together.
But at a banquet, a wedding reception, bingo, or groups
of more than a dozen,
we were always the first to leave. We loved every person attending,
but social anxiety had the last word far too often for us both.
They said we were well-liked; we did not believe it.

Neither one of was very brave, though we shared our opinions readily;
God knows, we both had a trove of accumulated knowledge that we
could dispense at will. We did not wear armor well, sometimes
the sunlight was all that sent us
seeking each other’s company when our personal
darkness stole the day from us.

We lived only a block apart, but now hundreds of miles away,
the same friendship carried me for months, but awkwardly.
We once sparred gently with our wine at the table,
but now, unable to see your face, to hear the laugh in your voice,
I fear, still without armor, I let a priceless gift gather dust on the shelf.

With so many miles and years between us now,
with the place the path has led me now,
with former friends who ignore me now,
(in their cases, they could not understand my shift)
I still long for a place, a person, to sift through the
unwinding of life. When I have failed, I have feared
all the more.
But, though far in time and space, the door between us, sweet friend,
is open. My best friend here,
a retired Lutheran minister, now as liberal as I am,
would complete an amicable trinity.