Turn To Me with Your Constant Love

Turn To Me with Your Constant Love

(“Because your love is constant, hear me, O Lord; show your mercy, and preserve my life!” Psalm 119:149)

You might be surprised to hear me telling
all my truth. You might think less of me,
you might look with disgust,
as I let flow the maladjustments that have followed me
from my youth.
I tell half with honesty, half with hope.
I write with symbols, I read with stops where I should
continue until the entire story is told.
Addicts never love brutal honesty;
the best of us don’t want to hurt those we love;
the rest of us quake at our reputation being more of a
government announcement that the check is in the mail.
For now, perhaps until evening, my eyes are undry,
there is a tremor in my hands, my voice chokes, and
I maintain constant vigilance that makes me feel like everything
I’ve said and done was just a cruel hoax.

I do two loads of laundry a week, and some of my jeans
are now torn at the seams. I could wear them to do yard work,
if I did yard work,
but I have nothing to wear to do the hard work of winning back
the man I thought I could become too many decades ago.

It would be easy if, just writing carelessly now, each transgression
was forgotten forever. But we are not made that way, are we?
The memory circuits stay active, the trauma rarely expressed.
I should have sought professional help, I should have gone
to the wilderness with one ear or two who would hear my
truth in its entirety. That is no one’s fault. I make no excuses.
But words I read creep beyond the fences I’ve built to keep
me from seeing the judgement in the eyes of someone who might
become my enemy. I’ve lived, every epoch of my life,
with this systemic aberration. There is no one to blame
but myself. And I know that loathing is the last thing my
lonely soul needs.

I’m looking for the one friend who I can spend afternoons with
telling my ancient stories and truth. Someone I have not hurt so far,
someone, some day with hooks in their soul just like mine.

Turn to me with your constant love,
let me confess the failings that still come
fast-mailed from the past. I have lost the trust
I once had. I am tired of being a hermit, tired of recusing
myself like a hobbit in a cave. Meet me for drinks
and we’ll see how the conversation goes.

He Dwelt on an Island

He Dwelt on an Island

(“But the path of the just is like shining light, that grows in brilliance till perfect day.” Proverbs 4:18)

He was exiled to his own hometown,
disabled and circling the days like an understudy.
At night the northern lights,
he said,
found ways to illustrate the canvas skies.
And morning brought approaching storms that
pushed the Columbian white-tails from the tree stands
to the meadow. The grazed in slow motion. A young doe
with a dappled flank was part fir tree and part willow.
She waited the passing of the thunder until
the sun moved her home inside the forest shadows.

He dwelt on an island,
or so they thought,
surrounded by nothing but sand that brought
every anxious moment to dock so close to his porch
there was little room for conversation.

It was a puzzle that they did not see the bridges
that connected him, you, and me. It was a mystery.
And like most magic, their eyes were averted from
anything they could not explain. He once had walked
down the center of town. He once owned the airwaves,
he once sat with princes and sang with jazz quartets.

He did not choose this solitary. He did not move away at all.
He lived as close as he ever had, within walking distance
from those that once shook his hand.

Some days it darkened him. Some days he believed his
isolation.
But when the clouds moved on, when the does and the fawn
tiptoed past his door,
he knew the light had never left, nor could it. The light
had been left on. The light was all that left him
completely
undone.

The Last to Leave

 

The Last to Leave

(“He had promised to give a lamp to David and his sons forever.” 2 Kings 8:19b)

Do you remember when you were the last to leave?
I wanted to show my heart, but not all of it.
Music wafted in from the next room
while small talk about big ideas
melted the distance between us.
I wanted you to see me clear, but not the corners.

Do you remember when you asked me where I bought my clothes?
I wanted to tell you thrift stores, but the best ones.
The places I shopped for t-shirts and 3-piece suits
smelled of dampness and sweat. You might not
have minded I guess.
I zipped my hoodie tighter, but not all the way.

Do you remember when you asked the last time I cried?
I wanted to be perfect, and so I lied. It was just before
we started our conversation.
I could write a thousand things and still not plumb the depths,
the reserve hidden at the bottom.
I wanted to cry when you asked, but got up for a coffee.

Do you remember when I returned with your espresso?
I wanted to impress you, show that I know you. Unlike
my silent self which I hid beneath poetry and song.
The dissidents in my brain claimed my last bit of resolve
and so I evolved into a domesticated animal.
I wanted the dark and light to be equal, but served the froth instead.

Do you remember when you were the last to leave
and I sat in the corner watching you lean into a new friend?
I wanted to die. I had denied myself and moved into
the shadows alone.
The very thing that frightened me, the thing that kept me caged,
was the thing you drank deeply as I watched your conversation.

And I had aged far too quickly. I lit my lamp partly.
I used up my energy deadlocking a room that consumed my thinking.
And I watched him, the same age as me, unleash his hiddenness
like a summer cloudburst. You were drenched while
I covered myself from the rain.

To Try it All

To Try it All

(“Be tolerant with one another and forgive one another whenever any of you has a complaint against someone else. You must forgive one another just as the Lord has forgiven you.” Colossians 3:13)

The tour would begin at the intersection of Second Street
and Alhambra road; two boys who had the wind knocked out of them
simply because school had begun. The asphalt simmered,
the crepe myrtles, the trees with a grandmother’s name, spurred us
on. We marched between the cyclone gates with every clue lost
to new boys finding a place sit, a group to surround our shyness away.

I was never sure who I was, or might be, though I had as many friends
as enemies. Bruce good at conversation, introverted, I think, borrowed
time for him to string words into sentences and punctuate them with the
tiny spaces. He hated his name, his first name, I mean; Marion, it was,
and I understood, though we all agreed, for evil or good, that Bruce was
not much better.

Deidre was good for hanging upside down. Her dad constructed the best
swing set in the neighborhood. She hardly used the seats; more often
she hooked her knees
over the cross-beams of the Capital A held the blue and white tubes together.
It seemed she would hang there half the afternoon, and punch me in the ribs
if I dismounted too soon. And she could throw a ball better than anyone but Don.

Don was good for walking home, and singing “Build Me Up, Buttercup” on the way.
Held back a year and big for his age, he was my protector when a bully
or a chum
sent me a private invitation for a meeting behind the temporaries after school.
Plus, MJ, his sister, was the prettiest girl I knew from third grade through
junior high school.

I still was not sure who I was, or would be. Would I gather notions, subtract
emotions, and arrive at a calculated equation, well-balanced and firm? Four years
of cramming every day full like a knapsack for a month long hike still left me
thrilled at wandering, spilling all my wondering in ink and hopeful encores
after finishing my set of hand-crafted songs.

I was so unsure, though, I stopped at every red light longer than I should. “Your
poetry
doesn’t rhyme, kid; your music barely has a tune, dude; and God needs you
more in the pulpit than on the stage, son.” I stopped my pursuit before it had
begun.

Now I’m old enough to say “No,” to the objections and “Yes” to the offers,
but have traveled so far from the connections my extension cord will not reach
from this tiny spot of paradise back to the places I should have rolled the dice
and given it all a whirl.

It’s not heartache, nor a spirit broken by age; it’s regret, and I’ll forgive myself yet
before the next song with too few rhymes is written from where I sit. I miss
every bus I missed, every song not sung, every role I dismissed and mostly
the courage to try it all.

He said What?

“Giving the right answer at the right time makes everyone happy.” Proverbs 15:23

Good conversation is truly an art. To be honest, as good a communicator as I can be when I’m “up front”, but me one on one with someone I don’t know well and I can sometimes clam up. I’ve always been that way. I even preferred double dating because it was so much easier to talk, not having to carry one whole side of the conversation.

Winter Clothing

Winter Clothing

(“He is the one mentioned by the prophet Isaiah, ‘The voice of one, shouting in the desert, Make ready the way of the Lord; straighten His paths!’” Matthew 3:3)

I put my gray sweats on into the heavy morning,
air a slight drip, breath a damp hello on
toward the breakfast-view of the river
from the backside of the one block downtown
restaurant.

It may have been too early, I may have been too slow,
words were like the careful boats who heard the foghorn
repeating the same warning before the island split the channel;
deep north and sandbar south.

We may be hard of hearing, we may be easy talkers,
we may want to say it clearly but the waters drown
the spoken ink we fell asleep knowing.

My coat is cow’s leather, not camel brush;
my breakfast Belgian waffles, never locusts
(but I do eat honey)
and I’d like the road ready, the single block I walk
downtown sometimes early, prepared and ready
for better hearing and quicker feet
to follow, fog or not (and trade my learning for
love’s experiment, a t-shirt and sneakers on the ground.)

I put my gray sweats on, my winter clothing
while the adolescent boy I met was short sleeve
white and jeans. One sentence was a door open from the inside

And the rest of our talk (other men and our inventions)
we tried to open with good intentions. Our words are
stuck, our love perhaps not, but we need practice
to cure the bends from spirit to sound, heart to hello
before we goodbye next time we meet.

Unfinished Conversations

Unfinished Conversations

Perhaps we can walk to the river and
finish our conversation there.
I would speak with you, sitting next to you,
on a craggy overlook with the sun behind us,
the river ambling past us,
and the fog nearly lifted above our heads.

Perhaps we can put a period to end
this unfinished paragraph without
rewriting the letter over again.

Walk with me to the river,
we will find the shade that makes the afternoon
nearly as contented as morning.

I will hope, (I have no indication for my hope’s veracity), but
I still hope the water past us, different as it is from the river
we knew a year before,
might also carry our words full distance to the
ocean where all things mingle without competition.

Perhaps we can sit by the riverbank
like we did only once before
and finish the sentence we started,
the ellipsis that translated everything without saying,
so your implications only left me wondering what lingered
between the dots.

Walk with me to the river,
there is more below the surface tension,
the quiet ripples that reflect the winks of the sun,
there is life beneath the mirror stream
beyond sight of our myopic vision.

I will slow my listen, and hope (still, evidence unseen)
the same life lies beneath the questions you left
the last time I thought I took the bait.
This time I’ll ask the questions out loud that
only bubbled below my fear, and trust, not you,
nor me

But the river to take the best sentences we have
out to sea and beyond reclamation.