The Sane Walked Away

The Sane Walked Away

(“False messiahs and false prophets will have arisen and will produce signs and omens intending to deceive, if possible, the elect.” Mark 13:22)

You had them convinced, you had them in the palm of your hand,
you had them believing you could cast out demons with
just three notes of your song.
The proof was in your words;
the demons were invisible,
you waved your feet like they were swords,
you proclaimed defeat while the crowd
watched in silent appreciation.

Your profit was enormous, your houses a dozen palaces,
you scolded the few who could not sing
the words you wrote that dug into the ears
of the unsuspecting.

You were not enormous but pretended to defeat
every malady, to browbeat the darkness as if
you had invented the sun. The day gave way to
innuendoes and deceptions. You feigned sanity
while handing out madness like candy. Where

Did you learn

To package it slightly, stuffed within your black coat
baying at the moon.

The sane walked away, went downtown,
and bought lunch for the hundred who were not
taken in.

I Belong

I Belong

(“It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. This life that I live now, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave his life for me.” Galatians 2:20)

I spent too many hours drowsy like
a wintertime bear. I waited for a knock on the door
or someone to pour me another cup of coffee.
I could have seen the hills where frozen fog had
decorated them like buttercream frosting. As the
day went on they melted like a cat licking cake.

My failures had piled up higher than I could reach;
my hallway narrowed in my sleep until I only saw
right and left directly in front of me.
I try to remember my dreams, but I fall back asleep
and they are gone.

I try to understand the words I’ve heard every day,
and they swirl past me like the mists that the haze laid
across the rolling field. I don’t ask for pity,
I never ask for money,
I only want to know I’ll make it through the
next decade older than I have become.

Haply, though, the chances were in my favor,
the changes like dusky diamonds on the road
were within the very breaths of my sighs and indignation.
I regretted more than I had forgotten
and ached more than the storms had gotten out of control.
I gave up and when I did

The mountains did not fall, the sidewalk did not trip,
the ice did not make me slip, the time took me no time at all;
I listened to your voice, and for once I knew
all I had been through
led me here. Where else could it have been.

My days begin and no longer wait for a mysterious guest.
Instead I find, more than bread, more than wine,
the wilds inside that lead me like adventure down the
wider halls of wonder. I do not mind the wandering
as much,
for I am no longer lost, though often alone. I am full though
hollow as ever. I belong, from Spring to September, to the
saints who sang uncanny music in my ears.

My Ears Are Wooden

  My Ears Are Wooden

(“Then he arose and rebuked the wind and the tempest of water, and they ceased, and it became calm.” Luke 8:24b)

In the meantime my ears were wooden,
I could not hear the beat set before the song began.
The winds whistled, shuffling the rhythm, and I
played on as if the damage was not done.

But we never finished together, the band and I.
I took the hard passages, the ones that were effortless
in my youth,
and now my fingers played on muddy fretboards,
I sloshed and panted my way through the solos.

I thought I was tired. I thought I was bored. I thought
I had grown old and would never touch the same tunes again.
I thought it was temporary. I thought I could come back.
I thought more practice would restore the agility of my youth.

But each solo my fingers were out of breath. Each melody meant
to take the song to the heights had to be edited,
my songs were discredited,
and my wooden ears only wanted to hear the way
I once played
before all the murmuring began.

Shiftless, lonely, angry, and afraid. It was another storm
among many. My energy was taxed by all the others before,
there was nothing left over. How to tell everyone that one more
crushing wind
has taken one more piece of my life
away again.

Without a band to rehearse. Without the skills I once had.
Without the tempo beating true. Without reserves to get me
through an entire song unwinded…

I’ve ended waiting alone for the winds to shift,
(if they have a mind to)
or send more bandmates to drift on the breeze
where we can easily play old songs like
old men do.

Family Portrait/Advent

 

Family Portrait/Advent

(“The rich and the poor meet together. The Lord is the maker of them all.” Proverbs 22:2)

Do your ears hear the same carols
floating from the trees as winged birds sing
in air grown crisp toward the end of the year?
Do your eyes see the same sunlight
creeping over the hills, the same fog
opening to reveal the day?

Do your babies cry like rain,
your children play ball until sunset,
your thoughts fill your mind like winter champagne?
Do you visit your muse to find the silence you seek?

I remember the blue slate siding with a dozen layers
of paint beneath the cracks.
I remember the first time I walked to school in the snow,
plastic bags over my little tennis shoes,
and I was late. A couple of inches of snow in
west Texas
will always slow a six-year-old. My
hand-me-down pants were cold and wet.

The children raced to the feasting table first
but had learned through instruction and habit
to wait for the elders to be served. Bright eyes
looked up to meet some eyes sad, some flittering,
some distant, some weary, and others gladly receiving
a place in line saved by little mouths. One time
an elder placed two deviled eggs on each child’s
plate.

Do you sit across from a little not your own,
next to a neighbor who lost everything that made them
well-known in town?
Did you hear the stories of sweaty days repainting a house
where the sun snuck through the cracks?
Did you find the place that eases suffering by the
simple touch of hand and face? Did you walk
the dirt road until everyone’s feet ached the same?

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.