Invitations in the Mail

Invitations in the Mail

(“For we are the temple of the living God, just as God said: ‘I will live and walk among them. I will be their God, and they will be my people.’” 2 Corinthians 6:16b)

Did you truly need an explanation about grace
and how it crosses the divides between shame and power?
Did you truly think your hardness was acceptable,
that your curses were blessings, and your judgment the very
throne of God?

How did we ever arrive at a time when people with no sense of God
told us everything
God hated about us? Did you turn your Sunday School lessons into
declarations of division? Did you think that Christ would not notice
your atom bombs and jack-booted roundups of people
who are more like you than you can imagine?

I’ve been waiting for a turn of phrase,
for a moment of grace,
for a day of mercy,
for a year of humanity that finally celebrates
every color of the rainbow and every hue we cannot see.
I’ve been watching and all I hear are enthusiastic salutes
that send us deeper into sorrow and loathing.

If God wants to be our God, then why are we expecting him
to stamp his insignia on our basest instincts. Do you want
God
to be your God
and never give a moment’s fuck to what it means when he
asks us to rethink everything we’ve been poisoning the world with?

This is my deposition: I have never wanted a single person excluded
from the fellowship, the fraternity, the family that laughs at the
feet that keep walking toward home. There are invitations still
coming in the mail.

Ragged or Smooth

Jagged or Smooth

(“Why didn’t I die from the womb? Why didn’t I give up the spirit when my mother bore me?” Job 3:11)

I know the silence that is deafening,
I’ve heard it when noon feels like an encircling winter.
I’ve read the words supposed to revive me
but only fill my gut with sand.
I hear you, though you are not talking,
I’m waiting for the same things. I’m waiting
for the sanity to return.

If we could ration our days,
equal doses of pleasure and pain;
if we could only measure the darkness
to equal the bands of solar flares.
Why can’t we find the answers we
beg for? Why can’t the sunrise turn itself
around to bid us walk lightly again?

I know the pounding of unanswered mail,
I’ve heard the shrieks above stolen slumber.
I’ve read the language I inherited, I’ve translated
every word until I filled the afternoon with
thoughts captive behind the leaden bars of my brain.

I’ll write to you; I’ll talk with you. I’ll listen for
a thousand days. I’ve pounded on the granite walls
decades at a time. I know the hope that seems hollow,
the afternoons that drag on like mausoleums hidden behind
startled and painful sighs.

I haven’t forgotten the days when I would sacrifice everything
I coveted for a
tearful friend to carry my
baggage for a while. I will always sit next to the one who,
seeing my damage, does not stop to ask
at whose hand I hurt. (Though most times, I confess,
the hand was my own.)

I’ll never forget you, jagged or smooth. I’ll never regret
friendship that lasts from moon to constellations,
from mood to mood. I’ll never remove your name from
the portraits hanging from the hallways of my heart.