At Least One

At Least One

(“Then the King will say, ‘For sure, I tell you, because you did it to one of the least of My brothers, you have done it to Me.’” Matthew 25:40)

I noticed the color of his voice, dark as midnight,
sorrowful as rain. I saw the sadness in his face, wrinkled in pain,
eyes squinting, the hurt unrestrained.

I expected the warmth I knew, the grace of noon in spring,
the mercy early and new. So much time had passed from the first
to the last
time I understood the best I could do
and the worst I had done
were not loaded upon a scale nor
could cancel each hellish act
with deeds done well.

I knew it now, embraced it how,
son and daughter, brother and sister,
are the new names for my anonymous past.

Today I could not understand, the frown, the hands
clenched like a widow’s upon the casket’s edge.
What loss could change the songs of heaven to
simple silence, a long pause of eternal time,
(a mere second of you disapproval took forever
as you scanned my face from eye to eye).

You looked at me, and the pain was a cannonball of sorrow,
as you looked upon the disregarded, the unrobed, the lately regarded
worst of sinners and simply said to me plainly, amen and
world without end:

“He was my friend” 

Layers, Decades and Slow Curves

Layers, Decades and Slow Curves

The wardrobe I rode in and out of town
I changed for the eyes that would see me
entering from dinner and a movie or
exiting to the hospital 70 miles east.

I could switch so fast then, wake when asked then,
that the wrinkles hardly had time to mark the angle
of my sitting.

Widows at home; white hair, doilies and tea;
the table set for her son’s birthday impromptu with
cake and Down’s Syndrome grins.
A drunk friend alone; doorbell, phone calls and pleas;
the table riddled with half-empty cans, flies and cats
and I sit with my the gentle again.

Day was early, sometimes fog and frost painted the trees
until noon at least.
But still mid-September the sun could manage a feast near
late afternoon; hours before the first full moon asked
us all to watch north past midnight; crashing breakers
in the air,
green and ghost-hued dances while men talked outside
the North Segment Hall
about the approach of deer season; sighting rifles
and walking razorbacks.

I kept up with committees and new friends,
uninvited popups with questions, phone calls with impressions
(maybe I quivered a bit back then)
and smile and wish they might call me again.

Waking now is a slow refrain, long chords held a full measure,
vamped and waiting the lifting of my head. And, there is a place
I hide

Every single tear

That I am no longer the same man,
no longer ready and aimed,
no longer brain-bursting with another idea to try.

I beg an answer while I dream, and all that seems to answer
is a white screen with soundtrack synched like bad jazz.

If a Field

If a Field

(“When the ground soaks up the falling rain and bears a good crop for the farmer, it has God’s blessing.” Hebrews 6:7)

“…but if a field bears thorns and thistles, it is useless. The farmer will soon condemn that field and burn it.”

And the day I started remains exactly where I left it
the. And the day I am playing out seems only so much
greasepaint covering how little progress has been made.

And the rain falls violently outside my patio window,
the wind fiercely tears the wind chimes off their

Nails in the wood.

I want to text the world to ask where my dreams disappeared,
I want an answer to my letters, I swear I would leave those days
behind
for just one word, or tear, or admission of the omissions that
send the bucket into the well behind my eyes, never returning dry.

I have all the rain I need, and dry, I remain the same
as the day I started. Like the expanding universe, stars
flying light-years further each second,
I discover the friends that once were my milky way
are beyond my ability to see; their appearance reaching me
20 years after the fact.

I have all the rain I need, and burned, I am on the outside,
a dry asteroid at the outer limits of light’s furthest spectrum.

A Slow Road

A Slow Road

(“Thus Shimei said when he cursed, ‘Get out, get out, you man of bloodshed, and worthless fellow!’” 2 Samuel 16:3)

Watch the sorrow that steps so slowly up the hill,
the Mount called Olive, as he leaves a kingdom behind him,
the sun hiding nearly the entire way behind groves of gnarled
ghosts he passed on the way to banishment. Popularity
once was king; shouts of glory once would ring each time
he returned from battle, every day below his window,
and he wore the crown with a straight back, ruddy complexion
and constant attention to questions he knew he never was tall
enough to answer.

It was family that did him in; the guilt, the anger, the choke that fills
sons and fathers with sin when the words fall short of their target. One son
gone, alive; one son gone and buried. The father-king could not utter a word
without stuttering twice over indecision and pride. “You may return, my son,
my rebellious one. But do not visit me, not at home, not on the throne, it is
enough I still call you by name, my Absalom, my rebellious one.”

With father and without him, rebel sons do what kings should expect.
Now father slumps nearly naked to the peak of the small grove where
he had learned to worship in David’s City; Zion’s hill. He cannot bear
the taunts that throw hell and accusation between each pace, within
the space in his head where, hoping for hope, he hears stumble instead.

Shimei, you speak only what the guilty father knows himself,
his scratching sandals write the sentence with each step, that
his Absalom, his rebellious son, deserves the kingdom he
ruled like no other. Yet his sons were at war, and father
could not change history, could not even the score, and
now walks in the woods where the future King

Will pray forward for the family of rebels who know war
too well. The Mount the call Olive will hear the tears
of the Son, the Beloved Son, weeping over the rebels
we all have become. And, for His Father’s sake (and ours)
lays his life down for His friends, not simply hearing the curse
of a rude subject,
but became the curse Himself, even the curse we cast
at Him we thought banished; and was heaven’s King
instead.

The Little that is Left

The Little that is Left

(“At the resurrection…all our ecstasies and intimacies then will be with God.” Matthew 22:30 [The Message])

I must apologize to the inventor of today that
I seem to always greet the day (sun or stinging sleet)
with a bucket full of empty.

I know the impressive canvass I inhabit,
deeper than holography, more dimension than imagined,
pigments to the power of rainbow beads on spider strands,
music so deep it slips between the half and quarter tones,
music that, with a single note, calls tears unbidden,
joy once hidden to fill the heart with ribbons of
folk tunes everyone knows by heart.

I must apologize to the artist who made
me,
that I find nothing to fill this
little that
pain and shock, blame and awe
have left behind.

Bright sun or happy song,
the tears still flood the bucket
at my feet with the little that is
left of me.

Bit by bit, I must admit, I was not made stronger,
but each bite left holes in my flesh until
fissures outnumbered the safe and the sound.

I would go now, if You would take me,
the little that is less than the day You called me,
so I could smile in your presence where no one ever
ever
can bite or hurt or walk away from me
again.

First Time Heard

"First Time Heard"

(“Jesus went with his disciples to a place called Gethsemane. When they got there, he told them, ‘Sit here while I go over there and pray.’” Matthew 26:36)

Carried along into the cave where olives branched to make
a cavernous ceiling, the worst dirge was sung with only
a Single One understanding the words.

Though the words may swirl around our heads when the
dying heart asks our attention; though we cannot grasp
which rhyme was chosen or why, the aching unto death
demands companions who will stay though the song
as perplexed as sitting at a Seder for the first time.
You know it is holy, and cannot perceive what each
cup, each herb, each prayer means. But you stay with
all attention; like hearing Leonard Cohen without knowing
he is a genius.

With the final Psalm sung, they stopped midway into the
grotto where sadness sank beneath their feet like mud
under the crusted earth. They were invited this
musty night and knew not why, trying to match their
mouths to the words their Muse had mastered.

Sad, frightened, agony and pain-till-death; these were
not words they had heard from the Joy of Heaven before.
They were absurd, their hearts bubbled like boiling,
in love’s strange attachment tonight to the Lover
leading them to their darkest encounter. They could
not
pray
but
slept.
And so would I, at the way the darkness made
the refrain a migraine unfastened from verse.

He stepped just outside their sight,
but they heard every word of His pain blasting
through the canopy to Heaven’s remote outpost;
and sleep only echoed the words in dreams as real
as their waking.

Sadness encountered sleep; sadness twice and then
the weeping was done, the will respun to symphony’s best
while others slept the words they could not forget.

Within My Sorrows

Within My Sorrows

I don’t mean to complain, it’s simply become a habit,
a well-worn path, a late morning communiqué.
Cranky is as cranky does and I’m doing cranky like
I’ve fastened it on my lapel.

It’s not that I revel in the drudgery; there is some evidence
I delight in smiles more than the four walls bearing down on
late afternoon winter like the closing credits of a movie
you wish you hadn’t paid to see.

I didn’t mean to be short with you; my skin is always tingling
and hair-triggered. I don’t mean to be famously gun-shy,
hiding so I don’t have to wave at people I have never met.

I cannot get it back, the lad who I was when the world was in front of me,
every decision a step toward the candy-store, every morning a reason
to try something new.

I pray, perhaps with my faith that has flinched. I pray,
while I scan the keyboard for happier letters to write.

I have less money than I need to make it till I die,
I have enough friends, but cannot find the money to
bring them next door or a day’s drive away again.

I play, perhaps with less abandon and passion. I play,
fingers curled around the guitar-neck, fingers ready to pounce
the black and whites. But nothing new fascinates me and my
old riffs rarely satisfy.

I don’t mean to complain, don’t want to be hypnotized by
tomorrow’s rainstorm. My day passes before I think of anything
that would fill my joybucket surely.

Here are my tears, My Lord, My Love, I am sorry I have less faith
and have not found the happy by riverbanks or back-porch friends.

Here is the remainder of the day and the one cent curiosity
about tomorrow. I will lay it on the page, a photo of rides around the bend
now too lazy to find.

I wish I was a loveable curmudgeon, but all I have become is
a cry-baby who can find nothing ahead to smile about.

I know the sun dwells beyond the clouds, and cannot bear to
give away the little hope I have remaining as I walk more disappointed
in my day than any reader.

I know the Savior dwells within my sorrows, and I drain the cup dry
holding to the love, the Creator of my days.

My Heart is Broken

My Heart is Broken

My heart is broken, that’s what it comes down to.
And, as if I had broken my leg, 5 years later I should no longer
walk with a limp.

But my heart is broken. And no one helped me cast it,
I was sent to lift more loads while it still burst at the seams.

As if I had broken my leg, 5 years later I should be able
to hike Yosemite.

But my heart is broken. And as with every broken heart,
all are at fault, and all wish someone would stitch it up,
take it to a better time, rewind the emotional health trap,
swath the mental health, retest the spinal tap, and give me the
CPR to replace the spirit that flew out the hole left in my heart.

As if I had broken my leg, 5 years later I should be dancing
like I had never quit.

But my heart is broken. Again. And I just don’t feel like dancing.
Broken hearts never heal in isolation, but ICU was the only room available.

As if I had broken my leg, I would be outpatient and 5 year later
racing to the coffee shop to people-watch with my best friend.

But my heart is broken. I wake after a good day to darkness.
I close my eyes and the good flies from my consciousness only to
have the movie of former times, I mean 20 years ago times, play
in grainy resolution.

As if I had broken my leg, my appetite would be unaffected,
my smile unforced, and the laughs natural walking down the pavement
on a warm spring morning.

But my heart is broken and spring feels like winter, winter never ends
and friends are better than my busted heart believes. But it was busted
by friends and my wasted allegiances, my unwise camaraderies, my
dance with those unlikely to return the favors.

As if I had broken my leg, I would not cry here, 5 years later.

But my heart is broken and the tears still do not stop coming.