The First Thing I Noticed

The First Thing I Noticed

The first thing I noticed was the vacancy
at the table, the chair you used to sit in,
the door left unlatched, the void where your
voice once filled the air.

You were no longer invited after taking your fall;
your name was forgotten after your honesty took the stage.
You lived putting it all together and leaving your mind
behind.
You could not accept the constant dissonance any longer;
your ears needed the chords to resolve. You had pinned your
hopes on the lyrics you heard earlier in the day.
You trusted promises that were left hanging like
torn sheets in the wind. You looked for the hand
that once carried you through the riptides of
bewilderment. But they had withdrawn to find their
own place in the sun.

You started the song again, this time all alone.
You played all the instruments because everyone had gone home.
You could no longer sing, though, like you had decades before.
You wondered why you even recorded anything anymore.

Doctrine had caught up with you. Creeds had kept you
bound to the chair at the table where only the most exclusive
were invited. You spoke too soon and were deconverted
unnaturally. Your place at the table dissolved even
more once you mentioned the poor. You were resolved
to live unnoticed like a seed underground.

The first thing I noticed was the way you
turned the tables
and lived again in the margins. The first thing
I heard were the words you said unleashed from
the strain you used to bear of living up to the dogma
of yesterday.

Fill This Vacancy

 

Fill This Vacancy

(“You have done well, and proven yourself to be my loyal and trustworthy servant.” Matthew 25:21)

Let me educate you about silence,
about the abyss that exists when the decades you
invested
amount to hardly a whisper a quarter mile up the road.

I hide myself, take no risks,
wince at squinted questions,
die of laughingstocks.

Let me fill you in if you do not know
that, beaten at my own game, I stayed in until the
final seconds ticked my fate dry. If you are asking:

Yes, I cry every day.

My time ran out, my well ran dry,
my risk was greater than my apparent reward.
My friends forgot to write, and one or two
called me in 24 months of shivering solitude.

And just down the hill today, just a 10-minute walk today,
they gathered six months after my return. Isolation
has insulated me
from unwrapping my skin again. I trace the same route
over and over,
up the road and down the valley where
bramble and tree limbs entangle the cold banks of
the brook that is background noise to the mosquito buzz
haunting the abyss in my head. I am an analog
AM radio
forever caught in the static between stations.

I hope Jesus, the one quoted above, will fill this vacancy soon
because I’ve been a tenant on this battle hill too long.
And if no one else has a word, a hug, a plaque or an
invitation to dine around campfire smoke,

I hope the words he spoke will be enough for me to hear,
that someone thinks I’ve proven myself,
that someone thinks my self-inflicted wounds are
worth the time to heal.