Would You Stop?

 

Would You Stop?

(“When the Lord saw her, He felt compassion for her and said to her, ‘Do not go on weeping.’” Luke 7:13)

Would you stop the world for just one moment,
would you look at me and see the scars
My clothes are worn, my heart is torn,
and my eyes cannot form the beauty I once knew.
No one sees me, no one notices,
no one watched me drenched in tears.

The gentle hands have become hammers
to
drive home points of disagreement. The voices
that once cracked with mutual grief
now shake in appalled increments like
the last line in obits where it tells who
was left behind.

Would you please pause time so they can see me,
would you place a parenthesis please so someone can drive
by and remind themselves why we were
friends in the first place?
Would you help them remember their promises of love,
would you help them see what has died inside?

There are no more discussions; even debates would revive
the barren patch that goes against the grain within.
They stay away while the pain twists my brain like a spigot.
They feign loyalty, while correcting me for the density
of death I express. If I lied about life, they would applaud me.

Would you please lift me off the carousel, the horses have
run their course. Would you revise this edition of me?
I want no thrill rides, just a quiet meal with anyone who
once pledged their love
and is still unafraid to
give it.

Would you look at me? Would you stop the calliope and
hear me closely? Would you (not tomorrow) attend to this
compressed sorrow? Would you see how the years and hours
have piled up on me? Would you stop and start
with me again?

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.

Nowhere Left to Go

 

Nowhere Left to Go

(“Jesus looked at his followers and said, ‘Great blessings belong to you who are poor. God’s kingdom belongs to you.’” Luke 6:20)

It takes only one gaze, one long and expansive glance
from the king of heaven, the lord of earth,
to bring the shadow people into their proper light.

He used to sleep underneath the bridge. Everyone knew it.
There are no secrets in a hamlet edged up against the river.
He had no car. Walked the bridge to the island where he
lived in a workshop his grandfather left him when he died.
It did not belong to him, but to his family far out of state.
The evicted him, he filled his crates, packed a leaky travel trailer
and pushed it to a storage area for safe keeping. Stretching tarps
across the roof and every corner the bungee cords groaned as
the winds ballooned the blue and camouflage waterproofing when
the winter storms blew fierce.

He could not live in it: storage only.

He cursed when he got angry. Ok, he cursed a lot. He had a motor
scooter he used to ride to town until it broke down. A bicycle replaced
it and worked just fine until the rims and gears wore out with rust.
Then his job fell through and could no longer pay cash only.
For the last two years he had fought to find a way out of the
shivering dark and lonely.

I gave him rides to the food banks when I could. We drove to
the storage lot, unlocked the flimsy trailer door and put the bags
in cupboards and counters, but mostly on the floor.

Nowhere to go when the rains came, I put him up in a storage shed
fifty feet from the door of the church. He found a corner between
manger scenes and lawn mowers and slept with his head on the
lower shelf with canning jars on either side. It was not easy. He was
not tidy. And it was only temporary we knew.

But some of the leaders blew their stack to think a vagrant, a
known drug user, (actually, they would say, it didn’t matter anyway)
and said insisted he had to be out by the end of the day.

Nowhere left to go, and with empty suggestions from the evictors,
he cursed at me, and cursed again. I had let him down, he had been
my friend.

And now, two years later I cannot find him, I do not know where he’s been.

I often wonder why my brothers would not receive someone that Jesus said
was a blessing.

When the Sparks Began

 

When the Sparks Began

(“Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you should answer each person.” Colossians 4:6)

 

They had been transparent days until then,
skies full of space, dewy grass with the fallen
petals of camelias carpeting the places beneath
the trees.

They had been joyful evenings until then,
rounds full of laughter, guitars with the chosen
chords of folk songs measuring the pace of memorized
ditties and reels.

A careless cigarette dropped from the traveler’s mouth
into a ditch on a day when all burning was banned.
He noticed, he looked
and exhaled again as he hurried to his destination.

A thoughtless epithet dropped from the minstrel’s mouth
into the circle of fifths on a night when choral odes were planned.
She heard it, she laughed
as if that would soften the blow of a word misplaced and unrationed.

The day became opaque for hours to weeks,
the sun was burnt orange, the sky soot black and weeping,
ancient tree roots and newly budded roses were burned
at the stake
along with farms and meadows and houses.

The night became static, claustrophobic and silent,
the guitar cases clicked as instruments were laid down to sleep.
Songs sung for generations, songs sung for solidarity were mute
at the way
unsavory words sucked the joy from picking and strumming
and singing and humming.

Wildfire and iced hearts. All we needed was seasoning to grace
the moment when the sparks began.

A Year in the Desert

 

A Year in the Desert

(“Then He went away by Himself to pray in a desert.” Luke 5:16)

The songs no longer come easy, the
rests and notes run together randomly.
When the blue jays whistle
the empty sky swallows their songs like
peeling paint from clapboard siding.

The songs once rose like nursery rhymes
unaided by years of leaded study. That is
why this is so hard to write.

The songs were for other folk.

And approaching endgame, the final moves, checkmate
looms. Alone with a head

Full of thunder again.

Some saw bravery; the options simply ran out. Stepping
aside across the unaided expanse, no one showed up to
say goodbye.

The words died upon the journey, the melancholic joy
sank deeper beneath another crawlspace with uneasy answers.
No one showed up to say, “how the hell are you?”

A year in the desert is spent crying for water, wishing for
another chance
where the rains wash away every question ever asked. Thirsting
for the rain that paints it all with green and yellow and pink
when the heart pumps only sludge through the man standing
under a frightening sun, onstage before no one.

But upon the advent of the second year the lonely sky
mentions that butterflies love sunflowers and
mockingbirds never sing the same song twice.
Upon the advice of professionals, the blood thins,
the skin is scanned, and the desert is no longer solitary
confinement. Sometimes the guitar strings are rusty
from months of humid atrophy. But strings can be
replaced.

Like a sitar being tuned, the desert became birth pangs;
music played only by a virtuoso. Maestro, play on.
And if no one knocks on the door to hear because
the music sounds foreign to the neighbors’ ears,
mentor us well; the few who had to venture

Far into the desert to hear the wind and sands
sing of the origin and cause of every song
that every wanderer longed for.

After the Fire

 

After the Fire

(“After the earthquake, there was a fire. But the Lord was not in the fire. After the fire, there was a quiet, gentle voice.” 1 Kings 19:12)

I am weary of the quiet with no faces to watch,
though I open the windows and close all the screens.
All I see are the birds flying between my house and the trees.

My mind traverses back to sunny days
on be-cattled hills. Two or three friends,
a guitar and a song, silly stories and
the sky filling our faces.

I coveted the fire. I had heard the stories;
people hiding behind the piano in the corner of the church
just waiting for the flames of God
to ignite them like rocket engines.
I only experienced jet lag.

I begged for the wind. I had heard the tales;
people unexpectedly flying above the earth
with divine wind in their sails. Sometimes they
did not alight for days.
I was displaced by a tornado.

I would prefer not to write about the earthquakes.
They left me broken, split apart like glacial stones.
They pushed me down from the mountain and left me
disoriented, sad and too far from home. The
fault-line
ran straight through my soul.

But I would sit all day unworded with
a friend who let the silence pass between us
like the slow bloom of the cherry tree,
like the change in the wind after a storm,
like the ashes who recognize they have already been burned,
like a dandelion being born.

After the fire I might sleep for a while.
After the fire, then the
whisper.

The Music from Within

 

The Music from Within

(‘Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!” Philippians 4:4)

One day you can hear the mandolin strings singing just
outside your window.
The next day the fog hangs so close nothing pierces the
heavy silence.
Some weeks are lived this way, and some years.
Some storms turn suddenly away and some
sit overhead like they have nothing else to do.

One day you’re riding comfortably under convertible skies,
the next you’re confined inside a cramped stone basement
averting your eyes from the next claustrophobic wall of sound.

Joy is not for the faint of heart,
but for those willing to confront the darkness
and the detours
that stop us in our tracks. Deeper than the cellar floors
and the shadows, higher than the star-view disguises,
wider than ecstatic proclamations, and closer than
the bud to the branch

Is the unmovable space where love abides,
where transient meets immanent,
where music from within captivates us
when continental shelfs shake us to our core.