Sunday, July 17, 2011
I recently ran
across this article
on this theological
about this man
who had a wife,
had three kids,
had a parsonage,
had a church.
But he did more asking
than he had
and they say this is
of every husband.
Is it any wonder
that the man after
God's own heart
from that roof, and his son
from many rooves;
while the man
in the article,
now sells cars.
Because he did more asking
than he had
and they say this is
of every husband.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Saturday, May 23, 2009
I say a movie is
Worth any only if,
Amidst its blazing and dance
With the demigods of culture,
It pierces through
Of man's depravity,
Breaking through the dead night
Onto light and the day of lust done.
And so the child plays on,
Divinity on hand.
Monday, January 19, 2009
To hope in no other.
To see beauty in no sunrise
When my eyes see not You.
To hope for death
As it ends all striving,
And I am in You, and You in me
When now all I see
Is me, far and torn,
Your face do I seek,
Your voice I plead--speak life to these bones.
And so I shall walk, though ungainly,
Toward You. By the hand
You shall take me
Sunday, December 21, 2008
The noise of this age
Is in its insistence
That there is more to be had,
And a reason to be glad,
Other than and apart from
...in every breath.
...in every thought, low and lofty.
...in every thorn plunged, meat marred.
...in every plea, desperate for redemption
From them all.
When all that remains
When these dark days
Is the soul
To be You.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
What have I lost that I did not
Lose upon entering this world?
Are not the seasons marked, indelible,
Never to be defaced?
So why do I grieve?
For these dreams that coiled
Around me, now fragments
Of broken bone.
For the light that now
Has its place where the wind
Spirits away its spoils. And here
In this old man of a cabin
Only my shadow remains.
My shadow remains.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Let loose to the wind your many attempts
At divinity, and watch your skin crack,
Your knees fold, your calcifications
Double. You thief. You steal His air,
His grass, His plums--and with them,
His throne. The dust beckons.
The slither of worms call.
You go laughing and He laughs with you,
As His peace is served, your light is snuffed.
It would have been different
Had you heard divinity in the wind.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
The child and his bright eyes
The curling of his tongue
As wrinkles form
On his face
As he smiles at the sight
Of his smiling father
No thought of taxes,
Or the other got ahead
None of that now
Today it's just him
And his smiling father
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Oh, yes, it is as if
The final drop of the storm
Has landed; and now eyes,
Dimmed by clouds gray and forlorn,
Can see the working man's sun,
Dimmed, gray and forlorn
It is so, for seasons teach
That the valleys and its specters
Must give birth
To the hills and its angels.
It is so. It was then;
So shall it be today;
And again in the carefree morrow.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
With steps ailing.
The yellow sky
As the brown earth
His tears kiss.
His shriveled hands,
Have small mouths
To feed and clothe
But he wishes
The yellow sky
Across the black expanse
For home to reach.
Yet not now.
There are small mouths
To feed and clothe
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
A black and white cat rests splayed atop the dusty pavement,
The occasional breeze ruffling his otherwise already disheveled fur.
His mind is on the shaking in the bushes that eavesdropping has brought to his senses:
It may be dinner beckoning or just the naughty wind.
But now he's too contented to move a muscle and too busy being a cat
To fret over a lost rat. So he returns to sleeping,
Fretting over nothing, too busy being a cat.
Friday, September 5, 2008
Never a day sighs
Its last breath
When I'm not driven
Onto hard ground,
To wet the floor
Cold with weeping
For fresh vision
Of a heart rancid.
Many a time
Have I wished
From the taunts of the sun
And moon; they shake
Their heads at me
For each sees the same,
The sun and moon.
"Shape up, boy!",
And go their way
Shaking their heads,
"See you tomorrow".
Friday, August 29, 2008
Is just a simple hello
When met by solutions
Pandered by hoods and whores
In scarlet and black,
As hands clasp
A simple hello
And drenched in pus and sores,
He's got your back,
A firm grasp of atonement.
Sunday, August 24, 2008
The quiet twinkling stars
The purple midnight,
They each have their songs.
Faces and forms,
Their peculiar graces,
Bound up in a sense
Spiritual in sad music.
The heart longing
For soft, sweet light
In sad star songs,
When the purple midnight speaks
Of quiet fire on blank faces
And lonely forms
Spiritual in sad music.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Wrists and ankles burn and itch
From these shackles hanging
Like red rusty vines
From burned-out trees:
Rats in suits racing
For ethereal cheese,
On grimy hide.
Some stumble, crushed
Never to bare
While the wise
On lush prairies
Roam the plains,
With them laughing
Their little ones.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Friday, August 15, 2008
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Travel times--those minutes, even hours,
On your ass, seeking a destination.
Sometimes the stroke of a pen
Seats you beside someone that makes
The hands or the sands move or fall
Unnoticed. At such times travel times
Are worth the furrowed brows and
But then there are better times
When your head allows for a sweet
Indulgence: the reading of a book
And the gleaning from it of spices
And fragrances, seasoning and spilling
Over to your need. At such times travel times
Are worth the furrowed brows, awkward knees, and
But a lifetime--those years, even decades,
On your ass, seeking a destination,
Knowing not where where is--
Is furrowed brows, awkward knees, and
A sore ass forever.
Friday, August 1, 2008
My walk laden with a limp.
Yet One has tread the same
Road, stumbling not a minute
Through pains magnified beyond
What any earth-bound mind can
Comprehend, and claimed
...for those acclaimed
By Him from before
The tree dimmed the light.
Limp-laden and triumphant:
Me in Christ.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Sunday, July 27, 2008
On the tattered roof
Boom into full
Drum corps rolls
A beleaguered heart
To her humans,
The cold flurries;
The piercing rain.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
A yellow daisy
Greets my revival
Onto a drab
By vivid light
Bouncing off eight
And a fluffy darker core.
It would be
Just any flower
If not for
The fact, a fact
That formed worlds
And shed blood
That it was plucked
In the throes
By my smiling child.
Friday, July 25, 2008
Thursday, July 24, 2008
I would rather
Be the greased-up rocker
Floating like a rag
On the streets of the metro
Grinning for nothing
A mind to dwell on
Than any respectable fellow
About to pop
From affluence but
The one thing
That looks living in the eye
And enlists the bloke
In the affairs of the King
None other than
Saturday, July 19, 2008
The rigid play
On a box
But a consistency
That I burn for
A daily clamor
That keeps my eyes
Every lifting of
On the light parade
Which is reason
But the only one
To be boxed in
The old hunkered
By ones that make for
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Friday, July 11, 2008
Life is a pardody of life
When mouths are poison arrow frogs
When the job pays but the candle burns
When your woman plays the frog too, croaky
When lately silence is the best jazz in weeks
But life indeed must be laughed at for
What is funnier than me thinking of
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Have you ever walked the streets
And stopped for a while to wade
In a well-timed gush of cool wind
When suddenly, at your feet, a kitty
Rubbing her face against your ankles
Catches you wide-eyed and warmed?
How fearless, you think to yourself.
How small but with a heart big enough
To trust this towering alien.
How against all instinct of flight
She came not for just anyone--but you.
She really is a pretty one, you muse,
Stooping to stroke her face, her back,
Her belly, and her sides. You decide
To cup her gently in your robust hands
And bring her home, knowing
As cats often do, that she might
One day stand aloof, away
From the heart and hands
That penned these words.
This poem is for nothing more than
Words let loose like ants in ordered panic
After the boot has heaved their heavenly earth
From off its Babel form.
No necessary theme.
Bereft of crafty schemes.
I can think of dripping honey
And a three-day slumber.
Ah, beautiful words.
Anything to fuel creation.
It's all about creation.
Procreate and produce.
Not just any trifle fart, but the real.
The you. Create the you.
In your words speak worlds
Like dripping honey and a three-day slumber.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
As I watch Bukowski be himself,
Seeing how genius fluorished
In a pot of flaming earth, scorched
By the man who would normally be called father
But in this case gnawing pestilence;
How in his escape from the whipping and
From the marring of human clay, disfigurement,
Into a world where despair was lifeblood
And the glimmer of gold in the bottle was
Communion with the gods;
Amidst the parade of flesh, too late in coming
Yet too soon to fade, from where many moons
Shone, both in the whisky sky and rooms
Dank and ailing--I recognize
Creation, art, intellect, and the bruised child
Held like a delicate bud in Hands
That meant for words from wounds--upward,
Glorious and etched in forever--to fly.
And I am better off for it.
Monday, July 7, 2008
Saturday, July 5, 2008
I wish you
A plane crash
Just when you're feeling
All white and one
A nasty plunge
I wish you
Of your vestments of pomp
See those imps
Coming they come
Their way through
To pretty hypocritical you
Scream soaking wet
Run to escape
The laughter of a million peeks
Bar the doors
Burn out the lights
Pungent whore smell reeks
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
I am cross-legged behind a computer.
Looking to my left, I spot asleep
My wife, crouched like a cave over
David, a sharpened arrow fashioned
In the swirling mass of glory that
Is the mind of God.
The bright pools that are Sophia's eyes,
Her wavy hair blacker than any black
I've seen on hair and the way
She is her name, these please me.
I breathe in the air of a gift opened.
That waft of love that is the upward
Curve in the lips of Him who makes men
Through the love of them--and I am pleased.
Monday, June 30, 2008
These bones are critters that scurry through a freshly-mopped floor.
Eyes that dream of a cool freshly-made bed are lead...sinking
To the bottom of free days.
A few hours of darkness and a crack of light
From an old wooden door, strange wind
From a screened window covering skin,
And the fruit of peace is plucked and had.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Would you skim through your breaths
Like a pebble flung across a placid stream?
Forgetting the eyes thirsty for just
A glimpse of fire in the sky--of fire
That walks among corn stalks leaving
Chaff in its wake.
She looks up singing, looking for the blaze,
The same inferno that rages within her--perhaps,
She is not alone.
Looking down on her rain-soaked feet, she wonders
How the sun loved the moon.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
The peace that moves with the swaying of the mango leaves
On the provincial plains of our ancestors
Is the same peace that curdles within the man
Inside a prison cell.
To rivers screaming the past
And whispering the enlightened hope
Of mango leaves swaying
On the provincial plains of his ancestors.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
My best bud is sometimes dark, a pristine black,
when the sun winks.
He contorts, shifts shape,
sometime dwarfed, sometime humongous,
sometime my size. He follows me around
when the sun winks.
I see him in vivid color when
I stand behind glass.
I realize we've been meeting like this
for so long now, he's never late.
Whether I'm brutish or the softest child,
he sticks, reminding me
of my many colors.
For so long I was not much
of a buddy to him. He was
often dismissed while I went
wielding swords against familiar
dragons, but somehow
we fought as one.
The days have aged and
my friend remains,
steadfast in our commune, but now
I am to him as he was
to me--he would've taken dragon
teeth in my stead. It took
an angel behind the glass to make
me see when she spoke,
I love the rainbow after the rain.
Monday, June 2, 2008
Friday, May 30, 2008
Beneath a mountain, immense as it is grayish-blue,
I stare up through eyes worn, coal eyes.
I imagine its cone shape if perhaps I,
coming from breaths called clouds, was an eagle
able to see the full bloom of this my blue mountain.
To this I aspire, the shedding of these crude
eyes, these vessels of myopia through which
the masses trade beauty for madness
--convulsing, exhaling, screaming for dung--and
seeing enough of eternity in trees and boulders,
roses and leaves of grass, I pluck these eyes
from off their Platonic caves and beckon the eagle:
enable me to see the full bloom of this my blue mountain.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
The week rolls into this, the king of days.
The laborer rules on a Saturday, unmanacled monarch;
the queen by his side ever the charmer.
His word is law after the sweetest of slumbers
of the Friday kind; subjects with tails
hooked to walls.
The royal days deposed, the royal days
When the sun is a Face, it all shall cease.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
There was a man who found a golden goose
Whose down was no, not yellow, but gold, so
Gold it shone, and she was the man's and his
Alone, or so he thought. But she was loose,
A golden goose, so alone, so without peer,
So loved by the man, but loose. She loved
The hands that eased through her dress. Her
Wings she spread for men holding the staff;
Her man was a cobbler, but he loved her. Once,
The man saw: she, in high spirits, laughing,
Merry in the company of the mayor, his hands
Beneath. The hammer quivered, his eyes weak
Before the flood that swept across cheeks
On fire. On the floor he slumped, emancipation?
Never, for he loved her. Never, will he find
Another. The man and his loose golden goose.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Ravens, in a flash they are overhead amidst wing claps.
They are night given flight and the liberty to muffle
The moon's wooing of once-contented eyes.
Perched on a shoulder, the nightbird is a timemachine
With red wine eyes entwined with mine, portals
To worlds that precede the fragments on the marble floor.
Ravens, they sadden the soul with what once gladdened it;
But in the presence of silver doves they fly.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Friday, May 16, 2008
Thursday, May 8, 2008
To You, emblazoned in the gaze of an impossible sun,
Mirrors fragile in every blade of grass,
Aloft in the flight of a fragrant east wind
That blows through mountains of white and blue.
It's true, in the billows of the foamy sea,
Puppet in obedient dance below moon strings,
In the eyes of the swift eagle, gold and taloned,
Or the elusive hare darting to its holed haven.
And even, when man is born with a heart far
From the desire of sweet river water poured
For them the chosen parched, still to You, it's true,
Is the love softer than a limp rose bowed.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
How far she has gone from Eve, and yet
The curdling of her blood is ripe with
The cider of adulterous fruit and windfall
Testimonies. She denies her lineage with
Embroidered pageantry and fluff; underneath,
A dark dank crevice littered with the bones
Of the sons of a clown-faced Adam.
She will forever reach for snakes
Clutching silver spiked apples.