March 26, 2009

My tongue aggrandizes
academically, that is to say
I don't love You. I say
I do, I'm covenanted to
what I've said. You know
that promise is deliverance,
for in times lacking touch
I've lusted for our violence,
a toothless tearing of flesh;
a rationalism You'd hate and I would regret.

Perhaps in refusing our separation,
I've instead divorced my heart
from my head.

A creed to come back to,
a serpent bronzed, a representation
of inauguration; something solid to
repent into. A cup that is deep enough
to hold blood for my contrition
to dissolve in, a body that is strong
to be lifted up, once for my sin,
and then once again.

What tragic beauty, arabian jujube
pressed in scarlet curls,
perspiration falling on the neck of
Your heaving back, eyes falling to
the dust of the ground.
You felt as I do now. A separation
what ran through You and what You said.
But unity was stronger, still is,
than that which splinters our skin.

March 19, 2009

Simple finger sketches, pushes the dirt of a hushed garden;
soundless repose, footsteps slow over fleshy grasses.
Pine needles and clay bricks seal this box from the parking lot,
in turn protected by a chain-link fence from trains that pass.

The spring wind blows inconsistently, yowling through the pine trees;
snowflakes have migrated north again, oaks and maple stand bare yet,
and who will be moved into dance? Certainly not the hairs that hide
behind bricks or temporary houses, in cement, permanently set.

Which is life, reality or the way it is supposed to be? The rain
in gutters or as it imbues the darkening stubble on my face
with texture within a texture, a spreading essence in the contours;
God in the storms or in the walls built for mute escape?

March 5, 2009

Job 19

i purposefully trashed
my basement today,
bagged up my needless things
to take to those in need.
In the midst of my ascetic
task of worship, alone
with the sapless taste of
half-used cans of brick-toned paint;
in the simplicity of making less,
i uncovered a blank canvas.
Stored recklessly on basement floors because
times of organization induce belief,
i can envision shape and color
and reproduce without practice or technique.
In one of these harmonized manic states,
my grandmother gifted me a 1 by 3 foot
quadrilateral of opportunity. i covered it
with suitcases, boxes of clothes, baby
accessories, dictionaries, and all
the candles we'll sometimes need.
i have found it is difficult to decide
what to create in permanency.

February 27, 2009

The last of the snow joined the rain today.
The uneven driveway slabs propelled it through the cracks
and it pools in the path of hurried footsteps across
the sidewalks; a unintended reminder to lack pride,
as the purity of winter now dirties my wet socks.

My son breathing lightly on my unclipped beard
as the snow fringes grass, leaves, then streets.
The dim light of the trucks that pleasantly rumble
through these picturesque scenes, rocking us to sleep.

And now a time, he rocks on both feet, scattered and
crooked, bounding foot after foot ahead of me.
January's serenity has become muddy puddles that he pounds
through, that the cars splash at us, that I scramble
to protect us from so he will keep his smiling peace.

February 26, 2009

Psalm 22 & Judges 16

Wasting strength on the critical,
the reckless and arrogant, has dried it up.
Wasting prayers on guilt and shame.
Save time; poke out my eyes and walk away.

Be peaceful and decisive, quit wasting away
and start cutting off. Don't let the browned
roses behind the garage wither until winter
before the die in the snow. Prune in the spring,
that new blooms may grow.

Wasting words on self-gratifying confession,
details of indiscretion lavishly inlaid with
more temptation. Sacrifice, short and swift.
Help me overcome wasteful, indulgent humanness.

February 25, 2009

Ash Wednesday

Didn't drink my orange juice this morning,
then I didn't finish running and then
forgot my son plucked the deodorant from my duffel,
then stuck it is his mouth, trucked down the hall
gurgling "vroom-vroom," then lost his wares within his room.
I don't know where it is. So I didn't put it on.
On this holy day of fasting, my lunch was rice and beans.
Didn't eat them though. I absentmindedly left them
under the front seat of my car, and my wife drove away with them.
Didn't watch the musical, the babysitter brought my son
and he brought his tired fights (but not the deodorant I needed).
Once sleeping I took him home, and then
the phone rang with questions and concerns that
racked my head until the silence of the imposition.

Something to remember.

But then, I didn't eat all day and we don't have money
to eat with friends at fast-food places. Only spaces
in the checkbook filled with obligations. And I'm guessing
I won't make love tonight, my wife looks droopy eyed, maybe
from the solemn candlelight, or the grinding gears of life.
And so with sleep it seems, my season has begun
as choiceless denial, dictated and dry. It didn't renew me.
So this Lent, I'm giving up on taking it. Giving up on sitting in it.
Giving a Holy middle finger to excuses, to the thing I "must" do.
Waking up tomorrow, I'll make the choice to choose.

February 20, 2009

Isaiah 41

i know i need a frosted cornfield,
wide and quiet, empty and undefined,
with thousands of collasped ears to help me listen.
i must remain still, but there is a
devastating silence in dead woods, cracked branches;
overwhelming and stagnant, needing action.

So i know i must clean and clear,
stride through snowy wheat to fallen trees;
renewed order entering the scattered reaction.
i must move, but some movement trips, slaps,
and distracts. The limbs and leaves are beautiful,
but i lose purpose in this wind and confusion.

Then i know i need a frosted cornfield.

February 19, 2009

As the snow returns in winter,
i return to simple desires;
my wife's head upon my shoulder,
my son's hands through the back of my hair,
Your voice soft in my sleepy ears,
and a deep chair, to watch and hold,
and finally close my eyes until spring.

February 18, 2009

i am the dimness before Your great storm;
the inconsistent, uneasy flicker that is blown
with my back to Your power, hair tossed by the wind.
i am the rusty light that rushes away from
Sinai's base, the rocks that break beneath lightning
rumble over cliffs in frantic escape.
Fearful, i am a flower in first morning; turning
to first nightfall under the sheets of rain,
unaware sun comes again, unaware that roots
grow deep while petals hide their face.

February 10, 2009

Matthew 16

Warm winter with
lapsang and Parmesan,
mac-and-cheese and children;
each one at a different
age of tantrum.
We are the young in You,
we yearn to tell You what to do.
The devil dwells in
our mouths and in our Macs;
behind our backs, beyond control.
Smarties in the hands of toddlers
long to be sweet, not crushed
and ground in carpet,
We rush to stop it, we rush to
say "no," to refuse and remove;
silently unsure what to say "yes" to.
Rules to life, attempts one and two:
close computer screens early and instead
join my lovely wife in her lonely bed,
and then wake early, to cereal
and self brewed coffee,
with wanton sips of priority.

February 7, 2009

Romans 11

i want to be the morning light,
slowly dispersing over hills to
drive the dark off the rocks.

My unbelief burns brighter,
for where You have abandoned
mountains, dug lonely caves

i wish to explore, to invade
these unelected quarries with
my oscillating flame. Underneath

i may find those uncalled by You.
i don't understand. i want to.
Lest i flare indignant, i must admit,

if there are some You do not want
then i will go, offer sorrow, apology,
and perhaps a cup of tea,

then hopelessly hope they will walk back to You
with me.

January 31, 2009

Romans 9

Dirt, ribs, and breath;
life rises with you.
Descendants with wind cracked skin,

barren as a charred pot,
burning between heifers, goats, and
rams. Got caught in the thistles,

yet as struggle became your name
the invisible hand rose between
death and life, slave and free.

The drops of the sacrificial lamb
are dark pockets in Egyptian sand,
hot on your bare feet as you ran

between the reeds; dried, caked
and unleavened dust on your raw heels.
But bronzed chariots, a thousand harlots,

and the amusement of wealth lay in languid wait.
On your backs, sang songs of palms and fawns
then rolled over to another love.

Unspoken of, insidious, dark walls tall
like an exotic women with intimidating eyes.
Bowing low, weeping at riversides

with the blades wide between harps
and joyful plucking hands.
Amends, amends and hope flows

like the Jordan and you came up glistening
in the baptismal bliss of repentance.
What you will still miss despite knowledge,

light, Moses and Elijah, outwardly contrite
but, as iron holds, you are convinced of
your own right, convinced you own the way;

instead it hangs between heaven and earth;
even the sky must look away.

January 29, 2009

Job 9-10

One dollar Chuck's, muddied and salted,
escape a network disintegration,
an insignificant download,
my gradebook's confusion and erasure.

Depression in a purple hoodie,
pink splattered up the side and
hair swept over one eye, he dares
not see the world as whole for then

he may be demanded to live in it.
The wind hits the four corners of my
white walls, dulled by blank stares,
apathy destroys some, devours most.

Crowbars of ice cracked my favorite tree,
the brilliant yellow i never see
in the Indiana winter, and constrained
to the older hallway with knotted beams

overhead of the daily abuse of the minutia;
the gnats in my coffee, the furnaces to reset,
the daily laughs i routinely trade for headaches,
the boring light of computer screens.

All around me speaks Almighty, for i have
no control of winter storms and students born
nor the mysteries of work's tyranny.
Everything is spiritual, but today i see

everything is not good?

January 26, 2009

Matthew 8

Atrophy and decades
of decaying springs compressing
constitute a difficulty in movement
for forcibly anorexic bones.
But a father is laying on me,
so with lanky clacks of
ligamentless joints I dig up.

I've been here beneath
man-pulled wagons (like the one
that dumped me over wooden sides),
beneath tar and pitch cabins,
legends of dragons and battlegrounds,
beneath hooves of cows and back lawns
and white fences, folding chairs and
yawning women under radiant sun.

And I've never been aroused for
the duties of digging another,

there has always been son or brother
to deal with death. I mean,
dying leaves dry on the trees, forest floor
or underneath. Why the urgency?

The living long to bury quickly
before a fever of memory, before
tears on stately black lapels
have evaporated into grieving.

So what has seized the breathing man
with morbid fervor and unity
of purpose and movement, that lightly
he turned back on lifeless father,
decomposing into my likeness,
and left him here upon my plot,
his resting place undug?

Perhaps, no, has he found life
and left the death to God and to me?

January 21, 2009

Psalms 8

"You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet..."

Classic espresso shoes with a light
crunchy layer of snow, and a salt line
fading into the backs of my jeans,

more than fifty degrees below
the temperature of freezing, and i feel
this cold creation seep into me

through the pores of my school shoes.
But i exercise control, the multicolored
welcome mat and the monotone shovel

help me stomp and swipe; clean, clear
and dry and enter my humanity.
When i exit again, i will try

to retrace the footprints of others
or steps i've already made
through the flattened white landscape,

For when inconvenient created life clings
to pant legs, arm hairs, sweats or shoes,
i brush it down and stomp it under my feet.

January 19, 2009

Genesis 9

Jolted by the choking bus,
faces and fumes smolder
and stagnate, Spanish warnings
splashed above unreachable rails;
i stand amidst it, my face in
the armpit of your rainbow tee shirt.

Sweating into Turrialba, its ruins,
motels, cockroaches, and creaking beds.
Over volcanic craters a conversation,
over the offer of a taxi-ride from
Humberto, over the fear we had when
he stopped in front of the house and
the wheelchaired man smiled and waved.

In the Costa Rican mountaintops,
amidst smoldering lava and nature's warnings,
an old covenant comforts us above
a whistling waterfall. The forest floor
lined with leaf-cutter ants busying themselves
without worry of providential destruction,

for colors streak through the ashen sky,
though you had tried to steal them,
though your every thought be perverted,
never again will columns of anvil cloud envelop
the whole of earth. Still, as we march through
Mayan wastelands, i beg you to not twist symbol,
to not manipulate mercy and grace

to prove that they don't exist.

January 13, 2009

Joshua 6-10

Disquiet in the mortar,
shofar shakes limitless brick,
the calm of the City of Palms.

The calm of the nation of priests,
spiders in the desert sands,
spread thin and blown hard by
faithful winds of reverence.

Eventually the pride in mudbrick
will falter, and violence will fall
on the heads of all without a rouge rope.
What political savvy and dreadful
practicality, as the death cries

of children ring in my ears. Sinful
mothers without thought of the Only
watch one-year olds mumbling "bye-bye"
tossed aside for the purity

of these, the Lord's priests.
In this brutal march, i do not speak of
metaphor, but demand to see mercy.

January 11, 2009

Matthew 3

Fireworks subsiding,
fluorescent basement bulbs
break the dawn.
My limbs and twigs arc
in brilliant white streaks
toward the violet Berber
that my own hands laid.
Thoughtful branches laden
with pomegranates and figs,
wheat and grain pastries and
a cold cup of leftover grapes.
In the winter season, in the newness,
promise and purpose warm the vines
and all that stirs my wakening
seems ripe to prune and type.
Strange that as spring clutters
with rain, mud, and end of the year
boxes of leftover grades
i will wither quicker.
i am no tamarix, green throughout
all seasons, but with no fruit.
My sticks produce in cycles,
fruit in keeping with confession, but so dry
when the world around explodes with life.

January 8, 2009

Job 4

Blue card stock and bold Garamond,
elementary words for elementary rules,
in the high whisper of puberty
italicized secrets of incredulity.

Stretched out on hidden cove carpet tiles,
with Mead's wide ruled stuck into texts;
his brother juggled torches the night before
they shipped him off to Iraq.

Anesthesia dried her sister's lips, they turned
as milk and water in nausea, like her
second degree burn, when her father tore
off the coffee soaked cotton sweats

but the melted skin was shred off as well.
Each one must tell, their unfortunate gospels,
the time in black Sharpie on back of the hand,
and the sweat smeared name on the palm.

Surely, my sarcasm, now underwritten, with
overblown activity. How can we keep from speaking?

January 6, 2009

Joshua 4 & James 2

Dusty aisles part discarded heaps,
canned green beans and boxed Hormel
chili; we twelve cross the stairwell
and formulate efficient means, the tide keeps

piling up behind our pacing backs.
Elementary boys busy themselves eagerly
paring rust circles, so recklessly
desiring to paint the water from the cracks.

Tell them to pick the paint cans
from the floor of this Jordan, construct and stack.
Splashed gray from the pouring; simple tabernacle
shrine for our simple remembrance.

Carry with me dank and dusky memories:
basements where our hands joined divine,
cleared the freezers, reordered by wine
and bread, where faith stands dead without activity.

January 1, 2009

Positioned for complete sacrifice,
prepared for a gritty recrudescing
in my natural dust, but first;
i do need to know if i know You.
It is essential, like my friends,
beer snobs, who drink
Eliot Ness and Edmund Fitzgerald,
they knowingly distance their names
from anything less.
My concern is less with alcohol,
(despite them i barely drink at all),
but with creation, with art, with imagination.
Be not daft and simple for me,
but give me knowledge; to what will You
ascribe Your name? How will You announce
Your presence, make Your nature known?
i see You speak the world alive in poem.
Bringing rhythm and meter to spaces unbound,
cherishing language, You bring forth
ground and water, punctuate darkness and light,
and with nothing less, with holy words.
As I hear the black breaking, i know,
we have a lot more knowing to do.