Category Archives: God

Rapunzel

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you deserve

Truth clenched in both hands

For years I have puzzled

How would she know 

“The real story?”

The only “mother” she ever knew kept her locked in a tower

Named her after stolen

Salad greens

Tell your twin 

Running to Canada was the

line I could not, would not

Cross for love

Unlike a man we both know

Who crossed lines of  law and love 

Abandoned wife and children

Hid his treasure 

Said he could not pay

No fairytale love-

Story for his first wife

Little ones

there are records of these things

The faces of the abandoned are familiar to you now

Unlike your own mother’s

Who they kept from you 

Fear and sin will make an ordinary

Monster out of us all.

Sadie’s foster mother told me once-

They are Christians, you know!

Christians do not steal babies

Live lies

Or put their assets in their girlfriends’ names

But how would Rapunzel know that?

She would have to borrow her sisters’

Plaited hair

A ladder to

Set all three free

Then look for the small stones

Of Truth

Scattered along 

the long road 

Home.

Memorial Day

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It has been almost a decade since my father died after his helicopter crashed on descent.

I still feel flashes of pain when I am reminded of that pain.

Ordinary haunting is a longterm normal for we who grieve.

The death of one man changes the world.  

Evoking Jesus.

He took every crash, every act of misery and self-destruction.  Drained the cup of history to the dregs of genocide, exploitation, war, famine, epidemic, deadly contagion.

Hell to pay for us. The wrath of holy Love, the grief of God poured out. 

For us.

To atone for the transgressions of a single garden-variety human would be unwatchable, unlivable, unthinkable, unbearable– awful.

The ransom for all our billions is so beyond reckoning, we do not try.

But we should.  

We should at least reckon the cost and the pain, fear, horror and brutality it took to redeem our ordinary wrongs-gluttony, lust, prejudice, and greed.

We should; we shall.  

We will either be defined now by our debt to this Eternal Savior or we will be defined forever by the life we squandered at his great cost.

Cesya

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I am familiar with stolen

Children stolen names

Borrowed children stolen names

Borrowed stolen beautiful

Girl metonymy

Is when you

Become a face in a crowd

The crowd then becoming

You in every face

I have looked 

You in every 

Looked

Have

I 

No.

Can’t do that or you will lose

Her you never truly

Had

Only a name

Crumpled broken paper fluttering down from the blown-apart skyscrapers which once defined our empire 

Mushroom clouded elephantine weight falls to its knees

Compressed neutron star mother

Heart the size of a sugar cube 

Weight of 300 million

Cars

On my chest

As I walk through the dark

Singing off-key these borrowed breakup songs

Fierce to the teeth 

Lost until I know

You will be

Safe.

The Girl in the picture

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haunts me with her gray

Soul, robbed of light

Too young to ever choose this 

She is a ghost

Who in all other aspects

Resembles me–

Breastplate taken in battle.

Which is why I see your face before 

Me always

The iron bars invisible to all but

We two

Jailed by men with carved out hearts

I carry you, darling

Close to my own

Beg the God of air and light 

To teach us how

To fly

Away from the shadows

Where ordinary humans claw and devour 

All but unaware 

They have bartered their own

Nearly extinguished 

Eternal selves

For shreds of ashen dung

More

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I told you

This was a two-part answer

Ironically framed

By the disembodied voice 

Selling cars in the next room

It’s like calling

A cathedral 

A room with four walls

And a ceiling

Huh…

I think as I finish

Stuffing variegated laundry

Into the high efficiency machine

That is true

You my darling 

Are no mere room

With four walls and a ceiling 

You are a cathedral 

And should be treated as such

Tear down this temple

And I will raise it again in three 

Days

He said

Evoking all

The foundations in the womb

Baby pictures and toothy grins

Girls whose smiles light up the room

Do not be content to be

Measured the way a man will

Span an ordinary room

Know instead 

It takes a lifetime and a fortune

To raise the extraordinary 

Cathedral

Flying buttresses

Stained glass windows

Columns and impossible

Arches

All to the altar

Rising incense

Gaze of the Infinite

God

Unwatchable 

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lately I have begun to speculate

About the geographical location of

Peter in the hours of the crucifixion

Because I am a coward too

I want to say I would be 

At the foot of the cross

But my feeble heart 

Suggests otherwise 

Snacking perhaps

On ancient Aramaic Oreos 

In some forgotten corner of 

The praetorium 

During the inexplicable hours of 

darkness

I would slide my helpless hands

Along this cavernous darkness/

The wound in his exposed chest

Grief an animal

Grasping for crumbs

In the dark heart of the world

The Movable Cross

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The sermon was solid, but my attention was caught by the cross behind the pulpit.

Resin?  About 5 feet tall?  With a base set on wheels for handy transport.

I have always wondered if Jesus had been hung in a noose or electrocuted would we have made the noose or the chair an easy talisman around our necks?

We cannot afford to think that the cross is a light and movable thing.

Jesus’ cross was massive, heavy, and blood-soaked because I am a sinner.  I have to run the horror straight back to me or I run the risk of not taking it personally.

If I don’t take it personally I don’t mourn.

If I don’t take it personally I lose my hunger for justice and my debt to grace.

We all search for love stories.  And many of us find them in the cheap trinkets of small gods and egoism–no love there at all.

But for a man to give his life for his friend?  

And to be that friend….

The unconditional lullaby

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i will stay with you forever

No matter what you

say or do

I will see you as a baby

Despite your sin and stink or view

I will never bring up “maybe”

When you ask me if I do

Love you here forever

When you have squandered like a fool

All the treasure I have never

Ceased to give to you

No act of yours can sever

The strength of love renewed

Dearest heart, eternal child

My one and always you.

Pretend you go

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pretend you had a lost daughter

Who in your mind will always be

A beautiful baby girl

Now pretend that in order to survive

You start to see your beautiful lost baby

In everyone

Then “everyone” starts to do things they really should not do

Go places they should not go

Smash through rules…

designed for their safety

So you, poor sot, try to warn them away…

From the crap they should not get into

But they don’t really wanna listen

Because who the heck are you anyway?

(Half-crazed stranger with some lost kid)

Yet you still 

love them

You know because you lost a child.

So you go find them

In the crack houses

Strip joints

And IRS offices where they work

…and screw up royally

Because you know

That is what love does

Abstract-I get it

So let me try once more–

Years ago I rode on a bus in a country men travelled to in order to have “legal” sex with minors.

A white man got on the bus with a girl from this other country.

A girl, not a woman.

We.  The people on the bus.  Watched them travel together.  Knowing (ball-parking, at least)…their destination.

Their terrible destination.

If she is alive somewhere I would hold her

Tell her her “job” was not her fault 

Tell her I love you

(No matter what)

–I love you

Now please darling, 

Come home.