if you are
Obsessed with light
Then the darkness will stalk you
Apex predator night
Until you
Strike the first match
Chemical explosion
So small you might discount it
Unless…
Match in the dark
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Category Archives: God
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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
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
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
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
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.
Shorn
don’t need to tell me
Time travel is real
I have stood in the room with you
When you disrobed
Mixed the paint
Self-portrait, pitiless and true
You weaponized unsparing
Light for me-
hair cropped close
Seemless undergarment
So that I could know
Exactly how to strip,
Bear cross, and follow
You to the last breath.
Girl, you got
girl you got
Wings down your spine
Silvery feathers
An anthem in your head
Sing it, Girl–
Sing loud
Whole world to hear
Percuss.
heart a bird caged in bones
Use it all to
Question every undisputed
Law mitigating the force
Of gravity and light
With your full-throated
Iridescent flight
Rise up
Rise.
Plunder
you think Vikings
Drawn swords and treasure chests
In the strong man’s house
Who ties and binds matters
The scars on His wrists forever
I am the plunder
So grateful to be found
Restored eternal
From the house of the strong man
Strewn with bones and promises
Redeemed by this warrior
King
Murder on Easter Morning
Easter morning.
The sun rises on a rolling hill in New Braunfels as worshippers gather to celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus.
Yet as the dawn Christians worship, a savage domestic drama unfolds within yards of the sanctuary.
Felix Antonio Nieves, seventeen years old, dies as the result of what news sources have described as a protracted domestic argument.
The accounts of the last moments of Nieves’ life describe multiple weapons–stun guns, a pistol, and the shotgun used to end his life.
What is shocking about this story?
7:15 on Easter morning?
The quiet neighborhood?
The proximity to a church?
Or the knowledge neighbors have that their neighbors include law enforcement officers? That this is a neighborhood where people might feel safer because some of their own neighbors are officers of the peace?
Or again, that this neighborhood is within a mile or two of a police station?
Maybe. But what shocks me is that in a protracted story of domestic violence, no one called for police intervention until a murder had already been committed.
What does that say about Texas? About us? About justice?
We should call the police before we load and shoot a gun.
Why didn’t they? Why did no one call the police until it was too late to save one family from irrevocable tragedy?
The answers might surprise us all…if we were brave enough to face them.
