halo
One hundred miles above the
Arctic circle
So cold the sun
Will fail to even graze
Skin of men bound in iron and chains
Click of light and dark, tracks and ties
Train.
To a string of gulags
Resembling nothing less than
Rough pearls
Which are surely
The opposite of coal
Torn from the frozen chest
By men whose bone-deep desperation
mix with their fear
As air bleeds out
We all dream of
of fire
Archangel
So far beneath the buried heart
Of this vertiginous stone
Planet
this is a parable
We are all parables
Stories of light and darkness
It takes only one
Candle lit in the dark
To make light
Someone always must be
Burning, held high
For all the dying
shadows to see
Over the course of my life I have been booted out of a variety of clubs..oh…I mean communities of faith. Always for taking a stand on some issue, always with the subsequent silence and loss.
Financial accountability. Child safety. Confronting greed, lust or both–there are all kinds of ways to trudge down the “narrow road” in christianity.
Which is sometimes confusing and disorienting but never totally forsaken.
Jesus is there, saying what he says to all of us–I will never leave you nor forsake you.”
We will never get that kind of promise from anyone else. We humans are nothing if not forsakers. We bolt at a pin drop.
Not him. Jesus stays with us.
And always he says the same thing. “You are in good company, darling…always.”
There are these nuggets of meaning (or anti-meaning) floating around
Zika fears, Pokéstops
Two presidential candidates
Each holding silk screened banners
The lesser of two evils!
2016,
When “most Americans”
Were once again depicted by
The hastily gathered
Opinions of just a few of us
Through the ghostly-lit rectangular screen
The message seems important somehow
But when we look further
The news is bleak-
This message has no content
gone too long
A litany of good-byes
Signifying everything
We want from Light
The shapes of letters resemble
Hands raised in supplication
Bottomless things
Somewhere in between I find you
In the story you beg me not to tell
Even though you are the hero of it
The boy who quietly
Saves the headstrong girl
From so many foolish choices
slow cooked, tail-gated
Cumin-laced
Beans or no beans
Chili recipes seem innocuous enough
Unless you are a cow
Then
They are simply another
Recipe for disaster
light
With the exception (perhaps)
Of biolumescence
Always burns
Always the symptom, the result, the flood
Of fire
So when He says these things about light
They would have been connected in a way we are not
With the pure physical fact–
Where there is light
Something
Someone
Must burn
after years measured in either sabbaticals or fists
The woman in the box
Realizes she has only been an apparition
Sorting through previous
Versions of “her”
She sees one to nurture–
No lines around the eyes or heart
An ordinary girl
Who believed in human intervention
Fragile thing, scoops her up
Just a bird in the hand;
Looks for a place to set her down
If only to assess
the utility of wings
Imagine them as you will but never
Assume your scepticism will make them
Mythological again
In the smoke of our discarded daughters
/commerce of indifference
Shoots craps in crowded rooms
Sweat-palmed cash for common shame
Summon these
Monsters of righteousness
From this fire we
have made of love.
I try to write you
Words of place
Search for ways to make monuments out of sheer
Thermal paper…
Keep your receipts
Each time the shopkeep
Asks us the question
…need your receipt?
Say yes Darling
Take these scraps of who we are
Were, will be
You and me, Baby
This inkless, thermal magic only you
Can make your indelible mark on “we”
Words written on paper
Miraculously appearing with just the fire
Of the friction
Between our fingers
Carrying Light 