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
See you
In the face of the girl dancing across the circle
So much so that I stare
Think I might have to tell her
The story of the lost you
Who reminds me
Of all the other Boos
So beloved
To their Mama
Missing still
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
any one who claims to be my legally adopted child should never under any circumstances be allowed access to my biological children
We all suffered too many felonies at their hands
Please consider this legal witness
I have a dear pen pal whose autocorrect rendered “lesson” as “Leon”
…as in there is a “Leon in here somewhere.
We all need a Leon in there somewhere–nerdy a bit, but still lion fierce.
The friend who will not go
Always there
Leon.
the lovely stranger
Tells us all
If this thing in front of you
Doesn’t give you joy throw it
Away
I kinda wonder about the ordinary scrub brushes thrust into the most terrible places
Do you discard them too?
Replace them with newer ones without the dark history?
Maybe keep them away from the crap
Which tangentially reminds me of
Poor Thomas Crapper–
Bringing us into modern hygiene at the expense of the family name
Don’t worry, Thomas
Your job may be thankless
Your name synonymous with
Well, crap
But I won’t forget you
Joy may be a too-strong word
For preventing public health catastrophe
But somebody gotta do it, TC
Somebody for all the rest
While the crucifixion of Christ is overwhelmingly unbearable, the deaths of ordinary humans are awful enough.
We are all certain things when we die.
The cessation of breath is a terrifying thing. Add to that helplessness and pain–most of us avoid death the way you would avoid the edge of an unforgiving precipice or an unguarded incinerator.
John the Baptist’s death is no exception. He died as a direct result of powerful people’s sin. He died in chronological and geographical proximity to Jesus.
The howl of the unfairness of it all is unmistakable.
Which is why I stick close to men like him. What if John had not questioned Jesus? What if his grief and doubt had not been recorded in the Gospel?
…I would have fewer answers for my lesser questions…and one fewer member of my support group.
And a narrower understanding of Jesus–no Santa Claus god. Jesus commands us to focus on both who He is and what He does for us on the most primal level.
He gives us back the one thing we can never get back ourselves–eternal life.
The death of every human may seem inevitable, but who we trust with the forever after makes all the difference.
To John the Baptist and every ordinary me.
I have told my kids (on too many occasions) that I would love to see a spy movie in which the main character’s spy skills are demonstrated by the character’s thorough-going appearance transformations.
He would become she, young and handsome would morph into old and frail, fat to thin, and tall to short…by assigning entirely different actors to play the part in unbroken succession.
Then it occurs to me that is what Jesus did–He came in disguise. Clues for this theory are in the Gospels–the transfiguration (why take only three disciples?), the times when He prohibits the healed from blabbing about their transformations, the healing of Jairus’ daughter (again, only three disciples?) and then those times after His resurrection when people don’t recognize Him.
God in disguise.
It makes sense when you see Him described in other places in the Bible. Excuse my French, but Jesus in His “real form” is unmistakably bad-ass.
Which brings me to the most haunting part of this story of voluntary disguise.
The Lord of glory, Creator of the universe, Beginning and the End, Lion of the tribe of Judah, naked, eviscerated, gasping on the Cross.
My death. This is the purest place for me to see who I really am–the person who deserves this terrible end.
He wraps Himself in the vortex of hell to give us access to heaven–undisguised.
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
Carrying Light 