Tag Archives: redemption

All hat, no cattle

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I once did a series of poems called the calvarium poems. I called them that. They remain in a kind of womblike obscurity, you could say the poems were like children

If only an ordinary person like me could

Cast a spell with words

Hocus pocus–live!

Abracadabra–live!

I alternate between believing

That the dry bones are the children tossed away from their mothers, their doctors, their strangers holding signs and vigil across the street from the alien clinics, iron bars on windows, misleading titles, security guards and not enough imminently visible heartbreak over this or

The people, the-all-of-us, too craven to save their little, perfect, amazing

Calvariums.

The Imaginary Conversation

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He is gone now

Gone to me, anyway

But I think of the things I would ask him if he were still here–

Would persistent nausea be enough? Or swarms of stinging insects? How about dead bodies? Or all the stubbed toes and fingers gone unmended

What if this post-modernist hell of your own invention were not unbearable heat, agony and utter despair

Forever/

Just

… an airless room, waiting for a love which never comes

All your regrets all your missed chances

To cry like a baby

Wail for a Savior

Weep at his feet, hair in hand, perfume spent

Shaken finally by what you

Would have been without Him

Frankie Gonzalez

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I can feel the force of the grief, another small tragedy. His death, like his life, will be a small story, buried beneath bigger fires, the roiling of big boy fights, what is the death of one little boy when the world is burning?

Everything.

His life was everything

To him

And to the One who stood at the field of Heaven

Waiting all those days to welcome him home

Wipe away every tear

No more crying

No more pain

You say the sweetest things

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You say the sweetest things

A soft answer turns away wrath

Love is always patient

What if you took the terrible letters of a curse of sorts

One you never willed and controlled and made it into an acrostic or a cypher-

The letters are a-b-I-r-r-t-u-w

What if that were a word by itself

And you-like the fairy godmother you resemble in rounded form only

No power only soft and aging

No longer the princess or the sleeper or the magic one

Just this one last spell-

Let the word when spoken

Set us free from past and illusion

Let it be the strange, scary truth of the thing-

Oh fragile love-

You say the sweetest things

This Little Girl

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I want to say so many things to

This man who does not really see

“This little girl”

But I know You

See her, see me, see them

All the little ones who

Need a God like You

Take my sins away, heal my wounds, stay until I am well, bring justice in your wings, never blame the victim, never stop searching for treasure

You

who were, who are, who always will be

Just You,

and “this little girl”

Eschaton and testing for Covid-19

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About a month ago I spent a day dragging my family through a crash course in coronavirus. It was appalling.

  • The range of symptoms is highly variable.
  • Carriers can be asymptomatic.
  • With over 200 mutating strains, the range of severity in this disease can be highly variable.
  • A person can be exposed to the mild strains, and still get hit by a secondary, more severe infection.

We put too much emphasis on testing. Testing would be great only if there were limitless tests and the tests were far more reliable than they are. If that were the case then we should all follow a protocol of weekly prophylactic testing.

Not feasible right now.

A few years ago my family started to play a modified version of a very complicated fictional tennis game from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. His version was very apocalyptic (fitting); ours was as well but with a fraction of the complexity.

In our version two teams of as many people as you have (evenly divided, of course) face each other on either side of the net. We divided as many balls as we could muster and started hitting them across the net relentlessly. The opposing team did the same. At a predetermined point (like music chairs), we would pause the game. The team with fewer balls on their side won that round and then we would continue.

Great cardio workout. Quickly exhausting.

That is coronavirus. We will all face an onslaught of a relentlessly moving, mutating virus which can spread quickly, if not effortlessly, through contact and fomite transmission.

Eschaton is a fun game.

This is not. But if I know one thing about how to “win” at eschaton, it is organize your team and don’t stop lobbing the balls back across the net.

We don’t play eschaton right now. Our tennis court is closed. That is a good thing. The best way to “win” at this is to assume we are all spreaders and keep us all

Six feet apart.

Pray. Pray because our lives depend on it. Imagine what a simple game of eschaton would look like if

God were clearly on

The winning side.

Matthew 17:20-21 KJV

[20] And Jesus said unto them, Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you. [21] Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.