Having no faith, I don't lift my eyes in times of sorrow. I wish I believed in Jesus, and so in times of trouble I think about him like I would a fairytale, and try to extract the homily behind the stories. I've found:
Be Kind.
Think of others before yourself.
Show unconditional love.
Right your wrongs.
Honor your family.
Forgive.
Sacrifice whatever it takes for the people you love.
During my greatest test, I did none of these things.
There's something in fiction that gives us hope for our own non-fiction. If the stories can build tension, crescendo, collapse on themselves and still end with someone alive at the end, then perhaps there's hope for us real life folks, too.
Stand up, Lazarus. This is not the end.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Sunday, June 21, 2009
for the highest.
Yellow daisy behind her right ear
Black pen in mouth, blank pages in her lap,
Her only power now is her words.
If she could, she would camp out on the steep roof of that old brick house
Hold a vigil for hope, prove herself to be new
On this, the first day of summer
She would lift her eyes to the sun and let it blind her
Wash away the past two months, the ones that broke her down.
She can't, she knows that.
What she can do is wash color across page
Draw and draw and draw and wait. Rip out the page. nail it to the smudged, white door.
A record of wrongs.
All we can do in this life
Is do what we do well, do it earnestly and prolifically.
And those things we don't do well?
Those things are puzzles that we are challenged to solve, to better ourselves.
All we can do is be kind and open, hope for the highest.
Black pen in mouth, blank pages in her lap,
Her only power now is her words.
If she could, she would camp out on the steep roof of that old brick house
Hold a vigil for hope, prove herself to be new
On this, the first day of summer
She would lift her eyes to the sun and let it blind her
Wash away the past two months, the ones that broke her down.
She can't, she knows that.
What she can do is wash color across page
Draw and draw and draw and wait. Rip out the page. nail it to the smudged, white door.
A record of wrongs.
All we can do in this life
Is do what we do well, do it earnestly and prolifically.
And those things we don't do well?
Those things are puzzles that we are challenged to solve, to better ourselves.
All we can do is be kind and open, hope for the highest.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
the river james.
If I had a sunflower scepter
Skeletal and black
I could change this all, I think.
If it were possible to deliver a sermon
To my own soul
And to Jack's soul-- to anyone else who would listen
I think I could just float
Up above the slippery, hazy grime of these early summer days
That are slowly breaking me down.
I went to the river to submerge, to go completely under, break the heat
But having never swam in the river, I didn't understand.
That in this River City, the swimmers don't mean swimming --
They mean standing, wading, the water isn't safe.
Nothing here is completely safe.
We sat on the shore, four of us sharing one beer, tall as it was
The herons stared from across the water, and they looked frozen
I wanted to stand up and shout --
"We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive..."
...But i'm always the one who looks crazy, so I gave it a rest.
Smoked a cigarette, drank the dregs
Walked the pipeline home.
Skeletal and black
I could change this all, I think.
If it were possible to deliver a sermon
To my own soul
And to Jack's soul-- to anyone else who would listen
I think I could just float
Up above the slippery, hazy grime of these early summer days
That are slowly breaking me down.
I went to the river to submerge, to go completely under, break the heat
But having never swam in the river, I didn't understand.
That in this River City, the swimmers don't mean swimming --
They mean standing, wading, the water isn't safe.
Nothing here is completely safe.
We sat on the shore, four of us sharing one beer, tall as it was
The herons stared from across the water, and they looked frozen
I wanted to stand up and shout --
"We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive..."
...But i'm always the one who looks crazy, so I gave it a rest.
Smoked a cigarette, drank the dregs
Walked the pipeline home.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
What they say
They say
That once you release your toes' grip on the edge
that once you do a swan dive
Off of a bridge into dark water
You realize it was wrong
That it wasn't the answer you hoped it would be
That falling, fleeing, is never the end of the sentence.
It's the confusing punctuation, the semicolon.
What now?
When you hit water
When bones shatter
They say you don't know which way is up.
Maybe if I just float here
If I just am still
I will drift to the surface.
That once you release your toes' grip on the edge
that once you do a swan dive
Off of a bridge into dark water
You realize it was wrong
That it wasn't the answer you hoped it would be
That falling, fleeing, is never the end of the sentence.
It's the confusing punctuation, the semicolon.
What now?
When you hit water
When bones shatter
They say you don't know which way is up.
Maybe if I just float here
If I just am still
I will drift to the surface.
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