The Table

I have missed You again today.  Amidst me trying to be Your hero.  I have missed knowing that it is me and You.  All I've known is an us, and feeling as if I bring nothing to the table - table of community leaning on our one-legged humanity, feeling strong and communal, and I think I could turn over this table.  Everyone thinks they have to bring something to it.  I'd watch as all the somethings fly in the air, tumble to the ground, and splatter blood - life and effort.  Why do we put this into these things - very living and life?   

I Never Wanted to Make Sense

And there was nothing else to say.

To see the breath of what You take away,

And I gave a pinched hand to them 

And a smile.

And laughed with the greatest of my least

Fulfilled singing eyes.

"I never wanted to make sense,"

And burn incense to these fleeing gods 

Of minds doubling upon themselves.  

Dawn has pulled over my clouds

 -something was there-

Nothing seemed to make it to the "hows"

How I'd free the burning, shove it off the table of the high places,

And put it before You on the altar,

Before what You've said.

The Sounds of Nothing Are Better; and I fell.

And my mind is rushed by the feelings of conundrums.  "You're creating something new," they said.  "No... I've fallen into something old."

And I tried to make it sound better, but I couldn't.  And I kept falling.  Into -nothing- of praises and His beautiful Judgment.  Into blackness of 

Light, to Him.  And I grinned feeling the wind and weightlessness.  And I smiled with gladness for the first time in a long time - of thinking, "No one knows me, remembers me, likes me."  And I was weightless into His arms upon the Throne within nothing of me - into singing, whistling wind... and stillness of falling; slowly turning but not knowing which way I've turned. 

And I said, "I will not publish this."  

And I couldn't make it sound better.

A Poem by St. John of the Cross

He who is sick with love

Whom God Himself has touched,

Finds his tastes so changed

That they fall away

Like a fevered man's

Who loathes any food he sees

And desires I-don't-know-what

Which is so gladly found.

For when once the will 

Is touched by God Himself

It cannot be satisfied

Except by God;

But since His Beauty is open

To faith alone, the will

Tastes Him in I-don't-know-what

Which is so gladly found.

Tell me, then, would you pity

A man so in love,

For he takes no delight

In all of creation...

I will never lose myself 

For that which the senses

Can take in here,

Nor for all the mind can hold,

No matter how lofty,

Nor for grace or beauty,

But only for I-don't-know-what

Which is so gladly found.

Lines

His hands were grey; hairs seemed large and protruding and some were growing out from the normal pattern of hand-hair, wanting to attach themselves to some imaginary veranda on his skin, like vines.  He pulled the dirty, black collar of his over coat tighter up over his neck when the draft swept through the cafe, and sipping a large gulp of his black coffee, he breathed in the deep, soft steam of the double roasted arabian aroma - tingling where his nose canal opened into his brain, filling the underside of his forehead with rushing blood and warmth as his eyes closed.  Glancing at the empty page, the piercingly straight lines bullied and mocked him.  They were still, cool, and silent as he swept his wrinkled fingers through his stringy hair - dark black at the roots, becoming dingy as it frizzed into ripped cotton balls, floating wildly in every direction, framing his face in a sun-burst of grey.

  "Do you see these lines?!"

He had a deep voice with an edge of grinding, like a Stone Age wheel traveling an ancient dirt path, slowly, heavy; taking time to crush every rock in its path, and yet an overtone of innocence sung over the deep, calculating growl like the high pitch of the axle squeaking within the wheel.

"Too perfect, too perfect!"

His bewildered blue eyes flashed around the cafe as if to demand an agreement.  But only forks and knives clanking against white ceramic plates, cutting through syrup, omelets, and the monotone murmur of mixed conversations.  Two or three guests sitting near him at their tables of ones and twos impulsively glanced up to the back of his bulging, hunched figure at the bar; his black coat streaming down heavily just short of the floor, half of his wrinkled, whiskered  face appearing behind his collar; the guests now saw only one melancholy blue eye surveying the restaurant with ferocity.  Flushes of red swelled up over their faces as they couldn't help feeling embarrassed.  In their minds they pinned him with imaginary judgments;  one by one sticking them into the flesh of his back with tack and paper, flying to him by paper-airplane, unfolding automatically as they approached his back, soaring straight and perfect over heads and tables quickly, effortlessly - a majestic scene of paper archery.  And then a sudden turn to their breakfast as if nothing had happened; they forgot of him altogether and tried to remember where in their conversation they had been interrupted.  

Turning back to his coffee and lines in front of him, he mumbled softly, "Perfect...hmmmf!  Hughmmf..."  He leaned his face close to the paper, eyes half squinting, scanning the empty page back and forth with vehement intensity as if reading an article about an outbreak of war near one's neighborhood.  

"Phinehas..."  A gentle voice broke the swelling of his anxious inner dialogue, and a hand landed on his shoulder, gliding back and forth over dirt particles on his coat, causing a subtle massage of peace into the stiff, black fabric.  The voice spoke again as if awakening him out of a dream, "Hi Phinehas!  How are you?"

His eyes tried to focus as they followed the thin, slightly muscular male arm, to a rolled up white sleeve of a buttoned, collared shirt, to a thin, light body, to a sunken olive face and large grey eyes magnified through thick bottle glasses with black plastic frames of a man standing behind the dark wood counter of the bar.  The eyes melted Phinehas with so much happiness, comfort, familiarity, and peace that his throat rolled into a bulging lump.  But with a slow swallow, he shoved it back down from whence it came, and keeping with his bewilderment he squirmed his face into even harsher wrinkles of disgust and blurted out, 

"In heaven's name, can you even believe the perfection?!  Well, of course you can't!  You're too young and disgustingly perfect yourself.  All of us are that way when we're young, don't worry, it's nothing, nothing at all - natural you know....  And perfect!  All were perfect until....  I say!  Have you ever seen anything like it?!  Well you can't until... you can't until you've seen, I'm telling you!  And I'm telling you truth upon truth!  If they would just splatter and spill... but of course they will not be written upon.  And they mock me!  Do you see?"  With this he waved the paper in front of the man wildly.  

Releasing a breath and sigh, the innocence of his voice shimmering through as the wheel slowly came to a halt, he asked,  "Well how are you anyway...I'm horrible and ugly."  The ringing tone of voice suddenly changed the atmosphere of the cafe.        

"Not as fine as you're doing this morning."  The man's eyes shone bright through his glasses, the skin under his temples wrinkling as he smiled and slowly scrunched his eyes into a grey brightness that seemed to make them even larger than before, totally overwhelming Phinehas with a contagious joy springing up and splattering on the back side of his chest and rib cage; then it quickly disappeared, running off his flesh and organs, leaving no residue.

"Cohen, please leave me...I'm writing, do you understand?"  He spoke now in a monotone.  His shoulders relaxed; he shifted his weight on the bar stool.

Cohen quickly took his hand off of Phinehas's shoulder, slowly stripped a white towel from his waist belt and began drying and polishing a bar glass.  After a few moments of peaceful, releasing silence that echoed back and forth between the two of them, Cohen looked up from his work and with almost the exact same smiling expression as he had looked at Phinehas just a few moments before said, 

"It is good to see you Phinehas!"  

His face kept beaming, and this time the brightness never stopped bursting forth from his huge eyes.  The wrinkles, the smile, the eyes were held in a suspension that seemed to stop time and the murmur of the cafe and the clanking sounds of silverware - a suspended hold of tension almost falling into resolve so beautiful that to just stay in the tension would be peace and beauty and life, and to resolve would be the going about the stuff of everyday after death.  Phinehas, without even looking up from his paper, felt the impact of the magnified eyes like two beams of lead smashing his shoulders into the back of his chair, holding them back as to force him to raise his head and look directly into the eyes for the first time.

Phinehas waged war within himself.  His entire insides were caught a blaze with fire, licking, burning for him to raise his head from his page of empty lines.  His pumping red heart was loosing strength as it pumped coldness like sonar, pushing back the beating heat - one after the other:  pump... pump... (and burning rage of softness)... pump... pump....  Even while he was fighting, even while he thought he was winning, pushing his head down further and further as it hung low, he felt a tingling warmth of the fires raging within him manifest itself in a tiny ring under his blue eyes.  He closed them tight (underneath his eyelids the blue shined like aqua emeralds, casting marbled designs of the freckles in his eyes onto the dark backside of his eyelids like an over-head projector - making constellations - making a universe of tiny silent majesty), and from the far edge of his eyelid, there appeared a clear substance, streaking slowly across his eye, rolling over each eyelash as speed bumps.  It made its way to the inside crevice of Phinehas's eye; up against his nose it curled into a glimmering tear and suddenly changing its slow pace, glided down his cheek bone with darting swiftness, slowed through his thick whiskers, and stretching itself from the end of his chin into a dramatic pose as a sleek, slender olympic diver, it fell into weightlessness - suspension - joy... and splattered sacrificially on the empty page of lines... perfect lines.       

 

In the Midst

There is no place for poetry here.

Everyone has crowed around with.  Beer,

Talking and laughing, creating filled lightning praise

Of answers and yelling.  Telling jokes

Bullied into a broadcasted song.  

Where I forgot what I...  

"cheers beloved, cheers."

Through smeared glass I heard,

"quiet beloved...quiet."

And I wiped away everything between us, and

"come beloved, come."

O grace, 

That you would look upon my making sense

And leave it for swine.

My pearls are You staring into my eyes, close to my face;

when I feel You breathe.

O intoxicating solitude,

Through a blare of crowding glasses (the stuff of intoxication)

Be near.

Here I can understand Your quietness.

Our Home

Been thinking recently about Home...that is Eternity. I have to preface this with the fact that I'm just starting to really learn about what is coming ahead, but I have to say, It's amazing! When it's really a reality within us, I mean really! Think of the nicest place you've ever been to - by the beach, beautiful sun, beautiful ocean. In the Millenium, creation is going to be restored! You don't have to settle for the nice resorts, nice house, nice comfort now (although it is good and I'm not saying to despise it). What awaits you is way way way more incredible than these things. These things only help the imagination. But that's the mystery - it's like looking into the heavens at night and it's glorious, but we can't really fathom what is out there - I mean way out there, but it does provoke our imagination. Maybe this is what our desires do. We can look at the most beautiful, luxurious things of this earth and say we don't need them because our home is FAR more glorious! This is huge! And we will be there with ressurected bodies! This is not just some neat little side note to those following Jesus, IT IS OUR HOPE! When it is alive in us then it makes it much easier to say no to fleeting pleasures of this life. We were meant for pleasure, and eternity will be our endless pleasure. It puts meat to the idea that Abraham, Moses, etc. were "strangers" in this world and knew that their home was somewhere else. This is REALITY, it is not ethereal. The earth you walk on, the oxygen you breath will one day be reconciled to God fully and the supernatural realm of heaven and the natural realm of earth will meet - they will be what God inteded for them. This is His purpose. He will see it through WITHOUT violating our free will. And this is why His will in our lives is so huge! This is why we must seek out what His heart wants to accomplish, because it really does matter how we respond to Him because He chooses (always has, from history past, i.e. the Bible) to work His purposes through human beings who VOLUNTARILY love Him. Yes, He is sovreign, yet He wants to work through us! It's incredible! Do you know why He wants that? (this is what I think, and I'm on a journey to know it with all confidence) He wants it for OUR glory. He wants to serve us, to come under us so that we would know the infinite goodness of Himself. He wants us to partake in His kingdom and share it with Him. What glorious thing has He prepared for those who love Him, who love the Son! There is a tension right now in whether or not we fully commit to see those things come to pass - I'm beginning to really believe this I think. And He wants nothing more than reconciliation - for eternity - for all wickedness to end, and for His glory to fill the EARTH. I think it is always what He wanted.

Thoughts?

Questions for a Kingdom Coming

Who's peace will you testify to?
Who's heart will you crave?
Who will brave through this tunnel of light?
Who will call Him righteous?

Who's peace will you lay down?
What broken sword have you found?
Turn it, turn it around and plow for His Word.

For hope comes as we've made it to come -
Only growing in what we've prepared.

Who will decide for the glory of a mustard seed?

Begotten

Through forests you moved,
Through heaven's breaking clouds...

breathing every step,
stretching through earth,
deepening every foot step.

Heart that broke your precious treasure,
possesion prized for glory
filled with dreams through every silver lining,
every touch.

Glory and honor and wisdom and power
belong to our
glory and honor and wisdom and...
speech couldn't breech our blindness?

why aren't there signs for this?
prophet, prophet, speak!
Listen to what we never see,
Touch our tasting to...
...Him be glory. and. honor. and...listen...

oh frightening idol revealed,
the terror is your illusion.

A Song of "Sleeping at Last"

Heaven Breaks

It always starts like this,
A harmless and simple thing to fix.
Contagious and spreading quick…
Like cracks in ice,
Wholly claiming our lives
While we sleep.

We’ll pray for Heaven’s floor to break,
Pour the brightest white on blackest space,
Come bleeding gloriously through
The clouds and the blue.
Forcing one place from two,
Killing formulaic views,
Only love proves to be the truth.

When heaven meets the earth,
We will have no use for numbers
To measure who are and what we’re worth.

When Heaven meets the earth,
We will have no need for mirrors
To tell us who to be
And where we fit into this awkward point of view.

When angels meet the earth, may our bodies be light.
When angels meet the earth, may our heavy hearts untie.
When angels meet the earth, may our bodies be light.
May our bodies be light for you.

from the Album Keep No Score
all lyrics © 2006, Sleeping At Last

Thoughts From Possum

"Never judge a man till you walk a mile in his shoes. Then when you do, you're a mile away from him and you've got his shoes."

His

Been realizing lately that in my dreams I truly want to love the world, but love is actually somewhat dreadful in reality. It is dreadful when looked upon by your flesh - without resolving, "not my will, but Yours" and after...joy is set before us. But make no mistake about the cost; the journey and road of it all - a death. But this is His glory, these are the purifying fires of love.

Anyway, I'm realizing that too...that we do have a flesh. We do what we do not want to do, and Jacob was called Isreal after he wrestled with the Lord, and that it's the wrestling we don't like.

I'm also realizing that I want to look artistic to you. Even now as I'm writing this blog I want to seem deep, mysterious, creative. He told me the other day that I will never be what I am not, and He told me to rejoice and be glad, for He is my Maker!

So I write to you tonight as His little one. Please, nothing else.

Thief

It's quiet here

and I'm not creative here,
and I make nothing here,

and my hands have been cut off
because I have stolen.

Listening is all He breathes on me,
and as I am breaking
I cannot here what you think about me.

Disclaimer

So if you're bored at this poetry, I gotta say, sorry. It's ok, though...you can be. I just don't really know what else to write you. The other day, I tried to sit down in front of my fireplace and tell you incredible insights into what I was learning; incredible revelations I was having, but then I forgot them.

And I tried to tell you about how, this one day, we all went out on a stroll and some of us started arguing over what to call a certain tree, and then over what to do with a certain boulder, and then over what to call the aroma of the dirt we were smelling...and then we all died. It was one day, really, only one! I saw a picture of you in the sand along the path we were walking on. It looked like one of those old timey pictures of our great great grandparents with their staight faces (it was superficial to smile in pictures you know) and their pitch forks and stuff. But you looked so sad, even more sad than our great great grandparents, and it was a picture of only your head, and I thought, "I should paint this." And so I did! It's wonderful, hanging over my fireplace now. I know, we've talked about when you come to life sometimes and sit with me next to the fireplace and we talk all night about the stars, the universe and the speed of light. But you don't want to hear about that, you want to hear about why you cry.

I'm telling, I've been working on it: painting and repainting you, but tears always come and they wash away half your face. But aside from all the painting, I think I've got it: you hate being a painting or a photograph, or anything that keeps you from talking about the speed of light. I just don't know how to keep you here. It's quiet here, the silence is actually beautiful, but I've realized that anytime that silence breathes over us next to the fireplace, you want to leave. I've told you, remember, that these walls are made of the beauty of everything, but they are nothing as much as they are beauty and so you may leave when ever you so please.

Please forgive me...I don't know how to say it...basically, I'm begging you to come back. Here there is speed of light for all of us and we can remember when we died and all of the argueing was over.

This Man I Saw

so...who's the pauper and who's the prince?
I know, it's Christmas -
hence
the kingdom's in our midst, I said.

I said it all.
I walked, falling off
his scizophrenic preaching,
"I know what's it's like," he said.

"My brother and his masters," he didn't tremble
at anyone's thought, thimble, or thumb biting potential

"He's got a masters in it,"
but who's master said it?

I said it...
all.

Fall from his inconvience (I'm telling you),
he was a grievious
embarassing babbler,
over his glasses, talking to no one
out the door, looking rather...fine.

and you will say, "I hated him,"
and I will say, "I hated myself"
at this perpendicular angle of my seat
against this
concretefloor of a painter's
door

I cocked your mouth and shot it right at him
if he wouldn't have ducked over his glasses

this place has never seen
the vertigo of my mind,
I gleened, stood horizontally in the presence
of a ghost of his kind.

The painting washed away
with halls of decking,
and the door closed,
he and his glasses left (they were the big kind, the ones from the 80's)

I wanted him to be a prince,
his bags and his voice void of the price of the praises men
said,

"He is a king."

again...

I ran again...

I fell again,
and he talked in his deep Spanish accent,
walking through the swinging glass
of past pressure-
slipping through dimensions
of the resounding sounds
-folded behind the entrance
of the portal to my memory...

and I bowed again
*(my head slightly in front of my computer)*

and I pretended again
I didn't see him.

and again and again
from below this heep of sheep,
I felt the warmth of his voice
and the swing of the glass
and the echo in my head of captive thoughts

and again and again and again

I'd bow eternally again.

So, all is well on the Starbucks front. It's really not a bad job, with great people and great benefits and all that, and all the punching buttons and all the steamed milk and all the coffee knowledge from Central America to Indonesia and sometimes I wish I could sit back and watch myself and my green apron, and I would live just behind this Starbucks smile and credit cards and thank yous, and I would leave a space (about an inch and a half - one inch for them and half for me), and the air would be stiff there and it would be like insulation for my quietness and insecurity and my smile could be smuged off with a paper towel and basic-H and I could see it from the inside while bombs rage under the North Korean earth, while my dog poops in the house, while my cousin is injured in Iraq, and while I forget how many pumps of syrup they want.

Inside there is silence.
And echos of confidence falling
Through the foam of screaming
steam scalding
the milk of the flowing
bodies of consumers...

and my hands they drink
and ask for refills.

I'm sitting in the public library, and I'm realizing,
"This is the place where people go
who are the most ordinary
of fantastical sameness."
And this changes into white-walled cinder block,

beauty bent over broken.

And this changes into simple.
And this changes the boring of your
walled perspective of jobs with money;
of kids grown straight out of the suburban air
-like aliens.

And takes you through the dust
of used xerox copy machines
and takes you to the old lady, pissed off
and where is my university?

It's gone;
slipped through my fingers -
ash from the altar
of the angel's incense.

and the hum of the computer,
and the clicking of stranger's fingers,

but paper butterflies hang from the ceiling
and my ordinary gives me the feeling
that they would stoop down,
wings pulsing slowly,
and take me to the Deep Heaven of this place.

Ideas of earth
revolve in my mind
around the sun of a page
and a galaxy of bindings
-the gravity holding things together.

Pages of light
viewed as history.
Time before you
in words insecure
-words under the influence.

And what if I wrapped up this bookstore
and called it the Bible
and what if I took their heads...

and what if I forgot history
and what if I forgot about getting a job
and what if I forgot the praises of men

and what if I saw the over-weight lady next to me
-smile-

and what if believing was right in front of me,
waiting for silence.

And here I love my enemies
and here there is an enemy.
And here the earth looks flat
and here I walk across the water of it
and here I fall off the ends of it.

And there they fall away from gravity
as I turn towards the sun,

I'm floating,
and it consumes me.

From Perelandra by C.S. Lewis:

"When she had at last been made to understand what 'creative' meant she forgot all about the Great Risk and the tragic loneliness and laughed for a whole minute on end."