Where have I been?

I count ambulances now.

They are like proud beasts
with siren songs, silhouettes
of hope, whispers of
immortality, and empty bellies;
they throw their lights across
bare walls and empty rooms.

     As if to ask:

           Will love save you?

And in angry reply I speak
for myself, through the curtains
and single window panes.

     I say:

           Love is all we have.

           If not,

                       death.

And, as if in reply, one

returns; a wounded dog, chains
trailing at its feet and I
see inside.

      Priests or Paramedics?

Love is safe this time.

But other times in less
dream-like lives, which
is to say with eyes wide

open:

      They return in vicious form
      with death lit up, put
      on display:

            This Chariot Confessional.

            This ring of red and blue.

            This unfortunate consequence.

                  Priests or Paramedics?

I count ambulances now.

They are like wounded dogs

in quiet retreat.

I count ambulances now.

I do, I swear I do.

A Return to The Old Form...

Life Is A Dying Dream

Life is a dying dream

Filled with empty promise,

Dragged along by a waning hope

And thrown away by chance.

Taken away by death,

Leaving nothing but memory

I watched as his memory

Faded.  I watched as his dream

Suffered a wretched and complicated death.

It was, after all, a single promise.

I took a chance.

On a corner, something beckoned, hope.

And with so many good intentions, hope

Began to collect my memory.

It rid me of anything he called chance,

And made fate, a longing. A dream

Worth the wildest promise

And bringing about a cold death.

This is when we explode, and death

Couldn't be happier. Hope

Has made itself less than a promise;

A simple one, a single memory

That slowly fades to a dream

That never had a chance.

And, when you think about the word chance

You begin to consider the possibility of death.

It is after all like a warm dream

That reeks of some sort of desperate hope;

Like a lighthouse long abandoned, memory

Of it flickers out, and we are left with a promise.

So now let me speak, and I will make you a promise.

Listen, because words have power, take a chance

Because, though it is fickle and strange, memory,

Though we would like to think it, has no death.

There are things that will fade: hope.

But only if we let go of the dream.

I promise, in the end, this will be no real death,

And you will not confuse chance with that faint hope.

I swear, the memory is stronger than the dream.

A Continuation of sorts...

Maybe it was the cold quiet of the morning.  You know how it was in the past.  Coffee, sunrise, talk radio, and an interstate dipping and weaving through the corn fields and strange animals in their desperate search for oil, dipping their necks towards the earth in some faithful search for life.  You could walk to your car in the midst of leaves gasping under your feet before they were carried off to some tomorrow.  They carried whispers of a different world that was soon to come.  Their veins forming vermiculate patterns that could only be described as forgotten.  They were the lucky ones.  At least now it seems that way.

If they could, they would have written poems.  Dark and lonely poems that spoke out vehemently against the wind, and the lacerations of the cold.  Bitter poems that forewarned of the season to come.  They would have gathered to read them to each other and spit on the ground in disgust.  Wait for it to freeze.  They would have said this season will never end. And you will be cold.

Even if they could speak.  Would you have listened?  Would you have taken a step back and put your ear to the ground?  Just to hear the Earth tremble and shift one last time before going silent.

           

You do it now, now in the strange landscape stretched before your eyes. Those animals, now strange statues, long given up to the earth run dry.  Right ear pressed to the dirt, watching the sun in its interminable wasteland eclipse. Round the earth. Round the Earth, and it is only a dim shadow. All is only a dim shadow.

Silence.

Autumn

Autumn

It is all because your eyes are like sunflowers; they light up, vanish, and return to haunt me day after day. And so it goes.  I've got a death grip on yesterday and a permanent fear of what will come tomorrow.

It is like autumn around here now.  The season that comes before you know it is there. You. You are like autumn.  You come in to this room with an air of quiet mystery and possibility.  A fallen leaf.  Twirling through the sky and grazing past beanie covered heads and scarf enclosed necks.  You are the fall.  You are beautiful.  The irony is the past year.  You can’t regret a season because it comes again, but I’m not so sure about you. 

This is the season that comes too fast and is pushed away by bare, broken limbs when the temperature dips.

This is when the days begin to whisper in monochromes of gray.

Irregularity

My heart beats with irregularity sometimes.  I can feel it.  I can feel it pressed up against my rib-cage and sternum, between my lungs; breathe in, breathe out. Ok.  Again now.  My heart beats irregularly.  When I speak to you.  When I see you, and I am not sure why.  But I would guess it has something to do with the raven on your shoulder standing proud and strong.  This is dangerous.  I imagine it has something to do with the polluted ocean gazing back at me when I look into your eyes.  I imagine there are better ways to describe this but I am doing the best I can considering the circumstances.  See, memory is a fickle thing, and she does not lend herself to a proper translation.  Cruel as it may be I am trying my best here.  Can you forgive me?

Because I am not sure if I should call this a retrospective.  I remember experiencing some sort of flashover or flashbulb and it was like a white hot coal burning through synapses; exploding in the brightest colors and fading as the morning fog crawls across the open plains.  And still your polluted ocean moves with the moon, catching my attention and pulling me in directions that no real compass could identify.  Like I said before.  I am trying to decide if I should call this a retrospective.

What I really mean to say is that you were priming me.

For what it’s worth.  I was asking for it.  I had found myself in this unknown space.  I oriented myself quickly, identifying the major landmarks, the major players, and of course in which direction the oceans lie, in the case of my escape they would be needed.  But I have never been one to focus purely on the physical and that is where you lost me.  Somewhere beyond the topography and the oceans you built a fortress and God how the walls beat me down and disoriented me.

Or maybe this is all topographical and I want to explode: ruin the map.

As far as I am concerned, and believe me I might be concerned. This landscape is boring and dry.  Cycles of rain and wind have had their way and moved on to the oceans.  There is safety in emptiness though.  That is why the oceans attract such storms.  They are like the older kids you always knew.  They carried dangerous words and unfortunate objects.  But we knew them anyway.  We counted dangerous words among our friends.  We were armed to the teeth.  We felt immeasurably large and life simple; it was beautiful.

Flashbulb.  Click.  I slipped into retrospective.  But God the pictures look good.

I don’t remember how these pictures felt but I have rehearsed their meanings for three or more years and I can’t quite shake the feeling that what I know now to be the truth of that moment is skewed by wet faces, blood shot eyes, and water logged clothes.  Dew drops are supposed to be beautiful.  Not when they are frozen to your eyelids.  Not to think that it got cold while you cried over which way to turn but you did and it is a scary thought because now both paths have proven themselves desolate.  They weren't always this way.  I’m sure they were once alive.  It is really just a question of sensory details.

Speaking of sensory details.  A note on my thoughts:

           

Tonight I will continue my journey, wandering from tree to tree with no specific rhyme or reason and no real intentions.  See this forest was once proud.  Trees stood tall and danced with each other in the wind and the snow.  They slept under full moons while animals explored territory foreign to human footsteps.  Rivers and streams once trembled and shrank, grew and jumped, fretfully, frantically down mountainsides.  Sometimes they would disappear whispering devilishly beneath the forest floor, leading to unknown worlds.  This place was vibrant and skies were the deepest blue.  If any place were to burn bright, this place would burn beautifully and it would be impossible to ignore the revolution and the possibility of renewal.  This was a place of explosive possibility.  It has become a landscape littered with volatile ash and mud capable of a transfiguration that degrades and carries away.

You can feel it in each delicate step.  This land is like silk and glass.  With each fragile step a new crack begins.  Spider webs weave their disconnected lines across the landscape.  They will cut you open if you are not careful, and no matter how much you hope it will, the blood left on those devilish traps will not save anyone.

In the early days the swings were always empty.  They would sway in the wind as if the children had flown too high and simply vanished into the sun.  Icarus become far too real.  Yet, in recent nights simple laughter is beginning to ring through the trees; it weaves its way through blackened trunks and fragile soil, assaulting my ears. It was almost like church bells, the laughter, it rolled and tumbled over itself like a landslide with no explosion of sound.  Yet, the possibility was there.  A ticklish excitement rode on the wind and I would count. One.  Two.  Three. Four…Ten.  Here I come.  Fast feet and even faster hopes.  Finding ghosts is no way to go about this search. I press madly onward weaving through broken limbs and frayed ropes.  All in a desperate search for a tangible sign of life.

And when you really start to think about it.  Silk and glass don’t mix.  You would never expect to find them together anywhere but here.  It is optically transparent.  What they mean by that is it is see through.  The glass that is.  It is brittle and fragile, composed of materials that have been worn down by the very hands of a God.  Slowly.  Slowly.  It takes thousands of years, combined with heat and pressure that cannot be imagined.

But there is another way.  A shortcut born of the ferocity of storms and given to few.  It is glass born of pain and searing complication.  It is born of fire and water and it will grow old shortly.  Lightning.  Instant ignition.  Fire.  Furnace heat. Explosive.  It is instantaneous and quiet, and very much alive.

What I am really trying to say here is that in a land of silk stretched thin over glass you can’t expect to catch up with ghosts.  What I am saying is the details are important, but I’ll never remember them all.

This is just a search for tangible signs of life.  And that is all we have ever done.  We began stumbling through forests and undergrowth overgrown and left to wither in a succession of possibility wrapped up and packed in a vast world of silence.  A void filled with promise.  Promise filled with obligation and intention.

Then.

Fire.

And we always end right here, among the wasteland rubble trees.  The children’s laughter, just a trick of the senses.  I always find him.

He lay like a wet blanket, twisted and contorted, then frozen to the ground in some grotesque manner reminiscent of all the pictures you tried to ignore.  He is alive.  I assure you he is because I have spoken with him.

Hauntingly beautiful words.

Touch the wine to my lips.

He is dying.  I don’t have this authority.

Allow me the bread.

I swear that’s not how a soul should breathe.  I tuck it between his lips.

The body and blood of Christ

Then it is finished.

Pondering Permanence [In all of its Glory]

See it's the dead that haunt me. I walk and I walk. I turn around and the road behind me is empty. It's the dead that haunt me because they remain that way. Dead…

The problem we have with books like The Road is not that we fear the apocalypse. No, it is that we fear the things that come with the apocalypse. We fear the permanence. We fear death; not our death but the death of everyone we have ever known and loved. Our problem with books like The Road is that the dead die; we keep on living, and the dead stay dead.

You see we fear loneliness far more than the end.

What we fear is a world of absenteeism. What we fear is the possibility that all of this could fade away. What we fear is a world in which the dead are dead and there is no one or nothing left to appeal to.

We fear absence, not death. That is the central issue; The Road simply shows us what happens when god disappears.

The Road is the complete destruction of familiarity and the inability to communicate that familiarity to a generation that doesn't know it.

That scares us. God, does it scare us...

Maybe what we need to learn from The Road is the ability to revel in the beauty of broken things; the ability to revel in the stark landscape before us.

Stirrings Pt. III: Bedside Prayers and Waiting Room Coffee

The phone rings on occasion.  Everyone will stop to look towards the volunteer at the desk.  She calls a name and most everyone goes back to what they were doing.  People drink coffee; they sip at it softly, with wandering eyes.  It’s relatively quiet and everyone is waiting.  People fidget and watch the TV.  People answer phones, speaking softly into ears listening. Miles away.  They drink their coffee again. Drink. Fill.  Repeat.  Like any other situation we fall into patterns.

I have a cup that sits, still steaming, next to my stack of papers. It’s not worth drinking.  What you might expect is a hot cup of coffee, comforting aromas, rich warm taste and all.  What you might get is an oily concoction of burnt out sludge, and it’s not a bad thing.  You can’t expect this to be an experience.  It just is.  You are waiting.  Not for anything in particular.  You are waiting for a moment in time.  You get the call and the waiting ends.  It’s pretty simple really.  The people surrounding you are doing the same. 

They wait.  They are called to the phone.  They leave…or they continue to wait.

It’s not about whether good things happen to bad people. 

It’s not about whether bad things happen to good people.

We are all here.

We are all people.

The fact is things happen to people.

Things just happen to people.

Stirrings Pt II: Coffee Shop

I’ve spent at least three nights a week here for two months now; I should know the names of some of these people.  I should know she will distract me for, at the very least, a moment or two of my time here.  I should know that in my mind we have been slow dancing, tiptoeing around a topic, a possibility, a question, and an answer, waiting for a strong wind that might sway either of us towards vulnerability.  I should know that it probably isn’t healthy for me to come here anymore.  Indecision and possibility are like a cocktail with a bad aftertaste and I find myself hooked, desperately and hopelessly hooked...

The thing of it is she still asks if I want room for cream.  The words have a searching quality about them.  They ring hopefully from her lips, like white smoke and bells above locked doors, but I’m not listening.

She still asks, and I still say no thank you.  The words hang themselves from my lips, and I take my coffee black, filled with nostalgia.

Stirrings

When you sit down and try to calculate the form and function of a memory it's likely that you are going to come up with something undefined.

It is likely that you are going to be viewing a form stirred up in the decaying plant and mud life of a long lost lake.

See, there are broken moments when you feel lost in the night. It's cold and dark and street lights exist as distant fireflies buzzing in and out of your consciousness.

Sometimes you wake up to a dying fire and you wonder where the night has gone. The sun casts its lot among the dust and the dirt on the floor and something cold stirs inside you. It's like the wind whipping through trees.

Building Towers

Building Towers....Our conception futile and our Grace replete.

Adam and Eve...

They were masters of their apparent and God's created world.  Their power extended to that world.  It was unique and solitary, and limited by necessity.  One might even argue, limited, in their favor or for their protection.  In this all was good.  Man had balance and God had creation.  No abjection and no struggle.

And this was the possibility of planet earth, of mankind.  This was the possibility of a world that did not know Sade's "universe of mistrust", or the terror of religious extremism, genocide, or mass shootings.  This was the possibility of endless morning ( the negation of mourning), the possibility of mists shrouding rolling hills, moving about freely and taking form when pressed to reveal its sole occupation: beauty.  This was a world free of negations; free of the oh-so-broken-hearted confinement of sin and tragedy.  This is our intended beauty, rising once and never supposing it might set; never supposing that night might take us to our grave.

This world was limitless and primed for an explosion.  Without any real knowledge of what we wanted we began to search for the fuse.  It was dangerous and explosive because the possibility of exposure, and incendiary material was compelling.  So we began to chase dreams in all of their misleading glory.  Like children chase ice cream trucks down summer roads unaware of the earth melting beneath their feet.

And so we sought the unique and solitary power that was God's.  We began to build him in the very image of ourselves.  We created and assigned with immunity, perceived because we were masters of this world.  We began the task of working with perceptions and assigning form to formlessness.  We began with assigning characteristics to the imperceptible and building towers to the sky in hopes that we may catch sight of this being.  After all we were unique and solitary, given power to create and destroy, and willing to take step after relentless step into the void.

It was only in the end that we found our foundation to be lacking.

Our conception futile and our Grace replete.

There are Greater Words

There were greater words to be shared

and we decided on taller trees so

that we could hide our heads in the clouds

They called to us:

"Come down from there!"

We replied:

"I can't see and there are raindrops on my cheeks."

Life is precarious.  This seems, after my simple 23 years, to be a point that is not worth arguing.  Life is precarious.  So it is necessary to decide what this life is, and I believe that C.S. Lewis provides us with an important definition of what this life is, and why it is so precarious.  Lewis says "you don't have a soul. You are a soul.  You have a body."  I think this is important because it explains the precariousness that we experience every single day.  We find ourselves in an untenable existence.  One which is as fragile and transient as it is beautiful.  For some reason, despite this precarious situation we continue to place one foot in front of the other and march madly down paths that seem fraught with impossibility and hopelessness.

There is a reason for this march.  I think there are many reasons for it.  Among them lie two things.  Hope and Devotion.  Devotion, whether misguided or appropriated in measured doses, causes us to move forward with the best laid plans and the most ill conceived notions.  It is our best laid plans framed with the purest intentions that end up causing us the most pain.  It is because of hope that our best laid plans dwell and linger on when all is said and done; when try to reconcile with ourselves and our hearts.  It is hope that causes that fire to continue its course.  It is hope that continues to burn.  The failure of our best laid plans is what sets fire to hope, it is what makes us believe that hope has been lost.  It is the ill conceived notions that tend to fade so quickly after their failure.  We always knew that they would lead to nowhere, and they always leave us with hope.

We were, after all, born thousands of years ago as adventurers and we have grown from that point forward. But adventure the true idea, not the word, has been watered down into an unfortunate pool of stagnant water that requires an outside force to make ripples.  We are, all of us, pools of water and we wait for someone to stir us into motion.  We wait for a pebble, a rock, or a heart attack to send ripples shooting through our veins like electricity, or with better luck, blood.  This is our problem.  The true bane of our existence.  We are a generation of immense capability and promise (not unlike the ones before us) raised on apathy and anti-heroes.  That is where we find our difference.

I think it is likely that we have all grown accustomed to fear and its ability to drive us.  I believe that our inaction may speak of apathy, but it is far more likely to be the ever present symbol of vanity.  A vanity that we fear is going to be torn to shreds in that moment that we admit we want something.  That we believe in something.  Vanity is a fragile memory.  We need only stare at wondrous eyes in the mirror, close them, and open them to find it gone as soon as it came.

They called to us:

"You've gone too far!"

We slept:

"..."

The branches held our weight.

And that is how I know I have found a dreamer.

Scared to admit that all the possibilities for greatness are there.

Yet, aware nonetheless.

How completely fragile this system becomes

First we must admit to the possibility:

We were wrong.

Then we stitch these patches back to where they belong:

And we know these branches will never fail...

Building Sandcastles

Building Sandcastles

She was building a sandcastle on the shore.

The early morning sun was just beginning to lend its credence to the water; bestowing warmth and possibility on pebbles, water receding and roiling back on itself, and burning memories into the shoreline with the care of a mad hatter on his vengeance run.

Her footprints led me here.  I picked my way through dunes and fences and old gates.  There were warning signs.

“Beware of tide.”

The tide will pull you under and you will drown.  Like memories.  We have the foresight to avoid them but something always draws us closer.  So I walked with my head down, eyes glued to footprints fading fast.

See, there are nights when the gale here leads the salt winds down alley ways and over fences.  Beyond old gates and across quiet streets it moves into open windows and stirs curtains into a restless dance designed for one.  And the floors creak with the moisture of 100 years.  It is with prudence that the ocean surges forward and rolls back on itself pulling grains of sand, separating lovers that once felt solid as a rock, and dragging the continent into the great wide open.  Sometimes I swear I can feel it.  As if the waves are pounding on my door and my heart it beating faster, and I swear that clock read daybreak long ago.  But the second hand just keeps dripping seconds down the wall.  They collect with the moisture in the floor; sinking in and backing down like memories.

I can feel the bed move and suddenly the floor is alive with moans of betrayal.  The curtains dance in the moonlight and I swear I hear them say:

“Just go back to sleep.”

See, there is a hollow emptiness in the walls.  It swallows the words and they seem to crawl across the pillow to whisper their sentiments into my ear.  One by one, on weak legs, they tremble into my thoughts falling hard.

It is quiet then.

She is gone.

So we begin to feel.  Her in her place and I in mine.  We try to bring life to words that rang hollow with repetition.  We conclude with all of these post-lapserian assurances that repetition breeds familiarity and truth.  Then we wonder: how might it be that when our fingertips touch steel our hearts grow cold?  How might it feel: another’s hand tangled with our own, fingertips searching for life, searching for a pulse.  Where did that heartbeat come from?  It is a heartbeat, a pulse racing, and a million thoughts that ring like a chorus of voices.

Siren songs.

We are the ocean vast, immovable and constantly changing.

In those quiet moments we pick up the pieces.  We lay them out on the table and begin the process of creating something to believe in.  Because the inquisitive love seeks to solve the puzzle.  Our hands tremble as they work to pick up pieces, gray and empty, to create a moment that needs no words.  We build with glue and tape, brimstone and fire, worth and worthlessness, sand and water, careless-broken-faith thoughts and longing-to-be-free notions.  We build in secret.  You in your place and I in my own.  We build in secret and wait for the sun to reveal it all.  Like the lighthouse on a cold dark night.  And just before the sun we extinguish the lamp and begin to wander again.  We wake up.

We wake up.  Or at least we think we wake up.  We pick up our hearts from where we left them in cardboard boxes on floors of closets, under beds and hidden away in sock drawers.  We pick them up with caring tender hands.  We wrap them in cloth and take them somewhere that we might marvel at their fragility.  We take them somewhere to marvel at their power to interact with another and change ones entire world.

You see she was building a sandcastle on the shore…to guard her heart.  Because a storm was coming.  Her pulse needed protection.  Because we all fear the feeling associated with drowning.

She said the castle would be mine to guard.

I have a secret, and I think it could make us beautiful.

But we turn back.  Hearts wrapped in whatever we have left.  We place our hands upon that rough hewn sea wall and try to find sure footing in the dunes.  We try to find home but keep moving backwards.  Back into dark rooms, creaking floors, dancing curtains, empty closets, dusty open boxes, sock drawers rearranged, and prayers left hanging on bedposts and ceiling fans.