Surprise

Go into your shining dark
Into painful transparency
Overwhelming insufficiency
Witness the without within

Be sufficiently inadequate
To gaze beyond the edges of yourself
To grasp beyond your reach
Only then to be
Held completely beyond your capacity
To behold

The danger of writing a sermon:
If you are to wield it uncallously
You must grasp it by the blade
Till blood names you hypocrite
In the eyes of all

I wasn't broken
I wasn't injecting anything into my body
But myself
Wasn't some addict curled up down in the composting vomit like some ghastly pale fern frond.
No I was curled like a fist around a smashed beer bottle, about to turn a brawl into something primal. A tightrope act stretching between action and reaction.
Action: the jagged arc of glass that holds only the fizz of falling anger
Reaction: the drops of blood that fall, and fall, and fall and fall until the thin line line hits the floor. And those watching shake their heads, and blame the law... The police man for not stopping it before... And leave themselves comfortably discomfited at the door. Ignored.

I wasn't broken.
I wasn't breaking anyone's rules
But myself.
I wasn't.
I was not.

But I could have been.
I could have been wide and long and deep as an ancient wood. Implacable. Immovable. Sucking up the waters of life be they ever so deep, be the heavens dry, come what may, and what may come... Is this - a crowd to the one Man not hanging back, who came through the door, became the door, hanging forward like a lean in time. A gravity the pulls and pulls my confessions out... and onto him. And into him like a spear in the side. Till he could bear it no more.

 Because there was no more. No more to bear. But to bear him down into the earth like an ancient seed buried in my shallow soil. And deep dreams for could have beens  and should have beens, and the green I know would grow if only I wasn't broken.

I wasn't broken
But he was.
And now the doors i locked are thrown open

Five

A planet can sustain life
Only if it centers its gravity on
Something greater
Burning with invitation
Stretching out the great across
Separating "I" from "other"
Bowing an axis
That leans
Like a gentle wind
Into the breath of life
Declaring "us".

Real beauty
Can only be chiseled
From the jagged stone
Of 'is'.

How much of prayer

"God change things so I don't
have
 to choose
Rearrange things to a
 simpler
 kind of truth
Move the icebergs from my way
Till there's no more sink
Or swim
Please don't let the bad choice 
in

Four

I'm not very good at this,
I'm so far behind
Crumpled on my tiny bed
Like last summer's green
How can I find rest and peace
By surrendering the search?
I just want to do it right
So I'm not very good at this.

I remember
when God was so big
He could blot out the clouds
And stand
With His back to everything
And not be afraid

I was smaller
Less compressed
Had not yet forgotten
Which way tears fall
And my yearnings gazed forwards
Instead of the mess behind

Three

Stacking up
Horizontally
I try to find the being unfound
As minutes condense
Weighting
The thinness stretched
Over my tiresome limbs
Tracing circles
On the sheets beneath
Stacking up
Seconds
Until I am found by unfinding
In accidental surrender
Of gently closing eyes.

Sadness

Sadness is not a puzzle
To be solved
By slotting each jagged piece
In just the right place
Grabbing all the edge bits
And leaving the vague till last

It is a broken thing
Waiting
For the making new
A mosaic of jagged pieces
painstakingly placed
By trial and error
Into a picture that
Breathes and stretches
as it gets made

Always resisting the urge
To rebuild what once was broken
These razor edges resist
The anesthesia
Of forgetting their birth


It is standing at the tomb of an old friend
And calling the unknown to rise.

Two

She hides her rage well
Down deep
It leaks into the water
Strains into the aquifers
Creeps into the buckets
To spill with heavy wetness
When her moments start to shake

She hides her rage well
Behind questions too big for asking
"Where?! Where!? Why!?"
Snapping in the wind of her mind
Like a tattered flag
Lost on a battle field
Where is the king now?
Why has he been gone so long?

Some things I found in my diary

Sometimes I forget
How to go places with my feet.
Or without them.
Or within them.

..

To be Samson
And push
On the pillars of injustice.

..

One

Blessed

Like the bleating ram

Fluffed and fattened

Finding its way to an unknown altar

I went to count them

But they

Had slipped away

When I lay down

Doubt
Lets the colours
                          run
Lets the ink unglued
                          become undone