Eye Contact

This is a poem which was written by a man who wanted to believe he possessed the qualities required to become a free-styling rap singer. The meter and structure go out the window in this one, but maybe my rapping friend could argue that is the soul of 'free style' . Judge for yourselves, my readers.

Eye Contact

He always says nothing; but he has a mountain to say,

he feels helpless knowing that she'll go away,

he's angry at himself and her, in a way,

because deep down he wishes she'd sit down and stay. 

They meet when he's strongest; 

For me it was the day,

When he's strong he's ashamed 

of the part that he played:

He's failed yet again, and knows who to blame. 

She takes many forms: friends, crushes, sisters,

oblivious of how his mind has been twisted,

how dark the places that last night he visited. 

He lashes himself with his own sense of Honor,

after so many failures his mantra seems hollow,

But denial tastes bitter and a tough thing to swallow. 

It's sad just how easy he can say that "I'm broken."

It's freeing at first, after that's spoken. 

But then it seems that the gates of his pride are ripped open,

leaving him free to sink in his poison. 

Dammit! He curses, there must be point to this shame,

surely there's a purpose for disappointment and rage,

surely dreams and ideals have not passed from this age-

can I ever live wholly, can I ever live free, 

is there a chance that I'll always want to be clean?

Wanting. Now there's the stuff. 

What we desire controls us, it will shape what we love. 

If I want to climb higher, will that be enough? 

Christ knew this in a world of hard iron and stone,

that evil is inside us when we think we're alone;

That it is in our own hatred where the murder is done,

and we fail and betray Her with the lust from day one. 

God save me! he cries, maybe this time he means it. 

The Lord works in our weakness; He cleans and redeems it,

Given chance after chance, at last he'll wake up and seize it. 

It's hard to be clean without wanting to change,

It's easy in the pigsty to stay just the same, 

But once from all his addictions he tries to escape,

The prison collapses from this leap of faith. 

Leave it all behind, every last indulgence!

the small ones are seeds for their unstoppable parents

If this leaves you alone - become a knight errant,

those demons will scatter once you take up forbearance. 

They'll seem like good friends- with which you had fun,

reliable mates with whom you've had a good run-

Damn them to hell, those devils are lying;

they were sucking your blood and your true life denying. 

What he really was chasing

when he bought all their lies

was a word with that lady 

and to look in her eyes. 

To be a man to his woman,

and a son to his God,

to win the battle for honor

 he did not realize he fought.

Oh yes I know how heady are the drinks Satan serves,

but I've tasted sweeter things in Christ's endless reserves.

Once you've felt the free air hit your face with sting,

You can't just go back to hell's stale gathering

of the objects and toys that broken men buy 

because they're ashamed that they won't look Her straight in the eye.

Awe

One time,
when my eyes were very large, and filled with tears I could not explain,
I saw you.

You showed yourself to me, for a half a second, for eternity. My heart could not bear up the wonder of your story, nor my mind cache your glory. There are fractured images, cartoonish now in memory, and that feeling, that caused me to weep with awe.

Bare arms with a golden arm ring, light flashing off your mail. You are victorious, naught could stand in the end against your purity. There was love, and sacrifice; a thousand times rewarded. There is hope, carried through a thousand dark nights until at last it blossomed in light and joy. Your hair is tossing in the wind, crimson now like the blood you had shed for love. There is a wind blowing off the mountains, and where it touched there is no fear.

But most of all, I was comforted. I had been sick with despair that you were small and fake, imprisoned in a few deluded imaginations or confined to a screen or a page. But in that moment when my eyes were opened it seemed you were huge, real, in ways that I was not, nor could explain. I felt flat and two-dimensional compared to you, in that eternal moment I realized you were looking in, and I was looking out.
 I was a creation, finite with limits and boundaries. And you, with all your mighty descriptions, hero of the infinite mountains, could see me. You are personal as you are infinite. You are more real than anything a thousand human minds could ever hope to compose. And I will one day rejoice to see you face to face.

Frustration

 Listen carefully: the universe is at war. Holy fire billows in the void, dark storm fronts of despair crackle and flash with all the colors of fury. Armies are sallying forth from the heavenly places, swift-footed agents escape certain capture. Legions of evils fountain up wherever the thin fabric of the mortal realm punctures, leaking across our world like a spreading pool of ink. We here in the finite world are both soldiers and battlegrounds, both waging war and being waged over.  Every little word and thought is as a bolt of fire and a thrusting sword in the reality beyond reach.

I can hear it, sometimes. The music playing in my dreams the moment before I wake. Though I can never remember the tune, my whole soul reverberates afterward. I see the effect if not the cause, like the invisible wind tossing a tree's limbs against a gun-metal gray sky.When you know you've heard the song, nothing else matters. We are notes in the song, pages in someone else's story.

Do you see it? Those rich red-brown autumn colored hills that spread off out of sight? The morning mists that hang over millponds and dewy fields? Those pale morning skies that soon give way to the deep blue of a crisp november day? They are not just in one place, nor in a single memory. They transcend memories, are too real and too big for place or time or human understanding.

I can feel it at times, mostly when I was younger. The gentle sting of a morning breeze stripping away layers of sleep. The feel of waking, of being alert and aware of wondrous things: mountain slopes and flushed dawn clouds and that wind blowing in your face. Deep oceans of peace and mountaintops of joy.

For split seconds I think I have seen the people who live in those mountains, maybe only begun to understand their majesty. Great sacrifices and burning loves and indomitable heroes are in those lands; heroes who never die and wear a thousand faces.

And so I remain, staring with hardened eyes before you, my heart filling up with sadness. It wells up from a grief at what should be, and in my childish dreams deferred they boil up as anger. No, I love you still, more perhaps as I learn more of you. But with every word, thought and deed that honors the darkness's sovereignty it grows in power over your heart, and I see the stars that shine upon you dim from a spreading cloud.

I am not some righteous bastion of faith, that need choke out my enemies like a tyrant. Evil does not offend me, it grieves me, as I watch it poison the spirit world. Colors fade, and the song from the infinite mountains grows hard to hear. I am pained, choked as if on ash by the evil that pervade us in this realm. That which serves life gives me life; that which serves death, to me, is death itself.

So please forgive me, for the sudden tempests that sweep across my face. I am weary, and walking a long road to my home.

White Washed Tombs

I've lived in a graveyard,

in a country that's hot.

The tombs are painted pretty

like a candy shop.

I met a woman who told me she Cared,

about places where kids lived with dirt in their hair.

But you know I think she was sad and couldn't stop;

since she'd murdered her baby at the Happiness Shop,

It's where they sell you your youth back at the price of your heart;

So she held up her sign, to cover the rot.

I've talked with a man just a bit too angry for me,

he was raging about sins he'd never achieved.

Boy, he was on fire about another man's hell,

I couldn't get close, but even then I could tell;
 he was afraid of his silence, and what it would say

if he gave it a moment to kneel down and pray

If he just stopped for one second from yelling to breathe,

we'd all hear the quiet where his heart used to beat.

Well I was pretty pissed with the tombs

I figured they ruined the world,

still I didn't want the streets to have more folks like me;

cos I was broken and rotting and ugly to see.

I was corpse with a stomach that was turned in disgust

at the white washed walls hiding bones turned to dust.

But one day in the graveyard a Live Man appeared,

he was human and hungry with dirt in his beard.

"Tell me," I asked him, while I rattled my bones "have you come to seal me in a tomb with a stone?"

For darkness was what I wanted, and it was where I'd end up;

laid out in silence and consumed by the rust.

"Answer me, Live Man!" I begged through my teeth "what is it like to feel hunger or bleed?"

"Do you thirst?" He asked, and my anger was spent; for I had been dead for so long I'd forgot what that meant. Of all the corpses that rotted I was the worst; for I knew I was broken but I'd forgot how to thirst.

"Live Man," I rattled, shaking my bones "I am not worthy for you to stand in my home. You are Forever, and I am undone. I will crumble and perish far from the sun."

"Tell me," he said, as he stretched out one arm "can these cold dead bodies ever be warm?"

The clouds rolled away and a wind started to blow. But I said only in a whisper:

"Lord, you know."

"Look around you," cried the Live Man, as the winds began to moan, "can I raise up my children, and put flesh on their bones?"

I covered my face and spoke real slow: "Oh God, you know."

The Live Man bent down and whispered in my ear: "I am willing, be healed."

He took me by the hands where only bones should have been; There was blood from his wrists and it washed me clean, he put a heart in my chest, and when he opened my eyes:

All around me were people, real live people.

 Wearing the clothes that the Live Man had brought.

 I looked at each neighbor and I didn't know what to say:

The stone on each tomb had been rolled away.

 

An introvert's review of the past year

Year One-and-Done. I think of all the people who simply were there.

For all the people who give a constancy to my life. Kind partners or friendly strangers, people who said Hello.

Awkward conversations, well trodden shallows like sports or how college was going or the weather, people who knew my name at and said it and nothing else. Sometimes that was all it took. If you have a name then you belong.

Greetings in hallways, two-minute chats. The people I only have something to discuss with after a test. How I treasure those.

People who would walk the way I am going. Maybe to the food trucks, maybe as far as the train station. Correlating routes; those precious intersecting minutes of companionship.

How much I owe to frustrating assignments, authoritative professors. The inexhaustible resource of mutual resentment, griping, bemoaning. How irritating it must have been for upperclassmen to listen to. How happy it was to have something to talk about.

The company of open laptops and lunches. Silence broken by farewells and vile conversations that were welcome conversation all the same. Eye contact and a greetings worth more than money. The reassurance of belonging.

And most wonderful of all, the people who made invitations; never gave up asking, never decided that enough initiating was enough. Said hello from awkward distances, asked quiet people for opinions, invited strangers like me.

Each and every person, whether I spent a moment or an hour, I remember. Your faces and your voices come and go in my memory, sometimes they are actors in my dreams. For you, your interactions may have been mundane, routine or natural, and they were. They were so much more, though. For me they meant the world.

A Poem for That Good Night

Given to me on a hill by Dylan Thomas's father. 


I remember the morning-
it did not seem long ago,
when all my life were simple things,
that melt like passing snow.

I was rich in the morning,
they laid treasures in my lap;
Days and weeks and laughter:
All that mortals have.

I spend my riches quickly,
they slip through my hands like smoke;
the money you can never earn,
the currency of hope.

Because my day was never mine to choose,
nor my birth by my desire,
I will thank the one who gave me life,
I know He will raise me higher.

A gift, this little passing life,
not mine to hoard or waste,
I must hold aloft my prize
until I see His face.

And you of little faith; my heart,
may bless, curse, even rage;
but know that he who gives the hour
has overcome the age.

A poem about Purity

Lord, make me new as the sunrise,
Lord make me pure as the rain,
that I might be as free as the wind,
or honest as pain.

Lord, make me whole as a mountain,
by placing Zion in my heart.
If I wish to walk with you,
I guess I must be set apart.

A life spent chasing the whispers
that reach my heavy ears
would not be a story ruined,
or a waste to all my years.

If now until my death I walk,
in lonely hedgerows before the sun,
I will not say I wished for better,
if at last my race is won.

There are heroes in the stories
that wander, righteous, filled with grief.
Theirs is sadness, theirs is mourning,
in the hours before the dawn.
Theirs is triumph, theirs is laughter,
theirs is love, and endless song.