All posts tagged: Ecstatic Poems

What I Like To Call It

comments 20
Poetry

They look at me funny when I tell them I’m a cosmic stunt man, like I have a condition because I can’t stop coming to Jesus about the elaborate nature of this phenomenal ruse. Like indifference is a rational response to having undergone such a prompt step into existence, to having donned that stretchy, knowledge-retardant suit and climbed down the business end of a circus artillery piece, only to fall asleep just prior to the moment […]

The Art of Pearl Diving

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Christ / Poetry

See if this helps: Christ is a fisherman whose nets are cast nightly into the sea of non-existence, pulling haul after haul of shimmering beings out of the abyss. The seas are black as ink, the waves like rolling hills of liquefied obsidian, impenetrable to plain sight, but the nets emerge from the deep full of wriggling, unspeakable colors. We were each caught like that, scooped out of the darkness in nets woven by angels, hauled […]

No Way to Live

comments 28
Poetry

It is possible, strange though it may seem, to imagine that right now is a most exquisite Love note written with you in mind, to imagine that this very moment– with all its shortcomings, flaws, minor aches and pains, pain killers, and just plain killers, the war department, the paperwork, and the miffed populace in which you’re mired– is a tactical choreography offered in the only language you yet understand, suggesting with all due respect that […]

Intersection

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Christ / Poetry

Illusion is a grid of two-way streets, an endless network of choices. Asphalt riddled with diesels, sirens, and street lamps. Buildings with decisions stacked up to the sky like trays of factory-laid eggs waiting for chicks. Dropped ceiling meanings.  Angled views. Helo pads on top.  A strange silence up there. What if the engine fails? Parachute racks, lightning rods and hose reels. Tightropes strung from peak to peak. Wind socks for safety and guidance. The heavy […]

Whatever This Is…

comments 25
Christ / Poetry

For a time it was vitally important that I witness the sunset, that I look up from whatever act of commerce or gastronomy had caught my attention that day and look west, to pause and listen to far away places that seemed, for just a moment, to pour through the offices of my heart in fleeting snippets of a cosmic dialect. That was the moment, the precise time to say it: whatever this is… I […]

A Lineage of Kazoos

comments 17
Poetry

A skull is a resonating chamber, a human-shaped bottle for storing echoes. A Great Mystery holds me up to its ear– who is listening to Whom? Awareness merges with such a sound, vanishes. A skull is an organic amplifier, a condenser of ethereal transmissions, an inwardly-curving bone around a hollow void, meant to be dipped daily in a field of silence– held to the ear of a Great Mystery. Over time, carefully tended, the silence […]

A Blown Correlation

comments 13
Poetry

After a day of cotton skies and bituminous questions about my fate, a gap appeared in the sky and sheets of light rained down. Leaves glowed like stained glass, the air trembled softly in the trees as it awoke from its slumber, and a butterfly took flight. Grace is like that, just a flicker of brilliance, a single data point that destroys years of careful correlations but brings the mountain into view. When I beheld […]

Underground

comments 18
Poetry

I’m a vein of flickering ore woven through undisturbed rock, a compacted silence. I’m the tunnel winding past, an opening pulled from one darkness to another, in a line, and a walker who wanders along its length. Each direction dissolves into vacancy. In the half light of a torch someone left behind, I look at the wooden braces and sense the immensity of the weight above. Who built this place? Where were they going? What […]

All Your Playful Swatting

comments 23
Poetry

A body is neither a limit nor a cage, but a flower on the vine of who you are. And those bees buzzing all around you? Those zoom-zoom experiences that keep swarming your life? They just want to collect your holy nectar and take it back to their hive so they can toast you all winter long, quite possibly for the rest of their lives. Best to stop swatting them away and open your petals […]

Drummed, Holy

comments 6
Poetry

All our assumptions were wrong. The strangest part is realizing we always knew this, even in the hour of our deepest pain. We’re like a secret of the universe that wandered through the trees to a scenic overlook and stood slack-jawed peering into a crevasse full of stars and comets choreographing the meaning of existence, then got whacked in the back of the head with a frying pan and splattered into a corpus callosum of inter-combinant […]