All posts tagged: Joy

The Cheering Section

April 8, 2015
by Michael
comments 30
Poetry

Three frogs were sitting together under a newspaper watching the typhoon of unnecessary human ordeals roll across the sky from one side to the other like an entire model year of locomotives wrestling for the glory. It was Fantastic. Thunderous. Unpredictable. Insane. And I was in that sky– whirling, pounding, placating, admonishing, wounding, encouraging, listening, stinging, consoling, worrying, wishing, dashing, leaping. Suffering, basically, all the madness of that turbulent fury. What I eventually noticed, in a […]

Flinging Fistfuls of Perfection

March 26, 2015
by Michael
comments 25
Poetry

I had a moment, very recently in fact, to which you might be able to relate, when I was looking up into the starry sky and thinking: why not…? Because it wouldn’t even be a violation would it? Statistically speaking, I mean. There’s so many of you… It’s like a goo goo cluster up there, right? Couldn’t there be some kind of unexpected gravitational perturbation? Like a universal sloshing effect where just one of you […]

Any Way They Can

February 5, 2015
by Michael
comments 17
Poetry

I can’t work like this, I muttered. (I get emotional sometimes around beings of the most radiant candor– the ones who tell you like it is without even moving their lips, who shatter whole lifetimes of log-jammed feelings with a kind of glimmering eye thing and an emanating peace that sneaks up on you like a heated seat, a peace that feels as though it’s backstopped by a battalion of compassionate mountain lions who keep […]

An Incurable Obstinance

January 26, 2015
by Michael
comments 23
Christ / Poetry

When Jesus was young they thought he had a learning disability. At the very least, they reconciled themselves to the fact that the boy possessed an incurable obstinance. At the dinner table, for instance, despite the most pressing tutelage, he refused to concede that an apple and a pear were innately different, choosing instead to refer to them both giddily as flowers. His mother and his father were also not permitted to enjoy the rights and privileges of […]

A Few Prognostications

January 22, 2015
by Michael
comments 28
Poetry

I’m not really prophet material, but how do you know if you don’t try…? Right…? (Lots of forced, intensely preparatory meditative breaths.) (Some swearing in confused frustration.) (And then…!) A few early warning signs Heaven on Earth is about to pull into the driveway: The number of trumpet players per capita starts feeling like a metric that can no longer be ignored. It starts to make intuitive sense why everything is so beautiful. Professional sports teams […]

The Function of Fir Trees

January 12, 2015
by Michael
comments 23
Poetry

A line of fir trees have taken up watch, wooden and resolute, their tips a Gaussian congregation of navy black steeples hung upon a night sky so clear and cold you remember what it’s like to open your door and venture out into an endless, moaning whistle that has frozen into place. The trees– they are like loaded questions, sentries of the borealis pantomiming secrets you can guess at if you pay attention to the way their […]

A Poem For You

December 10, 2014
by Michael
comments 23
Poetry

I wrote this poem for you. You wonder how this could be, since we’ve never met. You think I would need to know at least a few things about your self before I could make such a claim. You think, perhaps, that our two bodies should have shared a room at least once before I could even consider such a crazy idea as writing this poem for you. Or at least they should have heard one […]

On Looking Back, and Beginning

December 7, 2014
by Michael
comments 23
Christ / Course Ideas

This year I realized that in so many ways, I have scarcely begun.  The difference this time, is that having orienteered my way around the mountain in a great and unwitting circle– riding out storms and then reveling in the graceful vacuum of their departure, plotting the next day’s course based on a strange mash of signs, principles and self-argument, being nourished by glimpses of colored bird and flower, by moments of heartfelt communion with […]

Bag of Tricks

December 1, 2014
by Michael
comments 8
Poetry

High up in a cathedral of sky, in an alcove sunken into a sheer face of towering stone where few sounds dare to reach, where first percentile vultures congregate on weekends like a caste of the chosen and on whose sunbaked ledge adolescent mountain goats dream of one day standing motionless but for the waving of their beards in the icy winds and the steady chewing rhythm induced by a mouthful of snowbells, there is […]

All Of Us

October 26, 2014
by Michael
comments 8
Poetry

What if we look into the night sky, but can’t understand what it says? This happens all the time, because we sent Meaning away once. All of us. Banished it from our minds. Cut ourselves right in two like cosmic butchers. Each from each. Then each from each again. For our own good, we said. Looked up at the stars. Lost count. Lost our way. Every half blamed the other. We’ve got the right half, we […]