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 […]
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 […]
I was in Washington, D.C. this past weekend with my wife and her eight year old grandson, and we went to an IMAX film to see the story of Fred and Norah Urquhart, who spent much of their lives in a quest to understand the migratory path of monarch butterflies. After several weeks of an extremely busy schedule at work and an annoying skin infection that has been insistent on delivering its message– a time […]
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 […]
Some nights are for forgiveness. I can only let the mail pile up for so long. Then I have to open the notes I’ve been sending myself since who knows when, and really drink them in. Notice the handmade paper, the choice of twine, the careful hand-writing, the postmarks from places I never knew I’d been. How did I get there? When was I lost at sea? I realize… a distance has been opened, and […]
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 […]
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 […]
I met Jesus while crawling on my belly beneath a rock, scratched and bleeding, panting with the effort to catch a single drop of dew with my swollen tongue, straining to taste its coolness before it swelled, and gravity plucked it out from under me. I’d been trying the same stunt every morning at this spot for three days. Now I was too weak to move on. At the last moment, I hesitated. It was […]
This poem comes with a Satisfaction Guarantee. That’s right. Here it is, in fact: Your Everlasting Satisfaction Is Guaranteed. In case you’re wondering already– (you haven’t even read the poem yet for Pete’s sake!)– what type of compensation you receive should you find by some law-bending fluke of nature that you’re a twinge dissatisfied at the end of this, I’ll tell you that, too. Anticipating such a question, the Beloved has written the Answer upon an infinitude of hearts, […]
Night breezes tickle the chimes we hung, then rise through the leaves above, rinsing away the day’s hours, then rise to graze upon the earthen rays streaming from the crowns of trees, then rise to gather in counsel inside a vast cocoon of starlight. Underground, the bees are sleeping, their dreams sparking along the synapses of flower roots. Tomorrow they will harvest the nectar, discovering the return of all that was given. Life is neither […]
Embracing Forever 