Dear One
How you stop and start and fidget and worry!
So easily you lose sight of the promise--your promise!
You grasp for certainty, a title, tangible accomplishments--
You grasp for certainty, a title, tangible accomplishments--
Something to shield you from the tyranny of time and inevitable entropy.
You lose, you forget, you shrink, you compare, you despair.
You live in the lies of efficiency.
You’re bowled over by the complexity of human interaction.
Only in the quiet, despairing moments of solitude are you restored--
Not to a title, an action, a plan, but a way of being--beyond the labels you lust after.
A pure gift, undefiled by all your sin,
Poured out in spontaneous, fierce joy.
The Hedgehog
“Whenever someone opened a car door, I got in.”
-Robert Lax
Lord, I am not a decisive man.
I take comfort in the buffetings of wind--
being blown about and rolled around.
I’m a hedgehog, impenetrable yet inert,
I will stay rolled up like this,
communing with you, only you,
And perhaps, eventually, you can make of my rolling
a flat ground for someone to walk over without scandal.
I want to pray my prayers in public
I want to pray my prayers in public
Wrestle these groanings into cold cash
A stiff, fold-over lump of it in my pocket
Ready to be handed out at will.
Crucifix
To take hanging on the cross
and pin it on the wall
as a top priority,
as the bottom line,
the answer to all the riddles
spanning modern life:
The complexity distilled into one image
saying, “You! Do this.”
To then drape across it
one’s color and texture,
one’s hardwires and situationals,
and step back to have a look
as if looking into a mirror.
Always the two intertwined,
sacrifice and fate, side-by-side,
painfully balanced above the abyss--
the chasm of certainty--on a toe-hold of bliss.
Knee-Jerk Beauty
Comes a time when a man
must settle into his strengths
and stop trying
to sweep his limits under the rug
must know that the critics will come
like waves on a shore
endless and redundant
must even admit his culpability, his weakness,
surrounded as it is by his strength.
perfection was never the point.
he will inevitably fall short in several areas.
his weakness somehow necessary
his inability to cope required by
his singular essence, his knee-jerk beauty.
Wired
The body will move in circles
Around a center
That center, another’s heart,
Not its own,
Some days the orbit will be quite small
On others, vastly far.
In a hyper-connected age,
In a hyper-connected age,
It will be tempting to discount that distance.
To assume that wireless means wireless
As if there aren’t massive cables
Connecting our continents
At the bottoms of our oceans
As if a tether ball needs no tether
As if we don’t really need to touch
For anything to happen.
Limitations
If I am unlimited, I am limited
By the absence of limits
The pure of heart are restrained
In ways beyond their innocence
While duplicitous desire deals in distraction
A monogamy of medium is the ideal
But kept at bay, or tucked nervously away
In a file, labeled “someday”
To settle on something singular,
Seems a temporary display
Posture
What if there were no obstacles?
Take each one down in your mind
Take it apart and scatter the pieces
on the patchy ground
Walk, as if toward something.
When you tire of walking,
sit or lie down.
Pay no mind to the others, or
if that's simply not possible,
go to where they aren't, and
walk in that place
or sit
or lie down.
In Favor of Sports
Like Ignatius in bed
for months with a broken leg
no longer his own hero
but still the burning in his chest
that only some other kind of suffering could quench
He found it in Christ, his new hero:
a suffering that spoke to his savage soul.
His vivid imagination, colored by his prodigal past,
took flight at the thought of it:
“A triumph that is a catastrophe
And a catastrophe that is a triumph”
He would walk again but with a different gait:
the shadows of ambition--comparison and avarice--
no longer a threat to him now
Enough danger walking the knife-edge of love.