Darkness Burning

Darkness began burning in the heat of human experience.

The weight of emptiness, pulling with tectonic force, 

Is combustible in the cramped quarters of a trampled heart.

Like a stoic tree severed from its base and torn from its roots,

The soul splinters into kindling like pine needles falling on the ground

And fire forces the life out of  the scattering memories and up into the cold air.

The Path Darkens at the Steam

The forest lurches inward forming a canopy.

Bending forward like exhausted soldiers returning from combat

Torso’s hunched over their rifles like crutches.

The path darkens at the stream.

Broken boulders face the cold rumble of water  

The sound echoes against the mountains

As if forlorn canon fire in the shadowed distance

Shattering buildings into monuments of abandonment.

And thus, into the darkening valley of boulders and water

Along the stream’s banks walk trains of hollow men, Adam’s children. 

Fractured in meaningless fear of a full heart.

Evasion

His voice becomes the distant howl of the wolf in the desert. 

Where rivers of life parch themselves on the sand floor in the anger of a midsummer day;

The dreams of youth exuberantly painted the barren wilderness’s heaven 

In siren like colors of pacific blue and turtle shell green.

He is no longer found in this calcified enclave of memories.

He can be found racing beyond infinities rim toward his own being

Where the astonished wonder of first full embers of new born faith exist 

And the springs of inner delight is found in the wrestling of one’s twilight black heart

The place where personal peace and final stillness find there dynamic working.

He is never where we first catch him in the power of his repose.  

Collect for Jeremiah 20

But if I say, “Forget it!

 No more God-Messages from me!”

 The words are fire in my belly,

 a burning in my bones.

 I’m worn out trying to hold it in.

 I can’t do it any longer!

Curse the day

I was born!

The day my mother bore me—

a curse on it, I say!

He should have killed me before I was born,

with that womb as my tomb,

My mother pregnant for the rest of her life

with a baby dead in her womb.

Eugene H. Peterson, The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2005), Je 20:8–9, 14,16.

Father, you birth in your servants words we cannot bear to speak. Grant that we may find comfort in your love and mercy. That, in the end we can fulfill our calling by the power of the Holy Spirit, with Christ-like humility and obedience to the Glory of your name.

To Hear Grace

Through the dark tunnel of unknowing
Which is like a canopied wilderness of instinctual fears
Walks the pilgrim in the abandoned desert.
He has been brought to this sacred sight
like a willow-o-wisp carried in the forest
By the soft cool currents of wind
Which cross the beach and dance inland.
And in his settled surrender
His eyes are closed in gentle repose
In order to open his weak ears
To the sound of a finely tuned grace
Rumbling in great green waves
Like tall stalks of grass
Waving in the light of a great field.

Friendship

People standing against one another
As if they were opposing weather worn gray mountains,
Which lean over a hidden valley of human identity.
Relationships establish the limits of one’s being
In order to release the individual’s will
Free in an infinite playground of the true-self.
Through territories of strange similarities
Friends encounter each other in the mist
Like trees drawing water from the same brook.
Friendships give shape to the impoverished soul.

Memory, Plague and Space

If memory is allowed to fester,
As if it were a small opal blotch upon a muscle,
Which is starved of air that clears away the assumptions,
Then the memory grows in swirls of shifting context and chance.
Prodded by the presence of uncertain relationships
The infested personal history oozes the pain of guilt
Discharging a discolored pus of shame.
And in course of time it breaks the surface of consciousness
The human heart collapses with a crack as if tall pines snapped in two.

Rapids

Electrifying emotions storm through the soul
In a manic state of uncertain energy.
Hurling through the brightly lit facade of human perfection.
Like an out of control car on an oval track
Feelings careen on the corners the mind.
The mental agitations drags the self downward,
Toward the exhausted fumes of catapulting panic.
This rush of anxiety steals the nerve of self
Turning it into a useless plastic putty—a ghosted shell.
The hollow spirit is left feeling like soap squeezed out of a dispenser
In a gray dirty port-a-potty under a set of bleachers.