Gone

When I look at you
Days past settle like fog on a cool morning
Obscuring my path
Showing only the outline of you
A ghost in the mist.
I'll never reach you.
Your shadow falls across my humbled crown as it bows to you,
In thanks for all you've given me....
Your thousand words locked in a smile.
Every word hoarded away like a treasure.
My heart, a wounded dragon clinging to its prey for as long as it can stand.
It's strength waning but for the power you give through your grace.
How my arms long to be filled.
Yet your path lies ahead with me behind.
I live planted, roots digging slowly through the earths new softness.
Waiting for you to return, yet knowing that there is no return journey for you.
That if you return, it will be from behind, having circled the world's wonders as a child's coloring book.
Your dreams, your broken blue crayon.
Imperfect yet pure.
But while I sit in your ever growing shadow,
It's more likely that someone will come across me,
And my roots, so firmly planted,
I'll have no escape.
And though I'll be primped and groomed and fed, and will give life,
I will never again feel your warmth.
Your brilliant rays soothing.

This is what you wanted.

Though it's unclear whether your roots did not grow or whether they were not correctly cultivated to do so.
But for now,
I have no choice but to stare at your back and pray you turn around,
Or at least walk quickly.

Clouded mind

The fog of unsolicited thoughts thickens quicker than reason thaws.
Hesitant heroes enter on person-hood's plea
to attempt quiet
to cox a calm
to translate
to impose order
On the legions serving selfishly-
Fighting for the freedoms found in chaos.
Words repeated and created anew
Filling space
Tightening
The mind sits helpless
Staring blankly at the nothingness
Praying for even the illusion of order.
But prayer cannot penetrate this condensed thickness
Merely adding to the fray
Lost among competing silences
Tied to the itch of discomfort
Bound to a battle whose only victor is time.

Excess

A tire spins
Long after the bike has stopped
Fraying
On all sides
Destruction visible to all but itself
Locked in its endless parade
Mistaking friction for purpose

Disconnected

Cruelty is
Words without voice
Falling on deaf ears- straining fruitlessly for understanding

A gentle breeze, almost pleasant, caressing the back of my neck as hairs wake.
Dives down, clearing space
Fingers tingle, arms tense, stomach tightens, chest expands
The tide begins to rise.

There is so much

So much swirling chaos,
Such thickness
Such crashing waves
Such deafening roars
Bursting veins, darkening blood
Pressing out, defying gravity's demands
Threatening to separate flesh from bone on its way to you.
A building a storm with no release
Barely contained
Made all the more distressed by it's own loneliness.
It's waters will never touch yours
Your canvas may near mine and inside our waters will push and slash and claw and squeeze
In vain.

I am but a vessel.
and my storm is my own
Words are but sailors lost at sea, fighting a losing battle
My only hope for understanding-
broken tools which quiet the storm they seek to share,
Settle the seas as waters recede.
What's captured-enough to fill a palm
A poor approximation
Distilled, filtered, robbed of color, flavor, texture.
What's left is clear and bland and quiet
Nothing of the storm that raged.

And we remain, two ships on distant seas.

Questions

I wouldn't know how to start
Being
Truly in the world
Instead of alongside it
A diligent spectator
Swallowing truths as if they belonged to me
Swathed in sympathy and couched in complacence
With the world's calculated demands
Unwilling
To step inside the world's Me as Myself
Rather
Than one of the many assigned identities
Sheathed within the time and place of chance's choosing
Crudely camouflaged
Knowing that to start
Being
Would remove the shroud
And reveal

Nothing

Who am I?

Am I the dark?

Am I the light?

Or something in between

Is there even an in-between to be?

Or is that just a convenient illusion

Cast to protect the feeble mind of a lost man

From his own sin?

Is there a choice?

Would we want one?

And if faced with the choice of who to be

What would we decide?

And how long would that choice protect us from how we were made?

There’s something in me

Pulling at the seams of this fatal shell.

Something not hidden but not entirely seen

That hides half its ugly head while clawing from the dark.

It clouds the mind

And corrodes the soul within.

What part does this cruel-thing play

If not to provide passage to the devil himself?

His careful harbinger, 
Always waiting behind the eyes, 
To strike.

It will not leave me.

Though it seems my body should reject this vile thing

It loves it.

More wholly than it loves the world.

And the love it shares is not the love of man

But the seed of peril.

Growing, twisting, seething,

Corruption at its core.

Yet struggle brings it closer,

Tightening its sickening grip

Until all seems lost

Until I am lost.

But though it takes the body,

The soul

That bright, smooth crystal at the heart of things

Buried deep

Walled and Locked by so many years of fear

Yet stands protected.

It’s innocence long gone,

Its sole focus, being.

It will not be penetrated or coaxed by this long fingered thing

But will wait

Until it’s branches wither and its fingers fail

And its legs corrode and its grasp twists free

And it will emerge..

Confused

Still

And though it know not its own heart

It knows it’s life is its own

Its light, though obtruded, ethereal, weak

Still protrudes the darkness

Illuminating a pale gray in the mind’s endless night.

And though it wavers, flickers, and bows

It is wholly present

As it presents itself to the world 

And asks

Who am I?

Needs

If there is anything in life that we truly need, it is not what we think.

The needs we know are mere scratches on the surface of our souls.

Jagged imprints where life has too heavily or too softly flowed.

Small imperfections that can be fleetingly filled by the tracing of a single digit’s cold calloused roundness.

But in the end,

Their filling simply serves to deepen each crevice, making some imperceptible but through a self-conscious itching,

And others visible to the world as our own personal caverns.

These are the needs we know. And these needs deceive.

Permitting a false and feigned, superficial sense of being: W   HOLE

Our true needs,

These lay hidden from our conscious mind, as it ravenously pursues the illusion that we are solid, ordered, whole.

But we are not.

Our true needs are holes in our very being.

Structural flaws in God’s molding.

Missing parts, left intentionally but without explanation.

Empty regions of our soul that God saw fit to leave alone rather than to fill with our person

Making us the world's living honeycomb.

These holes were not bored in us by life’s ungentle passing,

But encompass and define us through their absence.

They are part of us. And so:

We are as much absence as substance.

And because these needs ARE us, we cannot know them, and the vain illusion of completion persists.

Until those holes are filled

By LOVE

LOVE penetrates the thick crust that the swirl of life’s storms has left upon our souls.

LOVE burns away the film of filth, revealing, weakening, and making vulnerable, that which had seemed so strong.

And finally

We are shown the emptiness that existed within our existence.

And just as the stuff of which we’re made becomes brittle and threatens to break,

LOVE fills.

Fills like water on a dry sponge, softening the hard, tough edges

Fills every crevice, every hole, every pore, every nook and cranny that lay hidden within.

Fills until we are heavy and overflowing and dripping with LOVE’s light, thy cup running over

And the perfection of God’s imperfections is illuminated in brilliance,

As all of your soul’s caverns fill effortlessly with the being of another.

Two melding into one through LOVE’s gentle and overwhelming embrace.

And for the first time, our illusion becomes real as we become

Full.

Whole.

Complete.

And our Needs are no more.

Dream

What happens when you go to sleep
And you don’t dream?
What happens to all those thoughts you should have, could have, would have had
Had you not chosen to close your eyes for too long a time under that big oak tree. 
Or was it a maple? If so you should get some syrup!
Eh...
It was probably just a tree. 
Or maybe it wasn’t a tree at all and you're asleep in your too cushioned bed, 
head laying uncomfortably cocked on your once-fluffy pillow,
now a vague remnant of it’s former proud self, 
tormented by too big a head and too much a burden to live out its full long life.
But it doesn’t matter where you lay.
Beds don’t absorb forgotten thoughts with any more fervor
Than the soft, damp earth meekly holding your weight. 
Your pant’s slowly soaking through
Your brain noticing too late to stop the wet stain you’ll have to fruitlessly clean by hand
To keep up appearances. 
Or maybe you knew and chose not to care
To for once, go along with life’s little trivialities like a leaf falling from a spring tree
Blown down by too strong a wind. 
Or maybe you knew and forgot
Fell into your dreamless sleep too quickly to change course and get a blanket to sit on,
To stop your inconvenience.
Or maybe you just peed your bed. 
Life menacingly forcing it’s way into your dream
Invading your one place of purpose, your one sense of fulfillment.
But you don’t dream. 
So you must be under that tree. 
And you will spend 20 minutes scrubbing a stain that will never come out. 
And you will not care in a day. 
Or an hour. 
You never can tell. 
But you will remember that dream.
You did dream after all...
Right?