there are shrill wires
strung upright in the wind
giving voice to a different spirit
sweeter than the lifted dust
driving it to dance in love
ghost-driven devils whirling away

old is a trap like seasoned meat
strung and hung before the young
a strange and intoxicating aroma
who once was Narcissus drowning in self
becomes old goat Pan chasing the chaste
till nymphs are reeds that bend and sing in the wind
and we dance to their mournful cries

D
R
O
N
E

words like worker bees
spill dutifully from my fingers
they dance to fields far
stealing fuel from the beautiful
to return and build my home
toward what waxen end
not even I know for sure
they come and go from my hive mind
feeding and breeding
with singular purpose…to live

why always the dead –
the kings that walk the walls
and the Marley’s in chains
to come with warnings
from a weathered life

what meaning are words
from the come and gone
to ones who are crisp
against the breathless 
better to hear from the was
from the was that went
went and came again
bold words are to be consumed
and to be drunk upon

there are screams in the poppy fog
to sound the deep welling dark 
ever-seeking weeps or wails
that should forever frighten
but instead and strangely still
they comfort like lost letters
found in the bottom drawer
to teach necessary lessons that
even banshees staccato crawling
‘cross the grey-moon frost fields
can slay the coming of alone

I am a puzzle to myself.

This cannot be good really, can it? I don’t know. Lately I have been dancing between deep introspection and desperate distraction…that is to say I want to understand myself better but avoid myself at the same time.

I came to an understanding a while ago that I was keeping myself busy to avoid being alone with myself. It’s not like I don’t like myself…I mean one of my best friends is myself (INSERT GRIN HERE) but I don’t know how much I trust myself alone with myself.

So I keep myself busy…boards, committees, work, kids, being ‘out’ in the world among people who will see me sneaking up on myself and sound the alarm should it happen. Even writing has been a way of distracting myself from myself.

I have looked back on my writing and realized that the most personal I get is with my poetry. My general blog posts are more like editorials on broad subjects of import to most people but not personal really.

This may be why I tend not to let people get too close to me. What if they get to know me better than I know myself (which would not be that hard really)?

It is a scary prospect to be vulnerable. I could do it in the pulpit. I could be vulnerable there because it really just felt like it was God and I…the congregation was the congregation…a mix and blend of different names and faces and people representing my small slice of local humanity. Such a collective cannot be personal…not in a deeply introspective way…but I could be personal toward them.

Don’t get me wrong or feel bad for me that I can’t be vulnerable because I don’t preach anymore. Preaching is not meant to be a place of cathartic vulnerability for the preacher…to use it as such was probably negatively enabling me from developing close personal relationships and maybe a small abuse of the preaching function.

So here I am now wondering if I have been running and hiding from myself all these years and trying to figure out the best way to stop. Perhaps I can invite myself out for coffee in public neutral territory…better still maybe I need to write myself a letter…maybe this is the letter.

 

I am lost inside myself
closed up
like a poorly stitched wound
crusted over and infected
and words spill from the gaps
seeking to explain
but are wiped away
in the cleansing

stoke a fire
in your heart
that the outer dark
cannot within
never within

Truth is a rumored far-off country known only through myth and legend and yet whether we believe it is there or not it remains steadfast and unchanging in the distance awaiting our arrival.

Truth is like the the Undying Lands in Tolkien’s Middle Earth – the place one hopes to journey to and, with citizenship, one becomes like the land itself…undying.

We are not truth. Sometimes we think and act like we are but we are not. We are flux; we are entropy; we are changing always. We are changing in time and space and thought – there is nothing about us that does not change. In this way we are the opposite of truth.

Truth is constant and we are inconstant and this impacts how we perceive unchanging, constant and reliable truth.

We are born into a stream and caught up in a current and life is like an ocean that we are swept up on. We occupy small boats with maybe one oar. We can make small changes in our position but are bound by the larger movement of the water and the wind (pneuma) that pushes us west toward that shore…toward truth.

Depending on our character we move toward truth in isolation or as part of smaller or larger flotillas. Small islands lashed together against the capricious sea joined as families, friends, lovers or all or none.

As we journey the shore becomes clear in the great distance. We begin to discern its character and are confronted with a decision – how we perceive truth impacts how we relate to our fellow travelers.

As we rise and fall with the waves, as we see the shore through sun and rain; through the light of sunrise, noon-day and golden sunset; as we see it through our own aging and changing vision we can come to a place where we believe truth to be an inconstant, unreliable, fickle and ever-changing destination with no absolute character…

or –

we can come to realize that truth is absolute and unchanging and that it is our position in the journey that changes how it appears to us. We see one facet then another; we see it reflected by the moon at night or through the fiery mists of dawn.

To believe that we are the pillars of absoluteness rooted in one place as fickle truth journeys toward us; to believe that we have come to understand fully the nature of this distant truth and can measure others by it – this is the height of hubris and sets ourselves up as having arrived; or worse still as the destination toward which our fellow travelers must journey instead.

In reality as we journey we must be wary of too clear a definition of truth for often the clarity comes from the hopes and dreams of the one offering the definition rather than reality. Truth becomes the high and challenging mountain to the one who climbs; truth becomes the great, unending metropolis to the lover of cities; it becomes the verdant green pastoral fields to the lover of creation…it becomes what we desire and in doing so is corrupted.

Truth is not a filter or a mirror; truth is not a checklist nor is it a guest list; truth is a destination to which there are no travelogues.

Ultimately we do not reach it of our own strength – it pulls us toward it. It seeks us out. It comes east into the barren lands and lives in our midst demonstrating its character to us by operating within our own constraints that we might have hope. It offers its own breath to fill our sails and pulls us toward it in embrace.

am i building a heaven in my head
when i imagine the way of things past
have i scrubbed the inside of my skull
a pot polished thin of this life’s filth
till all that’s left are threadbare glimmers
small bright joys like pearls strung on spider’s web
what cost to life if one forgets the many deaths
little corpses buried deep in tangled memory
mindful muffled howls beneath this landscaped surface
calling for extreme unction and rest