where,
o where do you keep your heart
my dear?

where is it contained?

in small and distant places?
fractured, scattered to the winds
and around the world?

is it in chests
of bone and sinew
beating alongside others
as mine is?

is it buried beneath this scabbed earth,
safe entombed in granite
and far from prying eyes…
away from pain…away from love
and numb with the cold?

can you hear it beat,
and if you can
is it a beat out of time
or in line with the grand chorus?

no matter love –
no matter where you keep your heart
be it near or be it far;
let it be in keeping with
the brilliance of who you are

What does it mean to find yourself in the desert? What does it mean to have been there so long you do not recall if you were cast into it, led into it or walked out into it voluntarily…and maybe you don’t care anymore.

Maybe you were born in the desert and raised on the glorious mythology of the golden oasis only to learn that the oasis was crowded and made poisonous with the filth of too many seeking after too much…and so you left.

Maybe the desert is where you belong…maybe it is where you and others want to you to be…maybe all three.

The desert is a place where God needs to provide. There is no way through the desert without God. No survival without God. Whether you are there for six months or 40 years is entirely up to you.

I confess I prefer the desert to the oasis. I prefer the silence to the noise and isolation to the crowd.

How does one reconcile this to a theology of community? What does the desert have to do with community? Is one desert bound also ex communio?

I confess I cannot answer these questions…not to any level of satisfaction.

Sometimes I miss the oasis but really it is not the oasis I miss so much as the pedestal and so perhaps the desert is the best place for me. It is not community so much as it is the mountaintop I miss. To visit the burning bush and return with the voice of God and the tablets…the whole thing reeks of presumption and ego.

The mistake of the Accuser, that Satan, in leading Christ to the desert was in thinking that in the middle of the waste the need would be so great that Jesus would crumble and bow down. The mistake was the failure to recognize that it is in the dry places that God provides water and in the lonely places that God provides community and in the hot places that God causes the shade tree to rise up and offer comfort.

The mistake is to believe that the desert is absent of God when in fact the spirit of God hovers and moves as the breeze through the barrenness seeking opportunity to bring life.

It is from out of the desert that voices pregnant with having met God come and faces glowing with having seen God come, to bring with them a wisdom that is not their own.

I live in the desert for now. I love the desert for now. I will remain in the desert for now.

beauty turns to horror
when the song becomes the scream
and the throat begins to bleed;

so much for the joy;
it was injected into our veins,
and burned into our brains,
and now we are blind with stupidity,
and now we are blind with rage.

weren’t meant for better things?
maybe were meant for nothing,
maybe we weren’t meant at all.

can we take a moment
in the quiet dark
and lift plaintive voices
like silver strings struck
that we might
sing the moon
and bring a clear light
into our blind night?

we had things in the littler times,
we had things we called our own,
we made these cast off things our own;
sometimes broken,
most times used,
no matter – this press board, this garbage, this shit,
it became ours. it was our shit,
and we made it better.

but

it was still shit.
just because it became ours,
just because we made it our own,
just because we did the best,
the best we could with it,
it doesn’t change the fact that
it was still shit and we knew it.

don’t ever think that taking it in
made it better somehow.

 

i drive the long,
and i drive the empty
spaces between the places,
the spaces between the smallest places;
though sometimes i fly,
i fly the blue and sunbright skies,
the skies between the places,
between the largest of places;
left alone with my crazy self
thinking shutupshutupshutupshutup
to the non-stop that blurs my thoughts
running together like an endless train
of painted, purple unanswered questions
of unchallenged observations;

and so

i put on the music of the other insane
and listen to their pain/pleasure craziness
to drown out the familiar nagging
that screams louder and louder
when it sense that i, that i, that i,
that i am alone with it in the spaces,
the spaces between small places,
and the skies between large places;
until it stops trying to force me to listen
and it takes control of my hands
making me write and write and write,
because it cannot stay inside
for fear that the unexposed nerve,
the unlistened to cry,
becomes the closed forever door
of the one walking who had died

People.

Interesting creatures.

People look at other people and think they know them. They look and decide if they like or dislike them. Often people are indifferent but when they are not they are weighing and deciding about one-another.

The thing is though we way and decide based on externals. Even when we think we are digging into a person we are often not.

Sometimes we decide whether people like us or not based on their ideas and comments to and about us. Usually however these ideas are not about us but about our own ideas. It is like two reflections looking at one-another and thinking they know the real person…the source of the image, only to find later the image was not real but a dim inverted representation.

We do not know the people we think we know. We know what they show. We know the external representations of the internal like we know the dim, out-of-focus edges of a shadow.

mystery is not what we have not found
mystery is what we will never find
mystery is not what we do not understand
mystery is what we will never understand

mystery is being stolen from us
in small moments and in little ways
until we are left with the antiseptic truth
of a reality scrubbed clean of the divine
and left to its empty self
prostrate before its own golden image
full of an echoing indulgence
confused only by its puzzling lonliness

Raven came to roost
deep and dark
inside my chest

raven feathers sharp
spread deep inside
new makeshift nest

this black it sleeps
this black it wakes
this black my days
to nights it makes

raven came to roost
countless years ago
and has not left
no…it will not go