Shipwrecked

Maybe there is nothing
So real to me as my own
Failure,
                  he said
through glass walls in his head, grinding
his guilt into his palms

like dust. It was dust
in his eyes. It

was
dust in his bloodstream.  But let me
be honest with

myself; let me be honest
with both of us. If there's nothing closer than

that

Glass can't hold anything back. On the other
hand if there is something like honest laughter spitting fire into night

I wouldn't want glass. Let me lean
                                                          lean
                                                                  into the sparks.

There's dead skin
here that needs to be burnt off.


He scratched at the tattoo
on the back
                      of his hand:  saint paul holding a serpent.


It was biting his hand.
Deep, hot marks in his skin.


I'm giving up. I'm tired. It's too late.
                                                         


                                                                                   She lit a cigarette and pressed it out
                                                                                                                     against the window pane.

I love you too.
           

A Post It Poem - Learned

What did you learn, they'll ask
me around party tables and someone
else's graduation
punch.

I'll be honest this time,
            I think.

I learned we cover
our pain in
                                 insufficient
disguise. We keep moving
to  the next dawn, the next
daylight,
only because we've watched
the morning
come sprinting over long hills
and wash like the ocean over a whole yard
of gravestones. I've learned patience
is about learning
                 to fall
                        apart
and laugh while it's happening,
that                hope
is giving and never expecting things to go
as you wanted. It is
     letting go.

And I've learned that hurt can run
so deep that some days bright
eyes
are the last straw to shatter like glass
your whipped
and bleeding
                      back. But
it is when you turn back to stare
the sun down, when you laugh for no
reason
and love                  regardless.
Then it is worth everything. That
is, I think, being alive.

Wolves

I listened to a wolf and he sang out my sorrow
I listened to a wolf and he sang out my sorrow

And the wind picked up the cries,
sped across all the wild stones
and it vanished out in sighs.

You heard it too, I thought,
and I hoped that for my bones
you would have willingly fought.

But all I heard was a wolf and the thunder
But all I heard was a wolf and the thunder


We'll both be alright. We'll both
speak in tongues.

The shoreline will hold
all the stories we've sung.

Floods of Fire

“…Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket...” Is an overly familiar passage from Jesus at the Sermon on the Mount. The implications that branch out of such a claim, though, are far deeper and realer, I think, than we give Jesus credit for. But let’s be honest, isn’t every quote of Jesus richer and more alive than all our words spoken at once? What good are our words? Brimming with filth and selfish failure, what use are we really? We say this verse from Matthew’s Gospel again and again; drill it against our foreheads; recite it into the air that’s thick with our self-righteous pride. Who do we think we are?

That, I believe, is just the point. We are lights. Sure sure. That’s nice. But there’s more here. Jesus says that he himself is the Way, the Truth, and the Light. When Jesus is transfigured, his presence becomes light. He is brighter than the sun and that glory explodes out to envelope both Moses and Elijah who are speaking with him. Again, when Jesus dies the sun too goes out. The loss of Jesus is the loss of light. It is not without reason that we celebrate Easter’s sunrise, specifically. We worship Jesus, the Light of the World. 

So if we are to be lights to the world, we are to be Jesus to the world. And apparently we’re terrifyingly dangerous. A light, hid under a basket, is not just useless. It’s destructive. It takes no time to burn a house down if there’s a basket close to a candle. The apostles knew this at Pentecost. When flames appear over the heads of 12 men, all in a single room, staying inside means burning the house down. So what is the alternative? Exactly what the apostles do. They go out, and they light up Jerusalem with their fire. Peter -I find it quite easy to say this -spews fire out on the Jews in his first sermon to them. And it burns them. It leaves them raw and throbbing. It leaves them like Job, like a dying Jesus, like a child. That is what the fire of Jesus does. That is the light of the world. It either stays in and burns things to the ground, or it goes out and burns things to the heavens. 

Here is where things get really wild. Paul speaks time and time again of being “in” Jesus. This is the same Paul who was literally thrown off a horse by pure light. It wasn’t a nice ray of sunshine. No. It was heavy, sharp, cutting enough to pierce his eyes and blind them. It was like a cattle prod. A goad, as they called it. And Paul was kicking against it the whole it. No use. It beat him. It threw him to the dirt and kept him there. 

It is this Paul that sees following Christ as something entirely other to the way of the Romans, of the Jews. He sees it opposed to them. It is a war. Those who follow Jesus, who are “in” him, are filled with dangerous power and are, in a very real way, threats to those powers around them. They carry fire in their eyes like Paul and fire in their mouths like Peter. Living with Jesus is terrifying. And it is the beginning of all things. Solomon knew such wildness. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom…”

That is what Paul is so intent on in many of his epistles. Lit on fire himself, Paul wants to hammer into his disciples the reality of being “in” Jesus, of living within His life. It is, by very definition, a call to choose explosion over implosion. Paul’s exhortation, his cry, is a challenge to people like the Corinthians, Phillipians, Romans, Titus, and Timothy. It is a prayer to be filled with fire, to be blinded by its power, and to shatter the tidiness of the world by that fire. 

Paul’s exhortation in 2 Timothy, then, is a hurricane of hope and fear and power and life. He says in chapter 2 verse 11-13, 

This is a faithful saying:

For if we died with Him,
We shall also live with Him.
If we endure,
We shall also reign with Him.
If we deny Him,
He also will deny us.
 If we are faithless,
He remains faithful;
He cannot deny Himself.

Death is being burnt up. It is being consumed entirely. And yet the beauty of Jesus, of the way God works, is that his consumption is of a different kind entirely. It is the burning bush before Moses. It is a burning without destruction. The bush is eaten by flame, and yet it lives. This is the consumption of the sacrifices before God. They are caught up to heaven, not lost forever. It is Elijah who, it just so happens, is caught up in a chariot of fire. Alive. Dying with Jesus is life because it is the fire of God, the power of the World.
Paul, though, is no fool. He sees not just the great things that can happen, but the full scope of this power of Jesus, of this fire. It carries the power to deny. And that is a fearful reality. The greek here is fascinating. The idea being spoken is one of denouncing, of rebellion, of defiance. And what is defiance and rebellion but the beginning of a war? The power of that fire carries with it the power of war with God. If this does not make you fear your twisted, selfish, lying self, you’re either twisted, selfish or lying right now. 
And yet there is a beauty unmatched that Paul ends this with. The fire of Jesus is not just a thing we are left to deal with. It burns our own hands when we hold it. We misuse it. We doubt its power. We doubt our power. But we are in Christ. We live with his Life. It is his Light after all, his early dawn and his thundering sunset. It is his Easter. Our faithlessness, our failings do not distance us from Him. Because we are Him. Christ’s faithfulness is the power which rises when we fall. He refuses to deny us because we, consumed entirely by the fire of God, are like Elijah and Moses at the Transfiguration. We are thrown off our safe places like Paul and carried up to heaven like sacrifices. And in the end, the very light, the love, the wild fire of Jesus comes rushing out of us. God swore to never flood the earth again with torrents of water. But the Great Commission is an entirely different kind of consuming. The fire of God is a great flood, and it will make the whole world new. 

 Γράφω ὑμῖν, τεκνία, ὅτι ἀφέωνται ὑμῖν αἱ ἁμαρτίαι διὰ τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ

I John 2:12

Remember

Do you remember the way the sand
feels in your hair? Just breathe out
for a quick minute and recall. The sun
dances like a crazy man and throws beams
into the ocean. Take me back there,
please. Things make sense there. So
much simple sense. No more cold
and no more bundling. Tanktops
and sweat. I'll take it.

Job On Fire

Have you ever been asked to comment on something and find that you're just spilling out your thoughts on everything else that's been rushing and stuffing itself into your days? Have you told someone they can improve their paper by doing this and that, and just realized that you're talking about your own brain? This piece is the result of all that. It is the thoughts that have been dripping out onto papers and paragraphs and sentences I have written this week. It is all those things centralized, thrown out in one moment. I have no doubt it will be a Jackson Pollick imitation. I expect nothing more. But there; now you've been warned.

 The reality of things we speak of is distant it seems. We can discuss in polite society and around  quiet coffee cups the dirty things of, say, the Bible because we keep it far off. I'm sure that it's all good and noble (that's what they call it, right?), but I am tired of polite Scripture talk. The world is not polite. Excuse me good sir, but I know women who have been raped. I know people who have watched their father die. I talk to people who had the ocean swallow their infants and pound them to death under the waves. They are real. Their pain is real. My own words, these words, feel thin and pitiful. Pardon the truth, but the shittiness of the world feels too heavy sometimes. More than sometimes. All the times.

So let's be real on this one. Let's look at things honestly for maybe just once. If it insults you, alright. If it's already insulted you, fair enough. Victorian propriety makes little sense to a man on fire. Socio-economic status speech means nothing to a woman with a gun to her head.

I remember reading in Job that God comes, after 40-something chapters of brutal hell, to the filthy king in a storm. Sure, it's not the first time he's done it. But it's the only time Job has seen it. Rain on raw skin is one of the worst pains. It is brutal. It is like lighting yourself on fire, soaked in gasoline. And as if rain on his boils wasn't enough, Job is sitting in the desert. Hurricanes stir up the earth. I've seen them pick up houses and boats and pile them on top of bridges and neatly designed hotel pools. There is no reason for the storm that Job finds himself in to be anything calmer. It is the storm of Yahweh, the God who ripped open the ground and swallowed a thousand men. Real men. Actual people. I think their bones must have shattered into infinite pieces when it closed back up. That God is the one who comes to a Job covered in raw skin and burning from the whipping sand and the screaming rain.

And Job yells into the hurricane. He screams with every failing muscle in his broken, sleepless body. And he is as real as I am. His flesh burnt the way mine does when it buckles and blisters. His veins bled when he scraped a shattered clay over them, when the sand stuck to the thick mucus that crept out his pores. His real pores.

I see the three accuser standing in the rain. They're in neat ponchos and well-waxed rubber boots. The wind blows against them. So they turn their umbrellas into the gusts; their black umbrellas, clearly the ones they're planning on using at Job's grave. Proper images need to be kept. Sensibilities and classy preconceptions ought to be maintained. Let the king die, and make it quiet. Shut him up under ripping accusations that pile as high as these clouds. He's screaming into rain. Don't stop him. Maybe it'll finally kill him. He's already dead. It's only a matter of time. Look, what's left of him? He looks like hell. Goodness he's practically naked. Button up the ponchos higher. Don't let the black funeral suits get wet.

Thunder claps in a hurricane are louder. Lightning is just closer. It's all faster. The clouds drop like hammers. They stoop so low, it's almost like the ground cringes at the electricity running, crackling in the blackness. And the dropping of the sky makes every sound run farther and reach deeper into our cramped skulls. The rush of rain-wind, the actual sound it makes when the first sweeps of a hurricane come are terrifying. They are like the breathing of some monstrous animal. They are the rumbling of Leviathan. The heavy air clearing the scene for the storm. And it comes. It is so huge, so very, really massive that you can feel it in every thing. The trees cower and the grass runs like frightened birds. It is so big that it is cold. The thing tightens your bones. The water dances away from the wind and jumps like desperate men onto the shore. There is no thing like the voice of the storm, no beast like the Leviathan that seems to rip apart the world with its very echoes. It is real. It is like flameless fire.

God spoke to Job and His voice was louder than the storm. What man in his right mind hears a voice so loud and so huge that it makes a hurricane small, that it makes a typhoon look like a calm waltz, and does not die? Is that even possible? What man could listen to a God that terrifying, that devastating, that real? And here is where my mind just cannot understand Job the King. He is no fool. Very simply, he is no ass of a king. He knows who God is. He knows what righteousness is, what it actually looks like. It looks like this storm. It has the weight of infinity and the reality of forever. And he asks for this. No. He begs for it. He screams and weeps and tears his clothes for this. This is the power of God, and it is wonderful to Job. It is beautiful. Every wild lightning bolt only whispers when the voice of God questions the King, and they are gorgeous. They are the fingertips of a God who clothed horses with thunder. Beauty is terrifying, and it is deadly. It is so real that death makes sense beside it.

How can any man live lit on fire? How could a real and fleshy, shuddering and frightened, stand in front of a furnace that would melt his skin? Not burn it, melt it right off. Did you carry the sea in your arms and then tear it in pieces, throwing it like seeds into the ground? Did you look into the eyes of a tornado and say "No further,"? Did you watch the blood of a billion people soak into the dirt and tell a single rose to crack through that filth, and know that it was good? Has your anger threatened in all righteousness to sever mountains from their roots? Hell, what are the roots of mountains? Why should it not be that demons are caught under them, breathing into the volcano? Did you even touch a volcano? Could you put your arm into the curdling heat and draw out a diamond?

No? Then stop asking why. Stop thinking yourself holy enough to need to know. You get it, you say. But you don't get it. Listen. Stop. It must be nice to be able to contemplate which coffee to buy. It must feel good to plan out your day on your e-calender. Organization, that's great isn't it. But when you get caught up in your 9-5 efficiency, go and tell a childless father he should get a planner. Tell Job he should probably have planned a 401K, should have gotten life insurance for his kids. That would have been prudent, right? How about you grab this black umbrella and polish up your rubbers. You can stand right beside those other three. They'd be glad for the company. It gets lonely when the King covered in plague keeps screaming into a storm. Be thoughtful. What are they suppose to do while he's being a fool?

Here's a prayer: God, light me on fire. Burn me like King Job. I cannot endure it. It will kill me. It will consume me, like Moses' bush. And I need it. What is man that you care enough to blow flames under his skin? I am no man of grace, no patient and beautiful Job. But my hands are pierced. I chose the nails. I will live in the hurricane. I will scream into the typhoon, and the sun is sparking in my eyes.

Quiet Blood

There is blood
between my shoulder blades,
bright steel and loud thorns
scattered like broken
sunlight on my dry spine. Quietly,
and in a very unassuming
moment, I have realized that white
is the color of tombs
the color of winter skin
the color of scars.
And it is the color of morning breath.

These storms leave us washed
 in the world's old
and heavy kindness.

Falling From Angels

In a snowstorm I saw angels. In a rushing dream I felt feathers against my hot cheek. Their wings and their voices brushed against me and left burn marks. The skin blistered and the scars along my back have stayed behind. They've grown white and crooked, like scrawled memories. They trace along me. When I sleep they sleep. And when I wake up they prick my, like the claws of a stretching tabby. Pain is a curious thing. It is the twisted root of an old pine, settling into my chest. And it pulls at my mind, drawing my blood into its breaths. But pain is not unique. This is what makes it so strange. There is nothing as common as the hurt that quietly gnaws. Men walk through the cold day with sorrow in their bellies, and they say nothing. 

That, I think, is the curiousness of hope. It is a wild thing, ready for the harsh desert. It is not soft or gentle. It has no beauty to it. Such a thing would be laughable to any tear-stained eyes. No, hope is mud-covered. Hope smells like old dogs and doesn't shave. Why should it? Far too often it has trudged slowly out to the edge of town. In a hissing winter rain it has walked into a ditch of mud and old trash, feeling in the dark for a hand. With a cut of lightning it has seen me curled up in a womb of tears and night and gone waist-deep to speak a word, to whisper like dawn. Slowly it has carried me back up, fought against every memory that burns and breaks. 

 

And when the new day cracks we are not clean, we are not even warm. But we can see the sun. Even in the winter, the dirt caked to our hair and under our fingernails, we can hear sharp and heavy laughter. It comes from a snow capped and wrinkled man, or an oxygen-assisted grandmother. They are giggling, coughing and chuckling because the sun has come back. It has reminded them of every birth they ever watched and every love they ever carried in their hand like a new and bright fruit. It is the old that make sense. It is their bodies that remind us who we are. Broken and forgotten, they heave in and out. They breath air thick with laughter and tears, air cluttered with the voices of parents and grandparents long gone. Why else would their breaths be shallow? There is too much to take in, too many days carried in and out at every moment. 

So here we are, covered in the night's mud, with tears and scars both still cold on our skin. Love is not clean, but it is warm and wildly alive. It is racing along the streets, a new scent and a new color caught up in the waking dawn. It will grip us by our dirty wrists and brush aside our knotted hair. Like wobbling children, like unsteady grandparents, we stumble on crooked roads. They look like our scars, they remind us of the cold nights. But we are stronger. We are walking.

Winter

I'll admit that this is a selfish piece. I'm writing this because I want to remember what winter is like, I want to remember in 6 months this exact feeling. I want this to be real to me when I read it again. So how about I write a letter to myself. That's ridiculous. Nevermind. Perhaps this could help anyone who's living in the summer. Maybe I'll pass it off as that. Yes, I will. Here it is.

The grass is dull here. The grass looks entirely crushed, like a pickup truck ran over all of it. Everywhere. The sky too. Yes, a pick up truck ran over the entire sky. I'll admit that at night time the stars have been beautiful. Sure. But then I remember that feeling of night times after the beach. Of coming off a day feeling like a god. The beauty of the bright sun burning still from your skin. Like the sunlight is in your veins. Ah, how I love that. So much. But that's impossible now. Even on the same beach. Things are cold. Days are short. Distracting yourself from missing the summer doesn't go too bad, until you think back on it. Things are getting done, and school's being school. Skin. Oh, skin is the real killer here. Pale is more than normal. It's everywhere. People are bundled up. Whispered at by frost and nibbled by strange wind. And under it all our skin loses itself. It seems to draw in, to pull back like a dog from fireworks. How often to you even see your skin? You look down at your arms and realize how sad they look. You find yourself in a mirror and see the eternally-sleepy winter face on your head. Who ever thought this was a good idea? Winter? Sure, christmas is great. But what if we celebrated it by cooling off in an ocean and playing some solid beach volleyball? Perhaps there are small things that bring us smiles in these annoyingly bright winter days, but come now. Am I the only one who, when the sun shines in winter, wishes I could just go ahead and put the sun away in the top shelf of the closet. If it's going to be winter, let's make it real winter. Save the sun for when it's real. Save it for the summer sunsets. Save it for the days when you can almost hear the heat in the air, right behind the waves and the giggling sand. Save it to bleach hair and lighten paint jobs. Tell me summer, where can I go to find you always? And when you tell me where, can I follow that up? Can you find me someone to go with me? Always?

Pale Shell

Waves in my ocean are like winter's snowflakes. Every one is a different story, a new breath of the sea with its own laugh, its own rise and fall. Each one will strike the sand, will end itself in a different way. Like timbers they fall, their peaks never having felt in an entire lifetime the solidness that is the ground. And even in falling every single wave will come as nothing before it has. It will fall like silk, tumble like a giggling toddler, or even strike like lightning, the thunder riding its tail. And then they pull out, they dig white fingers into the sand and drag back out in streaks or handfuls the grainy shore. And every second they come in the thousands, in the hundreds and hundreds of thousands along my beach. In one day out here they have spoken with the earth of a lifetime of things. They come and they go and there is nothing a man can do to stop them. Only watch or run out into them and feel them rush across his sun-brown back. And standing in the waves he feels the heartbeat of the world, the heave and the sigh that is every crest and every trough. This is Time. How else does it make sense? And as time comes, as it goes, beating against the ground, there is a miracle underneath. As every wave draws back from the shore there is always a moment when the water is perfectly clear, when the froth is gone and, looking down, you can see the shells. And it is these that take our breath away. Every man reaches for them. Every thought of staying dry is gone, every precaution we took so carefully is over; making sure the pants were rolled high and the t-shirt pulled up, keeping our feet dry to keep away wet sand, it is all gone. Because every man knows instinctively somehow that the shell they have seen, the one that has taken their breath away and sent it tumbling with the waves, she will only be seen once in a miraculous moment when time has stood as still as it ever will. And looking at that exact moment in that exact spot on this infinite beach he has seen her. A moment later and she will be lost. A moment earlier and she isn't even there. 

So here I am with the sun on my skin, with the sand against my legs, and with the sea chuckling around me like a thunderstorm. And looking down, in that one moment in the wave, I have seen a shell so wonderful that all I can do is bend my knees and hope in blind faith that my hand can find her. And as the sky turns the color of burnt and bleeding roses it looks as if that pale shell is on fire with the setting sun, glimmering with a life brilliant and dangerously beautiful.

Mud and Miles

I suppose that I have some answers, some thoughts, some rantings as responses to what I wrote before. Man is a fickle child. He is so easily torn to pieces and yet it is so hard to realize that this is, truthfully, a good thing. We get close because getting close to another is dangerous. And that is, I have seen now, absurdity in its clearest form. It makes no rational sense to give part of ourselves to someone. It is weakness to give, weakness to expose yourself, and absolute weakness to love something else that you cannot control. Why would you ever tell someone that you know could hurt you with words, with betrayal, secrets that would destroy you if they were given out? It makes no sense. And perhaps this has been the strangest thing to me. While all of these things make no sense. While logically, it is most advantageous, most personally beneficial (it would appear) to wall up your heart, to put it deep into the earth, to wrap it in some socks and carve out a vault in the corner of the bedroom floor for safekeeping, it is the most foolish thing possible. Quite simply put, life is worth nothing without loving someone illogically. Irrational love is what makes life Life. Looking into eyes that you know might never be your's, holding a hand that you are willing to cross a country for, is what makes you not human, but a living, laughing, image of God. Rationality does not define the world. Rationality attempts to make sense of the world, and finds nothing to make sense. Irrational love attempts at nothing, and knows everything. It says, "Look at how little sense this makes. Look at how different we are." And while rationality would call, "The End", the irrational, laughing life says, "I love you. And here, this is my heart. It could be your's one day." And while it could all change, I know that it is good. I have learned that Time moves, that people change, that the things we promised can change and the hopes we assured ourselves of, while still being hopes, can be moved and cautioned and tempered by the life that is always being. There are miles between people. There are states and lives and years that separate possibilities from real actualities. But even so, to love beyond and in the face of what is is the truest, clearest act of being a Man that I know of.
And so I choose to be broken. I choose to be hurt, to be confused and to struggle with God. I will be a Man. I will wrestle with Him. I will have my hip broken. And I will cry to Him from the dust, cry for him to stay true to His Promise. I will pray like a lunatic and love without sense. And yet the hardest part is knowing that, so often, it will be I who does the hurting. I will be the cold steel that rips through love and tears with dull hate at living hearts. But I have chosen to get dirty. And this is part of the fight. I choose to be covered in the mud, the dry dirt made wet with my own tears, my cries for forgiveness and forgetfulness. And so I'll strip to the waist. Give me the joy to fight You till I am broken, O God. Give me the unimaginable. Give me the patience for the greatest promise I have not yet seen.