Author Archives: threadfollower

Conscience

Yesterday unbinds the conscience of today
twisting happiness free from the pressed grip.

     Gripping hands wrench happiness away,
     claiming some divine birthright over all others.

My right to birth claimed nothing and everything
when I arrived from nowhere into expanse.

     Arriving, somewhere rather than nowhere,
     I learn how to be sadly dangerous.

Danger and sadness merge silently
when blood threatens to appear on white pages.

     No blood found on pages, black and white,
     means demands have not yet crossed borders.

Borders demand to be crossed so as to
unbind the conscience of tomorrow.

Difference

We need differences in order to be most fully human,
Say the wise, articulate theologians of the one g*d.

I spend my morning walking the same path carefully
Placed by the laboring hands of cement workers,

Thinking beyond the advertisements inserted inside 
Mailboxes in countless ways by the systems of the world.

A mourning dove coos for no apparent reason other
Than to hear the sound of its own peculiar song.

And the amaryllis sends two blooms colored with blood
into the morning air to ask, What difference do I need?

Three Wishes

To be released from the search for constant bedazzlement
into a rest area along the road I have been walking for years.

To cease contriving false romances with those things 
I do not own and will never have in my back pocket.

To get out from under the bright lights of the big city
and move, slowly, into a dusk where I can stretch.

Cram

     "But smaller bundles - Cram" - Emily Dickinson

I said, "On the way to loosening up,
stumbling blocks appear at random 
encountering my understanding."

She asked, "Do you want your days 
to be as easy as a bird of prey riding
the air, upheld by nothing?"

I answered, "I am looking for a way
to share my joy of living so others
may recognize what makes me smile."

She said, "In this time, the difference 
between recognition and figuring out 
what matters lasts only as long as the time 
it takes for a tear to slide down a cheek."

I asked, "Tell me, did yesterday's peculiar
ending shape the melancholic words
you speak today?"

She answered, "Halfway endings and 
unfinished finales and hazy outcomes
always, in the words of the poet, 'Cram.'"

A Magic Beanstalk

Imagine a magic beyond the beanstalk,
God bouncing between a burning bush 

     - Can God bounce let alone burn in a bush? -
     at the periphery of vision and to a place,

a place of vision ending at the edge
surrounding a fire shut up in the bones.

    Throw me a bone fired from the hip
    and I will show you a hole the size of...

Well, a hole the size of Rhode Island
where you can drive an elephant through,

     through and throw confetti while driving,
     falling into open hands grasping, failing.

All hands fall at the end failing to grasp
the magic beanstalk beyond imagination.

“When you come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you…” – Deuteronomy 18:9

Giver of Life and Land,
Who demands our obedience
Against the evil ways of destruction
Of the prior inhabitants, we wonder
If the land and what we own 
Is really ours, or perhaps our very
Thinking that it is becomes the
Path to our own destruction
And folly which you warned us
Against.  Make us mindful and
Aware so as to give.
Amen.

Deliver Us

We live with the mediocre in our lives, afraid
of being killed or of being left behind, unable
to define the far off poles between which
the conventional stands in the middle.  

We ask for no great shakes, determined to seek
the easiness we believe was promised to us
long ago by those who walked long distances
with a practiced pace and on calloused feet.

Salvation should, the story begins, be easy, with
no hindrance in our seeking for definitions 
of the God who seeks and waits as we actively
search for the desire that will deliver us.