Oswalt

Stoned


The going rate for going broke
With wide-eyed stares in curling smoke
And graveyard shifts in drowner's moats
Only keeping in the desperate.
Our feet are bound by twisted sheets
Soaked with artificial heat
Damp with manifested bleats
For death, for dawn, for drifting.
Harnessed in our fabric gallows
Hands sniffing out every shallow
Flicker, jaundiced lungs are sallow
Yet awake, flirting with destiny.
Garden handcuffs, fly-trap stains
Flowers decked with wistful chains
Petals laced with acid rain
Sifting across our compass,
Plucked and sown in sleeting spar
Picked and strewn in melodic bar
A fleeting wish on green-stemmed star
And we watch it float away.

We've Never Done Nothing, How Can We Be Something?

Contrivances


They said she said he said that
We said somebody said something
Passed along in sidelong whispers
Perceptions, rumors . . . flings
Shoulder to shoulder . . . tap, touch, tap
Fibonacci patterns code
Hand to fingers, nose to nose
Exchanged, inhaling gossip.
Chew then swallowing the rap
Drinking the isotope connect
Becoming caricatures
Of ourselves, straw people
In straw houses of sand, assured
Of mutually contrived
Misrepresentation derived
From deaf certainty, demurred
The ambiguous, amorphous sheaf
The collective teeming masses
Breathing sighs of blind relief.

Farsighted

Paper Bags

Hell's high-water mark is nigh upon us
Upon our knees, our bones . . . our souls
There upon the cash-strapped tree
Stripped of whatever dignity
We thought our right to own.
The slow decay of bramble
Into human ash
A world of fire.
Our collective work redundant
Mere mockery of complacency
Incapable of even that, fingers pant
Fulfillment.
And all creation groans in wait
A crown of incapacitation
Upon our feet, where higher wattage bows
To mere conductors, pianos of the mind
Strings and sound and triumph's score
                          Swelling inconsistencies.
The re-warmed brooks no reduction
Forever fleet of heart
And the original scopes the ceiling's fade
                        Arches loft the dead seduction
The quest to deny the wonder.

Tequila

Somewhere There's Rice in Her Hair


At the dark side of noon
Roiling, roiling, toiling
Perfection feels like failure
Faith is just an easy sell
Attraction reeks of hate
Above a cresting dell
Toiling, teething, seething
Cut our gums on milk and wine
To mask the taste of brine
Inane, terrain, indiff'rence.
Vacuums filled with substance
Ignorance feels like need
But fatal marks a diff'rent breed
Sliding, grinding, leeching
Just at honesty's impeaching
Love looks much like absence,
And damning with faint praise,
With browner grass to graze.
Salvation seems surrender's tell
Sometimes grace burns like hell.

Jesus

Jesus.

The word is obscene regardless of context. Those who use it as profanity offend those who use it religiously. Those who use it religiously offend those who it casually. It never ends.

Who is He?

What did He actually come to do?

Ask a self-proclaimed evangelical and you will usually get either a cliche, a slogan, or a long-winded response that ultimately is similar to "cow spit". Jesus did this theological act. He did this soteriological act. He freed us from this particular sin, that particular struggle, etc. He came to establish particular redemption for His glory (by the way, if anyone actually knows what the hell that means in real life, let me know).

Exactly.

Wrong.

You see, the real genius, the true brilliance of Jesus is that He came teaching a new application of old truths. He didn't come establishing new doctrines left and right. He came applying old doctrines to new life, using old doctrines to create new life.

He did not come to introduce a new religion. He didn't come to save us from particular sins, from general ideas or improper doctrines. No.

He came to do what nothing else could do, what no one else could accomplish.

Any religion, properly applied, can free a person from greed. Any religion, properly applied, can free a person from pornography. Disease can render certain sins impossible. Injury can render certain sins impossible. Surgery can render certain sins impossible. Any religion can fix the particulars, can change general ideas. Any religion can establish, enforce and manipulate doctrines.

But only Jesus can save us from ourselves.

Only the love of Jesus is capable of freeing us from fixating on ourselves, from being our every waking thought, our only true worship, our only waking desire. Only Jesus is capable of letting us see life beyond ourselves. Only Jesus is capable of freeing us from the mindset that we are the most important thing.

Only Jesus can save us from our need to save the world.

From our need to always be right, always correct, always certain.

If we are always right, then He is not. If we are all-knowing, then He is not. It is the nature of Truth. Either we can be the truly Great One, or He can - but never both.

Certainty in life is not the perfection of faith - it is the absence of faith.

This is the beauty and brilliance of what Jesus did. He saved us from ourselves by saving us from needing to be the Savior. He saved us from ourselves by freeing us from the burden of having to be absolutely certain, absolutely correct and instead He allows us to trust, to rest, and to believe.

That is the true measure or grace and redemption - they are always bigger than the scope of our imagination. They are bigger than what we can fathom. They are limitless.

And this is what Jesus did that nothing else could do. No matter how far we extend ourselves to assert our dominance, no matter how far we retreat within ourselves to preserve ourselves - He is there. Grace extends beyond the boundaries of our capabilities.

It surrounds us, hems us in from every side, isolates us from ourselves, and removes us from ourselves replacing us with the person we always thought we were and hoped we would be. A person who looks a lot like Jesus.

And that is what no one else could do, no other religion could accomplish - the redemption of the self. The newness of all things.

Jesus came to save us from ourselves, because no other Savior could.

Clock Tower

Clock Tower

We are clockwork
Carefully measured deconstruction
Inextricable
Mostly inconsequential . . . with perks,
But occasionally lights and sound
Combine to Morse the message
Embedded in a subculture
The stoned have yet to drown.
Noise without frame of reference
Beauty lacking footnotes
And depth less its citations
Gold, myrrh and frankincense . . .
Lights, sound and clockwork
And insubstantial meanings
Pain with transitive verbs
The promise lingers, the forgotten lurks
At the periphery of flatlined
When the effervescent clicking stops,
The memory burns both white and red
And only death can read the signs.
Lights and sound and clockwork.
Lights. And sound. And shame.

Moon and Whiskey

Black Hole Supernova

Cracks and fissures form, colliding
From the expanding contraction
In the heating and cooling of a blush.
Someday the somber drains away
To find another's face to flush
In reprimand, remorse, or glee.
Beneath the flash of melancholy
Mischief flutters pretty eyes
Every time you "loved" me . . . lies
Pupils sliding down and left
While my face wore a lover's smile
Not that you would glance to see it,
Chance to meet it on a dare
A chill falters through the air
Daily severing the human . . .
Confronting who we are
But not enough to chafe the mind.
Shackled by grandeur's hubris
While squalor lurks behind the blinds
And after shocks contorting grace
To form tomorrow's about face
A black holed supernova.

We Are the Ocean

We Are the Ocean

We are untamed violence with a poet's soul
Insurmountable potential in a harlot's bed
A seamless garment of fractured wholes
Unassailable in our disbelieving faith
Light and dark are the fire and ice in our veins
Contracting and recycling our breath
Forging and remembering the strains
Of the refining song the Singer sang
To purify our ash out of nothing.
The singer blinks above the deep
And pauses draft across the sky
To part the everlasting sleep
And impossible dreams above the dreamer
Where speaking into abscess brings about the keeping
Of the song of soul and psych
Where we are the ocean
As the Ever-Burning One ignites the night.