My Annual Christmas Poem

It never fails to shock me how disgusting the incarnation must have been.  We see it as a beautiful, selfless act but it was also a brutal act of unspeakable violence.  God, the forever whole, self-sustaining, forever complete God, ripped God apart to become one of a race of broken and incomplete people.  We're all born broken, with our purpose in life to heal and be healed.  To become whole.  This is what makes Jesus so compelling.  So significant.  So incomparable.  He was born as the only one who has ever truly been whole, and yet He chose to become broken that we might be whole.  He literally ripped His own being in order to restore ours.  Indescribable.

Instant

We're all born of scars, of wars, with tokens

Of unspoken snares upon our skin

Born broken with tears in our seems, we begin,

Awoken by pain from the daydreams we're in.

And if life has a purpose,

A surplus of purposeless torture remains,

To the sane, the trademark of our lack of faith

Strung out as bait, asphyxiate, we wait

For rescue from the days we hate

The lives we make.

As if.

What if.

If only.

Say it does not do to dwell on dreams

And speak till you believe it

Yes, bleed till you repeat it

Say it till you conceive it.

But exceptions come in unlikely places

In excitable atoms, in figures and braces

For impossible change, until wearing strange faces

We see ourselves in our eyes.

For into the chaos from the realm of the sane

Out of fulfillment and born into pain

From perfection and wholeness to incomplete strains

Of the melody, now all that remains

Is the moment to moment rendition, reprise

As we look to the morning, yes, look to the skies

For out of the billions, one star defies

The rules of our constricted sphere

And guides the seekers gather here

For the moment of triumph's surprise

The moment the dark cannot rise,

The moment the world was remade and reborn

The minute our hist'ry of tarnish was torn

The instant our heartache was parted and shorn

The second that cleansed all our grief and our scorn

The moment that changed everything,

A Baby was born.

Easter comes every December

Insanity

Someone asked if I was mortal

I said I was it’s chosen son

Till I pass in life’s sweet agony

I breathe one last, and then I’m done.

They asked me if I feared it

I said decidedly so,

Still answering no

Not knowing precisely where I should go.

There were pistols in her eyes, I said

As I walked roulette’s once hidden bed

Toward the perjury of the purge, then dead.

“You lied,” she whispered.  I lied, I said.

For death is just an alibi

A reminder of the days gone by

When we were found and worthless.

Not so anymore, I said.

Death where now is your vitriol?

Does it’s acid poison your tongue?

Insanity where is your caging?

Trapped in past violence and dung?

Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

Blasphemy, Blasphemy,

We all fall down.

Ashes to ashes, unless, unjust.

Ashes to ashes, and change we must.

Sheol, where are your games?

Loathing, have you begun?

Oh hatred, what have you done?

O evil, where is your son?

But ashes to ashes, a phoenix breaks free

What began as a martyr is reborn as a king.