Somebody told me that Mormons taste like donuts, and I said that's not possible, they don't drink caffeine

Witnessing a Murder


Creating Hell with insistence
Spontaneous riffs on existence
If life is wasted is breathing vain?
With each contraction exhaling shame
Conjunctions spell subtraction slain
A teeming mass of human game
Hunted by the same, divine without fame
Mocking each stitching, seizured side.
A Sisyphus climbing Syzygy's slide
And form without function is pride
Least until Dante finds us a home.
Industry replacing Shalom
Post scripts of violence echo Dear John
Where God signs the greetings of cons.
A poorer place, the world is lost
The sky is calm, the trees are tossed
By endless vengeance and arrogance
If we're going to die, then shall we dance?
Whiskey tango foxtrot, my side's caught
I can't breathe, dimes for nickel thoughts
What if I traded love, created naught?

Do the truffle shuffle?

Canonized With Paint


My eyelids have heartburn I claim
As I rub the reflux from my cheek.
My chin shakes with dry-heaving
Sshh baby, rest, don't try to speak.
Nursemaids with old fairy tales
Hold my writhing sides for countless weeks
And kept the lint from my tongue
Until her vacant skies are numb;
Yet dark with misty disregard
Still somehow greener than my black thumb.
There's life inside this poisoned rum
Leeching thin and taut, food from thought
And ridicule from religion.
Rolling paraphrasing from my skin
More alive than nearly scary
All angles and elbows, arms and shins
With soft misquoted reverence
And an embrace that smells of love.

Like finding a needle in a needlestack

Dingy, Sinking Dinghy

I sat alone in a peopled space
My prayers loosely forming fists
As if unclenched fists exist.
If I bare my throat in kindness
Are my sights above Your highness
Do You see me in this blindness
Are You answering with silence
Each desperate, graduated plea?
You must know I can't submit and see!
Are You drowning me in waves of sand
Or guiding me into wasted lands
Because You love me?

Or because You always find me deaf?

Am I so hidden within the cleft
And shadow of Your passing
That I'll never see where You are
Just lost among the fallen stars
Spinning freely from Your ether?
Another destitute with fever
Hallucinating hands extending
A beggar waking and pretending
That God takes notice of his fears . . .
Are You calming me with violence?
Is there sacred in this silence?
Are You reaching out in shyness
Crying every time it rains
To place the beauty in mundane
In my profane?


___________________________________________________
Spitting in the Wind


If we're going to set the world a-fire
Then we might as well burn it down
Hear the creak of guillotine sounds
Come to take the stress away.
Redemption is the endless tide
Repetition's erase divides
Or eloquently gathers up.
And we are the lens without scope
Still-life when capturing movement
We are the bridge, wood without rope
Finite blurs of self-reprovement
Pajamas soaked through with thunder
Anonymity stoops to wonder
Chaos finds us where substance passed
Camera shudders too slow to capture
All this chasing after rapture
Are we spitting in the wind . . .

Sooooo Tired

Lazy Can O' Corn


It was noon and the moon was rising high
And our horror plots were poorly written
While I rest against the fatal sigh
Shut my eyes, my faults are drawing nigh
Naive lies, no one's this snake-bitten.
Maker calling carvings; deaf, blind and numb
No one believes in patience anymore
The air-conditioned drum and hum
As raucous laughter mocks the dumb
Waiting, just waiting for the death of war -
Can't find the plot-line, fingers turning claws
Innocence sets sail, waving last goodbyes
The world handed me unlucky draws
I find excuses there for all my flaws
It's midnight, and the sun was in my eyes.

"What's the ratio of spiderman to moose muffins?" ~ Mark

Where Angels Cast Shadows


I wake and feel like blood clots in
Tornadoes, blocked and unrelenting
Swirling and churning with blacked-out despair
In a country of lead paint and consenting
Waste.  With garbage-pails of salad days
And quite frankly not repenting
Of our mindless belief in lust
In sweaty palms and dust and touch
And sand beneath and between
Our toothless fantasies, the sheen
And luster replaced by idle hate
While I pine to ponder love.
Love like free-falling screams and shrieks
Of helpless panicked jubilation,
Like thunder in squalls and reckless
Fear suspended in fascination,
Love in train-wrecked sensations
In thoughtless desperations
Until it only hurts to look away,
Love like a gale, that though I stay
Feral gusts carry the day
Steal me away.

Bounce

Deconstruction


Life does not exist in black and white
But in various hues of percolate
Of dark and darker blends, non-absolutes
Misogyny wrapped in coffee
A chocolate date with toffee
I lacked the guts to flip the trigger
I guess it goes to figure
Isotopes and dye
Weak kinetic ties
Allergies and wishful thinking
Stoned and cold and whistful drinking
Eyes are washed with lie, cleaning soap and lye
Careful children cry, but why don't I?
Life exists in capes of black, shades of lack
Window-shopping need
Hiding morbid thoughts with speed
Obese infatuations, obscene insinuations
A mist across creation
Some say the world will end in fire
Some in flood
And some when the gods blink their eyes
But most probably, if I can read the signs
We'll asphyxiate while doing lines
Hallucinating about the times
We held our breath for change.

p-p-p-po-em

Aurora


Formless and void . . . devoid
Nothing's expansive smirks
Expression tilts and spoke
Axis, expanding clerks
In dark cloaks of orbit
Spun of the naked man's
Journey into abstract
With flags to mark the span
And arrogance to spay
Or neuter each perceived
Obsession, whether fact
Or madness' hope conceived.
The licit rotates once
Angles, peaks, curves and rope
Anchor straining shoulders,
Tensed against graying slopes,
Heads rest on familiar
Habits, abbots, rabbits
Pulled from hats in keeping
Gravity at bay.  Mitts
Warmed at the blurring slide
Of great into the small.
Some see a juggler's ball
Some see a place to hide.

I Believe I'd Buy Whatever You Would Sell To Me

Mornings Spent Hacking Up the Phlegm


Sometimes I am weightless
But never in the proper order
Dark with flecks of light
Littering the unspoken eulogies
Of thousands of un-mourned
But well-buried beliefs.
Sometimes I see light in darkness
So secretly afraid
That it's only the patterns
The physics of motion
The induced psychosis of strobe
The effects of shadow
That I love.
And if the light would flood
Break forth and sink the barge
Of stranded deserters
And seek forth in absolutes
I think I would be mostly . . .
Disappointed (not to mention blind),
Become search and self-destruct
Another love in which to hide
Can the soul of daylight find
The luminescent terrors
That only ghost the mind?

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.

Tango

The Dance of Nightmares

Snowfall against a midnight sky
Breathing like teardrops
Swept across the madness of the gods.
Currents of torment, flakes of certainty
Funnel into wind tunnels and swirl
Eddies of prophecy
Three parts confusion, one part hope.
And stone by stone we raised it up
Brick by brick we tore it down
Voices raised in silence, united by the sound
Of whirling wishes, flickers in a stream
Sputters of anointed flame
Against the wings of serendepity
And the stuttering of the gods. . .

Chopsticks are not ideal for pizza

Orbitals, Spheres

I woke while drifting toward a feeling
Startled I continued reeling (in)
A fantasy lest it fade to haze
And count itself among the razed
The grind of years have rendered.
Toil endured made a peasant spender
The moon a change of phase
Human course marks the passing ways
In teardrops on a ceiling
The seasons spiral, ever stealing
Away. Fly and fly away you say
Count me in each yesterday.
There I can only gape and stare
Chance a glance at something fair
There, be swept away from me
By this tonic, static sea
Till my ember sparks the bloodless coal
To sapphire eyes I give my soul.

A Christmas poem and a poem about death. I'm so well balanced. Don't touch me.

Are We Having Fun Yet

A blue-eyed child with ruddy cheeks
Wonders what it's like to die
Secretly, I ask the same . . . no, not I
I ask in jest and beg for lies.
Will death knock, then turn the key
Or seep under the cracks
Will death barge in and break the latch?
At first knock I will tremble
As I silent towards the door;
At second, tear drops on the floor
Rivulets on my cheeks, knees are weak.
On the third knock I will answer
Standing, laughing, spitting
Crawling, weeping, lashing, hitting
Sighing either way.
So I will offer my bravado
And demand it be enough.

Listen Closely

Here and there a weary word
Turns to cross a bridge of death
And then travail at some behest
A helmet made of thrones
In a hallway lit by stone
As kingdoms fade in golden ashes.
Foot-sore hallelujahs
Straggle toward repletion
And until its near completion
We dwell where we destroy.
In fields of fleece and slumber
While keepers nod and number
Sleepers drift and start anew
Patchwork spirits ere the mornin' dew
And frozen comets in fiery hues
Punctuate each turn of phrase
As Hosanna's first prophetic rays
Paint Gloria 'cross the night.

When I Rule the World

- All Bible college graduates will be forced to spend a year working in an urban setting before applying for seminary or church jobs.

- All university and graduate school presidents will be forced to eat all of their meals in their school's cafeteria until they learn to serve their students good food.

- People who make the same ridiculous statement at least 3 times will be forced to act upon their statement. For example: "Every time I see Obama, I feel the need to throw up." (Actually heard today). Upon uttering this statement 3 times, the speaker will then be forced to vomit every time he/she sees Obama, or until they learn to keep their mouths shut.

- Drunks will have to attempt at least half of their boasts.

- People who hold religious and political views that allow them to preach racism will be forced to wear clothes stating their views at all times, in all situations, around all people groups.

- Guys who cannot aim in the bathroom will be required to pee sitting down.

- People who refuse to wash their hands will be sent to Dirty Jobs, forced to work, and then given lunch with no opportunity to wash.

- Anyone who refers to homeless people as "lazy bums" and "thieves" will be required to trade places with them.

- Anyone who roundly condemns all forms of contraception will be required to raise all the children produced by people who are not mentally and financially mature enough to raise them.

- The complete works of Shakespeare will be required reading for everyone. Romeo & Juliet will be surreptitiously removed from all copies and hidden until my death, and hopefully the world will forget its existence.

- Sopranos will be required to own very large houses.

- There will be baseball. Lots of baseball. And tacos. And pound cake.

- People who deliberately misrepresent other points of view will be arrested and forced to listen to their own view dismantled for 8 hours a day for 6 months.

- People who base their opinions on other people's opinions will be subjected to the real thing, and forced to campaign on its behalf.

- People who own cats will not live within 100 miles of me.

- All alarm clocks will be manufactured without snooze buttons.

- Chaos will still find a way. So will Jesus.