Aye! Avast! And a bottle of rum!

Jolly Roger

I often wondered when I was younger
About life, and faith, . . . and truth
And whether bathing on the roof
Could change the course of fate
If someone were a little late.
But then I put such thoughts away
As the mere ponderings of yesterday.
Today I think much stranger things
About duty, destiny and wedding rings
And if the rope that raises spangled flag
Is a noose around our necks to drag
Us to salute a modern Jolly Roger
Until we mistrust every potential lodger
And we lock ourselves away.
I oft wonder what it's like to pray
And believe that someone's listening
That my tears and fear aren't glistening
Upon my face near my smile of desperate doubt,
This fatal falling out.
I wonder if deception is itself deceiving
Because if I'm the only one believing
I think I'd much prefer an honest lie.
Our gluttonous appetites increasing
I wonder who it is we're fleecing
And if we've got an alibi.
I wonder if we hoist liberation's banner
Or if those we host in this named manner
Equate liberty with dread
And think us taking liberties instead.

Just stream of consciousness purging

An Increase in Brevity

And I’m suddenly struck by the truth

That this is all, this is it

As good as it gets

Analyze that for a while

Take the faith of a child

Add a dash of the wild

Sensationalism of proof

Distill sensibly with disbelief

Gargle and spit then rinse for relief

And never imbibe it again.

Childhood should always come to an end

Though the ending is always too soon

Though in the end, there was no more room

In the inn, for an ending to begin, if it’s true.

Or perhaps that’s part of childhood too

Boys become men, or at least in stories they do

In real life, we’re more Peter Pan than we think

Except we never believed, save when we drink,

Anything at all.

We grew big, bigger at least, and sometimes grew tall

At other times we simply grew fat

From being precocious to being a brat

To be thrown on the grill of the gods

For summertime amusement.

We fight to save dignity, fight to save face

All the while pestering, forgetting our place

As fat in the fire

As lust to desire

To make the all-seeing eyes burn

A cog in the wheel that makes the world turn

A wanderer sent here to learn

How to turn it all off.

We’re festering

Sequestering ourselves in groups

In troops of unequal numbers

Yet similar tasks

Men without masks

For we have no true faces

Step apart at ten paces

Turn, jagged parts in their places

And smooth edges have graced us

With these.

A minute of temple and freeze

A second of stillness and breeze

A time of silence and peace

As we bring the world to it’s knees.

Feted, dank and sewered

Pendulant until skewered

On the tip of a bet

On the end of a net

Without a safety for comfort

Without a face to contort

We bribe and we bluff

But it’s never enough

Till we wager the skin off our souls

And down at the flop

We gamble our top

To keep our pants at the turn

And hope is still spurned

As with a prayer to the giver

We look to the river.

And hope to build a dam.

Random thoughts from the ER

Cut the Deck


So this is how it feels to grow
Or better yet to groan
Alone, unholy scared
As though the gods have pared
Us down to basic shares
Spliced together in random pairs
Fear and hope, faith and fear
Always lurking near
Always standing here
Forever on the cusp
Of almost growing up
Or throwing up
Or laying down
And taking pound for pound
Whatever doubt is dealing out
Fake a smile to hide a pout
I thought this would be easy
I thought this would be hard
Who knew that the reasons
Could ever be so charged
That no argument could hold them
We built a house of cards.

3 for 3!

Heads or Tails

Pinwheeling in the happenstance

A flick, a turn, a timeless dance

A picture and a phrase

A quickly endless haze

Broken, raised, shattered, razed

Two decisions met

A handshake and a bet

A probability decided

And everything is one-sided

Unless it coincided

With another.

A war won on a toss

A lifetime at a loss

A gamble at a glance,

A game of patterned chance

An infinity decided

An eternity divided

On the derision of a split

Where thumbnail on the copper hits

If futures could be bought
Flipped, turned, and caught.

Bit o' Silliness

Ferris Wheel

Up but mostly down

Always spinning ‘round

Sometimes barely hanging on

Swinging back and forth

Often in delight, equally in terror

Always moving south to north

And back except for error

Sometimes stranded

Sometimes stopped

Sometimes lifetimes at the top

Otherwise sick on my shoes

Popcorn and cuddles,

Coca-cola puddles

And the smell of ecstasy, fear

And stale beer.

Hits and misses, hugs and kisses

Mister and Miss become

Mister and Misses

And the circle still goes on.

Sitting in streetlights

Staring at twilight

Watching the starlight turn dawn

Hearing my heartbeat turned on

Hoping I never get down and go home.

I'm frequently foolish

Barstools

Everyone else has their desert wand’rings

Their times in their wilderness space

But I went a-walking through heav’n

And then a-running out of that place

Everything was simply too perfect

Everything was too perfectly fake

Everyone was there handing out answers

While I was there looking for grace.

Hell looks a lot like a bedroom

While heav’n looks more like a bar

Meeting and mingling poorly

Oh and what a fine pair they are.

Decisions of glorious intentions

Leading forth to bedroom affairs

Which turns to drowning on barstools

When truth finds mysterious hairs.

Angels were dealing security

There is no cashing out of this game

Once you’re sat at the table

Your seat's always sat there, just the same.

Waitresses whisper “Take comfort”

Once saved for all time they proclaim

But why would any action then matter

If you can only play a rigged frame?

So when proof knelt off’ring marriage

I proudly accepted his name

Only to wake alone in my folly

Realizing grace had offered the same.

Sacrilegious, you have been warned

Genie

Maybe we’re all cigarettes

Dangling from the mouth of God

Inhaled, repelled in turn

As his lips caress our temples

Holds our asses to the fire

Yes, our butts are gonna burn.

I am the arson’s silhouette

As gods hold their cattle prod

Yes, our butts are gonna burn

And we’re all outta turns

No tickets left to remedy

To escape the brand we’ve earned

Man, our asses gonna burn.

How the hell is heaven here

When hope’s not near at hand

They tell me there’s a Lord above

In a wholesome promised land

But I ain’t seen a doorway

And all my petitions spurned

The arsonist is burned.

Everything is unlearned,

Yes everything is burned.

Maybe we’re all silhouette’s

Dangling from the minds of gods

God I hope his face is turned

Or our asses gonna burn.

I hope that all our soured ash

Is slowly being churned

Into something better

Than this disgrace we’ve earned

That there’s a phoenix in these urns

Cause if you cannot find a door to heaven

You burn in through the floor

And all my excuses will take their turn

When everything is burned.

To Be Perfect

Canopy and Void

Both from and held to the fire

To be revealed as shadow

An insubstantial wraith

A fallen angel

With wings of failed achieving.

Captive to both truth and liars

Enslaved to my religion

Entangled and concealed

Wholly revealed

To be partially deceiving.

Unsealed and now unrolling

To be seen and fully shown

A landscape without creature

Without feature

Pride’s rivalry to be played.

Stripped naked by the tolling

Bells of time, now fully known

To be re-imagined

I am to be unmade

Thereby to be made. 

It's Only A Problem If They Catch You

Hit and Run

I see faces full of empty places

Almost as though God did not

Connect the dots, perhaps forgot

When making rocks instead of souls

To fill our animated corpse.

Our marble animus, of course

In perpetual repose

For what we truly fear the most

Is being happy.

There are other people’s rules

For their own unique successes

Other people’s sympathies

Encouraging our excesses

As though if we add another bill

Our hopes and dreams fulfilled

In meeting arbitrary expectations.

When in reality and truth

We’re skin on a tin roof

Blistered from the heat

Of our own internal ire

Hold our statuary to the fire

Until our souls are nearly ash.

As we add another debt

Another hope is let

To pay off what we thought were

Our souls rise in smoking spires

And our dreams, our funeral pyres.

Cause/Effect

Leather and Lace

I feel forced and slightly stubborn

Though mostly unrelenting

In my perpetual repenting

For things I’ve done on purpose

While melted to the surface

Is this sneering veneer, this circus

Of emotions played out on a face

All so distinctly out of place.

Some prefer leather, some prefer lace

To parade their perfections

To charade their disgrace

I prefer cowls hiding my name

Masks are for parties, costumes for games

I prefer living alone just the same.

I feel wild in this jungle of tamed

Souls seeking niceness, politeness and cold

Distinctions of fact that I never see

There’s black, some white, no gray, and there’s me

A prophet in a land of seers who don’t see

A page in a kingdom of lords who can’t read

A sage in age where truth doesn’t bleed

Or a liar in a fiefdom with no use for me.

I feel anachronistic, or maybe too simplistic

For whatever else I feel

Sometimes I feel I’m all that’s left that’s real

I feel like the only human

In a world of perfect people

The only church without a steeple.

That all my doubts were inside out

That mine’s the only heart can’t break

Cause it’s too flawed for you too take

And even if I played my part

I’m just someone else’s broken heart.

I didn't have a muse, so I borrowed someone else's

Sparklers


I remember when I loved you
But all such feelings stray
And all extinctions fade
Into the past to be forgotten
An angel draped in cotton,
As I am sure you were.
All distinctions blur with age
As symbols on a page
Until I cannot recall your face
Save your smile, your touch, your grace
The ways that the sunlight
Lit your hair, reminding me of sparks
Lighting my way through the dark
Always bringing me home.

I use a loofah . . . so what?

I Am The Tempest’s Son

I saw my father’s face in a window pane today

Save that it did not have his features

The complexion and the colour were all wrong

The gaze as strong as the chin was weaker

But the same scowl curved the mumbling lips

The same shimmering, simmering rage

Seethed behind these always disappointed eyes

And I realized I’d never turned the page

Today, I am my father’s rage.

I saw my father’s faith in a windowed train today

As I glimpsed my own confused reflection

All sound and fury, noise and hate

As it always goes these same directions

Without variance and without hope

With but a slow certainty of arrival

It only goes where it’s always been

Without even prayer of revival.

Not even begging for survival.

I saw my mother’s doubt in an overpass today

With cracks in it’s foundation

And painted sayings not her own

Adorning each incarnation

Someone loves somebody else

But it never feels like her

Hell, it never feels like me

And we are always what we were

And we were never very sure.

I saw my own reflection through a looking glass today

And I could not find resemblance

A bitter husk of wilted choice

For each and every false remembrance

Where I blamed a father’s features

For a fault that I should bare

Or a mother for a fault I chose to share

Until I saw myself just standing there

Still so very unaware that I am killing me.

Happy Easter!

Metallurgy 


A tarnished copper flower
Bent and rusted through
In a world of alchemy,
Welded together differently
Than everything it thought to be.
Turning gold to polished lead
And elixirs into poisons,
A tarnished copper hour
In a world of gold philanthropy.

An acorn falls amid the dust
Among the leaded thorns and rust
That lust created man to be.
A biological reaction
In a world of Harvard pedigree.

A silver weed on a copper lawn
And all the neighbors sigh and fawn
Over what was never meant to be.
A single-souled catastrophe
In a world that hates misanthropy.

A living tree in shades of green
There among the metal things
A pulse amid technology
A grace before apology
A tree among the crowning thorns
Where that which fell has been reborn,
For in a polished world of gleaming thrones
There remains a grave without a stone
A breaking day
And a dawn that can't be scorned away.

There goes my hero, watch him as he goes. . .

Some Bridges Are Better Off Burned (A Slam)


Perhaps there are two men in every soul
A coward, and a noble man.
This much, at least, I understand.
In a world of poor and sick and dying
Of wars and fears and mere trying
To wake up this morning alive
We're more worried about shagging and bragging,
Shacking up and packing up, shucking clothes
And lucking into the right bed
And who is doing what with whom
As though this narrow bridge has ample room
For both our egos and our baggage.
We blame churches for deliverance
From what surely would be providence
Toward souls as pure as uncommon sense
Would dictate ours to be.
Blame governments for starting war
And governments for stopping more
For death always stimulates the economy.
Blame fathers for daughters and mothers for sons
Blame murder on children playing with red BB guns.
Hate others and brothers for hating each other
And brothers for being from the same mother as me
Until I hate everyone because I believe.
I hate you, and you hate me
It's in the equation of what we might be.
It's not dying I'm scared of
(That's just being without breath)
It's the life that comes first, not the one that comes next.
Perhaps I was wrong and I blamed the wrong throng
For all the problems I thought I could see.
For there is only one man inside of this soul
There is only the coward
Yes, there's only me
And perhaps the true problem isn't where I thought it would be.

1

Less

And everything feels like regression

Back to the mean, into the lean

Years of famine

Of hoarding, of cramming

Dull lives into bleak days

Until the haze would raise

And we'd be paralyzed by forgotten rays

Of promise. Let's be honest,

The moment passed, the die was cast

And I was carved out of dust and ash.

Yes, I am a ware in a peddler's stash

Anything for a little quick cash

I am the king of a valley of trash

For every time I've thrown myself away

In the hope of a yesterday

That holds no future sway.

Maybe I'm just here on my own

Maybe I thought I was here all alone

Maybe we're aliens desperate for home

In a world to which we've never belonged.

And maybe simpler thoughts convey more

Perhaps simpler words preserve lore

It might be that simpler waves can save shores

And the overly complex destroys all in its wake.

For art is the magic of give and of take

It's not always better to add more to make

A masterpiece.

So in this art that You're making

I'm tired of faking

And pretending I have good gifts to bring

All that I am is here for the shaking

That brings down and rebuilds all things.

So come ease this aching

I'm here for the taking

And make this world better with less

Take me away

Take me away

And save all the rest

Give us grace, give us love, grant us rest

And Lord, of myself, give me less.

Here we go for the hundredth time, hand grenade pins in every line . . .

Weltanschauung


Pray you do not think this open-ended
Find this plea both frail and winded
With which I dig one desperate trench
From which I make one last defense
And sweat, for whether dock or bench
The jury still deliberates.
Beg, do not think it trite and empty
But little pleasant rhymes with God
And even littler still with Jesus
Except worn cliches and the very odd
With which we all find disagreements.
Here, I do entreat you think
If for but a short and lonesome while
Is any subject more abstract to write,
Yet clearly put in common style
Than that though we strive with all our might
Remain meanest beggars of the night
Still needing One to save us,
To step into the bleak and claim us
When we would not claim ourselves.
All we thought was altruistic
Revealed as merely pantheistic
For too much good without a Name
Is really quite as much the same
As having done no good at all.
For if goodness is our claim to fame
There is little goodness in it.
Yet one day, on a someday
With a voice too loud to hear
And a sound too soft to miss
By and by it shall be made clear,
Resounds, "Be at peace and know, my dears."
Indeed, take heart, for Hope is here.

I'm trying to write more coherent poetry. Is it working?

Kimble


I wake as though I am sleeping
I sleep as if I were dead
Oft I speak aloud as if praying
Lest I commit treason instead.
I am not wishing for trumpets
Rather, I'm waiting for sin
To come on the legs of seduction
And transform the state that I'm in.
What I get is the clapping of thunder
And the feeling I'm lies wrapped in skin
The break-apart storm clouds of wonder
The sensation I'm where I begin.
Which is what I'm truly afraid of
That I can, in fact, change who I am,
That mistakes are all that I'm made of,
That I've always been out on the lam
To escape my own definition
A fugitive fleeing from grace
Scared of the future I'm racing,
Even more that I'll see my true face.

So come on around the bend

Walter Rauschenbusch

Evening found us waiting

Just to glimpse a shadow,

To hear a wraith, see a ghost.

Never realizing

That Elvis had already left

The building years ago

And been replaced with a ghast.

With an addict in costumes,

A preacher in street clothes

And we waited

And baited our breath

Too caught up in the fumes to notice.

Morning found us listening

To a pre-recorded message

Never realizing that Elvis

Would never have recorded that song.

Noon found us singing along

Subtly changing the words

Without conscious focus

Never taking notice

That Elvis was singing a wholly different song.

Sunday found us buying

Tickets to a magic show

Where Elvis would perform

Despite his missing qualities,

Namely breath and a pulse,

But details never derail true belief.

Monday found us waiting

Still in pre-assigned roles

Though Elvis had already moved on.

Tuesday found us antsy with

Sweat stains on our clothes

And not a whisper of rockabilly around.

Wednesday found us nervous

Just scratching the surface

Close to accepting the Vegas guy in his suit

Because Elvis had left the building

While we were still glued to our pews.

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.