Lift Up My Eyes

No matter what I tried today, it has come out badly, and now, instead of sleep, I have strange hours. All day, I have done what I did not want to do, always thinking that it was just doing what another wanted, wanting to give up the self for the good of the all. Now, for the first time, I am sleepless in my house again, not who I want to be, failing to please another at the cost of what I know to be true within me.

Can I hear the voice of the other; can I still find what has been lost again and keep the new gains? I can't presume to know the mind of God, but I am going to question the wisdom of one thing over another. I can't keep going with what I don't know, and yet there is no way that I can do anything else. I am back up the tree again and I don't know how to get out without scratching all my skin off, and if not mine then who other's?

I only know what I can know, and what I have known so far has led me in the course allowed to my life. Where else this can go, where, when strong I am shorn and when weak I am abandoned? Where, oh silly God, are you? Your children despise me again, and I am tested near the end of my strength. I know that You will come to my aid if I but utter my cry for help, yet I remain mute as You have asked. I stay away from You, and I don't interfere with Your children in Your name. But these tests have crossed out my name from Your book, and I still don't know what annihilated means. I am still raw and uncovered, still unable to say Your name aloud. My fingers leave the lines untraced, and their love for me goes unfelt. I am a thief again, unable to grow beyond my nature; a player who always plays the card that lets them win.

And I know the voice that leads me to You and I am trying to listen to the stars as they call from their hidden passages. I want to follow You through the skies and be strong. When is my throat going to sing again? When will the sunrise bring me the solace of the light that is You? How am I going to know that the last boat is leaving, Lord? How will I know the difference between my end and what is required of me?

The heat comes from the inside, and it is not strange that it is so. This is the way that it has been and the way that it must be. All I can do is wonder still. All I can do is keep the faith that has sustained me thus far. The questions put in my head, the odd, torn leaf and the faint, cold trail would not be visible to me if You did not mean for me to follow, but I am lost with where this can go! What prey gained, if it were to play out any other way, is the true prize? What unhappiness can be found within the forest of darkness that I am lead upon? Through what distance does the questioning bring relief?

This is the sitting that bleeds me, and yet, sustains my credibility beyond what I am able to express with this voice and these words. This is the tower that keeps falling over and burning with such madness and such grief. How can I open myself again further beyond what has already been taken from me? If You send another emissary, how will I stop from killing again with my small mind in attack and my dropped heart shackled, helpless and alone? How I long to protect and cannot! The oath sworn shown to my face by the tears of my own head!

Grief is the swallow. Grief is the smallest thought that gives the taste to the whole. Grief is the basis for separation and the voice of the preacher whose head is plattered in silver, the cost to be born by the generations marked in Your blood. Grief is waiting in the long harbor as the boat pulls out. Grief is the quiet that deepens across the water calling in the fog of burden. It is what they cannot understand that seems most explained to You, and what I cannot become without the whole of the abandoned lifted without Your hand. I am not asking that we go back to that day. I am not asking that we hide again the knowledge of You, nor bury the brute force of ignorance again in my breast, though I know again that I must go. Grief, for the answer, finally breaks though, and in my vulnerability, You have tricked me again.

I am cold and in the dark, the lamp lay beside me broken and the angry flame asleep. More lay about in the color of the sea, and the jubilant voice of the swimmer is silent just out past the tide. This time there were no takers for the offer of a savior. This time the cries go unheeded and the sleeper continues to dream, and the mark left on the sand has no one who can read it; washes away inch by inch until, yet again, we wake into ourselves as if we were not listening.

Who did I say I was on that day? Who did I long to be when I found that path? How many had to have what they had taken away by me in my greed to know? You have made me a grand and skillful thief to have been there with You, and You knew me and looked at me with such burning and such love! Though I had lived in filth and crept among such vanity, my body craving bodies and filling up with lies. I listened to those who had only themselves in mind and I wanted to be like them. I made myself over and over of the mud. When You found me naked in the copse, hiding like a torn puppy of slaughter, when I heard you coming and I covered myself in the ground, when I saw Your feet and I knew and yet You did not speak, when I broke apart in the dirt and wanted to be less than that, when You turned and I felt You leaving, when I tore up my roots and ran after You, when I got lost in myself again and again and again and You stopped and waited for me, when I knew where to find You and I lay down to sleep.

What makes a poem bad?

Bly: I thought of four things.
1. A lifeless popular language.
2. The writer's own prosaic nature.
3. A writer's obsession with fact.
4. And the tendency we all have to lie about ourselves.

So most poems that are written are bad. Many of my poems are bad for the same reason. Especially the latter one, the tendency to lie about yourself.

The idea is that your life is going to be ruined by your greedy soul, unless you pay attention to it. ... One of the purposes of marriages is to make it clear how big your greedy soul is. That's why marriage is painful.

The Watchmaker’s Code

Them all be askin' thet ol' question, "Wut 'n tarnation's agoin' on heah?" Maybe you do it with a Southern type of phrasing or mebe ya don't. It's all in the colah, the scheme o' things.

So now I'm sittin' heah, tryin' ta think of some sort of feelin' I might be having. Maybe I'm having feelings. I get those sometimes. This is the sturdy talkin' of reglar folk, some a 'em my own kin. Now, there is a certain feeling that sometimes comes up in a sort of surprise attack, a kablewie of a kablam, more like a focus or a lexicon than the sun. Ya see, it wants to be known, but like how ya sometimes see that somethin' out the corner o' yer eye, but then ya go n look an there ain't nothin' there but the same thing in the corner o' yer eye but just in a different place? Ya never can seem to quite git up on what that somethin' is cuz ya can't just look at it, ya know. So anyway, that's kinda like what the feelin' I been tryin' to get at is. It's a lot like that and then it's also not anything like it. It's both. Or neither, but it is something or it must be or I wouldn't know anything about it, I could just switch tense and voicing to well darn nigh any ol' thang now cou'n't I? Yes I could! Yes I could! (in the interest of my reader, I would like to add this stage direction: this last should be enthusiastically rendered in the speaker's finest, most ridiculous baby/puppy voice)

Ok, now that I've got you this far, I would like to insert the secret part of the test, in which, instead of just providing the testing free of charge yet in the guise of nonsense, I will now begin to extract my toll from you in the form of tedium of message. That is, I would like to be revealing an important secret and therefore, I am, in fact, doing so, but I don't really believe I'm doing it, thereby negating the service in the usual cloud of doubt seasoned with regret for learning to ever read, so it would seem to be another scoreless inning. The pitching was great, but all you can say to the casual hearker on the corner is the score, which at this point, is still nil/nil, but there is some hope still in the upper bleachers where they have been drinking for six innings now and are liking the prospects of the home team despite the futility of the batsmen. You know the game is not going to end in a tie. You know there is no writing without a message. You know that there are always pieces of the author and the reader mingling in a rare space called "this moment" and that if you could just go back to when you had the answer but before you decided again to forget because it was raining ever so hard and then theah was this great roarin' of the hailstones strikin' the roof n everthing n it was so loud and it was like there was this opening, an apology from the sky which had been trying all day to reach me while I was so tumbling along in the great cloud and racket, the leaving and the coming and the feeling, the one I was just talking about, it just takes me. It just takes me and I go. And I have all the other feelings, but the one I can't seem to know other than around it or by the named feeling's edges as a description of where they are superseded by the unnamed one. It's a lot like everything, maybe it is. I want to feel it more than the others. It's love but it's way more and it's hate but it's way different, it's fear but it's a part of the whole like ice and it's empathy without knowing anything at all. There you go, rascal, horsethief, there you go off across the landscape of my sight to the nether reaches of the far corner where the red lives in its great Jupiter's eye that you know is there but can't see without science and technology and a few courses in basic operation of the human condition (site TBD). My mind wants to know why it can't know you. My stomach just keeps laughing.