Sludge water dripping into an already clogged pipe. Blood in my microscope, torn out like a diary page, necessary to analyze the ingredients. Will the wound lift? be inverted into a creative windstorm or a nemesis spread, spidery-vein spreading until the curse is complete and conquers?
I know love is alive, and that hot and sudden is the joy that stems from a miraculous shift. I know building comes with the morning, comes like brimming sorrow and goes to a final destination like all things final, temporary, broken and sliced down the centre – undergoing a brutal mitosis.
II
Empty tables clawed apart within with spikes a-blazing on the edges, and the light of the moon high in the sky, hardly visible. Time is a dust heap I roll inside of, never making a dent or relieving my extremities from the grim cover. Beaten by the relentless overwhelm and the digging dream that digs further down more than ever before, pulled in by gravity unspeakable and charged. Living each day bent over, cane-walking, repeating anguish, shooting pain and dough-bread kneading, never baking, never consuming.
III
When grief comes it comes at the maximum degree of chaos, doubt and all things unsustainable. Even there, in the squander and grave disadvantage, I will surrender to trust, protect the embryo of my new understanding as precious as it is, as the only intention worthy of holding, clinging to despite the toxic smog encircling, twirling over my extremities, nose-diving into my internal organs, shutting me down.
It is there and its power is the past, old. It is able to kill but I am not afraid. I hold the jewel of this glowing budding faith and that is all I will look at.
My heart is crushed, undone by the weight of grief but my soul is tiny blooming. Let it be key. Let everything be where everything needs to be. Both are real. Only one will have authority and receive my attention, elixir formed, a trickle, ingested.
IV
Drum beat no beat I raise my arms and scream hosana. The drawers are empty hunger parts my soul into quarters. Stand up and take account, no one is listening. Four months of stagnant emotion, upheaval at the roots, planted again somewhere less familiar and less fecund. Faith and despair overlap, cross paths, join together as a new entity. Who understands? There is no understanding to be had, only the ceramic bird on the shelf, winking, and the air, heavy and humid one minute and cold, oxygen-free, the next. In my mind is an argument existential, without possible resolution. In my core there is shock at the terror of disintegration, and for how long? How much more? And still there is more.
In my being, I knew God came with mercy, with Jesus and the peace of infinity – washing clean, a soft joy without degrees but only flowing, showering, eternal. In between I wake up and I cannot see forward, I listen, but I cannot be one with what I hear.
Holy Spirit, holy, do not escape me, be clear, re-construct my devotion, find me my union seed, to plant and tend to simple devotion.
V
Jesus, you let me live. I will sit with you hand in hand. I know you in my personal crisis – faith obliterated, reseeding in a lucky garden. I will trust you with all my problems, with my anxiety like a dysfunctional city, polluting the roadway, the airway with its violence and indifference. I will breathe easy, knowing you are here, that you own it because I give it to you and reckoning is rescue, in your hands, miracles are coming – life changing, a kinship with your divinity. You are sovereign, my still-point, my doorway into perpetual redemption. I will collect the fruit and sit beside you, eating together – no hunger, no hurry – You and I, I with you, you holding my hand.
VI
When I see the unseen in a twisted longing death-circle fantasy, irresistible hope, and drive to make that hope happen even though I am not a citizen of that land, not meant to come forward and shine with those deeds, then I fail and live for an illusionary future, creating a hellish now, ripe with lack and disappointment.
Bend on your knees, bow to the one-name of God, feel the slap of sobriety, the consequences of depending on your own wit and power which is like a gnat trying to cross through a tornado or a choir that sings without glorifying.
I am learning that being conceived and being re-conceived is the cure for fear, the fire that watches a greater fire, burning enough, releasing enough to rejoice and just burn, a light, a warmth transient, but elementally, in this way, everlasting.
VII
It is hard to hold purpose when purpose no longer holds you when the single curtain seals the window blocking the sun and sky, making you blind so you only touch corners and never a door.
All things lost their ownership, just wandered aimless, squandering energy like tossed pebbles, no pattern, sinking. Governance failed, was only an imagined corridor leading to a chaotic marketplace that doled out meals, lacking nutrients and staying power.
Each shape to take and hold and shift from each day was hard labour, exhausting to perform, pretending hope existed when hope had abandoned. I was not afraid because my fears were pushed hard into my face, swelling my eyes so they could only see behind. Death won out over the light, won obedience – the middle and opposite, smelling. Death smells bad smells like an inevitable succumbing to rot, betrayal, rendering endurance useless and even the holiest of faiths debunked.
There is a string before me, thin and golden and unbreakable. There is something I see I never saw. I have collided with the consuming tyranny death, felt it swerve and twist through every vein, enter, break my heart, break the truths I had before.
The string dangles, dripping down from my inadequate cries and a mangled prayer, comes shining a faint intermittent glow. It is small and so am I, minute, hardly there, but there.
VIII
If I talk again, I will keep my end-mind twisted so it cannot speak or formulate a plan. I have no constitution for plans or wherewithal for achieving human-made provisions.
If I talk again, silence me into prayer, conversing only with the angelic order, strengthened by devotion and the power of obedience.
If I try to be a player, remind me of my meek capacity, sting me with regret and slap me into a state of surrender.
If I try to enter a world not my own, laugh at me, call me out and put me in my designated low-chair place, a dreamer, advancing no further.
IX
Falling away like before launching water at the moon then releasing it, scattering it onto a lifeless surface.
Songs and singing are murderous, selling the false business of a buffet inspiration, and poetry, like a sober prayer or pleading, blossoms in a place where no one comes or looks or even cares.
Things that once stretched with divine determination towards health, now fall backwards into addiction and defeat. Chaos always hovering at the entrance door, violence a few footsteps away.
Idealism once trapped in my mind has sieved through incrementally and now in my mind, a faint flow of tainted possibility, mostly consumed by despair, mostly non-existence, more hesitant than youthful, more resigned than risking.
The days drive on the same, and how I wish I was in a state of conspiratorial superiority or in a social bliss of nonchalance. How I wish I could be like I used to be, believing despite the odds, calling for help and receiving it. What is this weakness, this futureless waste of now, pressing on all my joints, an aching misery perpetual?
What are these days when I can find no hope to master this tortuous doom? I am removed. A thin slice everywhere between me and reality. Only sorrow brings me near enough to touch, only happiness lives inside my dreams or in my memories, stripping the peel from the fruit, dropping it to rot in the mud-marsh with the rest of my wearied hold on merciful possibilities.
X
I don’t see the far-reaching joy to build a future on, just disappointment, false-starts, isolation and how-can-that-be? I don’t see but I know the builders take their time to make sure what needs to be aligned is aligned, that broken hearts can become hardened hearts and hope is dangerous for those who are desperate, perishing at the foot of the mirage.
But there is a noble prophesy to follow, to stand by and wait for. There is true love, love that alters bitter grief that wraps your love in its healing balm until it blooms and your dry throat is finally soothed, your wounds are rewarded, transformed into strengths exposed, safe on the marriage altar.
XI
Time does not help to lessen the sharp scream of amputation, or to help gain a way to cope, maimed as I am, lacking resilience.
Prayer does not answer any questions or bury the emptiness outside of my body, allowing room that can be filled, even with only a faint groaning microscopic creation.
Love that sits beside me, day-after-day, holding my hand, stays with me – miraculous devotion – helps while it is there, but does not stop the welling-up of sorrow, that will not ease or be appeased in solitude or by distraction.
Faith is a word that sparks but cannot ignite. I sink down again on my broken knees. I cannot rise. I try and I try, but I cannot overcome.
XII
God do you love me? Everyday I fall short of receiving your love, blocked and stalled and wading knee-deep in sewage mud. I cannot take a step. I cannot hear you anymore or feel your mercy move the spoke a mile, an inch, a fraction of a way out of this criminal sleep, arrested every day.
I try to take a breath, try to step but I cannot move. Please God, show yourself to me again. I am aching all over, joints on fire, mind – ablaze in jet-fuel burning heat, tired all the time, cut off from your glory. Cut off no matter my prayers and my pleas.
Please God, take my hand, recognize me as one of your own.
I long for you. I need your grace to lift me, now, trumpets calling, advancing, only with you, loved, permitted.
XIII
A hive blasted by poison. A blood-letting in crave of a cure. Two close-together cliffs jumped across, looking closer than they are.
In the whirlspin of a fall – arms broken, extremities blasted, crying out for someone from the angelic order to swoop down and placate the pain. But no angel-being arrives and what is broken remains broken, deformed and starting to heal that way, into a permanent liability.
Even then, when stuck thigh-deep in forsaken ground, God is close, washing our cracked bodies, cradling our defeat, saying
My Love doesn’t always answer with a clean slate or a put-on spell so all hurt is forgotten, not a trace left traceable. Sometimes My Love just sits with you, beside the pain, lets you know I am here, here, in the empathetic love of others, here, in your own resilience each morning to carry on, here, in your determination to stay close to me
as you anguish and ache, unable to walk or fully wake, seeing that nothing turned out the way you saw it in your times of highest harmonic resonance the way you were sure it would.
XIV
Will you speak to me again like before death cracked my windpipe like when death still hovered thick in the air but you were there surrounding everything with the weight of your love?
Will you answer me again cooling my shape, giving back force to my petering-out flame so I can grow again, still tied to your mercy and the joy of having dreams?
Will I know you again despite my mutations and the iron that rotates sickeningly in my core, using my energy for lesser aspirations?
Will you love me again and I will know that love igniting its current through my every predicament, bonding me unbreakable to your side, inside your privileged embrace?
XV
First thing, you are here. I wake up and we are talking, merged in a matter-of-fact conversation. My need, my only way to take a step in the morning. More and more, without you, I can’t exist or comprehend a thing. Then why this endless desert, the hard bloated boils erupting every time I move? How is it, you are here, but there is so much pain still, so much struggle just to keep alive? How do I feel so close to you and need you more than I ever have, have you more than I ever have, with such drought and trembling-burns burning everyday, throughout the days, echoing – no medicine, no food, just you and I in this high heat, where I am barely capable, but somehow capable.
XVI
Then the bitter defeat was burning like a sin committed, recognized and unforgiveable. Then on a hill, heavy with weighted down legs and an injury there, debilitating but unexplained, the challenge came to walk.
Walk slowly at first, walk like I can walk even though the reins are dropped and I have lost my mother, lost life’s victory over death and the comfort of an unbreakable love broken, altered, intangible now as an angel’s skin or a hope held for decades unrealized.
Walk with my mortal burden, stumbling without a path, a cane or a flat plane. Twist in my ankle, twist in my knee, swollen, bloated with a hot fever, walk.
Face a direction, walk, slowly, commit and make it my own.
XVII
Soak the born in their own initial conception to remember the pure-memory-pockets, the truth of miracles. Underline everything that matters and read it again until no small word is skimmed over or taken for granted. Open the shelter doors and let all animals in, wild ones, broken ones, aggressive and tame. Free with a blessing every dream that isn’t false, and follow your deepest duty – both desirous and undesirous divine commands. Under the blanket, conspiracies are made. They grow limbs that look like light but exclude humility and the thumb-print of surrender. The atmosphere is big, the button-hole is small. I am small when I toss my self-determination out as wisdom and fail at every turn. Mercy comes with obedience, obedience comes with trust, and then finally freedom. The dying are trapped in their wounds. The living, in their success at survival, but the gift is always open for everyone, and changing even without core movement. I have a boat and that is all I own. I see flowers on the shore, rooted in the sand. I see yellow and sometimes, I see gold.
