in all its glory

The filmed figures
glorious in grayscale greek
comic and classic with missing
still stained by shadows
folk tales and faeries still fly
through frames black and white
while damsels defend love professed
i sit writing unable to tell
between blank and gray, man and ass
the piano sympathizes

Union

Like yellowed keys of an organ, sections of sidewalk lined a dirty city street. Buildings crowded around looking down at the street with rusty iron frowns. The tarnished metal faces of the city looked as if they had never been new, and even a hurricane could not wash off the grime left by so many tires and shoes. Run down shops accumulated junk behind broken barred windows, and the cracked glass crunched beneath beggars’ feet. Graffiti spattered across stained concrete walls, writings of years past. A few streetlights still rained down a sodium glow as early morning light crept through the air. The pungent sewer smell lingered at rat level, but the breeze blew in tumbleweed trash and left the street with the mustiness of old boots.
Next to a rubbish bin and a pile of garbage, a man’s weathered, stubbly face stood out, cheek pressed against the concrete and trash. The blankets and jackets and newspapers making his bed hardly separated from the overflowing garbage. His breath let out a telltale mist as he surfaced from his dreams, awakening with the street he knew. Serene blue eyes opened above a twice broken nose. A gloved hand reached for the knit hat covering his head as he began to smile wide, remembering the warm mornings inside. As he sat up, he gazed around at the early morning on Union and leaned back against the concrete wall. He rose and began walking toward the rising sun.

As We Know It

It’s the end of the world as we know it! Wouldn’t that be great if you were relieved of all responsibility because tomorrow, it’s all over.

Just don’t worry about getting up stay out all night – drive way too fast listening to music that will hurt your eardrums and keep you from hearing your grandkids when you’re seventy, but wait. You won’t have grandkids, or even kids because the world ends tomorrow when the sun rises. Walk off into the woods to be with God (and keep walking) or go crazy out in the city crashing at someone’s house because this is all the time you got and you won’t be remembered for it. Now total anonymity because everything is wiped clean tomorrow, no memory, no grass or trees or music or papers or cars, watches, stairs to climb forms or lines lightbulbs to break while being worried about backing over the neighbor’s cat. Nothing. Literally clear off your desk, smash your phone into the wall and break the empty plates and push the snooze button with a sledge hammer, because a clean slate is what you’ll have and a clean desk is what you want right now. Call up your sweetheart from highschool tell her how you really feel because it’s the last night! Pull out the stops and kick in the doors; doorknobs are becoming increasingly useless!

What if. As Christians, we realized that the dawn of our time in heaven is much closer than we acknowledge, and that our reputation and stance on earth matters not. What if we weren’t afraid to love like there were no consequences, to screw sense and to screw what we feel like we know we’re supposed to do. What if we jumped out of the boat and hit solid water and kept running? What if we weren’t so concerned about showers and food and clothes? What if we relied on God’s infinite capacity to love so that we could love like He loves? What if we looked at each other and realized that to follow Christ means the end of the world as we know it?

life of a string.

so this is a poem i wrote at one o'clock one night a few months ago, obviously inspired by guitar. i've played around with a few of these verses to help rhyme and flow, but as they say, art is never finished - only abandonded. so i may come back and change it sometime.



Listen to the way the note dies, reverberating because of well veined, straining fingertips and strong calluses deftly dancing up and down the rosewood board

I don’t think a note ever dies but merely enters the haze,
The wraith of a half-life floats spiraling a downward maze
Every variance of pitch finds its place in these dead days
Every color spinning all at once, every direction, the final phase

So the creator carefully listens, learning and teaching how to orchestrate and manipulate and duplicate all for the sake of a song
Vibrating gyrating strands of steel tell stories with tone and mood and pitch
Any sorrow any joy any thought the strings create comes from the fingers deftly dancing on a rosewood board.
Each song, each note and word composed, have synergy- sung, strummed, hummed
But the sweet sound of song-making is matched by the sorrowful screech of the string breaking