Awake at 3 A.M. (Again)
Asking impossible questions
My book too complicated to read:
Future-less, no whereupons, no whereins
My mind sandpapered
My eyes too tired:
May I return to sleep?
No mother to answer nor answer to
The question hangs like
My pendulum:
Dead in midair, awaiting…
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A broken chair on the grassy verge
Awaiting a Jesus Carpenter
Past support: its primal mandate
A sullen castoff,
Discarded after a lifetime of service.
Lost to fire, to water, to abandonment
Outside the window it smugly overlooked.
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Existential poems in a pit of metaphor & sigh
A breath breathed only out
Rife with cancellation
I never said that! I am not responsible!
A clear slash slicing memory & reality
Wording & warding
I am in some disappointment
To ever be agreed with again.
That I stood next you in that moment
My witness found wanting: Brushed off like brain lint
By your need to be the rightest in the room.
The real question hangs: am I making this up?
Your disturbing cancellation leaves no room for me at all.
Silence becomes the better part of valor & intent
I surrender & surround myself within it.
Tomorrow you will say: “You never talk to me anymore.”
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Truth or memory?
I stand erased, zeroed out, discarded
Watching as you lose your phone, your mind, your life, your money.
Our friendship with this line now drawn through. Who bleeds more?
I stomp through poems
With a giggle of splash
Water overtops the wellies
My feet are cold
My socks all wet
A poet dwells in a make-believe world
A made-up turn of phrase
Spun from air & words
As empty or as potent as can be.
A poet has no answers to life’s questions
No affirmations to any but a craft
Somewhat forgot in the everyday of flat fact.
But my feet will dry one day
An echo of joy in their smell.
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There should be certainty in a church, of all places,
A firm knowledge that God Is
But god seems less to be found where the bills unmet
Sit on the desk of a vacationing accountant.
The vendors stewing outside
Steaming up the windows with hot breath
At their completed work.
As down the line it flows
Their God reduced to a curse against our holy doors:
Their chorus raised to pre-billing or no work at all
In return to our intransigence.
A recipe for failure no God can endure.
He leaves by the back door
Tired & empty, unsure.
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You don’t share my divinity – your psychodrama has no place
In my black & white world
You don’t walk your talk, you dance with it in the moment
Not realizing the music stopped altogether
As of the First Excuse
There is no rescue here for Lord nor Love
But only a pile-on become an avalanche.
“As ye sow, so shall ye reap”
Replacing “Be thou blessed all who enter here.”
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There’s A Lesson Here, Damnit!
The mirror I’ve polished down to thinned-out silver
Over brass, no fault to find fault lines
Where I thought I stood on holy ground
I find my shoes & walk on.
Church bells in the distance
Become warning, not welcome.
Neither sad nor anxious nor beloved.
I empty my canteen of your brackish sentiment
To find Living Water
I fish my soul still kneeling at the altar rail
“Come on,” I say, “We’re leaving.”
I turn my back on your God
To find my own.
The only quest worth pursuit
The only life left to live…
I know my truth of imperfection & freely admit to God
Which is everywhere but not here anymore.
I follow a light still shining, simply swallowing your dark.
Riding the Light 
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