Stillness doesn't happen in a moment
It's beyond a photograph's reach,
Lost to an unquiet mind
Where the waters drown themselves
In the waves crashing
While God sleeps in the sinking boat.

Stillness is the sound of a pause
A silently inhaled breath.
Stillness is looking on at the carcrash
Where the wheel keeps spinning
And the people line up
In bright blue cocoons

It is remembering
That each moment
Lies inside eternity.

People are
the collection
Of stuff and confusion
And love that gets left on the bench
Milling around
Like sheep looking for a home
But finding an oven instead.

I hold these words around me
My constant friends
They never leave me alone
They always say the same
Thing
But I turn to them all
And never get it quite right
The idol that I make
Is cracked

They often say
True loves runs deep
Maybe that's why
It's always hiding
In the dark and mud
Patient for an unwary toe.

It's frustration
To feel words pile up
Like river logs
Then turn and slip
Away
All eels and mud
Anytime I put
A finger on them.
But the water
Seems damned forever

To look back
Without salt pillared regret
Leaving these things behind

Because
The tomb is empty
I don't need to be bearing
The hollow of broken yesterdays
My anti-wings on aching shoulders
Can silent slip and roll away.

Family

We are more than holes
More than souls
Tied together with string
Caught in a net
Of our own devising

I wrote you a reminder
The other day
In big sad black letters
Strange to watch them melt away
As though you remembered better

Turn the past into something new
Something borrowed shouldn't make me blue
Something old isn't always something true.

Hmmm....

I hate crying
Because it feels like letting go
In the moment's vertigo.
Forgiving unplanned tears
That flee my shivered soul
Unencumbered
By heavy handed futility:
Clasping the cracks together.

I hate crying
Because maybe if I do
Some precious part of me
Will flit away
And be lost to all memory.
Something I never let
Loose from it's cage.
Pain.

I don't come to tear these pages
Clotted thick with a chaos of scribble
And balled up in failure's basket.
Your own attempt
At drawing life.

I come to take these pages
Smooth their battered edges
Connect the broken lines
Paint light into the darkness
And bring that
Drawing to life.

Seeker
You find me in the hidden things.
Holding my sticky guilt hands
You turn them to wings.

I'm sorry.
By now I should be better
Perhaps,
Or at the very least
Someone else.

Words are such a poor substitute for fingertips...

Second Adam

I didn't mean to let you down
Destiny waits for the Fall
And I was fallen worst of all
The purest Adam in town

You are my unanswered questions
You wake the walls inside me
And make them yearn to be set free
You are gravity in my empty spaces
Direction is in your smile.

You are my toes in wet grass
When summer still remembers growing up
You are an iceberg of infinity
When I'm wondering
Just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

You are the heart
I long to hide me in
If only I could find you
And send my walls to be free.

Caged bird
Silence heard
Feathers only
Lie
When the universe
Lies outside.

Not so Bad

It wasn't so bad
Being lost
It was life in
Darkness
It wasn't clear
What was worse:
The terror hidden from my eyes
Or the one lurking in my mind

It wasn't so bad
Being lost
Just a world of darkness
Without a blanket
A moon without a sun
Solid, real, substantial
And coldly complete.

There was a flower on my desk
A crumpled, withered thing
Memories of being green
Now crisp, dried, yellowed
Shuffled through time's deck
Yet lying undisturbed
At peace.
A gift that never meant
More. Than it ever did.
At last it resembled more
The promise of the grave,
Than any promise that was made

There was a flower on my desk
But there is one no longer.

Prayer is turning the page
And finding the pen
And asking God to write

How do I walk
With him whose footsteps
Are the gulf between stars
Whose feet burn with suns
Whose voice calls out
Ans space's vacuum cries out
Till even emptiness is full.

How do I walk
With dragging feet
Barely keeping me off the ground
His breath is gravity
Yet I am falling upwards
When He stands behind me
And whispers "Come
Walk the heavens, and see"

When you sit beside me
There is warmth in my shoulder
And all my aches forget how to speak
You leak out my corners, out my seams
A dream so full, so full of dreams

The silence in my heart is hollow
And it swallows up sound
I can hear it when the beast moves round

We imagine He is
As we are
And we are made less
Because of it

I'd tear down these pillars
If I could just see you a second
As the roof comes down upon me

Sometimes I run from the beast
With the unblinking eye
Sometimes I hide in the quiet
Corners of my mind
He sniffs me out
He knows my names
He breathes in blood
And he leaves
Me
A ragged doll lying in the rain