Sunfowers
Hang
Beneath the open sky
Breathing in the
Sun
Reaching through the invisible

Surprise

Go into your shining dark
Into painful transparency
Overwhelming insufficiency
Witness the without within

Be sufficiently inadequate
To gaze beyond the edges of yourself
To grasp beyond your reach
Only then to be
Held completely beyond your capacity
To behold

The danger of writing a sermon:
If you are to wield it uncallously
You must grasp it by the blade
Till blood names you hypocrite
In the eyes of all

I wasn't broken
I wasn't injecting anything into my body
But myself
Wasn't some addict curled up down in the composting vomit like some ghastly pale fern frond.
No I was curled like a fist around a smashed beer bottle, about to turn a brawl into something primal. A tightrope act stretching between action and reaction.
Action: the jagged arc of glass that holds only the fizz of falling anger
Reaction: the drops of blood that fall, and fall, and fall and fall until the thin line line hits the floor. And those watching shake their heads, and blame the law... The police man for not stopping it before... And leave themselves comfortably discomfited at the door. Ignored.

I wasn't broken.
I wasn't breaking anyone's rules
But myself.
I wasn't.
I was not.

But I could have been.
I could have been wide and long and deep as an ancient wood. Implacable. Immovable. Sucking up the waters of life be they ever so deep, be the heavens dry, come what may, and what may come... Is this - a crowd to the one Man not hanging back, who came through the door, became the door, hanging forward like a lean in time. A gravity the pulls and pulls my confessions out... and onto him. And into him like a spear in the side. Till he could bear it no more.

 Because there was no more. No more to bear. But to bear him down into the earth like an ancient seed buried in my shallow soil. And deep dreams for could have beens  and should have beens, and the green I know would grow if only I wasn't broken.

I wasn't broken
But he was.
And now the doors i locked are thrown open

Five

A planet can sustain life
Only if it centers its gravity on
Something greater
Burning with invitation
Stretching out the great across
Separating "I" from "other"
Bowing an axis
That leans
Like a gentle wind
Into the breath of life
Declaring "us".

Real beauty
Can only be chiseled
From the jagged stone
Of 'is'.

How much of prayer

"God change things so I don't
have
 to choose
Rearrange things to a
 simpler
 kind of truth
Move the icebergs from my way
Till there's no more sink
Or swim
Please don't let the bad choice 
in

Four

I'm not very good at this,
I'm so far behind
Crumpled on my tiny bed
Like last summer's green
How can I find rest and peace
By surrendering the search?
I just want to do it right
So I'm not very good at this.

I remember
when God was so big
He could blot out the clouds
And stand
With His back to everything
And not be afraid

I was smaller
Less compressed
Had not yet forgotten
Which way tears fall
And my yearnings gazed forwards
Instead of the mess behind

Three

Stacking up
Horizontally
I try to find the being unfound
As minutes condense
Weighting
The thinness stretched
Over my tiresome limbs
Tracing circles
On the sheets beneath
Stacking up
Seconds
Until I am found by unfinding
In accidental surrender
Of gently closing eyes.

Sadness

Sadness is not a puzzle
To be solved
By slotting each jagged piece
In just the right place
Grabbing all the edge bits
And leaving the vague till last

It is a broken thing
Waiting
For the making new
A mosaic of jagged pieces
painstakingly placed
By trial and error
Into a picture that
Breathes and stretches
as it gets made

Always resisting the urge
To rebuild what once was broken
These razor edges resist
The anesthesia
Of forgetting their birth


It is standing at the tomb of an old friend
And calling the unknown to rise.

Two

She hides her rage well
Down deep
It leaks into the water
Strains into the aquifers
Creeps into the buckets
To spill with heavy wetness
When her moments start to shake

She hides her rage well
Behind questions too big for asking
"Where?! Where!? Why!?"
Snapping in the wind of her mind
Like a tattered flag
Lost on a battle field
Where is the king now?
Why has he been gone so long?

Some things I found in my diary

Sometimes I forget
How to go places with my feet.
Or without them.
Or within them.

..

To be Samson
And push
On the pillars of injustice.

..

One

Blessed

Like the bleating ram

Fluffed and fattened

Finding its way to an unknown altar

I went to count them

But they

Had slipped away

When I lay down

Doubt
Lets the colours
                          run
Lets the ink unglued
                          become undone

Acceptance

Acceptance is not for the acceptable

What need have they for it?

Where would they keep such a thing?

There is no room in the inn.

No, acceptance is for the unlovely

The tattered and diseased

A gift to those whose pockets have room enough

Because they are so full of empty

The Vague

Every time it gets me

Folds me up inside

Creases up my spaces

Until everything tears

We who burn to shine and yearn to climb
Bright towers where dragons do not lie in wait
No
Do not wait do not pause
To take in the sights.
To turn out the lights.
Take out the trash.
Preplan the flights.
What's the rush? Everything!
Stacked like dominoes in a Jenga Box
Poised for tumbling when the music stops

Burn to shine to forget the time
Forget ourselves
For one bright moment
Where we flow like stars
In our own galaxy

When you were different
On the day you were made
Ideas pressed together
Into soft papered flesh
There you breathed
Though you had no lungs
Or air to do the breathing
And no exhale marked an end
Or marred the wholeness
Of perpetual inhalation
Gulping in raw connection
Like a black hole
Like a sponge
Like the first unblink of a newborn
When you were different
On that day, before you made
Your first exhalation.

Silent Retreat

God struck me
So that I rang like a bell
And all my joints ached with fatigue
Yet it was not God who struck
For God was not there

God stirred my dreams
Like some vast prophetic vat
Bubbling thickly against the surface
Yet it was not God who stirred
For God was not there.

God ran His hands through my pain
Till its eddies shimmered drowning rainbows
Till they too were lost
But it was not God's hands
For God was not there

God came to me in the silence
In the stillness between thoughts
And held me within eternity
But it was not God who held me
For God was not there

God stood still on a lonely hill
As the Wellington breeze tore at the weak winter-sun warmth
And watched unmoved as I died
Yet it was not God who watched
For God was there already