The Tide of Night

 The pale moon is hoiseted high casting a white light of rememberance on forgotten woods. The dimly lit paths we used to tread came calling back to me as an echo or the remembrance of a dream within a dream. The vivacious spring time had held such promise of new life and hope of the coming summers dawn. Then I recall the moment fall found us and we fell through time as a leaf watches the love of the familar branch pass as it drifts farther to the ground. Yet, unlike the gentle leaf that lightly touches the soil, we hit the ground with a thunder and were buried beneath the thorns and thistles.

There we lay upon the cold ground struggling to regain a sense of footing, a sense of foundation.

From that ground the winds scattered all that we were or could be. Storms raged and refinement rained down upon me drowning out the dead seed of the man I had been, allowing the growth of the man I could be.

As I watch the tide of night wash over the memory of the mountains crest,

I turn my ear from the echo of those forgotten woods, and smile to God for making me the man i am.

The Gathering Fall

 

The Gathering Fall

These words are tombstones littering a graveyard of memories. My eyes have finally started to blind themselves to your ghost in all these old haunts. I've got one foot in the next world and the other is trying so hard to wipe my feet here. These old muddy boots have tread a few too many back roads, and dark paths. These eyes have wept in the depths of sorrow and uttered broken laughs. I lay these sentiments before you like roses among the cold empty air, as a visitor to the tomb of my own heart. The days of mourning a lost love have come to a close. I can see the winds of change pulling the stubborn leaves from the comfort of their branches. I can feel the breath of uncertainty as it caresses my cheek. This town holds the bones of dead dreams; the skeletons of old romance, and the burning silence of purgatory. I've burned my sins here in wasted breath and worthless words. I've felt the weight of a stone cross crush my iniquitous pride. I have seen the grave take you from me my ambitious bride. So in the stillness and quiet of the gathering fall, in the collective memories I lament... I shall remember that I loved you no longer my dear. I promise myself I'll forget

The Weatherman

There’s a tireless war in the soul, between pride and submission. The flesh and spirit fight for the prevailing interest. My mind oversees my casualties, and calculates the collateral interactions. There are days that my thoughts are cancer that seem to warp the cells of any around me. There are others where my casual self shifts the dynamic of the room, casting out shadows in a flood of life and light. It’s like predicting the weather on a whim even though nobody asked you too. It’s a gift and it’s a curse. Who can you trust with reality and truth?

There was a preacher man back in the day that used to tell me about how I made people feel when I walked through the doors. It was like I could reach into their hearts and unstrap the weights from them. When darkness fell upon me, with my grief and my sorrow, the man was wrought with contempt for me, like I was some casino cooler that just cost him his lucky streak. They always demanded that I be something. Fit the mold, dress sharp, wax the sheen in my smile and don’t dare wander into the area of mourning. He wasn’t even a good preacher. He always clenched his butt when he sang. It’s the odd things I remember.

 Love was like splitting the atom. The energy and the raw power destroyed me, burning my shadow into the ashes of my former self. In a moment I was becoming some one. I had a dream about her last night. It wasn’t unlike the rest. We’re trying to make it out safe, but I can’t save her. Sometimes my dreams are more honest then my waking life. Sometimes I’m pulling apart the things I know, and the world I see. I deconstruct myself like some self cleaning machine. I laugh at my flaws. I work on becoming nothing.

 Maybe relationships are like catching arrows with your teeth. In time, you might get one right, if you don’t bleed out first. People seldom sit with a man covered with blood, it makes them uneasy. It’s messy. Perhaps I have a morbid curiosity in the metaphor, “Who are you killin, or who’s killing you” It’s dramatic, yes. Reality is as such. Sometimes I wake up like I’ve got a secret to tell the world, but first I’ve got to measure who can keep it. Each day starts as life or death and it pivots into the other, moving as awkwardly as a high-school dance class. Monday was high with a 90% chance of memorability, but expect some storms rolling in by the end of the week. It gets lonely out there so bring an umbrella.

Are You Better When?

 I’m wringing old blood out of a bullet holed shirt since I’ve slowed the bleeding. Though the cloth might be warning sign enough, people still manage to see some kind of holy man.  My tongue is cut from all the times I bite it and my eyes are worn and old from fighting, yet some still come with accusations drawn. “I don’t think you give a damn about anyone, and I can’t actually believe that you’re even involved with something involving Christ.” She drew on me. I heard her coming though, as it seems I've got a sense about these things.  The shots might’ve hurt more if I’d even known her name, but these smaller caliber types aren’t much for a big old beast like me.  I shake her words like water from a bear fresh out of a stream. Have I become calloused to the voluminous strangers that approach and lob some critique of character having not known me? Perhaps I have. Perhaps not enough even.  She was up in arms because I didn’t spell her name right, or didn’t like the way I said hello to someone else, or more likely than not, wasn’t saying hello to her the way that she hoped.  I come with warning labels and I tell the skittish folks to be cautious, but yet they’re always mad when I don’t live up to some expectation that they’ve built. I never honor some contract that I didn’t sign. It’s like everyone knows some secret that I’m supposed to be more than a man, but a man is all I’m trying so hard to be.  Its as if I am a  scabbed over splinter in the body of Christ.  I know I am supposed to be something more holy. Are "We" loved better then? Are you loved better when you’re doing your best? Or are you crucified by strangers that think that everything you say and do should be different. I’ve been clothed in bullet holes and contemptabilities.  Both half dead and undying, I'm bound and bled by every word ever fired and every objection that’s ever left its mark.

Ghost in the Darkness

 Ghost in the Darkness

I'm picking my teeth in the still moonlight,
Spitting out the bones of this town
I'm grinning like a lion
Because I found my pride again

All you hunters with your arrows and guns
thought the best of me was taken down
and as I lay in the grass watching the wind blow
I remembered what it means to be free.

You're not treading on my skin thrown
across your hardwood floor anymore
because I've gotten that fire back in my eye
and I'm the king of the jungle
forget your spears and drop those sticks
I'm tired of your trite mud huts and frightened fire chants.
I'm done with this town.
I'm standing on rock, head held high
and when I breath deep...


I roar like the sound of thunder.

As Sons of Abraham

 As Sons of Abraham

I watch them march away,
in a single solitary line
They had so much to say
But no one took the time.

Some were vastly wounded
while the others had the means to mend
Some were spiritually executed
for their refusal to mix and blend.

Control is what they are after
Those claiming to be shepherds to the sheep
Sowing seeds of disaster
As the tares devour wheat.

Where are the checks and balance?
Where is the growth and life?
How many have gone due to circumstances
That could have easily not lead to strife.

When all it would have taken was discussion
When all that one needed was an ear
Now the community is rendering destruction
and not one of the founders would come near.

There are those along the way that saw this,
And they tried to scream out a word
yet they were dismissed as young and selfish
and nothing they said was heard.

So I look at the bones of my church
and I let out a serious lament

As one of the latest to be hurt
I remember what we used to represent.

Necromantic

 I opened an old wound last week just to make sure I was healing it right. I took a contentious book off the shelf of my heart and ran my fingers down the dusty pages. A tear in my thick skin stained the paragraphs with my blood. My eyes swam through the catalog of wrongs that I was professed to have done as my blood blotted out accusations.  I flipped the pages of the old tome of many authors voices, the lines repeating like a hymnal. “An anthology of fear and contempt; volume 1” is emboldened in fine gold lettering across the leather bound book.  Those that love me hate it when I read these chapters. “You must stop this” they say with exhausted eyes and tired attention. “This time is not as the others” I try to pierce their skepticism.  I sigh a knowing breath, as my fingers tighten across the pages.  I wouldn’t believe me either as patterns and predictions romance each other through recent memory.  With my blood stained fingertips I scrawl a confession in the margins of the wrinkled page. “I had a sliver of culpability, of which their transgressions did not justify” . I rip the pages from this archive of demonization, casting a whole chapter into the fireside.  I set the book back on the shelf of my heart where it will gather a thick layer of hindsight, until it’s inks are faded in time.

There is a body buried in the memory of my mind. A graveyard of love cut down. I walk among the limestone markers with embossed epitaphs. So many spiteful last words. This boneyard is for the living that have died to me. In the dead of night I reflect upon the message of forgiveness, and its power to raise the dead. Some words catch like cancer in the throat. I cannot bring myself to enchant the dead. I bring fear to these living dead as most do not see them as the are. To unearth these rotting bones with their tongues of poisonous hate is to crawl myself into their graves, deep into nothingness.  My loved ones look through the storm within my eyes to a sky that rages with light and not light. Backwards they tread as death pours from my mouth. In this graveyard of the living, there is but one body buried still. It is of the man I used to be. Poisoned knives have drank their fill of my flesh and I am poisoned, and I curse myself for allowing them to cut me.