The Heart Cannot Give Ministry
The brain is still a mystery
that the brain cannot understand
and the heart cannot give ministry.
The eye abhors its odious symmetry
such that seeing is not believing and
the brain is still a mystery.
Such problems are mated into our ancestry
who knew that lips cannot command
and the heart cannot give ministry.
Even to the man of artistry
who recreates the world by hand
the brain is still a mystery.
This citadel, whose abyssal entry
Bores through the Underworld, is beyond this land
and the heart cannot give ministry.
Despite the martyr’s misery
and the conquerors demand
The brain is still a mystery
and the heart cannot give ministry.
The Winter Wedding
The earth was dressed in snow
To honor the pure unity
Of the blessed virgin.
The tolling bell called the fall to slow
So the air could arrest the lunacy
of the solemn surgeons;
Images forged in defiance of the cold
and tested by madness with no immunity
or conversion.
A tear falls, becoming a snowflake as it goes
down a cheek, over a breast, across infinity
until the night’s conclusion.
Love calls the blessed ones to show
a symbol of their impunity,
An embrace of seclusion
wraps their origins in the throws
of wild ambiguity.
Afterward both will mourn the temporality of the fusion,
The frosty winter blows
icy singularity
A reminder of their flawed condition.
The Brothers’ Reunion (part II)
A burning, searing, painful light pierced the windows to the car. The smell of half-digested whiskey would induce nausea in any man not half-dead or half-drunk. Luckily the only occupant of the car happened to be both. The sun cut through the queasy blue sky and reflected off the empty fifth of Jack Daniels now located amidst a treasure trove of forgotten trash in the back seat.
Sigmund Cane, whose name is known to us but not by himself at the moment, was a simple man, the last of his kind. Utterly content with his decisions, although such as they were no reflection of any former or present dream he ever had for himself, he was free to make ad hoc amendments to his ethical beliefs. Such amendments, so nearly as he could tell, lead him to late night revelries on Thanksgiving Eve in some dive bar neatly tucked between a church and a construction site. Although in his foggy memories it was a graveyard and a house.
“Drink on Saturday, confess on Sunday.” He laughed pouring himself head first out of the back of his car. “Crazy Catholics.” Another chortle was cut short by the realized sensation of grass on his unshaved face. The green horizon was cut by two deep brown wounds leading to his back tires. Gathering his wits about him, Sigmund realized his location was in the middle of a field – luckily not to far from home. Unluckily the field was surrounded by an old stone wall. More accurately, it had been surrounded until a local gentleman had disregarded its existence and driven his car directly through it.
The car itself served better as a bed than a form of transport now. It’s owner looking on for a brief moment as if calculating some abstract quantum equation.
“I’d better start walking” Sigmund mumbled as he retreated from the field like a child learning to walk and how to fall properly. He left a scribbled note on the windshield explaining various situations which had theoretically occurred the night before in hopes that perhaps a Thanksgiving dinner might serve to cure his hangover.
Here, Now
shhhhh
Like the ocean or the wind
pressed in an abyss
between two lips.
shhhhh
Allow silence to define
a kiss from a near miss
between two hearts.
shhhhh
Snow as it dances outside the car
or a grand mountain of sand slipping
between two hands.
shhhhh
The stream is slow
A painful cry
between two eyes.
The Brothers’ Reunion (part I)
Thanksgiving was just another opportunity for a full garage and an empty house. The silence of the broken car radio reminded him of his recent money problems. Why had he traveled so far? His body had been trapped, although his mind admittedly far away, within the 1996 Jetta recycled tinfoil coffin while the same street front repeated every 3 miles: empty house, closing store, market, church, bar, construction, another house. The entire city was the color of a shabby paint job.
The dull gray fog made the ordinarily boring place, even more boring, the color of a man’s eyes who had given up. Despite the constant rain the only rainbows that existed on those streets were oil spills walking on water. Gray tombstones were camouflaged by the dull sky. The dead only parade by day light. This was a miserable place, a place he had regrettably been born in.
Beneath him miles of gray tar stretched back to his home, his origin. His former home, his new destination, lay through a giant mossy tunnel, one last stint of darkness. A cornucopia of bad habits itched underneath his skin, the sort of bad habits that a family will allow you to have out of love. He had once traced this road going the other way, running from a nightmare, rather than chasing a dream. The running was pointless. The umbilical cord had pulled him back like a man with a rubber band attached to his hip. The Jetta increased its pace.
Father’s Day
To give a life
To give away life
To give a way of Life.
Happy are those called to this life.
Hung
A tremendous blow
a heart string to hang from
curling like a question mark
Once inside.
A punctuated equilibrium
swinging back and forth
like a pendulum,
The crowd gathered sighs.
The man doesn’t die,
not yet, that would be kind
So he swings, swings, swings, in the wind
and can only whisper “why”.
A final exhale clings to silence, a nice clean note,
the summation of a life, leaving through the throat.
The author writes to a girl
He is an author writing a poem
in a room where the image of a monitor
reflects off the pupils
containing the universe of the author.
In the poem, the author describes
such conditions in such a way
So that the reader can surmise
a message? Perhaps not so fast
Because so too does the author read
every word, from first to last,
and never does he recognize
the same word.
He sees his face in the digital mirror
A forlorn brow,
a set of limp fingers, bearers
of a message, to himself, to others?
The coffee goes cold from being overlooked
Various books, with permanently bent spines,
are never understood, only elucidated.
He is an author writing a poem
about nothing except,
an author writing a poem
and deciding whose ears he speaks to,
whose eyes he writes for,
whose lips will follow along his path.
He pictures the tiny fingers
of a young girl who should be studying math,
but instead, for only a second,
decides to linger,
Her digits gliding underneath each word of
her favorite poem, his poem.
One day she will find a better poem,
a classic, or a confessional,
but she will always owe him, the author,
for, in his own simple way, he brings
her into a world,
Where a mirror can look into a mirror,
and see infinity.
But not be afraid.
The author smiles at a perfectly white
Sheet of paper, having been dirtied
just so one girl, he’ll never know,
Can find some strange and perfect delight
In the malformed words that grow
From a malformed head,
with malformed eyes,
that gaze at the size
of his head in the haze
of a malformed mirror.
“She’ll never know my name.”
said the author with some pride.
“But she’ll never be the same.”
Thus being said, he pushed the poem aside.
The Law of Non-Contradiction: Or why things die
It was on this very spot,
this pile of dirt we bought,
that our father once stood
He lived through wars we fought,
and he never forgot
that evil comes from good.
Is he in the wind, or in the mind,
the absolute of history, or the grace of time,
In her hand, or in the trees?
Perhaps he is none of these.
This body once contained
A child whose laugh sustained
the people of the wood.
But now this corpse remains
drowned in cheap champaign
that never tasted as it should.
Is he in the wind, or in the mind,
the absolute of history, or the grace of time,
In her hand, or in the trees?
Or perhaps he is none of these.
While turning old and grey,
he was recalled to say
“Dear, perhaps I’ve misundertood
The meaning of the day
or what price we pay
In persuit of the almighty good.”
Is he in the wind, or in the mind,
the absolute of history, or the grace of time,
In her hand, or in the trees?
Perhaps he is none of these?
But on the night he died,
While on his bed he lied,
He finally understood
That while some run, some will hide
some will fight, and others will abide
but no body shall be considered good
Are we in the wind, or in His mind
the absolute of his story, or the grace of Thine
On the land, or in the seas?
Or perhaps we are all of these.
