Safety from False Security

Would you rather be complacent or compliant?  Would you rather someone speak for you in moments of silence or be lost in the shadows?

There is darkness in this world but we're not made of shadowy figures.  No one is all absence and we cannot be completely present.  I don't know everything and neither do you.  I'm trying to practice compassion but when I hear you saying it's one way or the other my ears become clouded.  I'm trying to practice grace and mercy, but I don't hear it in your tone.

I'm trying to practice unification though I know He said He said he came as a servant's sword.  Family values is not the gospel that I follow.  Though I may often travel the way of least resistance, I am not seeking to walk down padded hallways during my stay on this planet.  I just haven't figured out how to be vocal without being a condemning voice.  I am trying to be the incarnation of the Incarnate Word and it's not an easy task.  I am seeking to be hands and feet but I recognize my heart is flawed.

You may say we make mistakes but I know the truth.  I do more than make mistakes, sometimes I'm just downright hurtful.  The pain I've caused isn't always inadvertent; sometimes I'm transferring the bloodstained message of death.  Sometimes I'm ugly there is no excuse but sin and selfishness.  To say that I've made mistakes is a vast understatement.  In the moment sin doesn't feel like a misstep or a stubbed toe.  Rather, it is a moment of temporal self-gratification that I must recognize as the ugliness within me.  It is not something imposed from the outside, nor is it something that I can wash clean myself.

Granted, I do make mistakes, but to say all of my sin is just like stumbling over rocks while walking a freshly paved highway is to detract personal responsibility.  Sometimes my sin deceives me and I think I'm doing okay.  Sometimes I've convinced myself (and perhaps others) that what I do is less concerning than the (in)action of others and that is false.  Sin is sin and it is self seeking at it's most basic form.  I do not wish to avoid personal responsibility and so subtly damn myself and others in the process.  Instead, I would rather take full responsibility for my actions and turn toward a Savior that says He is more than I ever can imagine to be.

Not Quite Three Years

I fled my comfort
zone for a complacent
home.  A place where
an oasis is a hand
to have and
to hold.

I fell
asleep in Your arms
and woke up to
silent alarms.  My heart
rate slowed as
I managed to crawl
into adolescence and
saw signs painted
with the words
"arrested development."

I wish
I could understand

                              what

they mean but
my brain lay
incomplete,
undeveloped, and
immature.

So instead I fall
asleep and   dream
my courage to speak
                       and adventure
will return when I awake.

I dreamt of cityscapes
and arrived at
off-white
walls laced with personal histories.
Outside faces and names
mingle like dyes
on a gray t-shirt,
while inside my cinder
block shoes hold me
down instead of
arms reaching out
to hold me,
to carry me.

A Hastening and Hushed Heartbeat

I wish.

I wish I could tell you I was in love.  I wish I could let our dreams implode and the words in my heart met your ears like a soothing flood.  I wish there was a chance to connect the dots in our minds.  Tie our strings together.  I feel you light as a feather.  A dancing marionette doll that's cut it's strings.  I wish you knew me like these four walls.

Nestled in the distant clouds lies a once forgotten heart.  She told me she'd wait for me and I let her down.  Any words I could think to say just fall from who I am and fade into the distant past of who I've been.  No one hears me anymore except the echoes of the therapist's feathered pillows.  My voice echoes forth and back again and nothing visceral stays within me long enough to plant a seed.  Every seed dies before it grows.

She spoke softly to me so as not to hurt my healing heart.  "You've said too much; hold your tongue before it's bruised by your chattering teeth."  And yet I hadn't said enough.  The problem wasn't too much, it was the distance between words.  Why can't I speak more before the dam is constructed?  All the feelings, dreams, and wonderings become damed behind the structure within my head.  I wish I could tell you more sooner but I'm afraid it's untrue or inadequate.  I feel I have to wait until I'm cool and collected.  I try to fully understand a vaporous string that is constantly whisking with the wind from one soul to a shuttered song emerging from the shadows.

And my life as poetry is more narrative than rhyme scheme and rhythm.  It's more faint whispers in the distance rising from my heart's ashes.  I'm a blowing breeze and she'll never see me the same.  I'm a wandering soul and she sees my chains.  Falling down slowly is a miserable fate.  She found me in an unlocked prison and was too afraid of losing her wings to pull me out.  As I was too afraid of the world outside, I could not let her set me free.  My caged comfort feels like freedom so I lie awake with the weight of my mind's eye rising quickly while my heart's eyes run circles in the storm.

Nothing

I used to like the Internet but now I've begun to despise it more.  It's filled me with disgust.  It's brought out our worst.  It's driven a wedge between all of us.  Culture wars cause us to choose sides.  We filter our words because we don't want others to hear are real selves.  I don't know why I'm telling you this.  I'm just sick of all the nonsense.  All the laziness that blames me for my actions but doesn't tell me how to fix it.

One night I fell asleep a slave only to awake a prisoner in a dimly lit cell.  All the walls that held me in were shadows of all my forgotten dreams.  They ebbed and flowed, like early autumn branches that hadn't yet tasted the cool of the season.  Everything I thought I was was just thin tissue paper taped to my face.  I had believed the lies that those around me had spoken to me with smiles, hugs, and cherished words.  I had fallen for the falsities that I was trying so desperately to avoid.

There were holes in my beliefs grander than the self-inflicted stab wounds on my heart.  The faces winked at me and the salt from their eyes poured deep into my soul.  I lay upside-down and all this time I had tried to be inside out for them.  I had tried to share me with them but just became less of myself to appease them.  I fell while already laying down.  I fell asleep though my eyes would never shut.  I had to take everything in like a dehydrated sponge in a sea of filth.

Don't listen to me today.  There are only a few sufficient sentences here.  The rest has filled the room with nonsense.

Discontented Complacency

It was you and
it was me.  It was
all that we could do
to just keep
from falling further,
deeper.

Then I fell
face first into
sparse unidimensional relationships.
Words again became
hidden strangers but those with
familiar voices became stale,
shallow, and more like echoes.

The place
I fell consumed me
like a vortex
in a valley of quicksand.

All the
voices in my head
run away when I step
inside while the phantoms
lull me to sleep.

Every idea evaporates
if you leave
it out in the sun
long enough.

Nothing more,
nothing less;
while
my heart dreams
                           of falling asleep
in your arms.

Some Sort of Knoll

It's difficult to accept that you may be a wolf when you look back and remember the lush green pastures of your youth.  When you've tasted the cool stream of water, how can you stand to sit under the burning sun?  When you're raised as a sheep, it takes concerted determination to begin to wander into the fold.  You find yourself feeling like a prodigal son that has chained his right leg to a post while your left leg futilely tries to force freedom.  You find your mind wandering while your and try to catch your heart before it gets carried into a the forbidden forest like a balloon afraid to pop, though simultaneously reaching for the maze of branches.

Reaching higher but only holding onto my previous notions.  The daylight is a waking sign.  Cold water and no electricity reminds me of taking this life for granted.  Luxuries like a warm blanket on a brisk night.  Not knowing who I am but redefining everything and still nothing.  Embracing all but still feeling unaccepted or as one who doesn't accept.

The colors aren't just black and white.  It's not just neon and pastels.  There is vibrancy in a dusty woodshed and superficiality in the glow of the sign that reads "Now Open".  I'll see you on the other side of this and I'm today's a day I'm climbing.  No, perhaps climbing is not the right way to describe it.  Perhaps I've reached the surface in some aspects and have come up for air and to feel the buoyancy of my body anew.

Life takes (only) years

No matter how old you are you're likely to hear some iteration of the phrase "30 is the new 20," but let's be honest, the way some of us are living it would probably be more accurate for some of us to say something like "20 is the new 40."  We live sedentary lives behind phones and screens and long for community.  We hide behind bright, glowing distractions and live like no one can tell us what to do.  The one who will live prosperous life is she who has the humility to ask for help and the courage to push through crippling fear.

I cannot say that I've lived a full life as a 27-year-old teenager.  Rather, my life could be easily compared to an antisocial individual living with paraparesis and mononucleosis at times.  I return from work and stay inside.  I hide under covers and beneath my own selfish judgments.  I long to be longed for, to be accepted, or to be sought out, but all I do is breathe in the stale air of my apartment.  I fall asleep with the lights on because the lights behind my eyes have all but gone out.

...

I've taken myself seriously a time and a half but that's behind me now.  I'm walking around my shadows, hoping to avoid the cold in the darkness.  I'm breathing today and that's enough.  Complacency is dry, comfort is uncomfortable, and rushing through life is frivolous.  I'll write the words here though my fingers have not minds of their own.  Wake up now and then maybe we'll learn to live together.  Atoms overlap and time is a cycle of cycles that seems to move unto infinity.  Still humans are finite and all we claim to know is nothing but spinning for a short period of time.

Do we make the most of it when we say carpe diem?