Give me new paper. Fresh, crisp
and smooth, so the ink
shall not run if I must write.

lines.

i think what i like about being part of a lie is that... you know what the lie is and what the truth is

-- Pavithri Kulatunga

Maybe after all these years of understanding your silence
For once, I didn't get it
When you spoke.

Before it is finished...

I have come to touch you.
To put my fingers in your hair - oh!
it must be thick and strong
does it stretch or curl? - run,
through parting until somewhere, there,
I feel little depressions where a crown was once fitted.

I have come to touch you.
To run the side of my thumb down your spine - oh!
It must be straight as an arrow
each vertebrae precisely placed - stroke
and find a story everywhere, there,
written across your back in rivers of scars and hills and mountains of knotted flesh.

I have come to touch you.
To slide my palms along your shoulders - oh!
how strong they must be, they bore, the tree and the world - rub
gently down your arms until there, where,
your slender wrists met the forge, there,
there is my heart become stone.

I have come to touch you.
To bow low and reach for your feet - oh!
how beautiful they must be, we,
deign to wash them? - touch
the tender place there, somewhere,
where in roses
sprung in indescribable perfection of
torn tissue and ripped muscle, spouting
spewing, spitting blood, blossomed
everlasting life.

I know
deep inside, strong inside, unshakable, immovable
that you. have me.
Lungs burning body cringing every hair reaching for you.
I fly for you.

You know
I write you poems because
deep inside, strong inside, unshakable, immovable
you are beautiful
Only, now, your eyes explode me your voice unmakes.

But enough.
of seeing
and hearing.

Now come.
touch me.
Break my sternum crack my ribs rip through my lungs pound
diamond to dust.
crush.

So I can finally give you the one thing you ever wanted.

Psalm 51:17 The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

Confessing

Psalm 139 has been one of my favourites for a while now. I relate to it so strongly that when I am lost for words and struggling to pray for myself, the psalmist seems to speak for me.

I'd been carrying an unidentifiable burden for about a week, and a few days ago, something finally triggered a total lock-down in my spiritual system. My body didn't want to cooperate either. And of course the judging little devil-voice told me it was sin: I must have done something wrong to feel this way. So I ran to the psalms and stumbled into chapter 32.

While I kept my silence, my body wasted away
through my groaning all day long.
For day and night your hand was heavy upon me;
my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.
Then I acknowledged my sin to you,
and I did not hide my iniquity;
I said, "I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,"
and you forgave the guilt of my sin.

So I confessed. I got down on my knees with my face to the ground and prayed and confessed and prayed and confessed and begged and pleaded with God to take the trash away from me. I know the categories: sins of commission, sins of omission, known, unknown. You name it. I thought I was doing a pretty good job of cleansing myself.

Of course I'd forgotten we inevitably fail in that. Nothing changed. I went back to my good ol' 139 and started reading.

Now a lot of us know lines 13 and 14:

For it was you who formed my inward parts;
you knit me together in my mother's womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made..

I mean, I've got it underlined in purple in my NRSV and all. But what caught my eye that morning was 15 and 16:

My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.
In your book were written all the days that were formed for me,
when none of them as yet existed.

Now I don't know what this says to you, but suddenly, I realized that I am not some flawed piece of God's creation that He was making with His hands while watching TV or something. He wasn't just practicing on me. As He made me, I was not hidden, His eyes beheld me. He observed, very carefully. And He appraised and approved every intricacy of my mind, every weave of my emotions, every line and molecule of my body.

And then you know what? He even wrote it all down before it was, just to make sure everything was perfect.

Oh look at me! Trying to fix it, trying to make sure it goes right. Dancing around in the gooey muck of my life, trying to hold it all together. And so proud of my shoddy work.

I didn't clean my life up that morning and I didn't suddenly see the light either, but I had a revelation. I am still struggling on my own strength. I don't still completely trust the man who made me. And I still have much to surrender.

I keep forgetting the latter part of 14:

Wonderful are your works;
that I know very well.

God is breaking the box that I've been trying to put Him in.

I've tried to close Him up between a number of walls: prayer, worship music, bible reading, animated discussion and sermons. I seem to have decided I will not hear Him or see Him in any other situations, and that if I don't "feel" Him in the situations I've laid down, then something is wrong with me.

But He is breaking through that.

He is speaking to me, despite my lack of discipline. He is speaking to me through my illness. He is speaking to me in "sensible" thoughts. He is speaking to me.

He is telling me I have become religious. I have a system I've developed for myself. A system of rituals like prayer, worship, bible-study, cell and rules like not swearing, not listening to secular music and not dressing a certain way. They are drawing me away from Him because He is love and grace. And there is neither love nor grace in rituals and rules.

Sometimes, it really is about letting go. And that's why love and grace are so important. We let go, and by His grace we don't fall. We let go, and in love, we are saved.

How terrifyingly simple.

How God-like!

We know not what we do

I lie, knees folded, my

Face to the ground

While I, knuckles clenched white

Cover my head, my

Spine exposed.

I pray,

“Lord,

I cry, knees folded, my

Face to the ground

While I, knuckles clenched white

Cover my head, my

Spine exposed, screaming

“Do I not hate those who hate you with a perfect hatred!?

“Waiting,

Knees folded, my

Face to the ground

While I, knuckles clenched white

Cover my head, my

Spine exposed,

For your wrath as it flows,

River, sea, storm grows

Waves rising, reaching for the sky, scraping, screeching, screaming as

Thunder roars

Pours walls of fire

Devouring everything in its way.”

I am safe, knees folded, my

Face to the ground

While I, knuckles clenched white

Cover my head, my

Spine exposed, whispering not but

From the depths of my being

Screaming

“SAVE ME!!!

“And in the eye of the storm I will be still and know that you are God.”

And the whip

Not still, quivering dried skin

Is raised, flung

 And I, knees folded, my

Face to the ground

While I, knuckles clenched white

Cover my head, my

Spine exposed,

Grit my teeth, waiting.

And the wind

Is flicked over my back

And I shudder knowing

That I felt nothing

Because it did not fall.

On me.

Fight in Me™

Peace.
Can be wrong..
?

When there must be struggle,
War
Pulling, calling, instigating.

But silence.

What bugle calls then?
What trumpet? What drum?
What sentinel on the city wall
Screaming
Never resting nor taking rest
until, Lord, you establish Jerusalem?

Only pounding.

Pounding silence
in the heartbeat
turns the prophecy into silent crashing
as the walls fall down
but

Diamond shields underneath
Fortress of the Broken Queen
Glittering hardness
rock.

But the voice of the Lord causes the oaks to whirl,
and strips the forest bare;
and in his temple all say, ”Glory!”

Send the fire.

The Promise

Twenty thousand feet above you, my children

Five a.m. and losing time

Everything is dark.

The haze is blue and grey and murky

Deep, where is anything?

But far, far away that pale strip of orange grows

Glows clearer into open blue

Slowly

Only moments since it bathed us red

Deep and painful like

Coagulating blood.

Do you see? Do you see?

Do you understand?

The Son is rising on your night!

Steady

In the deep heart of the morning is that moment of unknown
Between sleep and waking on the edge of a dream
The fragile border of transparency
Between black and white

The storm swirls and the dawn will smudge in
The sun might seem not to shine
But in the deep heart of the morning you are there
And I will hold the hope.

Soul Food

The thing you’re not going to forget about this kitchen is that it has a lot of yellow.

Not the kind of bright yellow we usually associate with kitchens, but a deeper, almost ochre shade. It says something about how she loves: happily consuming all, yet deeply, committedly.

At the table against the wall is where we sit long after meals or tea, talking, laughing, teasing, arguing. I often accidently take the old man’s wooden stool before he gets there, and he will improvise. He and the two boys are gracious in this, making allowance in their home for people who don’t have a claim.

They share space and love like the sunlight that streams in, all day long, through the window framed by white-blue-green curtains. It glitters, bouncing off the floor, lighting the place up.

In the late morning and afternoon, when there’s work being done, the place is like a factory. Sizzling, bubbling, aluminum lids tapping against pots, constant chatter and worship music on the radio.

Sometimes it gets so hot that someone must go round the back door to let the bamboo blind down on the outside. This is the only time I am glad to be barefoot, when the cool cement tiles soothe our bodies, from the soles up.

Those already passed on are missed, their padding through, mewing, zipping between the table and stool legs as they get to bowls of food against the other wall.

Funny there were never any ants in their food but always some in ours.

In the cake cooling on the stove, in the ceramic jar of sugar, in the juice, with the cookies, the chocolate. There is obviously too much sweet stuff here, tempting the ants. I keep spotting them, like the boys sometimes joke they find funny stuff in the food.

“Oh, it’s alright to eat,” she says. “I pray over it as I cook.”

The old man laughs, his voice booming, and the table erupts.

[diary entry]

 

Today is the kind of day that it doesn’t matter where you are. It never matters where you are, but today is especially so.

It’s cool out, the bench is chilly, but the sun is gently laughing at the cold.

I just shook hands with Bertis Downs. If you know who that is, “Wow!” cus you’re almost as cool as me. If you had to google him, now you know how cool I am. If you’re happy not knowing, your loss.

Athens, in my last few months here, is becoming more and more exciting. I am finally doing not just what I hoped to do here, but much much more. Now, the prospect of finding work here (let alone NY or Boston) is starting to look brighter and brighter.

How fickle the little brain up there!

In the Dark

In some distant
Neglected part of
Somebody's brain, an
Organism throbs,
Mulching fear and
Negative
Identity
Against her desire

About the other man…

 

It’s crazy what a song can do to you. I want to apologize.

I haven’t been exceptionally horrid I guess, considering I’ve been sick. It’s just difficult. You know, how you have a million things planned and you find that all that can actually be done is precisely nothing. First you lie on your butt, then you lie on your face, then on your favorite side, and then on your other favorite side and then you start wondering if you can lie on your head or something. And the sweating? It’s supposed to help get the bug out of your system but its just infuriating to be first cold, then hot, the cold, then hot, first dry, then soaked, then dry, then soaked. What happened to the middle ground!? I forget there’s no grey areas with you.

I know I should have been waiting for you. But its difficult. And sometimes, it’s just plain boring. So I start thinking. And when you’re sick, you don’t think straight. No, I’m not trying to justify myself or make excuses (only YOU do that) I’m just being real.

I tried to keep my mind on you. But honestly, I can’t remember the last time I saw you. I’ve forgotten what your voice sounds like. I’ve forgotten what it feels like when you touch me. Well, almost.

He’s just so much closer. And that makes it all that much easier. I’m sorry, but you’ve see him, you’ve seen what he does to me, and I kept you in the loop, so I might as well let you know – this is all your fault. You should have stopped me before it was too late. Why didn’t you do something? I mean, I don’t pretend to understand what you do, but I let you do it, don’t I?

Yes, I am petty. I am petty to blame you, I am petty to not take account for myself. I am petty for being a woman, petty for wanting a man that will stand next to me, hold me, smile at me, laugh with me. I am petty for loving that he’d hold my hair tight and kiss the corner of my mouth where I’d forgotten it burns. I am petty for finding reassurance in a voice that I can hear, petty for being pleasured by a form I can see and touch, petty for being a human with a body and a soul apart from the spirit that gives me life.

I am sorry I looked at what I saw. I am sorry I stared, and made him speak. I am sorry that when he spoke, I had to touch him and make sure. I am sorry that this still all about me.

All I have of you now is a vague memory of something I never perceived. Help me remember. Please.

Am I? - Alumni

 

Morning emails carry stories
of tea-parties, lunch and walking the town
Nostalgia, finally, will probably never end
No end, no closure for me.

This must be how the bug begins.

Truth

But if I build up again the very things that I once tore down, then I demonstrate that I am a transgressor.

I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And this life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.

FOR FREEDOM CHRIST HAS SET US FREE.

I will stand firm there, and not submit again to a yoke of slavery.
(Galatians)

He who planted the ear, does he not hear?
He who formed the eye, does he not see?
(Psalm 94)

Depart from me, all you workers of evil; for the Lord has heard the sound of my weeping.
(Psalm 6)

“…to fill the world’s cracks with needles that will let us hear those cracks speak…”

William H. Gass

from Reading Rilke

Falling Down

 

Squirming

I know this feeling

I know where it comes from

And I know who’s leading

 

Breaking

Writing as always

Opens up the floodgates

Now it’s going high ways

 

Calling

I will not be lost

You will always remain

The one who paid the cost

Wringing

Blood from the darkness

Power from the name

And glory when it all comes falling down

 

 

*disclaimer: I am not proud of this as writing, but as action.

Crudely

The sun has set. We’ve wandered along the riverbank and trotted back. It is a quaint street. One of the many, but we gasp about “O! How lovely!” it all is.

The candy shops are magical. Willy Wonka was real. So was the Mad Hatter.

Lights from the wharf glitter on the water now. They’re adamant not to be carried away by the flow of the river.

Chatter in the lamp light. Slapping thighs and necks to massacre bugs. Old friends meeting as tea glows gold by candle-light.

The chill coming down and we rise to leave.