I'd rather sit here with You
And perceive myself alone
Than search for her cold comfort
In a love long overthrown.

The Enemy

Why do you let me live
When you know I need to die?
I never had a thing to give
... To all your asking 'why.'

Yet, I'll send you running
Away from me again,
With such a keen cunning
You'll think me your best friend.

All the while I am the foe
You never would suspect
Who steals from you that I might grow -
Your Dark God-elect.

So of course you will not kill
Because I have such a charm
As to take over your will
And from God your life disarm.

The Ultimate Sacrifice

In the end, everything comes down to this that you must choose:  do you want your suffering, or do you want God?

God knows the choice you've made for all your years now. 
Do you want your suffering? 
God knows all you have thought, all the violent, angry, and cunning cogitations, for all your years now. 
Do you need your suffering?
God knows the lengths you have gone to hide yourself from yourself for all your years now.
Do you covet your suffering?
God knows all the precious moments you have run from to protect yourself for all your years now.
Do you crave your suffering?
God knows all the hearts you have trampled on to elevate yourself for all your years now.
Do you love your suffering?

God knows it all, has seen it all, has been there through it all, has experienced it all, is with you even now. 

God does not hate you.
You hate you.
God does not judge you.
You judge you.
God does not wish you harm. 
You wish you harm.
God does not give you guilt.
You give you guilt.
God does not withhold from you love.
You withhold love from you.
God does not make you unloving toward others.
You make you unloving toward others.
God does not ask you to suffer.
You ask you to bow down before your god:  suffering.  For the mere sensation of life rather than the profound living of it.

The heart-rending groans while in the throes of choosing to give up and let die your suffering are surely the heavenly sounds of the angels motivating and celebrating with song your freedom.  Don't stop.  Don't turn away now, though it hurts.  God is calling you home.  You are oh so near.  Go the rest of the way.

Why does God love me so much? 

God gives me love even though I don't deserve it.  I want to give love even when a person does not deserve it.

Love is receiving what you don't deserve.
Love is giving what you don't have.

W.B. to T.J.

You're done with all that there - that saddening
of heart, that parting of ways, that traversing
of streets worn bare with the mind's maddening
penchant for undying through ceaseless conversing

over what is past, passing, or to come. 
Now is before you if you hold it there
and agree to set fire to all you become
as this Second Coming places you where

this woman called you can be undone.

Winter Lyric

This weekend, you reined creativity
On me.  Back again like the sight of breath
At the return of winter.  Seems like spring
When for so long now my heart was barren

Of the nourishing light, soil, and seed
Your love provides to sow this need.

Love's Greatest Gift

Death is Life's best friend because he removes us from that which hurts to hold onto any longer and leads us not to the end but to a new beginning.  And while Death may seem a grim, sad, and solitary figure, it is only because, when in his throes, we see him only for what he is taking us away from, not for what he is taking us into. 

Mostly, it is only after we have been dragged unwillingly through the process of dying that we are able to see that an ever-expanding and an ever-deepening version of Life exists eternally on the otherside of Death.  Yet, Life says, "Love Death now, for he is my most precious gift to you." 

Such an understanding compels me to invite this Old Friend into my life in each moment.  Afterall, any friend of Yours is a friend of mine.

I Just Remembered...

Nothing belongs to me.

Pretty Bird

Tonight, I bury my beautiful friend and companion of 17 years, little Zeke Esther Lee.  This morning, when I was coming out of sleep, I thought I heard her little tweet.  Her beautiful little spirit is nestled in my heart...always.  I love you, Pretty Bird.

She died this past Monday night, 6/13/2011.  She was not sitting on her little stand in the living room, but in a different space due to a recent rearranging of furniture and combining of families, and I just wish I would have been there with her and for her when she passed.  I wish she could have felt at home in her final moments. 

Yet, I know that now she is home, and welcomed there by Another who is so grateful to her for the journey she took and the lives she brightened. 

I love you, Pretty Bird. 

Losing My Life

There is a saying:  "Take back your life."  This thought has continued to present itself for my consideration over the past few months.  But why would I want my life back?  My life is the reason that I am here in the clutches of an intense and prolonged despair.  I don't need it anymore.

I have come to the point in my existence in which I will either receive Your Life or I will have no life at all.  This is the line in the sand.  The darkness can do with me what it will.  I will no longer lend it my voice or worship it with my deeds.  Whatever life there may or may not be outside of this, I cannot know.  I only know that I can no longer abide in this lonely death.    

Wasteland

Last night was the cruellest night.  I dreamed she returned to me, ready and willing to be loved by me, ready and willing to love me.  But it was a lie revealed by the cold truth of the gray light outside my window as my eyes opened against my will.  Today is a good day to die.  I am dead inside already.

"I Felt So Symbolic..."

I've been in a poetry kind of mood lately. I try to journal or blog in prose, but it seems so inconcise and wordy. So I put it in a poem. It may not be good stuff by any measure, but poetry is a way to force myself to get to the heart of the matter. I'll stick with it for as long as this stirring to write it remains.

Where Are You?

This loneliness is You calling me home to You. Yet, when I look to You for comfort and company, You are no where to be found. Could this be because You do not reveal Yourself to that which is unreal? Is the me that is lonely as illusory as the light of the moon? If so, then purge me of this dark light!  Rid me of its nonexistence inside.  The hypocrisy of fearing that what You have to offer is not enough when each breath and each beat of the heart...is You!

Integrator

You say to me, "Come with Me if you want
to die," and I turn back to whence I came,
for even though it is this place that's death,
at least it is familiar terrain.

As I wander this world for lifetimes hence,
You speak no more to convince or defend.
Yet, does Your absence from each moment since
tell me this offer You never rescind.

Then arrives at last this dark, deathly night -
that all unlived moments must lead me to -
when, for weariness, I no longer fight
as You take me tenderly into You.


 

The Prophecy

The confidence to which you stake your claim
is as tenuous as boastful Peter
on the fair-weathered day he swore to Christ
that, of all disciples, his love was sweeter.

Now thrice-denied by your cold, clever heart
distracted by the arms of another,
I say unto you such false loves must depart
for the pain you grasp is your true lover.

Partial Love is Partial Hate

"...killed the part of me that loved you,"
she said to the pitiful fool
who once had the nonsense to believe
that the whole of her love did rule.

Now wearing stabbed heart upon
his sleeve, the fool has nothing to
believe, but only this to know:
wherever half-love lies, there too

                       does hatred grow.

Go Before Me to Make the Crooked Places Straight

Thank you, Love, for saving me from myself.  If it were ever obvious that I know not what I do...

Unholy Creation Through Opposites

To experience your absence
is a body without food:
I linger undead for a time
as if I've misunderstood.

Your withholding creates
the hungering of my soul
that can only be appeased
by the presence you control.

A Beautiful Song About Letting Go

Radiohead never fails to delight.  Listen to this song and weep.  Or rejoice.  Or, most appropriately, do both.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPkhb8l8UNI

The Purpose of Past

I know without a doubt in this moment that the greatest act of courage is starting anew.  All that is old rises up against me in that moment of wanting to begin again - a tsunamic tidal wave set against my leaving behind the confines of the island of the past.  This idea of starting over is so cliche in our world today, and it is sentimentalized to such an extent, that there is virtually no awareness at all of the pain-staking determination, persistence, and effort required of the individual who knows that he can no longer remain who he has been up to this moment.

I know this to be true because I am working to start again right now.  Returning to this blog is an expression of that work.  I got a chuckle out of seeing some of the old things I wrote about on here.  Most of it seems to me to be naive, boring, and not too well focused.  Downright rambling and even embarrassing at times.  It seems I mistook this blog for a journal of sorts.  I was tempted to delete it all and start the blog over from scratch, but that would be a denial of who I have been, which, paradoxically, I have found to be the biggest stumblingblock to starting over.

The Real Reason (Love's Dead)

She thinks it might hurt me -
and maybe it does -
to read her reasons for
The End of our love.

Still, something's still worse than
being thus told...
Like clinging to reasons
for love turning cold.