I’m on fire and swimming in a pool.
I’m swimming underwater and still on fire.
But nothing burns
but me
Tag Archives: poetry
Can I make out of words
Can I make out of words
what I wanted to get on film?
Ten seconds of the freight train
rumbling by?
And a boy biking,
his pedal striking
the kickstand loose
and useless?
With a proper hoe / The harrowing
Won’t there be endless
progress into the past
and won’t we find there
everyone no one
ever heard of,
and won’t they stand
and flourish finally,
just as they’d hoped?
I, Barabbas
Christ to death
while the guilty man goes free.
And a white-hot freedom it is –
one better left alone.
Better to putter behind
shades and abstractions,
to sleep the many sleeps
that bring us our own.
Where believers go when God arrives
Your light is flooding this tract.
It has soaked the grass
and risen up through the brush
to fill the trees.
And so we must flee.
We climb the trees to await
boats of darkness
that will take us to caverns
cool and
covered with moss.
Where we’ll wait, to see what You do.
The living water went out of her
No, don’t look back
Don’t long for it
Don’t stand dry with memory
in a future made of wind
Am I reducing you?
How can I help but reduce you?
Even now I’ve no line
to show you’re more
than I can see or say.
So stay, please,
and forgive me.
Forgive and watch
these passing fields,
and be the same
old friend to me.
Laetare
I don’t like the stupid part
of being a disciple –
how you have to learn
the same lessons again and again,
fight the same fights,
and offer the same apologies
thirty years in a row.
I’m sick to death
of thinking I get it –
feeling contrite at Mass,
all that wet-eyed resolve
and the light shining on
just the right window
at just the right time –
until you’re again coughing, after,
over your coffee, sputtering
your justifications and wondering
secretly if God Himself is not choking,
ready finally to keep His promise
and spit you from His mouth!
Unburdened by apples
I took apples across
the country and back.
I didn’t shine them,
I didn’t eat them,
I didn’t even know I had them.
They lay hidden beneath
a coat in my bag.
They’re perfect, perfect,
potentially perfect.
May you, like me,
be unburdened by apples.
Love makes another scene
Going overboard again,
overdramatizing,
forgetting there are limits
to what people can take,
how they don’t want to hear it,
not in a restaurant
or ever,
all the fool convictions, thinking
she can fix things,
hoping again, when all we want
is to be left alone
Utrecht Journal 