On Mirrors

You drop an eye to me like a coin in a coffer
Begrudged every inch of the way down, careless alms
You are spent in passing. A pair of
Spinning gears and a quick recognition,
tide of remembering, tiger of a rival;
I am suddenly halved. Twice I feel
your depth as my own and your
Skin as my barrier, your pride as my chain,
And your face as my script.

Manner and Means

The heart is a lonely thing to lose in the dead of night.
The heart is a sad thing to lose in the throws of a fight.
The heart is a match to the fire
And the embers of desire, to keep it burning.

I am a shell of the manner and the means.
Mine is a story of nothing as it seems.
But when we’ve come this far
And still don’t know who we are, does it keep burning?

When it’s over, and you see it with your eyes
Would you rather have the truth or a lie?

I call for angels to breathe holy on this rust.
I call the snakes to come out slowly from the brush.
I need a massive overhaul-
A revival to fall, to keep it burning.

The heart is a costly thing to sell in the prime of the years
And my heart is thinly veiled in the usual fears,
The heart is the dream and the kiss,
That there could be more than this, to keep it burning.

-Caedmon’s Call

Important Business

As I Wear A Waterlilly On My Head

on weekends I gallavant
marked on my head with a waterlilly,
the mortar and men swelter fastidiously
and i need to skip slow so
they leave it unhurt.

A Door To Destroy

I walk tip-toe through fire beds
and pause at the doorframe; the spiral
of smoke they subtlely stated, “luminous,”
“novel,” “superb” and “delightful,” forgetting that
few loves are fireproof.

Laden with guilt, and full of fears,
I fly to Thee, my Lord,
And not a glimpse of hope appears
But in Thy written Word.

The volume of my Father’s grace
Does all my griefs assuage;
Here I behold my Savior’s face
Almost in every page.

This is the field where hidden lies
The pearl of price unknown;
That merchant is divinely wise
Who makes the pearl his own.

Here consecrated water flows
To quench my thirst of sin;
Here the fair tree of knowledge grows,
No danger dwells therein.

This is the Judge that ends the strife
Where wit and reason fail,
My guide to everlasting life
Through all this gloomy vale.

O may Thy counsels, mighty God,
My roving feet command;
Nor I forsake the happy road
That leads to Thy right hand.

-Isaac Watts

From “Little Gidding”

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives – unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:
For liberation – not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past
[...]
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.

IV.

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one dischage from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

-T. S. Eliot

A wonderful lift me
Waves the challenger
And enchanted,
Like snow, I succumb
To the fall and the wind.
The stitch in my side
Was sewn with your teeth.
The knot of the hem of
My soul is undone.

A singing cold undercuts my
blankets with the patience of a surgeon
and drags me from my own hoarded
warmth, shoveling my half-naked
contentment into the street. The
brightest lights are not in the sky,
but the dances of eyes and of smiles.
My confessions hang dragonlike and
hymnotic on the force of the air,
surrendered the wall of my pride. You
are the warmth that i seek and the
book of my silences.

Henrik Haiku

so blonde in green felt
grazed a page of craftsman-
wondering totem.