It’s bizarre
Stumbling into a waltz
Mid-song, mid-step,
Uninvited with all your faults:
Clumsy toes, lack of rhythm,
Ignorance of the dance,
Rote outdated maneuvers,
Misplaced stances
While all the other dance partners
Know each other, know their moves.
They laugh at you as you trip by:
The tongue that cannot find the groove.
Sometimes it stings, and you weep.
Some days you shuffle on numb.
It isn’t their fault
You’re the sore thumb
The left foot.
But on the off chance
You may find the music,
There’s nothing else to do but dance

Alone, offbeat, the best you can muster.

The compensations I make:
Reaction, emotion, expression-
To maintain my balance
Lean farther in either direction

Than I am comfortable or accustomed.

Help me find True Center;
Give me a Northern Star.
Or help me see if You already have
And I am blind to where they are.

I am forgetting what solid earth feels like.

I am struggling to bridge
The chasm between their small graces
And the self-involved apathy and cruelty
That, with indifference, left me faceless

Alone in a cold grave.

I am struggling to see our intimate prior life
As a predator feeding at will
On the ignorant lamb
And does that mean I am still

The ignorant meal?

Can I heal and forgive and love
In a way that isn’t driven
By sheer choice and discipline-
Can I still be forgiven?

Since my infancy, sharpened fangs
Fall in line to feast
A constant succession, is the procession
Because the awful beast

Hates me, or the Divine it sees
Has etched me in His hand?

Am I worth more than the blows that land?

Will I ever trust again?
Will there ever be someone worthy?
Will I ever truly care for another again?
Is brutality the perpetual cost of mercy?

Are there human connections that don’t incise?

I have been murdered in plain sight,
And reciprocity cannot make it right

But I want to strangle time nonetheless.
All these things I confess.

Procreation is the apex of maturation;
The pinnacle wherein the thing being made
Becomes the maker- prototype to replicator.
The thing grown into itself is staid
And able in turn to produce
In identical form and shade.

How much so for those of the faith?
Reproducing in like form
The substance of things hoped for.

Time is the food
Feeding the activity of conversion,
The exact amount of fuel
To power the engine
For the exact amount of miles,
Minus a few.
The author who constructed it
Did so with ALL in view.
As it disperses, it releases
The sustenance of our motion
And transformation
Our propulsion
The blood feeding
The running leg,
The flesh in the seed,
The oxygen in the egg,

A powered field of momentum and vacuum.

The foreseen necessity:
The exact requirement of energy
To gestate and develop a bride.

Climbing a mountain
With lame feet
Means being left behind,
Stumbling, tumbling in defeat
Down the plane, over stones,
Beginning again incomplete
Alone and bruised.

Reaching for heaven
Lifts the aim of my pursuit
Above the jagged obstacles,
Hazards inflicting jabs acute,
But no jab compares to Your nails:
Bleeding to commute
The sentence of Your enemies.

You had to keep moving.
Your enemies right behind with
Different faces in different places,
In deceit, in false kindness,
And both friends and enemies
Walking in total blindness
To the reality around them.

I am blind, Father,
Touch my eyes, make me see,
The structure of Your design
The power of speaking into eternity
As Your Spirit indwells
Time reducing infinitesimally:
Colliding, dispersing, converting

The golden thread I saw
A quantum entanglement of soul
Sharing properties, transforming,
Fusing with lesser nodes
Rescue, redemption, regeneration
Damaged strains to integrated whole

A great organic debridement
Of Your forever, woven bride,
Burning off what’s disentangled;
You never intended to hide
The complete, amniotic poem of creation
But in our pride
We think in crayon sketches.

Repair my love.

Grow new limbs here:
My faith. My hope. My love.

Let Your desire for me
Be my only sway
The only guiding gravity
Molding my byway:
Remake my ability to move and
Repair my ability to stay.

Where You go, I go.
Where You stay, I stay.

Thank You for the beauty
Of Missouri: the river, the fields,
And all the wonder of them
I’ve been able to steal.

But the people here that You rightly love
Have been brutal to me
All empty words and numb hearts-
An ice gauntlet: a frigid battery.

And I know You,
How You must grieve
For all of Your prodigals
But I want to leave.

I can’t wait to forget this place.

In a raw season
I let them in.
I bitterly regret it,
But I can’t get them out again.

Their appraisal of me
Will be the one that carries me
For the rest of my life:
The one that buries me.

Is there a corner on this earth
I can curl up under for comfort?

Is there any safe place for me
To rest in peace?

I hate it here.

All of my days, so full
Of the myriad of moments
The complex paradox
Of human atonements
And divine renderings.
How prodigal I’ve been.
Look on my ignorance;
Forgive my sin.

On those incapable of love,
I spent it all.
So did You,
In the throes of our fall,
But Your love
Changes a man;
Mine built houses
Of sand.

I’m world weary
In my bones
Please let my journey
End in a forever home.
When I close my eyes
In my final tears,
And lay to rest
These tragic years.

Or else, let my heaven
Be a lonely meadow in bloom
Wherein no predators
Will ever consume.
I told You once: I’m so small.
I asked You to carry me
Into tomorrow:
Maybe tomorrow is eternity.

I’m sorry I wasted my hours.
I don’t have any more stakes
To drive into the earth.
Please don’t forsake

Your foolish child.

Father, cleanse my soul.

For believing the worst of my friends,
Forgive me.
For speaking what offends,
Forgive me.
For thinking as means to an end,
Forgive me.
For demanding food for my sin,
Forgive me.

For stepping into another’s place,
Forgive me.
For seeking comfort over grace,
Forgive me.
For desiring anyone else’s face,
Forgive me.
For resenting running my own race,
Forgive me.

For turning a shoulder
Where I may have extended a hand,
Forgive me.
For thinking of myself
When I could have tried to understand
Forgive me.

For taking or keeping
What I may have shared,
Forgive me.
For expecting care
Where I ought to have cared,
Forgive me.

For coming to be served
And not to serve,
Forgive me.
For treating love and grace
Like substances deserved,
Forgive me.

Most grievously I have sinned,
Let Your mercy know no end!
I have no righteousness to display
Let Your glory light the way!
Cover me in bridal garments of grace alone
Prostrate I fall before Your holy throne

And surrender all of my nothings.

Cleanse me in Your tenderness,
Worthy Lamb and Father.

Forgive me
My speech became a saturation
Of resentment
And bitter accusation.

Help me
Extract precious from worthless
The heavy grief
Leaves me mirthless.

And the pain,
And the lonely work ahead
May be my days
All that remains before dead

Resurrects alive in me.

The tiny, baby hairs
On the back of my neck
Bristled in warning
Before and behind, I checked
For the being I felt
Staring with malicious intent
The darkness took form
Street noises went absent
Is this because of my new routine,
Or just the year I’ve had?
I sense danger in persona,
Threat in shadows-clad,
Is it in reality?
Some kind of spiritual stew?
Or just psychological drift illusion
Looking through trauma-residue
In fragmentary awareness
With an understanding
Of the new risk levels
I am handling.

But then,
Has there ever been anything right,
Or safe, or trustworthy
In the night?

Is safety even a real thing?