The sleepless moon is rousing me
And pulling me to ebb and flow
Pale rays cut through to drag the deep
But silt yields nothing worth the know
Still every churning of the storm
And every passing of the tide
Combs through the bowels of the abyss
To clean and purge its black insides
And by the moon the angry waves
Keep threatening to wash ashore
The hollow, lost, eroded bones
Buried, banished to the sea floor.
All watery graves overflow,
And all their secrets, in time, spill.
Every wave hits its breaking point
Against the sand, against its will,
Pushed along by the wide-eyed moon
Who does the deed and takes his rest
So that the sun may shine upon
The tangled strandline confession.
Author Archives: viewingcamelot
About viewingcamelot
Your Sin Will Wash Ashore
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Narcissus would love this age
And its high-resolution photography
He would plaster his Facebook page
With his beautiful face for all to see.
And he would allow followers
But never accept friends,
Though the pool is ever shallow,
He would stare until the end
At his albums of his images
And post his every vanity
Always staring, but never seeing
The essence of his insanity.
Longhand
Spit out something new,
Something you have spewed
In the same old terms.
The linguistic squirm
Fidgets from thought to thought
Nothing is as fresh as it ought
But each day is a new footstep forward
We all move away, we all move toward
We’re all becoming what we rehearse
For better or for worse.
The Shadows of Time
Darkness stands above me,
A black clock-tower, and the face
Of the moon is handless
Counting by months, by days,
While my feet are ticking, ticking
Along the ground beneath,
And all the time that I tap out
Is time that I bequeath.
Obedience
Oh how we strive
Within this realm of God and men
And all the while
The ivy climbs the wall and blooms again.
We build, we shape
And we destroy with fervent hands and yet
The dead seed underground
Will live again and not forget
Where to sink its roots
Or to the surface stretch.
Turtles All the Way Down
The turtle’s shell would crack
Under such a great weight,
And my shoulders have long drooped low,
But I am learning to stand straight,
Learning it’s better late than never,
And never is a very long time.
Lament
Oh for these wasted, mortal senses
To perceive so much, but little understand
Filling the thoughts, the soul, but hence is
Emptied as an ocean poured in open hands
We wander each through his own field
We gather, we gather, but do not bake
With all our toiling, what do we yield?
With all we have, what do we make?
Betrayed
You, my usual haven in dream,
Came rushing in after your brood
Speaking sharp words, like breaking sticks
Like shattering my childlike mood.
Now, when I’m already weak
And the thing that lives inside my brain
Crawls and chews and leaves
A tunnel system of pain
Why, when I have stayed loyal
Swimming against the tide,
Why do you stand against me
Withholding kindness already denied
Just to cast me aside?
Calling on You
I stare beyond civility with closed eyes
Because the dancing flickers of light wound them
I chase you free through sticky grass fields
The air is clean and does not yet burn my chest
We run to where the storm loomed
I see you kneel;
This is the moment I learned your secret.
And I return after you have gone to
Wander through the smell of rain on hyacinth
Slowly, now my lungs are wrong and the air’s so thick,
But I find your abandoned crevice of hidden treasures
And now I kneel.
The sun is gone adventuring when I get home
My sweater is shrunk and stuck to my skin
I’m in bed three days with fever and sweat and dreams
Sitting on my chest and taunting me,
But I have been out to see you again
At the place I know you will always be.
God of Wonderment
Oh God of the smiling moon
Who watches me these many nights,
While swimming in my mother’s womb,
And blind in my first cries
You cradled me with tune
And steadied me upright.
Oh God of the dancing stars
Who stands guard over my bed,
Who sought me from afar
And resurrected all my dead
Who gently dressed my scars
and kissed my fevered head.
Oh God of the cloudless deep,
Who framed the soul of man
In flesh of day and bone of sleep
Who weaves our purposes to plan
All that is inside Your keep,
And all I am with all I can
Lifting muddy hands
Cry out Hallelujah
Holy, Holy, Holy!
Hallelujah
Holy, Holy, Holy!
