Five years
I gnashed my teeth,
Anger’s fist in my stomach,
The world, the future, my history
All rewritten in blood

Five years
I berated myself to obey.
Self-flagellations, recriminations,
Hard within a hard day,
Seeping the infection.

Five years
And I got sick
Death-rot in my gut
Burning sulfurous double-wicks
Trying to chastise myself to release.

One afternoon,
Memories sweet like sun tea
Cool on porch swings
Memories of your fidelity
When the worst is done

And You remain.

One afternoon,
Chubby baby legs in the sink
Repentance, dissolution
Washing her clean
Alongside my own soul

Tears flooding my rotted gut
Where reprimands could not reach,
The tender tide of love impossible
To dissuade or to impeach

Releases forgiveness, the caged dove, and
Restores the softness inside me.

You spoke
And matter collided into being
In perfect order
Animals stretching forth to sing
Praises in a new tongue
To the Creator King

And I will be whatever You say I will be.

I sin
Striving hard between
My broken flesh,
Emotional deformities,
And spiritual stubbornness
But I have seen

The glimpse of Your beauty beyond comprehension.

You redeem
From the darkest sins
I stand only on Your work
And when I stumble again
I fall into You
Spare me from the recoil of men

And allow me to sing,
Whether in exuberance or agony,
To You, my eternal Savior King.

I never belonged to the barking hawkers.
They heralded my path to perdition.
Sufficient without their momentum-
Forgive me for seeking their permission

Even their affection.

What may be their mission,
Is an expression of my conformity
Overturning my design for
An infirmity of form

A painting over a painting.

I am not incorporated.
A single person from humble beginnings
Flailing in the freedom
Of expression, and service, trimming
The wicks of history

I am painted in
The broadest expression
Of human experience
And it is a transgression
To seek heightened, narrow pursuits

A tower, a city, a mantra.

I have walked the earth
In the barest of feet,
And in my poverty
I have dined with kings.

This is who I am
And it is dishonesty
To amble with troupes
When I am made to be me-

Small,
but distinct from the sea.

Rain pelting my swollen face, but
I wandered barefoot into the storm
In searching rays the unbroken sun rises:
Your face shines; by grace I’m warmed
And the laments, the wails,
The twirling vapors of fate
A million broken stories
Step back in shadow to wait
The bridegroom draws close,
His musical entourage swells
My knees find the dirt
The black dog felled
Footsteps, and a harsh word
Would shatter what remains
These few, fragile shards
Wearing my name.

No voice has earned the right
Like Yours
Yet You share Your worth;
Your worth is sure.
And of all the swirling majesty
Calling electric praise
From grounded souls,
Endless shouts to the Ancient of Days
From finite vox
The clean from the unclean,
It is Your infinite tenderness
That reigns supreme

In the frangible, sensate-awareness
Of my mortal and immortal being.

The summer blades
Carving monuments
In derby cars and soap bars
And skidding bicycle tires
Rolling with the ants
In itchy pollen sleeves,
Plump, fat leaves forming
Shade tenements
And eternity is summed up

In a single afternoon.

Years ago, I spoke it clear
Our society by design:
My father took my mother’s name.
My father gave me mine

Until a brightly cheerful
Blooming summer day
I made him stand and watch
As I gave his name away.

There before all God and man
His name dissolved in rice
A smile, a hug, a warm farewell
Atop the sacrifice.

Nestled home, a new woman,
And never quite the same
I gave birth to a daughter
Who bears her father’s name.

I’m tired of being a fractured dish
The smallest on display,
With all my jagged, broken bits
In vibrant disarray
Like some offbeat, off-key,
Off-kilter cabaret

Are these seeping seams
Caused by fragile health?
Gifted with loyal friends, abiding love,
The immeasurable, unmerited wealth
Of grace in constant, freeing aspersions:
I’m tired of being the worst version of myself.

If these breakdowns
Breaking me down
Are caused by some physical intruder-
Misfiring nodes, a chemical frown:
Mend whatever interferes
And bring me back around.

If these longer shadows
Signal another pruning season-
Don’t let me run from the blade,
Nor commit the tiny treasons
That prolong the day
Finish what You began:

Deliver me to the day of completion.

I gazed through the back window
In a car in Warsaw
Staring backwards
Past the houses
With jumbled yards, and
Those with squared lines and
Mowed precision
Past the jumbled years
And expectations
Drying up like fall leaves
I stared
Into the broken homes
And dark rooms, the violence
The battered hours
The flesh on flesh
Twisting, pounding,
Staining childhood with the
Bloated, purple corpses
Of hope, or trust, or
Any layer of security.

Still a child,
Still purpled and sullied,
I saw it move through
Generational brokenness-
An excruciating inheritance,
Those who came before
Cast echoes through
The ghosts that are to come,
And I prayed fervently:

Let it end with me.
Let me be the last one.

I read Plath
And all the while
I was mad
As a March hare.

It’s the relative passage of time
That wrecks us,
Splitting the infinite paradigm
The smallest flecks of
Moment and inkling
Memory as masons, paving neural networks
Christened by the sprinkling
Of patriarchal guesswork
While a fresh pulse of ink flows,
The sands of time fall still
In the aura- outside demands grow-
Earth, round, spins at full tilt.
No sanctum as refuge-
No sanctuary to claim
In the pagan temples of refuse
Maiden debris of names
Cast-offs of Indifference
The altar of unsculpted desires
Running crimson with reverence
Withheld from the fire
And endless rounds of the savage
Beating of drums,
Stanzas repetitively ravaging
Linguistically numb
Quotidian queens in full regalia
Stooped under headdresses
Worn for the staggering saturnalia
Of autochthonous excesses-

And we gurgle, flail, and elsewise drowned,
In the words we repeat, but never write down.

Last night, within the realm of dream,
Every knee must bow
But there was kindness abundant
For those in the position now

Yet there, on our knees,
Perpetually hobbling
Right and left
Incessantly squabbling

We argued whether
You began Your work in man
Because we bowed, or if
We bowed because You began

And all the fighting made me sad
I withdrew to higher ground
Where I saw You never began,
But always abounded

Changeless through all
Every moment sketched
By Your palm
And a calmness in all You etch.

Then I awoke in a body
Heavy under the effect of sin
Old and tired and broken
At the hands of men

I slipped again into dream
In a foreign land, under no conviction
A uniform led me alone to a cell
Though we both knew he had no jurisdiction

He asked me if I would wait inside-
I was too tired to speak my release
Tired of the fighting, of being alone,
Tired of yearning for peace

So I waited in a cell
I knew would never hold me
I searched my depths for any part
Of me that could still speak boldly

But as I sat, the ground began to teem
With mites, and lice, and parasites,
And every nasty, crawling thing
That lives upon the bite.

Still tired, but I knew it was imminent
That I would leave my little cell
I wouldn’t be allowed to wait there forever,
As all of time would tell

And I inhaled to tell,
And I awoke.