A hand to the helm
And an eye to the stars.
Let You be my course and aim,
And be my means both near and far.
Let me hold with cold knuckles
The wheel of obedience
To guide this vessel through fog and foam
With all hope and expedience.
Neither driving blind in darkness
But clear the webbed clouds of desire and doubt,
Through which I strain, but cannot
See Your magnificent route.
Be my works, and be my hope,
And be all You always are
To guide me safely home again,
Be my helm and star!
Waves of faithful
washing over my faithless,
When I despair
as one who is graceless,
You respond
and fear falls baseless.
I know again, it will be okay,
for even if I cease,
Your love continues on
to uphold in perfect peace
where my love stumbles lame,
a slave to consternation and caprice.
The sky bleeds a violent gray
Like some sidewalk chalk masterpiece
Under the storm’s display
Raining in the depths of me
Rivulets of dread dismay
Is it anger? Or sorrow? Or sin?
Or just a rainy day
Seeping through the cracks of me,
Leaking in to how I pray
Dripping, dripping, each drop whispers,
Eager to join, eager to say,
What if it isn’t going to be okay?
Red Sky at Morning
And you were born in the churning storm
Following the warning.
Violence in the wind,
You board up your windows,
In limbo again
While the tempest rages-
Your most-valuables
Barricaded in cages.
Red Sky at Morning
Blink away your warnings.
Red Sky at Mourning
These are your days of turning,
Unfurl your sails, still forming
Warm yourself in the light of day,
Put your face into the tide
Get your strides underway
These howling winds will pass
You are seaworthy, and your hull
Will remain intact
Red Skies never last,
The sun’s fury sets
This too shall pass.
We dug our toes into the clay
Formed along the banks
The walls of our castle at play,
We watched as clods sank
But we ever stayed.
The tides came in, came in,
And we rejoiced to see them rise,
But they always left us again,
And it came as no surprise
We tarried on the banks when
The final sunrise condemned us.
And how, if you weren’t there,
Could you profess to understand?
Being familiar with a continent
Doesn’t make you a citizen of the land.
You cannot see your own tomorrow,
Yet lament the doom of another’s
Because you don’t have the faith to see
The caterpillar gets smothered,
Digested, and seemingly dies,
Before being resurrected in beauty-
Nothing gets so terrible
So far beyond its duty
And incapable of function
It cannot be made well again.
Nothing gets so bad
That good cannot break in.
So don’t weep for those whom you are not,
And declare the good has gone and died.
The ferryman doesn’t wait for your alms
To pass from side to side.
Every crippling blow today
Can one day fall in stride.
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.
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.
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.
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?
viewingcamelot 