Coffee, pen, journal
I told the page a secret
Blotting out the sin
Coffee, pen, journal
I told the page a secret
Blotting out the sin
The moment he calls
I want to be by his side
Like how a leash works…
If love is a hotel…
And my love is on the top floor…
What gets me in the door?
To the front desk?
On the elevator?
With a key to the top floor? (Of course that floor is locked and guarded by fearsome goons.)
To the same room on the top floor?
And into his arms to save his life?
Crystal ice like shells
Once we fall through, won’t we freeze?
Scurry back laughing
Writer who does not:
Separate island, stale wind
No thought, words, sound, life…
I stir the cream into my coffee. The sky is lit with the moon and it keeps me awake enough to race with my thoughts. “Compatible,” I think. I keep getting hit with this word when I least want to hear it. When I make a play for permanence, the other party starts their doubts. “Is it me or her timing?” “Is she consistent?” “Is she looking at me right now?” I don’t want to make them uncomfortable, but I do. And then they hit me with it. “Do you think we’re compatible?” And the next move is crucial. Because once they ask, there is only one correct answer.
I couldn’t think of something more peaceful to do than sit on the grass in the sunlight and let my warmth and the temperature of the grass come to one stable level. It is even more than touching snow until fingers freeze just slightly. Like flow. The beautiful mornings are given to us by God and the perfect temperature is something set by the Lord. Even when we assume details that please us are too trivial for the Lord, remember that he made it so grass shows up as individual blades instead of one large patch of a waving piece of oxygenated plant. He detailed it so that grass is singular. So I must see the small pleasures as singular—a detail given to me, once again, by our true and living God. Because he is living he can also enjoy the fruits of his labor.
Whenever I feel warm I imagine that the atmosphere is giving me a hug, keeping me close and safe and comforted like a child. When it is cold I want to cry. And then both are love and beauty and detail from God and in all he is righteous.
I knew you were true so I boiled inside just looking at you.
Content believing anything outside an adulterer was a solid significant other.
Though, while you were here, I was so so sad, finding myself trailing the house like a sleepwalking phantom. Too exhausted to remember not to be found where I ought not. You married a ghost–a ghost that is so fitting for your temperament.
An eclipse of my whole self.
The listlessness an appropriate darker side.
Where you vowed to stay forever and guard it.
A flag on a shifting side of my moon, determined to be in shadow. While the war on earth began.
The trumpet marking the start of carnage was all of humanity showering my sunlight with arrows. A few billion lanses.
—-
I tilted my head forward a few inches to feel heat cloak my face and steam roll down to my collarbones. I inhaled the fiery gas and it burned through my nose hairs and throat. Like something more than water going through me. Looking into the shiny steel pot I saw flesh double over and whine. The meat would be nearly finished soon so a half sprig of thyme would need to be thrown in. Perfect timing!
“Hon, will you hand me the thyme from the cabinet?”
“What would you have done had I not come into the kitchen?
“Please. This morning is sweet. Just pass the thyme. Please…”
She passed it, but not without something to say about it.
“I’m wondering about that shelf you mentioned a few nights ago. The floating bookshelf?” She pauses waiting for me to respond to something that isn’t actually a question. “The one with the marbled plexiglass?”
I loathe that, regardless of being told a million times over, she insists on believing that if she simply inflicts her tones a certain way, she can goad people into answering for things like a guilty child. She intends to make me speak like a toddler on display because I have frustrated her by something as simple as dry herbs.
“Well, all I’m saying is you look like the proper lumberjack. It’d be nice to get some handiwork out of you is all. Not that I don’t enjoy you making organic food for the dog. It’s just…”
This little dance was the most tiring. I didn’t mind the mother-in-law-like nitpicking or the insinuation that me taking a while to build another bookshelf in the house that I built from scratch with our contractor made me less of a man. And of course I cook my dogs food from scratch. He’s a pure breed for goodness sake! But as is the nature of the storm that is my wife, a purposeful drip can be more uncomfortable than water boarding.
But I told her the same thing I told my sister and mom when they asked. “Hon, you are worth every drop of effort.” And it remained true as long as I kept saying it out loud. One day I wouldn’t have to say it at all. That’s my hope. Everyone married over twenty years says it just gets easier after that. We’re six years in and I’m wishing I could time-lapse the next fourteen years. “And you look hot as hell today!”
That seemed to please her and she waltzed out of the kitchen. If it weren’t for the way we level out in bed, I don’t know how long I could’ve kept this up.
“Honey, I’m here for you,” I call after affectionately.
“Well it’s like being here with a ghost!”
Trapped! You are my cage
Banging on your bars, palms bleed
No water, just blood
All the while we snooze
Sorrow billows, tears…. pillows
‘Tis better to have…
Sins sink down near me
Somewhere, tears are obsolete
On earth, as it is…
She told her father
But he couldn’t disannul.
Head hung, she went on.
Hot skin, cold air, bed.
Email—things spiral quickly.
Time to fight the day.
If I had to choose,
Criticism than lashings.
Lashings than to die.
Didn’t feel as dirty as I wanted it to. Just hunting the deer and understanding the death of the animal… I later on smell metal as I feel the air coming through the grill in the truck. The doe sprawled across the front of my truck is the bloodiest part of my life. All else is peaceful and full of life. The only death is what I hunt.
Thanking fading sins
Doubt of consequence is seeping in.
Each one shaking with feeling, but wouldn’t say, “And the commandment, which was ordained to life, I found to be unto death.”
The wind hinting-hurling at a tempest mind says to the emptiness in waiting…
Though it was to be filled with faith—
Being whole unknown to us—wholesomeness unknown to us also, “May I wonder?”
“For sin, taking occasion by the commandment deceived me, and by it slew me.”
Until, in some way worthy of your grace.
Your giving of it making it so.
May I believe there is nothing more to abhor of myself if you have found something worth loving?
Or have I once again shown my brazenness?
In the morning they installed 100% California Bluegrass. Avalon made people around her vindictive and impatient when she wasn’t trying to. To them, she was obtrusive in sight and impossible to get out of their heads.
So the night before, when they thought no one could find them for being so dark, I saw with my own two eyes, they poured at least three feet deep…barrels and barrels and barrels full of sand through her lawn and shoveled through. Whatever owner she planned to sell this house to, they did not want them growing a single bud. Months later I heard it told she had a conversation with the owner.
When asked what type of plant was growing from the ground she said “Sand suckers.” It obviously went over their heads, but created for an awkward enough lull in conversation to transition her out of the home now that the sale was done. The sale always got done. Their thoughts about her started making them uncomfortable and she finally, in her thirty-second year in life, had become comfortable with the tenseness in the air around her. And Avalon wanted to talk more about the grass. To tell them they had a lawn that was quite literally resistant to sand and weeds because she…
But she got the hint. She always got the hint even if too early—even if before there was a hint. And left happy, leaving them happy in their new home.
Utopia was real
At one time
It was not new
Was not unlikely
Was deserved
At one time
Till then, again
Endure this hell
The chosen ones made idols.
Statues of gold and genies right below the present, True and Living God.
Stay far from gold.
Whatever you should decide to arrive in, let it not be gold.
Too oft does gold stimulate hungry pupils readied with greedy hearts waiting to make of you a statue and symbol of meaning in their eyes.
A symbol of something foreboding. Coated completely in matte armor.
Turning shiny in the sunlight
Then back to its lusterless base.