Words to make me run.

I have scrawled the scientific formulas of my heart into these notebooks,
written out the directions to engineer the inner workings of my being,
the instructions on how to take apart complexicated locoemotions
and put together the simplimechanics of my factumacallits.
There are equations for every occasion,
words to make me run
the distance from here to the sun;
words to bridge the gap
of the distance from my heart to yours.
The beauty of it stems from the ambiguity of it,
words replaced by newer, more difficult-to-deconstruct words,
and sentences abbreviated into overly simple words that had lost all meaning;
the ambiguity of it,
with no absolutes
but plenty of absolutions,
no definites
but littered with definitives;
the ambiguity of it,
with no ambiguilt about this ambivalence to be carried away in ambilances!
And all at once,
there is clarity.
The words come together,
no longer a jumble of senseless sentences;
they come together,
coherent coefficients,
words like equations
and scientific formulas;
words,
words to make me run,
words to make me
run.

Naked and unashamed

This is my prayer before God,
naked and unashamed,
in ecstasy and in truth,
in honesty and in love.

It is a quiet prayer,
it is a loud shout;
there come whispers in the dark
and cries into the light.

May I never forget the good things He has for me,
forgiving my worship of another,
when my nakedness warranted covering,
when my honesty was untrue.

This is my prayer before God:
in nakedness, I am unashamed.
I have found ecstasy in truth,
and have been rewarded with an honest love.

I am naked and unashamed,
free in love, free in prayer.

Counterculture

I am counterculture.
When the world says death,
I speak life;
when the world whispers hate,
cold steel pressed up against warm flesh words,
I speak love,
words to brew heat in dead hearts,
words to melt the ice around my feet
and break the stones surrounding truth.
When the world says death,
I speak life;
when the world whispers hate,
I speak LOVE.
I speak love,
I live love,
I die love,
I AM Love.

Alone

Some moments are lonely affairs,
worlds bursting with millions of colours,
while this one held in my hands remains
tinged by a blue filter.

My crippled heart recalls the weight,
the crushing emptiness of a hope gone forth,
carried off by fleeting winds of change,
as my greying eyes blinked back tears.

I know now, however, what I did not then:
the emptiness can never last,
for there is a fountain that fills me still;
and though my world is coloured blue,
the fountain floods it red again.

I saw you in a dreamlike state

I saw you in a dreamlike state,
where all our conversations were italicised,
and all the world was in a haze.
You wore an unblemished smile
and your laughter was unfettered by past hurts,
echoing defiantly through hours and days.
Then I realised again that I loved you,
deep thoughts calling to deeper emotions,
heart fluttering ahead of the cocoons in my stomach;
and I promised myself that I’d always love you,
never to swim out from the oceans to the shallows,
never to awaken
from this dreamlike state.

Beneath the tree

Surely when I fell asleep
beneath the tree,
my rib was removed
and fashioned into you
as I dreamt
of you.

And as you were formed,
you dreamt of me,
sleeping beneath
the shade of the tree,
dreaming of you,
dreaming of me.

And I heard
our faintest whisper,
in the midst
of the dream:
“Can we dream;
can we dream
forever and
evermore?”

Writer

There are days when I wonder what it means to be a writer.

I wanted to be many things. I responded to my mother’s question of what I wanted to be when I grew up first with “scientist”. I felt really unique for responding in such a way, knowing with smug pride that others said “astronaut” or “president”. Years later, I found myself also wanting to be an astronaut, though an irrational fear of assassination kept me from ever wanting to be president.

Through the varied possibilities of future occupations, the one I landed on last was “writer”. I found that I enjoyed writing toward the tail end of high school, when everything was filled with bleeding emotion, and I was so certain that my typically teenage thoughts weren’t so typical. Yet now, looking back, there were even more formative moments throughout my life that imprinted writing on my heart.

There were the years of reading novels until academics sucked the joy out of reading. There was the time when, alternatively, I wrote a quasi-fictional short story about my cousins for a writing assignment that received a good reaction from classmates. And there were the many characters I created with friends, wanting to one day create a magnum opus with all of the fantastic heroes and villains we had imagined.

Whatever the case, the dream of writing for a living quietly died under the porch of busy adult life. I couldn’t be sure of when it happened, but peeking through the stairs that I had climbed in order to reach some semblance of functional being yielded the sickly sweet odour of decay that had yet to completely disappear.

I am now studying again, for a vocation that I do love; and yet I find myself looking back at the porch with more and more regularity. Even as the lights dim and the stars climb into the night, I remain outside, flicking through old writing in wonderment, unsure of who had written such words under my name. A deep desire to write, a hunger for words arranged in certain orders not yet discovered still resides within the pit of my stomach. I wonder if I will ever be afforded the opportunity to retreat into the early mist of morning, sighing to see my breath crystallise into the air in front of me; then I might be able to write for hours and days.

Then, I might know what it means to be a writer.

Pacified

Why do worries cloud the darkness,
when the shadows are enough? –
as though blackness could cover blackness,
and intimidate me into surrender.
But these things cannot touch me;
although I may weep for a moment,
hope springs life inside of my heart;
hope brings light inside of the dark.
In the honesty brought forth by darkness,
I admit that I am weak,
that I have been cut open by the dull blade of doubt,
and that I need You,
and that I need you.
Weeping lasts but for a moment;
you spring life inside of my heart;
You bring light inside of the dark.

Burst

Then I watched as the sky burst –
explosions that painted the night white
and cast all doubts aside,
cast all the shadows into the light.

I wondered where you were then,
wondered if it was where I was,
and knew it was where I would be.

Snowfall

Along the blanketed streets stand
a thousand unfinished snowmen;
and upon white sheets, man
has left imprints, to show them
who may come tomorrow
that they, today, once were.