Missionary

I saw you in a photograph,
but could not bring myself to love you.
No matter how I searched my memory,
I could not find you.
You were a phantom,
a ghost of a memory;
a distant thought in a dream-world reality.
I wondered if you knew the thoughts I had for you,
how you had become an abstraction,
living solely inside of a photograph,
where a stranger could not bring himself
to love a stranger.

I saw you in a photograph,
but could not bring myself to love you;
so I set out to find you,
so that I may love you.

Blue filter

I saw my life through the blue filter of your absence
and the world went grey.

I had been wounded,
heart crippled by the weight of the emptiness;
I asked,
“Why do I have eyes if not to see?
Why do I have a mouth if not to sing?”

Something must change.

Betrayer’s kiss

In your kiss
I tasted the blood that betrayal brings,
and in your smiles
I saw a thousand ships launched single-file.

They sailed in orderly fashion,
straight toward the grinning mouth of an open sea,
an ocean stained with sin
and a horizon tinged with misconception.
The night sky laughed,
its freckled face bright with stars
and puffed up with the knowledge
that it had won.

But the victory was ours;
knowledge melted away like time burned,
and the stars faded as the night gave way,
silent in its wounded retreat as the sun rose,
flooding the horizon with its light.
The ocean washed away every trace of sin’s stains
and sunk each misgiving into the bottom
of its great depths.

I saw a thousand ships sail firmly forward,
despite what billows wrenched certainty from them;
in the betrayer’s kiss,
I tasted blood,

but you tasted life.

Library

My head is a library in a hurricane,
thoughts tossed to and fro by the winds of change.
Poetry and literature lie haphazardly strewn
across your ravaged landscape, giving shape to the ruins.
Words I once considered dear and secret in my heart
are abandoned and waterlogged, no longer works of art.
These are the immortal words that will never last,
torn apart and remaining wherever the winds cast.
When can I hope to rebuild these walls?
How can I recollect all of these lost thoughts?
But there He is, the one who witnessed my fall
and remained undeterred; I was the one He sought!
By His blood, this mess was bought
and I was blessed no matter how the storms wrought.
Now I know, whatever cards time assigns
My Redeemer makes everything beautiful in time.

Surrender

Tell me,
if one surrenders of his own volition,
succumbs to death only to overcome,
bursting forth victoriously from its dumbstruck maw,
Is he a prisoner of hell
or the unconquered one?

Did I ever recover?

Did I ever recover from the wound you gave me?
Did I ever mend
the pain inside my heart?

Oh,
that you would rend the heavens,
that you would set your seal upon this ache
and your fire upon these dry bones.
This wound is nothing,
nothing without the one who caused it;
just another flaw
upon sun-blemished skin.

Could you descend
the same way you descended before?
Could you come down
and raise me up again?
You descended from the tree
so that I may be crucified with you,
but I need you now

I need your help to climb upon my cross.

Bricks

Outside of my bedroom window
there is only a brick wall.
No vine decoration upon the lonely red,
no sight of the sun in the sky
or the moon in the night.
There is but a wall,
a wall that I did not build.

The wall is a bitter fruit
picked from a bitter tree.
There is beauty that is recognisable
only with the deepest introspection,
but this self-examination only leads us
to know that I did not build this wall,
but neither did you.

I wonder about the future.

Is there a tomorrow that will see
the sun shining unobstructed
upon my sleeping head?
Will I ever awaken
to the light and the heat,

the palpable lack of separation?

The Ocean

The night you faced the sea frightened me more than anything in my life.

You stood and screamed as though you had no fear of the life leaving your lungs. Words dribbled intermittently from salt-encrusted lips, but for the most part, all I could hear was the fight of your voice against the waves.

It was as though you were throwing a challenge into an immovable opponent. You waded in, further and further, the slowness of the action contrasting the urgency in your eyes. Water crashed against your chest as though it was trying to stop your heart from the outside, but you would not be denied.

I called for you to come back, futilely, voice sounding quiet even inside of my throat. I knew that I would be drowned out by the roaring waves and the distant thunder, but I continued to call out to you. It felt as though I was lighting a candle and placing it amongst a sky full of stars, but I did not know what else to do.

Maybe one day, after I’ve learned how to swim the depths of your ocean, I could do more than call out to you from the shore.

April

I don’t like cats.
They stare out windows
and long for freedom from you,
then scratch at doors to get back inside.
They long to be held,
but turn against you if you hold them against their will.

I remember when our family had a cat;
we named her April,
and she slept in my bed for warmth.
In the morning, I couldn’t find her anywhere,
until she was too hungry to be alone.
I loved her still,
until we had to give her away.

Years later,
when we went to visit,
she did not seem to recognise me –
she was more concerned with getting food
from her new owner.

I wondered if my love for her was ever real.
If her lack of love for me
was enough to turn me away,
then perhaps it wasn’t.

I don’t like cats;
the way they stare out windows
and long for freedom from you,
then scratch at doors to get back inside;
the way they long to be held,
but turn against you if you hold them against their will;
the way they remind me,
so much,

of myself.

10:29

Grandma always sleeps with the tv on.
I used to wonder why,
until I remembered

you talked in your sleep.