Anger In Red

Tearing skin and shattering bone,
The blunted edge slashed deeply,
Smearing its blood-red stain inside the cavities of my soul.
It was not the wound of a friend,
Nor the careful incision of the Restorer’s healing instrument.
Its bluish-gray, carboned steeliness,
Wielded by some long ago face and name whose metallic-tasting anger time has
Blurred into all faces and names, fomented my bitter war.
Savaged and misshapen, I screamed, then demanded, and finally begged
That it be removed. I don’t deny that they tried.
But it stayed, slowly becoming a part of me.

After a while, I hissed and dared for someone to take my anger from me.
Swinging murderously, I wielded my own axe, determined to reciprocate the original pain.
Its blood-red handle slippery in my calloused hands, I gripped harder still,
Volcanic eruptions of rage spewed from my perpetually inflamed wound
On everyone, seen or not, known or stranger.
Striving to even the score in a futile mismatch,
I would make heaven, hell and the world pay every hellish day.
Temples pounded in blacked-out white heat, cold eyes burned in consuming fire.
Show no mercy, take no prisoners.
Each scant, Pyrrhic victory forewarned me that
Discharged anger only cauterizes and callouses the heart,
Ripping apart old wounds.

The Restorer’s scalpel dared inflict another wound.
I whirled furiously, blindly, intending to fend off the intrusion and stop the pain.
I sensed the difference; it was the careful wound of a Friend.
The blood-red handle did not slip in his death grip.
Alive and forceful, the honed blade left me flayed on the rock, daring to touch the original pain.
Joints separated from marrow, soul from spirit, the governances of my mind unraveled.
Pinned beneath his riveting stare, I thought blackness, creeping up the edges of my consciousness,
Would suffocate me. It was the final battle of the war. Then I understood that the metallic
Blackness, the stained-red vestiges of anger had been gently taken from me;
Someone Else’s blood, spilling from a perpetually fresh wound, washed away the bluish-gray.
I am astonished that a rugged piece of wood can cut so cleanly.

Avalanche

Beauty unleashed, like a massive foam pearl necklace breaking apart,
Cold, aerial oceans, unable to cling to rugged shores,
Lust’s avalanche groaned, then thundered in seismic currents.
White continents, sewn together by innumerable miniscule pieces in
Lost covenant, pushing their mounting, pent up desire against soft underpinnings,
Dropped into an unbridled free fall. Frantic, yellow-suited skiers and
Slack-jawed loggers watched as the purple mountain catastrophe hurtled past,
Bulldozed its way through the token resistance of spiky pines,
Gestured an irritable dismissal to trapper’s outposts and concrete works,
Oblivious to all that would impede its course to the abyss,
A killing cloud of total whiteout.

And the spiky pines, buttressed by jutting crags raised their well-intentioned protests,
Their scrawny appendages shaking fingers at the uncontrollable lust
Their warnings not rewarded by the slightest pause.
So, hideous elongated gouges rake the landscapes of the heart, personalities
Permanently insulted by the ravages of emotional brute force.
When lust conceives, it births offspring called sin.
Something…a creature…a foul beast, unmanageable, manifesting itself in a separate life, springs up
Without boundaries, lacking mitigating grace, unresponsive to reason.
“I want.” Nothing else matters. Empowered by the law of accumulation and triggered by a snapping
Twig or a melting drift, crazed Amnon bursts into Tamar’s room.
And when he is finished with his unspeakable crime, Absolom appears, hunting down his brother.

When “I want” speaks, nurtured childhood innocence dies. The vivid photographs that tell
Glowing stories of Samantha’s, Agawa Canyons and Magic Kingdoms , fade and peel.
Lust’s avalanche shreds the covenanted linkages that bind the sacred pieces together;
Lost in a stupid reverie, flat-lined into mindless destruction. It is so soft. It is so beautiful. It is so cold.
The thundering breakaway overtakes the earthbound—-the loggers, trappers and skiers,
Spinning helplessly out of control, shut off from every passage to freedom,
Taking refuge in the beckoning rocks, teased by cruel hopelessness with glimpses of hope.
Laws rule; law of gravity, law of inertia, law of the flesh, all irrevocable, except…
Above the whitened din, like gulls over the aerial ocean’s whitecaps, only the winged-blest escape.
Never able to stop the murderous rush, they admit their frailty and soar on top.
Strength renewed, they mount up with wings of eagles.

Below the Deck

We had seen storms before,

Dark sky rising, wind driving rain like daggers into our faces,

I’m not sure why it was so terrifying that day.

We had always mocked the menacing waves.

Taunting, laughing, screaming, sliding across the deck,

Thrown into fish-laden nets.

But that day, there was no playfulness in the wind.

The waves, furious at our mockery, exploded against the rails.

Ominous gutturals wrenched from the throat of our craft,

Like an arthritic old man in seizure.

We fought each other for safe places to grasp

With our wet, fish-slimed fingers.

Friends turned fiends, scheming and vicious

We raged against wind, rain, waves and each other,

Clawing for survival, despising another’s fortune

To find even a moment of security.

Then someone remembered He slept below the deck.

Awakened, He quieted the savagery, and our fear with it.

As long as there are seas and ships, there will be storms.

God will not permit it to be any other way. He knows that

The storms teach unteachable lessons to fellow passengers,

Like, storms sometimes make us enemies.

Or, turbulent survival is better than serene drowning.

Remember, the one below the deck, not only masters the storm,

He holds the ship together. He will save us,

And he will help us love one another again.

Conversations Aborted

Conversations Aborted

We had sweet times, you and I.
Scintillating, I think we called it.
We sparred, honed, showed each other up.
Sarcasm dripped, stupid remarks cracked us up.
We could still be persuaded; we had nothing to lose.

I can no longer have conversations with you.
I write what I think, and you laugh and scorn.
It’s not that I wouldn’t like to talk,
But my vocabulary has become limited.
Every word I can think of to use now insults and angers you.
I can’t talk about the war. When I say “President,” you go off.
When I say soldier, arms, fight or force,
You spit the words back in my face.
My old familiar favorites like freedom and defend
Incite you to ranting and raving.

I can’t talk about killing babies.
You throw a mother’s power over her own body at me.
When I call God our Father, you revile me for not saying Mother.
And if I vaunt human life, you castigate me for devaluing animal life.
You say my holidays only celebrate bigotry,
My patriot heroes are former slaveholders, chauvinist pigs.
Manifest destiny was a mandate to rape Native lands,
And red, white and blue mean killing of innocents,
Racial supremacy and imperialistic designs.

Funny, isn’t it?
We were at each other’s throats, then slapped each other’s backs.
In the days when we had an irreverent respect.
In the days when we could talk…
In the days before we had power in our words.
We had freedom then, you and I.
Collision of ideas…freedom to be ourselves…and now…
We have the freedom to destroy ourselves.

Answer one more question, my old friend.
Did you think it would all end this way?
Because, this really is the end.
Did I win? Or, did you?

Earth From Mars

Earth from Mars

I saw the Earth from Mars today.
NASA provided the eerie pictures.
We live on a blue dot against black nothingness,
Holding one light grey moon in orbit around us.
Later, the cameras zoomed in closer,
But, in my opinion, the photographic technology
Didn’t really improve our image.
We just seemed fuzzier, if bigger.

If time and space don’t make us better,
Why do we go to the trouble to make the pictures?
And why this strange fascination with our image from space
When we frustrate ourselves up close?

I would like to talk to you more often,
And about deeper things.
But they’ve already told you not to listen to me.
So we will continue on in distant silence.

We’ve never seen Earth from Mars before.
I really don’t think we should see it again.
At least, not until the micro enhances the macro,
And we could really learn something beyond technology.