Yellow and black and worn back then
I burned you a bit on accident
You made a noise when I shook you round
And your felt antennae were always droopy.
You were a gift that I had got
And now I could not even say
Where you’ve gone just like the ghost
Who gave me life and gave me you.
Memories are hard to hold
but some are hard to lose
I wish that you were still with me
That I might just remember.
Please let the ending
far from this place
be.
Stillness sought on foreign shores
And longed for in such harrowed nights
Finds its way inside your soul
Just when you would die.
After all these years
I say to myself
and now it feels more true
As my body catches up
to my soul.
Do you in your mornings find
A place for hope or just despair?
As the day begins again,
Who will lead you on?
I suffer under the burden of my own introspection
The weight of which is like unto lead
Or perhaps in Egypt I carry bricks
With every thought I have.
I have been hard on myself when I should have been soft
And soft when I should have been hard.
And the feeling of failure that snatches my joy
Is another brick thrown on my back.
“Have mercy on me!”
I cry in the evening
“Sustain me…”
I whisper each morn.
There has been a cleaning,
a beating,
a molding,
a forming,
it is a fire that burns me
my mistakes burn like fire
each success is a flame.
And everywhere I am consumed.
“The weight of which,”
I collapse.
Do not delay
Long expected king.
I have been to market and to church
and in the coffee house I have discussed
all of knowledge that I knew
and then I took a sip.
There is a burning.
At the concert hall I sat down
And listened to the works of man
and all I heard was God’s own voice
in every perfect note.
There is a fire.
If I sing in our church choir
will I feel the hand of God?
Or am I filled with fool’s desire
to trip and fall again.
Let me be so consumed.
I feel as though in harder times
I may have sewn some weighty seeds
And now the rain begins to fall
And I can feel the earth.
I studied like to ancient men
And prayed as though mountains moved
And now I feel the slightest breeze
And I can feel the sky.
Holy writ so lived from high
Made unto us lesser men
We who feel the earth and sky
Look to see you come again.
There lies I found a special place
And so interred is all we seek
But this is not a place for words.
And yet this life with agèd sight
Once ringed in glory climbed so high
Sits now in darkness as the night
And all its wisdom is a sigh.
The view of age that should be clear
Became obscured by hapless act
And now the night is fast upon
And so the soul upon the rack.
And yet a light still now exists
That may yet break upon the shore
And grant raw visions in this night
That lead to life forevermore.
If on hollowed ground I seek
Living in the sense of life
Will the holy keepers keep?
And keep me in this searing strife?
Death that holds me like a friend
Means to me so many things
I will see You in the end
And wear my robe and all my rings.
So as the bullets fly so near
Sometimes ripping into me
Fill me with your holy fear
And teach me now how I might be.
A Soul's Walk 