Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Sing For Tomorrow Burns

With every revolving relentless cycle
this stagnation is quickened.
Every breath brings another pain
another in a lengthy list of offenses.
Actuality ceases to bring meaning
in this cancer and never ending sickness,
with every broken heart harkened
to return to life abandoning sleep.

Poisoned veins empty onto ground
glisten in half truths
fooling only the self,
breathing life into the dumbfound.
Awaken at long lost from slumber
on this final day.

All of our meaning becomes crystallized
when all will be seen,
the sky rolled up like a curtain
and the defective exposed in their flaws
and the casting down of the demonized.

Speaking their madness no more
they will be bound eternally
to torment no more
and those freed by the shed blood
of the One
will be made whole,
freed from this final disease.
The cancer of soul.

No more heartbreak.
No more sin.
No more casting about within.
No more trite metaphor.
No more false pretension.
Only one way of salvation.

Only freedom.

Better Words Needed

You certainly know how to make one smile,
thanks a million for everything
and you help make it all worthwhile.

Even deeply within this dark circle
never knowing what is next
always knowing there is an angel
on my side aiding the vexed.

Words never offer substance
sincere enough to give life
to all these fleeting thoughts
about your aide in fighting this trite
and excuse filled life.
I am ashamed of myself because somehow I forgot how amazing Stryper is.

Random Comedic Sketches on Warfare







Numerous Tangets...

I keep having these really vivid dreams...I just woke up again...it was me being back at school...it's hard to phrase everything because it is really so silly...and I don't like looking utterly ridiculous...even on here...I can only be myself to so much of a degree before I start feeling so...exo-outside of this skin and body...and the dream was vivid enough and incorporated a few dozen people I knew from back Mobile and high school.

I'm not sure dreams mean anything other then the fact they are random neurological impulses firing through the brain...and trying to make sense of a human is impossible...as impossible as track the quantum mechanics that govern the sub atomic particles and their little dances through the infinite void of which matter consists of.

Well make sense of them in the sense that I'm tired of being in this isolation, this exile of such.

The more time a person spends outside of REAL community the more dehumanized they become...the less they are capable of their true purpose and of becoming who they are. Whether we like it or not we need other people to realize who we are...oddity that it is.

Distant Yet Close, Far Away But Near

Being lost in this labyrinth of my mind for so long...I've ignored so many well meaning friends, people who have done more then their fair share of trying to help me...all the while I have wondered lost and bitter in my own world. This medicated haze broken only by a few rays of sunlight that burn so much.

It is almost like trying to learn to be human again.

I've forgotten what compassion looks like, that love is not just a ludicrous human emotion conjured by futile attempts to give meaning to an otherwise meaningless life and that hope, dear God hope is not just real but it is this fire that burns in my heart...and that You, only You can make my heart beat twice as fast whenever you draw near.

I can't pretend to have a special clarity or that somehow I have found something no one else has...just that I run myself into the ground every day and lay here in shambles and even thought I curse the day as being night...there is more hope and life than I can scarcely hope to believe in.

When will this end?

Friday maybe. It could easily go either way, I may die today or Friday or in another hospital in twenty years. God knows I don't know at all and do not need to know.

I've stumbled through life and have been dragged along for most of it and here I am at another threshold. It feels like the day I woke up in Mobile and I had graduation in a few hours. John was kind enough to stay with me, drive me around so I could find some dress shoes that were overpriced and then drop off at the civic center for graduation.

Some friends are just so good you don't deserve them, especially when you tend to act as a pompus know it all that is laughing at the joke that the rest of the world hasn't gotten yet.

And yet, there is still love. It's amazing how clarity makes everything more beautiful and painful at the same time...sort of like finally getting to breath again after holding your breath for what feels like an eternity, like waking from a nightmare to find yourself in bed or to finally be able to walk again after being so drugged up you can't get yourself off the bathroom floor and you have to crawl to your bed and hope you don't throw up again...this release of bondage, this breaking of the chains tying you down, having your spirit freed so you can fly and run to freedom.

It's all this and more...it's impossible to put into words because every metaphor is full of inadequacy.

Screams in the night being replace by sobs being replaced by gasps for air and finally laying there realizing everything you've wasted life on was worthless but oh the beauty, the clarity of knowing that it doesn't matter because love can rescue you at your last moments of life and that the blood already spent is enough to cover over the world's monuments to sin.

It's something not here yet but it is coming, something seemingly impossible but nearly tangible, feelings beyond consideration but grounded in this moment and place and time.

It is here, it is there, it is coming but has always been here even though we just haven't seen him.

It's every moment of my life played back at fast speed, rewinding to show every step I have taken and the thousands I have came into contact with and those whose faces I know but whose names I can't remember. Seeing the pain and loss of innocence painted on walls as murals and warnings for the horror show of life...but still the undercurrent of hope that rips the air from your lungs because the joy is so beautiful, so complete and so without end.

How wonderful, how beautiful, new forever and world without end.

Life and Grieving

I do not function well around people that are mentally retarded. Partly it is because my older sister has a small disability that developed because of oxygen deprivation when she was younger and ever since then she has had trouble learning...she wanted to go to college but wasn't able to...so instead so works at the same place my mom does (Blue Cross and Blue Shield) in the mail department.

I say that to bring up a part of my high school experience. When I started doing weekly Wednesday morning meetings at school there was always one guy who would always show up, regardless of whether or not anyone else did (including my close circle of friends) a guy named Thomas, who had a severe mental disability. When he was a young child he had drank some sort of cleaner and it almost killed him and so he had trouble talking at times but he had this ridiculously strong faith that he always shared with those around him and more often then not made me realize how shallow mine is.

It hurt to see him, to talk to him and hear him speak because it showed my own inability...my pride, my addiction to attention...how I needed people to pay attention to 'my' message...and it's not like Thomas realized what he was doing...to him it was just as natural as knowing when to leave class because of a bell ringing.

Anyway...like I said, he would always be there on Wednesday mornings, regardless. We were in the same grade as well. I don't know how he could understand the love of Christ except to say that he saw Jesus face to face in a way I barely understand and don't think I'll ever understand. No matter how hard I've tried to stop this I can't help but try to measure my success by quantity and how many people were at any given meeting or heard me speak...just this part of me that isn't bad necessarily but a part of me that misses the entire point at the same time.

The last time I saw Thomas was in the spring of 2007, the night before my grandmother's funeral, at the wake. He was brought there with the grandmother of a cousin of mine who use to be my best friend. I have never dealt with the loss of my grandmother and still keep trying to repress it and hold things back...the grief terrifies me...but of all the things I remember about that horrifying week was Thomas and my cousins grandmother coming up to me. The little old lady hugged me and like most southern ladies had this air of understanding about her...and I can't remember what she said but I do remember what happened next. Thomas, who is almost as tall as I am, walked up to me and hugged me and said that he was sorry...but everything would be okay because my grandmother was with Jesus right then.

I have no idea how I held myself together and didn't break down sobbing right there...but I did. I honestly hate when people talk about death and Jesus. I don't want to hear about how she or my dad is 'with Jesus'. I've never been good at dealing with loss of any kind...of having parts of me just ripped away...its a feeling that I think may be universal but tangible and paramount only to those at any moment of time...in other words we all may know what this feeling is like but it is a burden a person has to suffer through alone and something they can't be helped through. They have to choose to walk forward or allow the grief to smother them.

There is only so much we can know and that we can learn about life...but here we are. Belief and faith are not as much as something a person can choose...but He finds you...and will not let you stay where you are...and once you are His, He won't let go...no matter how hard you fight to hang onto these scraps of a life that no longer have any meaning.

Luckily blessings aren't just for the ones who kneel.

Luckily.