Lux, part 2

I have felt God in the unexpected, in the mundane, in the darkest places. Somehow He has followed me, tracked me down and laid His heavy hand on my sky, compressing me into a magnetic field of confusion, and simultaneously expanding me into the highest heights of elation. I have felt God in the back of a dingy car, driving home from the club with raucous acquaintances, my thighs sticking to the leather seat and Chris Brown blasting from the stereo. I have felt God surging through the air of my favorite coffee shop, looking straight into the caverns of my mind from a fishbowl starry sky, holding my atoms together as I sat in a classroom, randomly interrupting my thought maps with a warm and wide-open feeling, reminding me of the everywhere-ness of the Divine. God has found me in a Catholic Mass in Spain, on the floor of a Buddhist temple in Thailand, in the blue morning light of my decaying apartment patio, never mind all the times He showed up in my own church. Somehow He manages to wrap His hands around a simple moment and bring forth in that moment vivid color and a lush warmth. Somehow He manages to remind me when I most need it that He is everywhere, with no exceptions or limitations, and I need only to look up just a little higher to see that the Light breaking through every window is His.

Lux, part 1

Omnipresent. Omnipotent. Omniscient. People describe God in such clinical terms. They see Him off in the cold distance, perceiving His remoteness as bitterness, percieving the walk to His house as treacherous light years, imagining their quiet entreaties never reaching His deaf ears. They wonder at the darkness, or do not feel its reach at all, but either way, they cannot see God through the thick of it, and so they disregard Him, and walk about blindly, forever running head-long into walls.

Talent on Fire

"Talent is a cruel mistress," a wise man once told me, and he was right in every regard. Crueler still is the talent you cannot keep. To have a talent that you cannot share is a burden, a curse. To have a talent that you keep locked in a cage is haunting, unnerving, unsettling at best. 

My talent was always my ability to make chaos out of nothing, on the paper and in my twisted little world. To smoke cigarettes, leaning out the fourth story window, the screen popped out by a helping hand, disregarding the crack under the door. To jump from passion to passion, to drink the cup of pure oblivion, to feel the bliss of change coursing through my tentacled veins. This was my talent. 

To apply red lipstick at an angle in the mirror, to appear as an apparatus in one life and then the next, to feel the depth and the breadth of my self and to swim in my own ocean with no fear of drowning, no matter how many times I went beneath the waves, to look constantly toward the shoreline for a savior. This was my talent.

To be the flighty favorite of offices and coffee shops, to have a story to tell, a new one at every turn, and to hold your interest with the details of new intrigues, to keep you coming back for more with new characters and new tragedies. This was my life. 

I incinerated it all, set it all aflame, with the gasoline of loyalty and the struck match of normalcy, the heat reminiscent of motherhood, the smoke of a promising future, but nevertheless a painful blaze where everything had to die. 

And still it comes back to haunt me, a ghost in many dreams and daymares, the thing that I destroyed, the chaos that I put an end to, the ocean that I dried up, the poetry that is gone. Talent is a cruel mistress, and I killed her in a shady Broomfield apartment and never even went back to pay my respects. And I keep killing her every day, renewed, with a vigor and a misplaced hatred, trying to hurt what once always seemed to hurt me, but in the process losing everything that made my face my face. 

The Grey Sky Opens

The grey sky opens

no sun to speak of here

only a filter of fog over a photograph 

of the cavern in my heart

A little fire inside,

gunpowder thrown into the flame,

destructive hands with no regard for my plans,

the Old Me has arrived. 

Wraith-like, a pale-lipped muse, 

her explosions rock me to sleep, 

her wounds keep me locked in dreams, 

chaos reigning 

when the grey sky opens

And the grey sky opens

to a moon unlit,

just a hunk of rock

in the ocean-floor sky 

And the Old Me mumbles

something about a wolf

as one yelps off in the distance,

as my bones feel that chill,

of memory holding me

as the grey sky opens

And The Old screams out

"Baby, you need to stay alive.

Take your car and just start driving

until you see the light

Take your car and just keep driving

until you can sleep at night"

And she weaves her fingers into my future

as the grey sky opens

And there's nothing I can do

nothing at all that can be done

The Old is here to stay

There's still a cavern in my heart to this day

A little sliver of my mind

Where I talk to myself 

back and forth 

all the time

And there's a place in my soul

where the mountain man feels at home

But I can't open up its doors,

until the grey sky opens