wordsalad

Easter

I love you on paper

On the page you read pure pleasure

Not like real life, flesh and blood imperfection.

I am run over with feeling these days -

words, images, music and laughter converge

in a personal resurrection, of sorts.

In a season designed for sacrifice,

can I coopt this for myself, heathen that I am?

Run over with feeling as I am?

My little Catholic grandma asks if her prayers count,

since I don’t go to church, but everyone needs a novena, 
I say. And didn’t they once give to the pagan babies?

An organized effort to save the ones in foreign places who didn’t

know the true way?

After twenty years in church, I’m not saved, except by myself –

a smooth stretch of highway a pew,

a mix cd the only hymnal.

What can you do? If it doesn’t speak, it doesn’t speak.

There’s nowhere else to go on Sunday but the farmer’s market

and when the sun shines through the open roof,

can't that be God speaking, even if the collection basket

belongs to a Pennsylvania farmer,

who may want to be in church, but can’t, because he has mouths to

feed.

Call and response is difficult in these times, as hungry as we are

for connection, as wary as we are of the hand reaching out to shake,

which may just as easily be reaching for our wallet as our soul.

When it Hits

When it hits,

the waves of the days submerge her in

the violence of water,

striking like a tsunami

of pain, of memory,

of the brain’s betrayal.

Black moods, sharp impulses,

unshed tears -

as her words collect

like grains of sand

on an endless, cloudy beach.

The undertow of sadness pulls

her down, wild and deep,

as memory fills her

with the awareness of danger.

No horizon line in sight, only depths -

of pills, of talk, of fitful sleep -

no evidence of sunrise.

jazz hands

His hands wish for music -

strong and sturdy, beautiful,

willing magic chords out of silent strings.

The groove in his mind -

like a session with Miles at Birdland -

is worlds away from this practice room stool.

“Is it worth it? This hunger? This want?”

I ask, and in a voice like his eyes,

deep as the echoes of jazz,

he says, “Yes, can’t you hear it?”

What will save your life?

What will save your life?

The word not spoken? Not ignored?

The place you go you never meant –

the wrong turn that - somehow -

became the right, only way?

What – I ask – will save it?

The check that comes in time

preventing disaster that isn’t,

(But feels like it, pulsing, so much due.)

What will do it?

The photo long forgotten, showing you your

own eyes, the way they are meant to see?

It can’t be this – the grind of daily action,

the people, only faces, barely known,

the connection longed for but not made,

the film, the meal, the passing chat.

All these sustain, bring you through

to what means everything,

without being it, exactly.

Lives saved require more-

So many words spoken, not ignored.