waking up early

Have you ever seen the sparrows fly from bush to bush?
Or the white cat basking in the sunlight amongst the spry?
Have you ever smelled the bread factory at 7:43?
Yes, it smells the best at 7:43, and it's morning.
Have you ever seen the beauty of a village in the rising sun?
It's so much that the tired flees from your eyes.
Have you ever seen the messy frock of hair on top of the corn stalk?
They laze out of their beds in slow patience.
Have you ever taken a bus to go down the mountain?
You can see fog from above, feeling closer to God.
Oh, but have you ever seen Bazna in morning?
Yes, then you'd know what I'm talking about.

just paper

"These incidents made the youth ponder. It was revealed to him that he had been a barbarian, a beast. He had fought like a pagan who defends his religion. Regarding it, he saw that it was fine, wild, and, in some ways, easy. He had been a tremendous figure, no doubt. By this struggle he has overcome obstacles which he has admitted to be mountains. they had fallen like paper peaks, and he was now what he called a hero. And he had not been aware of the process. He had slept and, awakening, found himself a knight." --The Red Badge of Courage

I find that I can relate to Henry Flemming (the youth) in this book. I feel, now more then ever, that my life is like a battle front. Barbaric, inhumane, struggling for survival, wearisome, wounded, and death in plain sight surrounding me.
I had my rifle at the ready at your funeral.
My head throbs and pulsates, reminding me of my wounds.
I move from front to front, and it all looks the same; death, dead, decay.
Yet, there is an origami sun in the sky,
eloquent clouds sewn into the soft blue mass,
water rippling in the same direction as always,
and the wind who faithfully combs my hair into tangles.

I do hope these Mountains before me will fall like paper peaks, I don't have will to fight those as well. So I'll throw little mustard seeds at them until they topple to the ground.
after all, they're just paper.

I miss
I want
I am needing
Oh, You are still good to me, Dad!!

I want to rest, and awake a victor!

resurrect me

I died with you that day
water poured from my face
as a car crashed into a hydrant
the pain exudes from my veins
my heart failed
I screamed
I threw up
I wailed
and then...
death subdued me

I was a walking corpse
a dead limb
a plumb picked
and spit out
I was trampled to vinegar
and then...
silence

I flew 5,000 miles away
I sit sipping my coffee
as I listen to John sing
'10,000 rivers run red like my veins'
suddenly before me
like a child's pop up book
beauty is unfolded
and then...
a beat of my heart, a breath in my lung

I feel the little child in me awake
I feel a piece of me shifted
as I listen to John sing
'I've overcome you world'
I feel as the woman in front of me
her hair the same shade of red as her jacket
and then...
I can see again

I see:
The little boy troubled
the young girl doubled
a man's shirt that says
'Truth is nobody'
The Jewish man; glasses and a cigarette
the old woman in love
and then...
beautiful sound like a symphony

I am slowly coming back to myself
the thing that surprises me so;
it is all so much more beautiful the second time
the clouds and all that I hated when I awoke this morning
are no longer trite after the waking 10 minutes ago
HE is resurrecting the dead in me

I am scared of letting you go, Chris
but I know that can never happen
until then...
I'm alive and breathing in the beauty

writing from the train

I am on a train to Cluj.
I dread writing, because I am worn of expression.
Even the thought of a mere pen and paper gives me staticity in my temples.
staticity isn't a real word.
I am frustrated right now.
When I cry I have this aching pressure in my chest.
I like to think of it as butterflies to the masochistic.
A few hours ago I was on the mountain top, where the Lord was romancing me.
Now I am fighting for my life, in a valley somewhere in the thick of war.
the seasons are changing too fast.
I am growing in love and longing too fast, it's like weeds shooting up amongst the spry.
The thing I am most frustrated about, and the thing that makes me fitful, not only in sleep but in life; you're still gone.
I have lost my will for many things:
I am easily upset
easily hurt
easily emotional
not every plate, guitar, or even cigar in this world could curb the way I feel right now.
I want to be over it
I want to be ok
I want Chris
I want to be patient
I want to love freely
I want to be alone
I want to be the crowd
I want to be understood
I want to be allowed to be angry
I want to be silent
I want to trust
I want to be done with the process
I want to configure time
I want to squish the world like a grape
I want to declare my love over and over like a childish child
I want to be old and almost done
I want to be young with wonder abounding
I want to want only YOU
I want to be honest
I want to be known
I want to know the Lord
I want to know how to be
I don't want to control
I hate everything that is happening
I love everything the Lord is doing in the happening
I don't want to be asked "what's wrong?"
I don't want everyone to walk on egg shells around me
I thought today would be different, but it isn't
everyday is the same since you left, and I don't know what to do
I am wanting

Steal, KILL, and Destroy

DEATH
he has come
to kill
murder
slaughter
mutilate
LIFE
HE has come
to overcome
to make a way
to trample the grave
to make us
ONE
in Him
free from sin
delivered again
until the
END

How I long to be free from this body of death!
I have become ever aware of satan's intentions to kill. I had a beloved friend pass away this last week. She jumped off an overpass unto the highway. She was a gentle and God-fearing woman with a husband and two immaculate kids. How it tortures me when I consider the grip of death and how it constricted all hope from her spirit. I can never know what she was thinking, or really why she did what she did, but I love her and I mourn for her and her family.

We can't give in to death
only to His love
which brings us life

I was dead in my transgressions
and now I am alive
I'm ALIVE
in the great hope of His coming
I'm ALIVE
I will forever glorify Him


He's worthy of my life

I Just Want to Write

I feel like writing...
Not writing for the sake of communicating really, and if it were for that purpose I would have to communicate that I only want to write to feel the keys under my fingertips or to hear the sound of clicking as I tap away at them.
I am in the mood to write...
I watched a film with Gregory Peck in it tonight called The Snows of Kilimanjaro, it is indeed oxygen to my imagination. In the story Gregory is a writer and he is traveling the world. There were many other story lines in the movie, but this one had my mind meddling to the end. I could barely focus on the picture, for I was too busy imagining my own life looking as his. I want to write books, they would be about the places I have gone and the people I have met.
I want to write, and yet I have all the things I want to write stored away in my head. I haven't quite mastered the technique or discipline rather, of actually writing it all down. When I do, however, get overwhelmed with my lack of expression and decide to spit it all out, it is so therapeutic that I wonder I don't do it daily or maybe always. I sometimes wonder why the Lord didn't make me a mute left only with my written word to communicate the musings of my heart. Yet I am left with a tongue that works and very much so to my dismay.
I am deciding now as I type, and as I listen to the hum of my fathers computer and the clicking of the keys, that I will become more disciplined. I do hope that this discipline won't take away from the passion, but enable it. If I find myself going there I will do away with the disciplines and settle with the fact that writing is not what I am meant to do as a title, but more as a subtitle. I shall then go on with the therapeutic every once and awhiles that always seem keep me coming back.
Until then....

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."
-Billy Collins