Change change change,
I have fought you
cursed you
and run after you ever since the moment I declared war
on apathy
and poured fire to my belly and mud around my ankles

and my head is full of ideas
and memories of hearts lost
and fingers stained.

and always is a tremulous word,
but I believe in her.
Sometimes.

YHWH, you change, I think
but you are faithful to yourself
and to me.

And you are love,
and so love must do the same.

it changes, and moves, and runs, and weeps, and slows, and speeds..
but it is love all the same, and it is true to all it binds.

bind me to all that is faithful,
and loose me from all that decays.
i want living love, covenants spoken true
and all that is fire, earth, and heart.

there's something about a gentleman,
holds the umbrella over head, or at least halfway
laughing as the water hits my left cheek and eyelashes

asks questions,
cares for the answers.

smiles brightly,
laugh laugh laugh
my soul let your eyes smile.

this is the time for things to mend,
for knitting and making
and cooking and creating.

sweet yeshua,
gentle men, those rare
living breathing imitations of you
they exist! HALLELUJAH, all beautiful things
have not died.


HALLELUJAH,
all things are not broken in this
bent and less than glorious earth.

Warm love, with achingly everlasting cups of cocoa.
The air outside is frozen, but our breaths and laughs and bodies have warmed the living room into something like a home.
Something living and breathing, with flesh and blood and woolen socks.


I curled up with comfort and let him hold me through the night,
and the first night it was sweet, sweet, warm, and safe.

Then did you hear my heart beat fainter? Did you see me roll away and ache to sleep alone.
I covered myself, head buried deep beneath a pillow, hoping to postpone existence
just more more minute, hour, day.

sharp air bit my nose, uncovered by morning
sharp drop to my stomach when i remembered
the evening of comfort, caresses in bed.

from healing to wretched
too quickly to catch the change
a fatal moment of naivety.

tonight i sleep on bare wood floor.
i want no more secrets,
i want only to be whole

gilgit

oh, and my bones miss you pakistan
they are aching to walk in your dust and splendor again.

hours on the trains, warm pages

Smiles seem to have wound their way back around my vocabulary. I've been testing it mostly with strangers, funny strangers on the deep long trains. Easing my way into the waters of the Basement, that fluorescent cellar of true ideas and grumpy people. Smiles there feel good, too. But smiles when you ask how I'm doing? Terrifying, but suddenly here and the words well even came from my groan. So much tearing and daring to speak truth, to declare in honesty who I am, to decide earnestly who I will become.

Lewis's words are reaching deep, deep, deeper than I wanted.
We were blinded in Eros, worshipped his terrible feet, and pleaded our lives for him to be among us.
There was no depth our love could not reach and, and so there was no hope in our grasp.
I hated Venus, course but sultry lover, wanter of all that feels like you.

You loathed, and perhaps still loathe that Eros, he that bound you into me,
gave you no door to open outside of my own.

But Venus, she cut me and I did not feel whole or good or loved in her presence.
She's a dirty lover, she's a course replacement for things that should breath life.

And the quick pain of shame tore the veil of Eros around us from my eyes and out of my senses,
haze lifted, lines sharp, who are you?

I ran, clawed, buried myself beneath so many pages of safety, of Tolkien of Steinbeck of Wolfe
oh oh and Micah and Isaiah, and some strange strange psalmist and Solomon himself...
and tore Eros away from me, though he's always at my feet
and in my sleep, reminding me of love that I left.

Of you, but I called YHWH's heart to be more than yours.
I screamed and wept and sat quietly, slept fitfully in every sort of
desperate and resigned attempt to love YHWH more than you,
to bind Eros to my deadened flesh
and something beautiful to Hashem.

Husband, the true Eros himself; please bind me to you.
Yeshua, here is the bride, here I am and I'm not clean.
Venus is mingled in the scent of my hair, but I've cut it off.

Shaved and homely and in all my lack of glory
here I am. I am for you.

All of this caring has been wearing
on my everlasting, wait, always heaving always musing blood.

Season of distance, season of resistance to your pull.
And long hours from embraces, and a damn long bridge
from talks and walks with the other talking walking parts of my soul.

Mumbling whining blood, foolish blood that wants to color
bike trails far from here. Wants to run back to where its thickest, to
deep dirty soil from Alabama.

And wants to run under the East River,
through the L train and the Q, soak right deep in to the belly of
the Empire. Wants to run through the limbs of my loves,
its other highway home.

Wants to be the life and move and pull, wants to be essential,
and begged for. My longing rumbling foolish blood
would never stop pulling us all together. Our hearts could be nothing but
one, because we'd all flowing one to another.

Yeshua's unity, and something about
YHWH's love for me,
and I think it's all muddled again.
This blood's been run through rust and it's carrying
bones from long dead loves. It needs to be alive, carry whispers
of a different ghost, a Living ghost, a Holy one.

The skeletons have been knocked loose, they're going to
clammer through the flow and into another's and then
it's all out in the open. Then I'm there staring at the ugly
decay that was in me. I'll see it and we'll all see it.
Oh, and YHWH, you'll see it, too?

But it'll be out of me, and maybe this blood
will stop being so foolish.
I'm asking for wise blood, I'm begging for clean blood.
I want your blood to be my own.