How is it I'm a big mess of words,
and I break the ones I never meant to.

Sometimes I smear the ink and sometimes I misspell the words,
but I never meant to break them.

My body's tense and if you move too quickly,
if you touch too suddenly,
I swear I'll run.

I'll run I'll run I'll run just like Honey
my dearest baby fawn ran, I'll run I say, I'll run.

Headlights will fade and I will wake up and I will run
til my feet touch Alabania. I'll run with a tin drum and a tamborine,
strap my fiddle to my back and black my fingertips with ink
so I can write the stories with my fingers on the strings
of my violin. Big messy words, and little ones that sing so sweet.

I'll run til I find a tent, around the hills and through the mountains
and past the wilderness and all the way to a tent, where we'll sit and drink
chai. Play with each other's hands and say that we know one another.

My ink will stain your fingers and the story will be close, will be close, will be close
and frighteningly intimate.
My desert gypsies will love me home, and we'll drink chai in your tent near the manna.

The aching is no longer aching.
No, it's fire under my skin and in every breath I take.
The aching has surged to ripping.

YHWH my heart wants to drink in the stories.

There are dollars dripping around me, spent on drinks that comfort
and food that calls me home.

Home is no longer comfortable, these dollars are no longer mine.

Yeshua take them from me, take my time, and my body, and pour me out to the nations.
To the little ones who live in bitter, and the aching bodies that sleep in no home.

They are mine to hold, mine to weep over. I can sleep in this bed no longer.
Food and drink and cloth, for what? I am a queen among the tearing of the world.
My dollars should be bled for the ones who cannot speak.

My dollars will be bled for the ones they do not know.
They are not invisible to me, their cries wake me in my sleep
and my dreams feel their little bodies.

YESHUA forgive us. Forgive me.
I am no longer blind.

There's a big rumbling sky
and it's wider than the smiles I throw
past strangers.

And it's bluer than those eyes
I said I loved.
Only the sky's grey today, and

I'm not sure I ever said I love you.

I'm writing lines lighter than a bleach blonde's hair
and pretending to care about the color of the sky.



Big dark rumbling sky,
thunder deep and my blood thumps
and a prick and there's real red on the floor.
It's so I know I'm alive. It's better than
a paper cut, my pulse is thick with laughter.


Found this, from years ago. Written about a friend I ached for.
The aching never stops, though the faces do:


There was a weed, in his path,
and he stumbled on a stone.
There was a mushroom by the tree,
and there he fell on his own.

He took a drink by the stream,
and there he wasted his time.
Under a tree in a dream
sleep failed, while he grinned at the sun.

He tasted the apple,
and laid down in the dust.
Woke feeling weighted,
with Wonderland winds a gust.

As the poppies bloomed forcefully,
he sat on a rock,
at the foot of a mountain
where the weather was soft.

He wasted his years that day.
as he stumbled on a stone.
He tripped again that day,
and grinned as he stumbled home.

It's an easy night with long drinks,
good company, and the house smells of sulfur
from matches lit.

Sun was warm today, and I smiled for it.
I was loved today, and I warmed to it.

Little can turn such an easy aroma sour,
but the sweet smelling room still did
when you slunk to his call
and turned your eyes down.

When light is shed on the ill-trusted, it hurts no less though foreseen. Ache is deeper for the trust held higher stakes.

Tobacco is lingering in my breath
and the feel of music slipped around my mouth.

They taste good together.

Both are stale now,
but the story they tell is worth living.

Work late, drink later, sleep hard,
wake heavy, work again while Sunday sleeps in.

And then the road, long and thick with
other cars living stranger stories.

And then the music, weaving and swelling
and waning and crooning, and pulling strings
of your work ached soul to a perfect pitch.

And between sets the smoke is easy
and full, and dances pretty past your nose and hands.

Inside a song begins as the bowl empties,
and tobacco and music drift together.

whiskey ponies

whiskey ponies,
shaggy little ones
with flared hooves and sharp eyes.

stamping their feet, and sniffing
the fermented gold on their backs.

cross with their ears laid flat,
they are impatient to trot paths
smoothed by their errand every week.

the lesser known brothers of those equine
heroes, the runners of the Pony Express.

but these were ponies with stories rarely
told, with coats never brushed.
Joseph, Nicholas, and Bartholamew.

These ponies had soul and hot whiskey
to wind over the mountains.

Good Morning, Istanbul

I crawled one thousand miles south of the city,
thought I would follow your smoke signal home.
Find you on the porch, with your pipe in hand,
but I got there and you were gone.

The smoke that remains, was from a book you had burned,
a book I wrote too may words in.
You flew five thousand miles east across the sea,
to write better stories than I could.

Good morning, Istanbul,
Do you miss my hellos.
There were an awful lot of them.

Now I'm writing words in the books of gentlemen,
Scoundrels I should never have met.
The handwriting's sloppy and the story
melancholy, but at least I am writing at all.

Good morning, Istanbul,
Do you miss my hellos.
There were an awful lot of them.

Did you keep even one page of the stories we lived?
Or have you left them in sweet Alabama?

The danger of words to a simple girl.

There's a maroon 1998 suburban out behind the barn. The one on Tally Ho Drive, way down a two lane highway west of Auburn. It's got those runners along the side of it, and a dozen scratches from dogwood branches and the back bumper is wrenched out to an awkward wave from the time I caught it on the side of the house. It's been sitting for three years now. It's the same four wheels I learned to drive on, pulling hard on the steering wheel to make doughnuts through the red clay. It's the same truck written into a story that still makes me tremble.

I was fifteen and words were a new and exhilarating tool. To write things I never dared speak, create stories and moments and sentences I blushed or swore at. The story, I named Plastic. And it's protagonist was a surly young woman, and she was running from something. And she drove that suburban through stop signs and lights and into parking lots behind bars. She left her lipstick in that suburban, and she felt her weight against the door when she slid out of it into a house that held a deathtrap. There was something sultry in the story, and something forbidden. A man with his hand brushing higher and higher on her thigh.

What humanity that I wrote these words and crafted sentences about a woman I had never seen, who experienced things I had never tasted. The story is raw and it brings red to my cheeks even today. I created a character and her steps more honestly than I'd dare to write today. She was sexual and deviant, and broken and weak, and resilient and beautiful.

What a strange thing, the freedom words bring. The terrifying and fulfilling rush when the un spoken is written and the unthinkable created.

To know I have books upon books left unwritten down in my belly and every new sentence is a step to writing the truest one.

The three of us, we decided to drive, to grab the keys to my car and head to a city we hadn't seen.

Well, that's mostly true.

I can lie on the grass, let the sun warm me through the breeze and grab deep breaths of sweet pollen air. I can lie here, and I can let my mind drift no further than the prickly green in my back or the story-swearing crusty kids a breath away.

They are all huddled around a man-sized cardboard box, smoke snaking out from their mouths toward a sour looking middle-aged couple. They seem happy and I like watching them.

A bicycle, of course. It would be, they're building it in the park. It must have come in the box. I wonder if they carried the box here. Of course they did, how else would it get there? But I guess I'm wondering if it came in a box from a store down the street or if it was ordered and mailed.

I wonder if putting a bicycle together is difficult. I can barely tighten my own breaks or change a tire, but they look more bicycle knowing than me. I wonder if they think I'm too clean, if I'm casual enough to join a group of story tellers like them? I wonder if they tell stories..


I'm twenty and I'll never be old. I'm twenty years old and I'll forever be young. I can take deep breaths of this air and life is only as deep as the distance I can stretch my toes toward the sun. It isn't far, I've got the shortest legs I know.

Blake and Ian sat down beside me. I didn't notice them coming, I didn't remember them saying they'd join at all. But it's ok, I like them and they joke young. Their smiles are still light and I giggle often at Blake's recent mustache. They're safe. It's Saturday, so no one will mention work or school. It's mid weekend and the sun is shining and there are crusty kids building a bicycle and I'm breathing in pollen and we're twenty and I'll never grow up.

My dress is too bright and I've put on three patterns and I almost put my hair in braided pig tails. Today is one of those days I'm fighting it hard. If there were clouds I'd be trying to find shapes in them, or a daisy and I'd be picking off love and love me not petals.

They hug me, but somehow these hugs aren't giggly. There's something weighty in their hands and I pull back to look at a squirrel. Squirrels are brilliant, always nimble and delightful to watch. But I notice this one has a shrimpy tail, like something big and mean tried to..

Blake's mouth is moving and his voice isn't jolly. He found out Lucy was pregnant. I knew that. I start thinking about babies and spring time things and giggly spit and wonder why yellow is a gender neutral color. It seems pretty clear that yellow is feminine. Well, I guess it might not be. She's young, but she's older than me by three months. Which makes her twenty one. But a little one will bring her back a few years. How can you be old with a little new pink toed baby on your hip? I guess she'll have to grow up, but a new one gets to be young. I guess that's how it works. One day I'll have a baby and I won't be so young anymore, but she will. A little baby girl will be young and beautiful and she won't know that the middle aged-couple doesn't like the crusty kids. She'll think they everyone loves everyone and that the smoke curling from their stomachs is magic for big kids...

Ian's mouth is moving now and I don't know what he's saying. Something about an abortion and how she didn't tell anyone. Something about her being worried about not having enough money or being able to finish school. Ian has his hand on Blake's back and Blake is crying. Why is he crying? Babies are wonderful and they don't know about the bad things that I'm trying to forget about. Blake's eyes are a story I don't want to read. I couldn't understand his words because I'm crying la la la in my ears, but one look in his eyes and I understand it all.

I don't want to, I'm in the park wearing a bright colored dress thinking about bicycles and squirrels and I know that Lucy lost Blake's little girl. Lucy lost Blake's little girl.

Those kids smell terrible and their bicycle is probably a fixed gear. I'm sneezing from the pollen and the grass stained my strange colored dress. Something big and mean probably should have finished off that squirrel and with no clouds in the sky I'm sure I've gotten sun burned.

My hug is frantic and I struggle to hold like I haven't just lost my world. I'm twenty years old, I'm too young to know about best friend's losing their children or squirrels getting eaten. At this point his hug is holding me and I feel defeated. I should be comforting him, but the three of us are one hug full of disbelief.

Much is blurry and few words were said. In the end, three kids sat in a park and cried because Lucy. Well Lucy lost something we would have loved very well. Ian asked if I wanted to go get icecream. I don't want icecream, I'm too old for icecream.

He says it's for my birthday and he's sorry that today isn't how we planned. Today I turned twenty-one. I want ice cream and to pretend to be young.

Moon risen, wide eyed we wait. All is ready to burst. Bursts and the silence is shattered and the curtain is torn, and death sighs its own death rattle and a new sun rises to the morn.

My door is open and wisteria is wafting through, and there is sun, and warmth and there are insects and birds and one car after another is rumbling past my home on Thach. Does Thach know? Does my front yard or the wisteria? Does the bird in a cage beside my bed know? Is that why he sings?

Has creation any idea? Anymore aware than the humanity that is blind to what has just burst and broken? To what has just ripped and risen? Death has been denied all authority, yeshua has changed things.

Who knows this? Does your heart feel it, do your bones ache with the weight of knowledge or your lungs ring with deep gulps of air not condemned?

Sun risen, wide eyed I am watching. Old corpses have burst and instead of their death stench something sweeter pours out. Wafts of wisteria and something very alive, something very alive. No veils remain, the sun is warming my front yard. And creation must know that something has changed.