A Damsel, A Tramp, A Wildcard, A Jack of All Suits: The Story of The Knight

Good Lord.

The Killers are the soundtrack today; you know the drill: open this link and listen while you read.
You know, artistic choices and stuff.

When there's nowhere else to run
Is there room for one more son?

I'm warning you all now: I'm experiencing a bit of virtually every emotion on the spectrum today. So brace yourself. Here goes.

Becca told me once, "If they can't accept you at your worst, they don't get to see you at your best."

But for me, it's about being accepted at my best. And I don't quite know why that is. I get to the top and somehow throw others down to the bottom. Stay with me...

If you can hold on, 
If you can hold on, hold on.

I'm going through some things, and in the last 72 hours have been filled with love and heartbreak and angst and grief and shame and pain. Overall, I'm overflowing. And at the same time I feel a little empty inside. Like there's this swelling loss so big that it's taking up all the space inside my insides, and it's pushing my lungs up out of my chest and it's hard to breathe and eat and sleep. And I only stop thinking when I'm sleeping.

I'm hurting, because I was called fragile.

Fragile is one thing I am not. Never have been. Never will be. 

I wanna stand up, I wanna let go.
You know, you know - no you don't, you don't.
I wanna shine on in the hearts of men;
I want a meaning from the back of my broken hand.

No.

I have faced abandonment and abuse, divorce, depression, hatred, loss.
I have seen cancer and rape and violence.
I have been hit and hurt and cut and thrown aside.
And what hurts most of all of it is the thought that I might not be able to handle any of it again.

Another head aches, another heart breaks.
I'm so much older than I can take.

I'm not asking for it, of course, but in life there's one thing I've learned again and again: Man will not save you. Man will not hold your world together.

You know you gotta help me out.
Don't you put me on the backburner.
You know you gotta help me out. 

You grab your satchel and your wheelbarrow; you load up your skeletons, and you call on your God to get you through. Because no one can carry the burdens of your heart but you. You set off along the railroad tracks, another tramp in the haze of a southern summer and you go make your own story. You march, crawl, scramble, amble, sprint: to your hurdles, your loves, the moments in time when you stand and point to the first person in the room who catches your eye and he changes your life.

And then you go to the next room. And you point out someone else. And someone else changes you, too.

But you never let those cards--the Jacks and Queens that float in and out of your hand through the trick, through the game, through endless turns and rivers--the cards never play for you, never throw your ante into the pot, never raise your stakes, never hold themselves up at the table.

You hold your own. You tramp along, another game awaiting your bid.

It's a valiant knight who makes the attempt to pull you onto his horse and carry you along. But there are some pieces of your life in that wheelbarrow (your family, your desires, your memories, your insecurities) that you cannot leave behind. And in his armor, he will try to lead his horse while you ride; he will push the barrow. And you're there: just riding along.

But eventually you both realize he has done too much. He has carried all your weight. You wrap your arms around the neck of the steed, laughing at the irony of a man so strong who has worn himself so ragged. You tell the horse to carry his master home. You thank the knight for the beauty of his heart. You give him one last look while the rider mounts, and you say goodbye, and thank you to your dear, dear friend.

You know you got to help me out, yeah.
You're gonna bring yourself down
Yeah, you're gonna bring yourself down

And you pull your satchel back over your shoulder. You say a prayer of thanks for the kindness of a wildcard in a moment of need. You realize you lost the hand, but the Dealer is still at the table, and He's got another trick for you. And all the cards are back in His hand. And you've learned another secret of the game.

I got soul, but I'm not a soldier.

So many metaphors. Sorry if I lost you. That was maybe more for me than anybody else. And I feel good about it. But here's where I wanted to end up...

I am a strong, strong person

You're gonna bring yourself down.

And I am resilient.
Three weeks ago I was at the bottom: emotional, frustrated, hurt, trapped, angry.
But I built myself a terrace; I climbed my way out. No one else did that climb for me.
I had plenty of concerned hearts on the outside cheering, but for years now I've been the one to pull myself from the hole.


But this time, at the mouth of this crater, I was careless. I saw a hand reaching in to pull me out, and what I thought was one quick pull turned out to be much more, and when I regained my footing, I saw I had thrown the body of that salvation into the place I had only just left. I made a martyr of the grace I was given.

Over and in, last call for sin
While everyone's lost, the battle is won
With all these things that I've done
All these things that I've done

I didn't realize how tired the knight had become until I saw him fallen and bloody at the the bottom of the hole I'd dug  I never wanted that. No one should ever work so hard only to come out feeling like a failure; like I feel now.


So, I shovel another heartache into the barrow. I say my prayer of thanks, remind myself of the lesson I keep relearning: man will not save me. But oh, it is a beautiful ride when he tries. And for that, I stay grateful, and with grace, I stay away while the knight picks himself up from the pit, rebuilds the terrace, climbs his way out.
 
If you can hold on
If you can hold on.

The Old Year

Listen while you read: "There Goes The Fear" - Doves

Every night is a reset button.

But tonight is something different.

Tonight, I'll close my eyes when I sleep and wish with every muscle and tendon and cell, that I'll wake up to the first day of 2011.

I want a reset, to do the last year over. Not because I made mistakes, although I did, but so I could relive the best moments, and appreciate them, and so I could make choices for the right reasons, not out of desperation or expectation.

If I were to wake up to January 1, 2011, all over again, I'd be in the same room, here in my parents' house. My ears wouldn't be pierced yet, and my grandfather would still be alive.

What I'd do first: I'd wake up in the morning, and call the Foxes of Hickory Hills to ask if they wouldn't mind having me for lunch. I would cherish it. I'd take a picture of the three of us together: a replacement for the one I won't have on my wedding day, and didn't get at my graduation.

If I woke up to the old year, I'd make mostly the same choices, because the point isn't to make some manufactured future where things are "better," but I'd care better for the hearts of the people I love, because I've done a poor job of that for the last six months. I've been selfish, to the point where I lied myself through a relationship that was completely fabricated in my mind--I made it something it would never be.

But I'd still approach that relationship with the same hope, because we came to understand each other better and more easily than anyone ever had before.

My heart was out of sorts for a while because of it, but I learned about myself, and about relationships and people in general. I now I know what it's like to have a man ask me what's wrong, because he knows that I'm thinking about something that has upset me, but that I won't talk about it. All this he can tell by the way I bite my lip when I'm simultaneously frustrated and resigned. Yet he doesn't love me.

I'd do our friendship the same way in a repeat.

There are times when I'd hold my words and wait for better ones to come, because there have been, especially in a Chicago apartment since October, plenty of words that never should have left my mouth. And for all of those, I am still sorry. I was destructive in the wake of the waves that a broken heart made in me. I was some one entirely different.

But I'm better now. If I was to do it again, I'd skip the disasters, and come straight to the healing.

If I woke up to the start of 2011, I'd be so very excited to go back for my last semester of college, and that, I would do better. More studying, more reading, more writing. The new friends I made in the last year: I'd start those friendships all over again. Everyone from Westwoods, in particular. And I would pour into that community ten times over. Those people helped me hold my world together this summer, and I never gave them proper thanks. They were all beautiful and I hold them in my heart. I would be a better youth leader, and I'd be closer to those kids. They'd know I'm still here for them.

I would be a better roommate to my best friends, and I would value living with them so much more, because A207 was a perfect home for us, and I never loved it while I was there, but now I miss that place and the three girls I had lived there with so very much.

I would spend more time with Laura and Jessie. I'd get closer to Jess.

My college friends started sort of slipping away from the scenery of my life before we were even close to leaving CCU, and I wish that even back in our sophomore and junior years, we had kept the bigger group together--all those Shelter boys. I know that people drift apart, and that's obviously a part of life, but I know that a good number of us are still close enough and have the sort of relationships where the distance and time apart will never matter. Boys, I miss you, too.

The summer was a dream. I wouldn't change a thing. Except I would have saved more money, and saved Barry. Poor little guy all crushed up from an RV on I-25. (Barry was my old car, for those of you who don't know. And no one was harmed in the accident.)

If I'd been smarter and worked harder, who knows, maybe there would have been a job waiting for me when I graduated, and maybe I wouldn't have ended up coming home. But it's no matter, because despite this great wish to relive the last year, I've found my way:

"I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength." -- Philippians 4:11-13

I've made it through another Old Year, in the air of loss and change and heartbreak and a hundred other ugly things.

I've made it through another Old Year, because I was swirled with snowflakes and love and laughter and butterflies in the rain. There were fireworks and we held hands and breathed the mountains like we owned them, and we did: they were our private gift from heaven, and we threw worship to the Creator from their roads. We worshiped with our hands and our mouths and our pounding feet and fists. There was love. And wedding cakes in bright and shiny shoes, on my best friend's best day. There was Denver and DC and Lakewood and CCU and Target and Lemont and wonderful everything. I wrote letters. I danced. I laughed, God did I laugh. I walked and I smiled and I cried and I hurt. And there was so much love.

With another shot at that old year that tore up my picture of the world, I'd love more yet.

Cheers to the Old Year, here's to the New Year.

For more love, we'll take 2012 as it comes.

Had You Followed Me Home

An old poem: for October and November, for quirks, for happy times and timely goodbyes.

Had You Followed Me Home
For all the things that never happened with you,
and all the things that shouldn't have happened to anyone else.

If you had followed me here, we’d be in the breaking leaves
behind my parents’ house—the dying earrings of the cottonwood
litter the grass, the chopped onions from a mower blade in a lawn salad.
Your warm Pacific blood would move slowly and
you’d beg my worn Midwestern hands to assure you—
You’d stand, swirled by yard dusts and flakes,
and I’d touch your knee and smile with my father’s laughter
when we’d meet him for pizza on an October Thursday in Chicago.
We’d see my high school friends and sing our way to the all-night diner
that’s been made-over (purple ceilings and yellow walls) by the
Greeks who’ve owned it for the last five-hundred years or so.
Holding the menu half open, you’d order—no, ask for—chocolate cake and
my friends would taunt and tease you, actions typically reserved for me.
I’d swipe a taste of the frosting and bury myself in the corner of the booth,
green glows for irises at the impossibility of you on the vinyl with me.
Had you followed me home, you’d have seen Chicago play a symphony of who I am:
the Metra hum beats percussion with State Street brass and theater light strings
and my hometown, my mother’s house—its mellow reeds play woodwind tones.
In grass under cotton shade, we—with closed eyes—would float on
the rising of the suburban orchestra and then, with the birth of these thoughts,
you’d tune the masterpiece and call it love.

A Breathy Defense of My Reckless Disclosures

December 2009

It’s ever so peculiar—

how we tend to find something new
to say about the same things
whether they are old or unimpressive
or unamusing

that we assume words addressed to
anonymous audiences are really
calling our names or looking at us
sideways

And it’s not quite right

that I told a man it’s a lot easier to tell my
secrets to a holiday card with a calligraphy
pen than to actually vocalize them
out loud

that we keep living our lives after
parts of them end—not stages like
adolescence or relationships—but
separate worlds

It’s appalling—

the way I forgot about the boy I
abandoned when we were children
and that I didn’t realize it for
five years

that I am so thoughtful of these things
in coffee shop moments
but that they escape me in exhales
and regularly forgotten motions

Yet I—we—forget

We do

Futile.

You get Sufjan, and he's a treat, so listen.

We have stories that are secrets in their own regards--silence in their tellings.

There are words we never want to say or hear or feel.

And these are such: Cancer. Love. Death. Distance. Time.

They are harmful and breaking and painful and I fear them. I do not feel safe or happy or comforted. Right now, not even by love. But that's for another day.

I'm surrounded by cancer, in the women we've lost, the men we're losing, the places we're going.

And I feel useless. I can do nothing. I can pray. I can cry.

I've done those things, and I retire in curious March sunsets with nothing, feeling nothing, feeling scared.

I do-love you-I do.

I can change the way I feel, and the way I experience what happens around me, but I cannot prevent the spinning of the earth, or dark empty breath and its stopping, or the growing of tumors.

I cannot force life to function under the realm of my whims.

To try is futile.

So I do nothing and cry and pray.

I see the astounding simplicity of who people are---

In strings and salads, running shoes, tobacco pipes, haircuts, hubcabs, VHS tapes, nail polish, name tags and needles--for creating and destroying-- and in crossword puzzles, veils, backpacks, sandwich bags, and text books.

I see truth in picnic tables and Midwestern Oaks and the conversations we've never had with the people who have always needed them most.

We see truth and we keep quiet.

And I would say I love you, but saying it out loud is hard.

So I won't say it at all and I won't stay very long.

There are things we ought to say, and love we ought to give.

But we are frightened and foolish.

And words are futile devices.

More from Sufjan. Listen. We can do much more together.

We Knew Time (and a note)

Inspired by a summer's sleep with Kurt Vonnegut and Jack Kerouac

I had hummingbirds and refracted light for birthdays.
Life was miracles and moments that floated on whirs of backward wings.
At their beats, your beauty swept in me, and pulled webs from atrial corners
with straw bristles that pricked up through my chest to you.

I desired the endless; you asked who could say anything of us.
The stars! I cried: The stars who fall and our wishes
answer pleas for tomorrow, for more days, time.
To the stars, the birds, the colors! Magic and wonder—
Love, I was a child again on logs over streams
in mosquitoless, thin air beside you.

Those June hours ambled along like we knew time, though
it laughed us off—whimsies on the road with some dead language.
I told stories of beauty without pain, of flesh off bone,
and lost my own speech to questions novels asked: If this isn’t nice, what is?

There was Independence pumpkin pie on the bridge, on a night without pops in the sky
because the rain soaked the fuses of all the men in our towns.
We had Broadway bookstores, their paperbacks for our change and
I gorged myself on the scribble of a dream—a world where the rain kept coming.
But it slowed. And the days shortened so the cinematic light
ushered us to darkness on plazas and porches.

Without cover, we watched shooting stars in backseats and coffee shops
with fewer words between us, yet ever more beneath us.
On broken color and falling light, I wished for more time—which you spent with
ignorance of the short season we pretended to enjoy, or did—maybe.

There had been days rich with rain and walks in soggy denim
on Friday nights when I—with dripping hair—would ask you why.
Then there was Tuesday outside the speckled library windows
when the books stayed shelved: out of our hands, dry from the air.

But under hot blues, words of the published men in our eyes went out my mouth
and in your ears as July cried in the dry heat, while we sat poolside and silent.
The heat came on with hurricane breath and desert air,
then we shriveled as sprinklers spat and the backwards birds kissed us goodbye.

The summer drought sucked the color and give of our skin, which
left us to watch as it flaked and burned.
We knew time like the touch of arid rainbows,
ruby-throated, and almost alive.

Hey all, this piece was going to wait to see the blog until summertime, but today felt like an appropriate day to post it. I just hit 1,400 views, and I'm pretty excited about it. Thanks for reading and supporting me. And now I have a favor to ask: share me with someone you know. There are about 50 of you who consistently read when I post, and if each of you share this poem with a friend who you think might enjoy my type of writing, it'll make a huge difference for me. If you didn't know, I started this blog in hopes of establishing a readership to help me get published in the next year or two, and now it's time to move past having only people who know me as followers. Again, I'm so grateful that you have all been reading, and I'm humbled by the numbers.
Easy option to be a huge help: share the link on Facebook. I can't even tell you all how big it would be for me if you each got one more person to start checking back here consistently. SO big!

Let's make it happen. Have a great day everybody. Let's get to 1,500 by tomorrow!

The Van

October 2010

For my siblings

We cleaned the old family van today:
the carpets are now more brown—less gray—
and wrappers of twelve different gum brands
were stuffed in the backseat cupholders.

The waxy printed paper tells of
rides home on Sundays after church breakfasts
when each belt was stretched over the hipbones
of a child—one in each of the benches and buckets.
We went altogether and with filled seats:
in one place, at one time.

We sucked dirt from a dozen states or more—
and as many years—from when we gobbled
the Midwest and jumped to coasts in summers
when we children drove alone, all learning, all leaving.
The sand of seven beaches came up and out
with football pads and baseball bags,
record players and poems scribbled on those wrappers
and napkins that wiped all of our faces
of foreign filth and the sin of thoughtless travesties.

We had left our childhood skins in the upholstery
with engagement rings, teenage things
who we were, and how our family exhaled.