Jesus
never taught me
how to interact
with a rock, didn’t address
the souls of things.

There was that one time
when He talked of rocks
but all He said was that
we shouldn’t  be throwing them
at each other, for which (I imagine)
the rocks
were silently grateful
but their feelings
remain unrecorded
in any of the Scriptures.

Later, He called Peter a rock
and said He’d build a church on him.
I don’t imagine real rocks
were amused — a man’s not a rock,
they said to each other, how foolish
to imagine that a church could be built
on men alone?

I do not know
if Jesus listened
to the voice of the earth
when He lay down to sleep
on the hard stone
of the Holy Land. 
Did He even
consider that land holy,
or was it just
a convenient place
to start?

Even when He lay
for those three days
under the ground, protected
by the boulder,
sleeping upon stone,
the story that we’re told
is that He wasn’t truly there:
not present
in the place
of His greatest
possibility.

It’s said that
an angel
rolled away that stone
on the Sunday,

but I have always imagined
that the Stone moved out of Jesus’
way on its own, as if to say:

"It’s your time now,
and we’ll let it happen,
but we will be here
long after you’re gone."

This is how the Robe
was passed
to Him: it was an allowance,
a sufferance,
and not a seizure:

for I still see rocks everywhere,
intact, patient,
waiting to be heard,

while Jesus
lives in a house
of broken stone,
split wood,
melted, clarified sand;

while we know what He said
to us, it is impossible to know
what Gospel the rocks heard
as He stood upon them,
preaching what to their ears
was must have been
an impenetrable message
of the End of Days.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

PS:  I’m sure this will prompt some upset here and there; sorry in advance.  Just talking about my own beliefs…

Tuesday
has yet to click into place.
Birds fall silent after the dawn chorale,
the squirrel’s chattering on his usual rock,
and I can’t decide what to do:
go back to bed for a while,
or start working.

This week hurts more
than I’d planned for.
Money’s tight, I’m alone again,
and while there’s a pretty world
out there to astound me,
it seems I can’t breathe deeply enough
to take it all into me, let it expand me,
open me to something greater than myself.

Perhaps I should be silent too today,
take the birds as mentors —

eh.  I am not good with mentors,
with being advised.  I’ve given up on
therapy, listening, pills, meditation,
exercise, thoughtful contemplation
of what others have said.  All I’ve got left
is a keyboard and a lust
for getting me out there,

instead of letting what’s out there
come in. 

Believe me, you must believe me:
there was a time when I could have told you
the names of all the minerals in the rock
that squirrel is using for his soapbox.
There was a time when I knew
what I stood for, and upon;
a time when I knew how
to be awake.

The first great poet
was Lot’s wife,
because she dared to look back
and understood, for a second,
why gaining distance from pain
is important.

Lot was the second,
and he didn’t even know it
until the day he could bear
salt on his goat meat
again.

I washed dishes this morning,
then made coffee. Right now
I’m waiting for the dark brown scent
of it to come alive, and I realize that
the scent isn’t dark or brown,
and the only reason I say that it is
is because coffee is dark and brown
and there’s no way to describe a scent
without relying on comparison,
and on other senses,
and all of it is about the past,
how coffee reminds me of past things,
of how a sink full of dirty dishes smells,
it reminds me of fear and sloth
and those days when I couldn’t
get off the couch
to address anything,
and I’d go out for coffee instead of
making some.

Hearing other people in the diner
talk about work and babies and money
just made me think about the couch so I’d go home
and sit on it some more, and I never bent down
to smell the couch, covering my own scent
with deodorant and spraying the air to remove
the scent of cigarettes and cat and old me,
until I just couldn’t stand myself anymore
and I’d go back out for more coffee, a beer,
a shot, anything to cover the smell.

I know I made it to here
by repeating a story
I wrote from whatever
I can remember…

but this morning,
I got up.
I washed a sink full of dishes.
I brewed coffee.
It’s ready,
and all the cups
are clean.

some of us think we’ll close the deal tonight
when we fire up a doomsday machine in France
and atoms open up
and let themselves go
and maybe we’ll all burst open with them;

or maybe it will come ten years from now,
or twenty, when we drown in our own waste;
or maybe when the earth finally opens its gates
and sends another flood to pull us down;
if we close the deal that way we may be wet with more than tears.

one thing is true: when we close the deal the sky will be blue,
surviving birds will sing, remaining animals will chuckle
in their furry throats, cockroaches will stretch
and slap each other on the backs even as we turn toward each other
and try to decide if it will be worth living one more day

if we have to slit the throats of children right then to gain it,
or will we decide instead to stroke their hair and tell them
that all the promises we made about making a better world
were just like drawing knives across their necks? will they
beg us to kill them before we close the deal?

when we close the deal (and maybe, just maybe, we already have)
will we still wonder how it happened, or will we take one moment
to recognize how we failed? or will we take that moment to lie one more time
and turn to the ones standing beside us, trembling before the awesome End,
and say, “I’m sure it will all come out right”?