Originally posted 7/29/2008.

People have lately
developed a bad habit
of walking into churches
to kill other people,
which (I suppose)
is the natural evolution
of several thousand years
of people walking out of churches
to kill other people.

Killing for any reason is so common
that no special wringing of hands
is strictly necessary, although
(as is true of the killing)
we’ll do it anyway, even though
we get into that “us vs. them” thing
when we do, with our sad fingers
pointing outward while our trigger fingers
itch in sympathy, if not
(at least to our hopeful minds)
solidarity.

You have to wonder (or at least I do)
if the problem is really
in the churches 
or in us
when people
(not all people, of course,
it’s never “all people” when we talk of this)
put so much faith in the ability of
the God of the gun to bring peace
that the God of the hymns is relegated to
providing the soundtrack to the crusade.

In one of those violated churches
they have a song that goes,
“come down peace, come down peace,
let peace come down and surround us.”
On the news this morning a man,
survivor of the latest killing,
wipes his eyes and says, “It’s gonna be hard
to sing that now.”

Of course it’s always been hard
to sing that, to wish for Something
to come down and bring a blanket to smother
our fire as it consumes us.
(I know, I know how hard it is myself,
for I have wanted more times than I should count
to bring my own pain
upon those who bring me pain.)
It’s harder now to sing it
as people (not our people, we know
it’s never our people) are reloading,
adding fuel to pyres,
blaming people (other people,
not our people, it’s always other people)
for bringing the fire upon themselves
in the first place because God (our God,
or perhaps some other God, we can never quite
put our fingers on that God) isn’t in the church
where the fire came down in place of the desired peace.

When the fire came down this time people were singing,
“the sun will come out tomorrow, tomorrow…”
and maybe it will, we hope it will; a sun
to cover all of us (all people, all people
who walk beneath that sun) in something that
resembles peace.

Until it does we’ve got
just three things to remind us
of what we claim to want:

we’ve got churches,
we’ve got people,
we’ve got a God who may not live
in any church
(if the death toll that comes from churches is any
indication, although I’m sure God stops in there
from time to time just as we do),
a God who sometimes appears deaf and blind, who
may not know much of peace at all
(if we are the measure of peace),
who holds the blanket high above us
(perhaps to block the view of all this)
and waits for us to call for it
before letting it fall.

We are so hoarse from shouting at people
(other people, all the other people)
who seem to feel
that the road through death
is the only path we truly share
that when we sing
(why must we sing so hard?
why is it so hard for us to just sing?)
we don’t believe it’s singing (but it is).
Let peace
come down and surround us.
Tomorrow,
tomorrow
(if not today).

Originally posted 7/13/2006; original title “Spiritus Mundi.”  
The thrust of this piece has changed pretty dramatically in the revision process.

This is the desk
where I claim to work
but it’s so cluttered
nothing big can happen here,

so I work on the porch instead
where there’s an ashtray
large enough to dump
only once every couple of days
next to a pair of chairs
set up knee to knee
where the laptop can sit 
and the notebook can sit
while I sit pretending
to type as I smoke,
pretending the work goes on. 

The ghost in the kitchen
never comes out here, the ghost
that is audible from every other
place in the apartment, the ghost
that won’t leave me alone
unless I’m out here
trying to work.  When I’m not
the ghost rattles the pans
and runs across the linoleum,
tattling on someone unknown 
who ended a long time ago.
The doors swing open and shut 
without anyone touching them. 

My neighbors come and go as well,
swinging doors open and shut 
without anyone touching them
or me touching them either,
or so it seems from the porch
where the ghost never comes, 
where the things that ought to get done 
never get done, where the smoking
is good and the sitting is easy. 

I have no fear of the ghost. In fact,
if I could I’d let the ghost
open and shut my notebook at will.
I’d let that ghost
write it all for me.
I’d let the ghost make sense 
of the miscues
and odd placements, let it
take over my life; I would 
put it in better hands,
hands that can pass though walls
to get big things done

in this place
where I’ve come to rest,
where the desk is so cluttered
and the porch and I
are both so empty
that the big things
never seem
to get done.