Margin is where you will find Jesus;
joining in with a party, dancing, and providing the best wine,( at a nudge from His Blessed Beloved Mother) if asked.
While as he said to those who hated Him, and they did,
I danced for you and you scoffed, you called me a drunkard,
and a fool, I did everything and nothing to satisfy those with no faith.
How would I ever live up to your false belief.

When I was a child, I drew maps. As did my father, and his father before him. As to their reasons, I can further a guess but no more. Even my own were vague at the time, much more so now. At first it was mere fun, something I was good at and enjoyed. The simplicity of the things I drew reflected that. There is a book out there about a teen who draws maps of Manhattan, and that is his link into community with the people he's institutionalized with. An interesting parallel, but not an end that I share with him. If one could take all of the maps I drew and place them side by side in chronological order, one could chart the dissolution of one self, and the evolution of another. The first, probably a quick game I played with my dad, dots for soldiers and little tanks, thin pencil streaks delinating fire. And the last I think, was an overview of the Krak de Chevaliers, drawn from the memory of a lost book on the Crusades. A nine year period between the two. At some point was born the concept that as disordered and chaotic as my life and feelings were, as beautiful things ended around me, I could create order and purpose on a piece of paper. I could shape a city or a fortification to my will or whimsy, could garner accolades with a craft. Writing began that way also. And at some point, the visual precision of cartography gave way to prose, and then to poetry, and finally to apology. But the skills remained, and the practical eye that governed them. I've always been able to see maps and translate them to first person imagery. Been able to inhale a document and ingest the contents like food and drink. Today, if asked, I could tell you of the seven great walls of Constantinople, of the how and why they finally fell in 1453 to the Ottomans. I could describe in detail the failure of Charlemagne to reconquer the Iberian, and of the disintegration of the great man's realm after his death. Dead history to some, but not to me.

Show me a map of Afghanistan and I see more than ISAF and Taliban. I think that was one of the many reasons I was good at what the Army asked of me. The job itself, not the lifestyle. An excellent addition to the S-2, but a terrible Soldier. I thought too deeply about things, saw too far behind our infant of a nation to really believe in our mission. There are some children playing soccer in Paktika today with green eyes, passed down from Macedonian soldiers during Alexander's conquest and the subsequent Wars of the Diadochi. Dig a few feet into the walls of Herat and you will find musket ***** from Tarmelane's devastation alongside shrapnel from Soviet mortars. Some villages so old that they were inhabited when merchants from the great plateau of Iran brought the first tales of Rustam. All this behind a map, with soldiers far tougher and experienced than I wondering why goatherds with small arms were able to resist the most expensive military machine in history. Don't mistake me, the Quetta Shura Taliban, the Hiz-bi Islami Gulbuddin and the Haqqani Network, to say nothing of Al-Qaeda and the Khorasan Group, are people who perform evil deeds. But those tactics, beheadings and hangings, public stonings and burning, are tried and tested methods. European armies and commanders from 1632 would have approved heartily, recognized all of it as a matter of course. 1632.....A mere second ago in terms of the history of the Human species.

And so, I no longer make maps. Not for the Army, not for myself. I only write now. For many reasons, but primarily only two. As explanation, apologia more precisely, to describe and justify why I am the way I am. And for the joy of creation, the mystery of reaching into a soul with mere words. No map can ever accomplish that.

She had bid unto him, that a garden should be built. And he, with all the art he possessed, driven on by fire, had done so. He stands there now, alone in the dark, aching for her as he has never ached for anything else. Remembering the stories he had told her in the beginning, how it made him fill with light at the request. And he thinks of the strangeness of it, this soul that speaks as if it has walked out of the East on the heels of Rumi. How he can not ever seem to say these things aloud, how he fears the past has more power than the future. He wishes that he could have been given a book about her, so as to be all he can for her. This is how he communicates the deepest parts of himself, afraid that she will flee at too much tenderness, or think him weak and effeminate. Belief alone in her, and of what they share, is all that propels him forward. Knowing they have only begun, that his experience of her is merely a taste of what may be, he writes.

This is Detroit
and we ignore
what the rest of the world
has to say about us,
we wear our stink
like a badge of honor
and we laugh
at the fear on your face
knowing where you are
and what youve heard.
This is Detroit
the motor-city
which means
you better own one
because our public transportation *****
our roads aren't much better
and our gas prices are high
which means
the speed limit is unacceptable in the fast lane
in fact,
anything thats not 10-15 over
is not acceptable
treat our highways like the autobahn
This is Detroit
and any Coney Island you go to
you shouldn't see any fries
underneath the chili and cheese
regardless how small It may be
This is Detroit
and its a city that refuses to die
because of its artistic output
from Motown
to Eminem
and our failures
that catch the eye of the world
yet we live on
through the hardship
that builds our character
as they scoff
This is Detroit
and every pothole
every decaying building
every makeshift
into a new business
is a character trait
where banks become pizza shops
and theaters parking lots
This is Detroit
where we still show up and party
for a football team that has never
won a Superbowl
This is Detroit
we are dangerous
we are lawless
we know our own
and we wouldn't want it any other way

Dear Mom,
I know I shouldn’t have been
snooping, but when looking
for some socks on a day when I was
still living with you and had neglected
to do my laundry, meticulously paper clipped
in your drawer, I found a 26-page document
that made my insides curl
when I saw the name of Dad’s mistress
printed blatantly on the front cover.
Yes, I looked through it
(and I know I shouldn’t have) and I don’t know
what made me more disturbed—the fact
that you took the time, ink and paper
to look up the woman who
destroyed your marriage
on public records,
and neatly annotated the highlights
of her messy divorce
prior to meeting Dad—or that this
26-page monstrosity sat innocently beside
his old Valentine’s Day cards,
still painstakingly arranged by year, mixed in
with your daughters’ decade-old crayon drawings
captioned by the loopy letters of a child’s handwriting
next to little plastic baggies with worn edges
containing baby teeth,
the roots yellowed by age and decay.

You never let anything go, do you?
You hold time captive by the wrists
until the soft skin bruises, and even when
it finally jerks itself away, you still manage
to sweep up every speck of dust
its presence
left behind, and store it
perfectly labeled in your archives
like some neurotic historian,
where you think your daughter, who was
only looking for a pair of socks,
would never just happen to stumble upon
this hoarded material record
of every ******* thing
that torments you.