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139 · Oct 2019
Hesitation
md-writer Oct 2019
When my pen hangs over the paper, just before
I set about to write, but haven’t quite
decided yet, there’s a flash in my mind of a
thousand possibilities - all the things that
I’ve so long dreamed of writing, and more;
while empty, wordless day
follows empty, wordless day,
all the things I fear will always be an
echo in my mind
resound.

Of maidens pure, opening the door to find their
****** ‘trothed come home
to kneel at her feet
and die.
For he fought well, and nobly held the foe at
bay, and came to tell the
tale in his own blood.

Of men wandering from themselves, broken
and restless souls unhinged from any tie of
hearth and sudden infants’ squall,
or love that lasts past morning.

Of hidden forest rivers fit to burst from
aelven-home, and carry all the sweetness
of that place to mortal ears, and eyes, and nose.

Of mysteries so deep they span the starry sky
at night, looking down upon the speck of one
night-eyed man, and knowing him alone
of all his fellows.

Of birds that whisper from a golden god above,
of dragons dark and slumbering, with scales of
ore and gold.

Of a crystal statue chiseled, by a blind and
tender hand, in the shape of hidden beauty,
then revealed through all the land.

Of a toddler and a giant, of a flower
barely bloomed, of a man, and of a woman,
of the beauty of a tune.

Dreams, all dreams. Things that haven’t
yet come true. Not until I write them,
or I die before they’re through.

Just before ink meets page, this cacophony of
images resounds, and almost as if frightened,
I pull back.
All of it. I want to write all of it. I want to
lay it all down on paper. But it takes so
blasted long, just to make sure each word
comes out right, and to do it all -
all at once - is too much for any pen.
I fly too high; sometimes I forget how to
spell; how does one write the entire
dictionary of the human soul in just
a story?
139 · Apr 2019
He walks with me
md-writer Apr 2019
He walks with me.

God the one and only monarch of all that is above,
below, and in-between,
the omnipresent majesty -
He walks with me.

Step by pitiable, dragging step, through murk
as deep as my soul's neck
and drowning in sorrows larger than
any eye can comprehend; and
walking by the babbling brook on
soft and springy green
(and yes, one day up in
the very clouds) -
He walks with me.

Pleased as man with men to dwell,
pleased to die and free from hell,
undergoing all the trials,
tribulations and temptations,
every waking moment I have lived
known because that Man lived too.

Now I lay me down to sleep,
now I rise and start to weep;
now I feel the joyous thunder,
now I cower on His shoulder;
now I lift His name on high,
now His hands are holding me.
Every broken part of me,
every soft and shattered dream,
all are safe in His embrace
and I am quickened in the race.
Because He walks with me.

I am lost and I am broken,
I am weary of the fight,
I am curled up on my bed
and thoughts are swirling through
my head.
But.
I am kept, and I am woken,
daily by a whispered grace
hands of healing lift me up,
and wash the tear stains off my face.
Depths cannot divide, nor heights bring
distance,
everywhere I go, there is no difference
for
He walks with me.
139 · May 2020
aurora
md-writer May 2020
I think sometimes that I want to live in a world that is full of fantastic wonders, where beauty hits you over the head with the full force of its pure extravagance and needless perfection.

And then I remember that that is the world I live in. Fantasy isn't something fundamentally alien, but reminds us of what is fundamentally wonderful about our world.

I do not see it because my eyes are half-closed. But sometimes it screams in bold letters, and reminds me that if I were to look I would see the same wonders everywhere.
139 · Nov 2019
Psalm 23
md-writer Nov 2019
No need unmet
I rest in peace and plenty;
for I am shepherded by God Himself.

He beckons along a path
that leads me to the river,
where I am strengthened and
restored -
and the spark before me is the name
of my Lord,
and the path (straight and narrow),
paved with
love and mercy;
So I follow, stumbling
in the footsteps of a greater far than I,
yet I follow still
for His name and seal upon me
will admit no last defeat.

Even the whispered shadow of death
cannot shake me,
for fear hath no place
where my Lord is -
that Riverside peace, the rest in plenty
He has given, remain
unshaken,
brought back to memory by
the correcting rod and supporting staff
to stay my path in comfort
straight and true.

The battle spreads before me,
enemies snarl, and the
fiery darts whine.
I stand in armor, but a feast is
laid out there,
a repast fit for heroes,
to remind me that the battle
is
already won.
The victor is anointed,
the warrior too - a paradox,
already and not yet, I live
on both sides of the battle,
and His cup of joy and strengthening
wells over,
like a stricken rock in desert wastes,
it flows out in a river
by my side.
I may wade into the gore
of battle,
I may stand at death's
own door,
but this everlasting goodness
and the mercy of His face
will not depart -
will not depart from me.

For on the far side of this
valley,
on the flip side of this fight,
the house of my God is,
and in it's halls is my
eternal home.
There in that place are the pastures,
the rivers,
the feasts of the soul...

...the fullness of foretastes He's
given before.
Expanded personal paraphrase
138 · Aug 2019
Dead
md-writer Aug 2019
Ghost left the shell.
Years ago.

Hardly knew it at first.

Gradually.

Colors muted. Sounds dulled.
Constant ringing in my ears
replaced the hum of mind.

But later, when I died.

Then I realized.



I never lived.
135 · Sep 2019
Depravity.
md-writer Sep 2019
The grotesquery of humanity is not seen in the mundanity of its many perversions, but in that we who have been set just below the gods stoop so low in our search for the satisfaction of heavenly desires.
134 · Jun 2019
Alien
md-writer Jun 2019
The world is far more
alien,
than I supposed before.
All it takes to see this is a trip to
somewhere
humans aren't supposed to be -
the sky above, or foundering
in the deep, deep
sea.

The truth is, we've only got a tiny window of the
space that's on this earth,
and while we call it home,
there's far more we can only
glimpse and stare at
from afar.

There's a world above the clouds
that no one could have
ever seen,
(if we never made a flight machine, that is)
but always it is there, regardless of our eyes.
And when we've tumbled through
that air-space and
come down,
well, it goes back to being what it
was before - the gentle
undulating whiteness of the tops of
clouds and plains.

From a distance, it should be solid,
one thinks. A planet
of white rock, with blue sky
overhead
              and sun.

The tall and gentle creatures
that should live here,
soft of foot and hibernating
for years, perhaps,
in crooks and hidden crannies
- Lord only knows -
white of skin and eye and bone,
matching the world they live on,
unchanging and yet
never same.

But no. There are no creatures
in the clouds.
None but us - and we don't live there;
no, we wouldn't dare.
We'd die, if we ever tried.
And that's the point.

The world that we call "ours"
is just a sliver, just a slice
of everything this world is,
and all that lies between.
132 · Aug 2019
First Days
md-writer Aug 2019
The heavens warred
above us,
for decades at a time:
with blazing lights at midnight,
and
shadows stalking past at noon.

We took shelter in the depths,
left our children in their
graves.
The old and weak among us
fell beneath

the dying
of
the gods.

Towers tall as mountains,
walls once thick and strong,
cities split like gemstones
by the fountains bursting through.

Scorching heat,
flames born of wind,
the air around us burning,
the deepest depths our
only
refuge from the fallen
fusing forms.

Cold, both long and bitter
followed,
all our caverns covered over.
Unceasing was our journey
and to stall was
certain death.

In time the final judgment came,
and heralds marched the skies.
The soft sweet glow of
sunset,
and the trumpet call of
dawn.
Day by day the rivers swelled,
and life crept up again
through white.

The final moment of the battle came,
with the shudder of a curse,
and the body of a demon
flung from God's sweet
afterglow.

His body left a trail of ash
wind found the bits and swept them,
day by day they sifted
ever closer to our earth.
The rest of him, a smoking wreck,
destroyed our tallest mountain,
fire rose from it
for years,
and then settled into smoke.

Until the dragons woke.
Then came the end.
A poem from my fiction.
131 · May 2020
known
md-writer May 2020
I was told that love is painful,
that there is terror of a certain kind
in being known.
But I've left that voice behind me,
now that love has soothed my fears;
that voice?

it was my own
130 · May 2019
Upward
md-writer May 2019
Light ****** the heart
in ways that darkness never can.

Joy speaks more softly than despair.

Love will change what hate
perpetuates.

And mercy gives what justice must withhold.
130 · Jun 2019
grace
md-writer Jun 2019
Every time I set pen to paper
I am struck with the vastness
of the world that I am entering.
Sometimes I stand on the brink, unwilling
to hurl myself over the edge of
what has already been made
into the long dark of uncreated
nebulae and whispers of
story that run through
my fingertips as intangibly as
starlight from above.
The possibilities are endless. It's true.
And the sheer immensity of creating -
such a lost, divine, and yet
most common art -
it pushes me backwards with
hands given substance by
nothing more (and nothing less)
than my own mind.

Is it hubris to create?
Miserable makers are we,
unfit to be gods
of anything, let alone the
vast, untamed beauties
which ramble in that long
and undivided brightness
of imagination.
We are unworthy all,
and I most of all;
the hand that spells out majesty
has broken heartstrings,
plucking at them
day by day
and clutching at the tattered ends
when at last they failed.

Yet still the world of what could be
expands like stars in space,
every time I step up to the
portal of that world
(the unmarked page).
What is this gift, this mystery?

To write love and darkness,
joy in misery,
these hands - this ****** ink of mine -
is able still.

Grace.

The word should be
blank,
when this hand tries to write it.
And yet the ink still flows
and forms the shape,
a living testimony
of itself.

So here I stand, one small pen
in hand, like a bucket meant
to catch an ocean of rain.
And my inevitable failure
is somehow
still,
an overflowing success.

One moment of that other world captured is enough
to stir the hearts of men,
and turn them from their gold to things above.
129 · Oct 2019
Doctor Says
md-writer Oct 2019
Doctor says the voices
will someday go away,
but I don’t mind.
Sometimes they scare me, with
the way my heart rattles - a can
rolling in the back of a van
around a very fast turn.
But this is only because they are very
scared.
I know it’s true.
And when they are silent,
I like to picture them like
sleeping dragons.
I tuck them in, and
kiss their hot foreheads goodnight.
The scales feel like glass beneath
my lips,
And I think of just how fragile they are…
…just how gentle I must be.

The hospital is dreary;
my bed is a comfortable
prison.
But the voices, some of them anyway,
make each day a carnival, and
nighttime has always been an adventure.

Mother sleeps in the chair
most nights. But it is
the voices who tickle my toes
and make my heart giggle
in the dead of night.

Doctor says I’m dying, but the
voices laughed at that.
I don’t know, myself. Sometimes
my hand flickers in the
moonlight, and
I can feel them tugging.
“Nobody else listens,” they say,
“No one else has ever kissed
our heads goodnight.”

If I die, who would listen to
my sweet and frightened voices?

Doctor says I’m dying.

Nurses say I need to smile,
(as if lying is good for my health).

Mother saying I’m fading
(in whispers behind curtains,
so I will not hear her despair).

Father says I’m very brave,
(even though his eyes
are very scared).

Sister says she’ll miss me.

Brother says nothing, only stares.
He’s one.

All these voices echo, and some days I just
want to be alone.
Just me and my own voices - not theirs.

+

Darling says the voices
are getting louder.
She turns away from me
when I try to smooth her hair.
Her eyes are accusation
for the moment that they rest
on me.

Darling doesn’t eat.
She murmurs and laughs in
her sleep,
waking me. This chair is not
for sleeping.

Darling is fading.

+

“Hi.”

“My name is Albert.
You can’t see me now, but
I have blue fur,
and my eyes are whatever color
you want them to be.
I’m here to make the voices go away.”

“Which ones?”

“The ones that break your heart.”

“Okay.

You are one of the voices that
I love, right?”

“Yes, darling.”

+

Darling’s bed is empty.
Doctor says the cameras
cannot find any trace of her last night.
I am lost.

The sheets are folded neatly,
but I did not wake.

+

Albert says we can play here
forever.
There are no hospitals, no beds,
and the sun always shines, until
I kiss it goodnight.
I like it here, with my frightened friends.

I met George and Annie and Bob, and the
funny one with sixteen horns.
I call him Poke.

Oh.
And the voices are gone.
128 · Mar 2020
that infant's cry
md-writer Mar 2020
wordstorm pouring from my bleeding lips -
an infant's scream for sustenance rising soft
above the sound of battle, the shrieks of devils and war.
ravens mock, their harshest rasping calculated
to pierce the heart of all the wounded,
bleeding out into the pits of shattered planet earth;
mud and rats and infestations of the most severe order,
without respite...

this is my battlefield within;

laughing is a sorry antidote to crime and sorrow;
joy is bared to bones before the shadow of a thousand failing suns, it laughs despite the pain;
you say that love, the most supreme of all affections, cannot be touched by misery.

devil.

go back to the

shadow of god

where you lurk, a curse to be unleashed; raving at your chains

This is no monologue. It is an address. It is not the raving of a madman - just the scribbles of a fool who seeks to grab the heart and soul of men with words:
complicated patterns sparking complicated thoughts sparking every **** achievement of our broken, bleeding
history,
our downfall and our towering symphony of
glory...

words attest the fabric of the world we create,
undead they speak with voices heard in silence and propel
the mind to visionary things;
or to the pits of hell.

Either way they give our mortal bodies wings.

We cannot fly too far, too high, with these;
life and death and all the shades of
heaven and hell between - that's where words can take us

if we let them

don't you see?

So listen. Write one more time. I speak the struggle of living flesh, and you hear the mournful infant's cry.
It is your soul raising living sorrow above the sound of busy anguish. It seeps through every waking moment of this dream.
So feed the baby, misbegotten mortal. Feed the ******* lips of your own soul.

One Word can stop its cry forever.
127 · Apr 2019
dead
md-writer Apr 2019
If only all the sweet
and terrifying
things I say could be untrue,
then little gleams of life peaking
out would be stifled
before they gained a senseless
spark of courage
in the face of undying agony.

Ha!

So says the ******, if he could
speak,
looking back at good things done
to him
by him
for him.

I shake my head.
I am not ******. I am dead.
To death, to sin, to darkness,
and to all the crawling creatures
of the murk.
125 · Aug 2019
curbside beauty
md-writer Aug 2019
little blossoms
by the busy road,
growing on the spew of industry
are more beautiful to me
than gardens
cultivated, purposeful,
and green

the wild, road-edge flowers
have no reason but themselves,
a purely unprepared oblation
welling up in beauty
at the whispered voice of God

but those other blooms - those hot-house beauties
are simply what they are
supposed to be.
Perfect in scent, in shape, in size -
everything just so, and just so much
less free.
I sometimes want to say it isn't beauty

but every flower has a name,
so who am I to say
that some are better
than the others?
124 · Apr 2019
better man
md-writer Apr 2019
You set my soul at rest.
Not by relaxing any standard,
leaving any stone unturned that I
should consider.
Just... the way you look at me. With
patience, confidence, and that strangely
tender hint of longing.

How can I hope to give myself to you,
when my daily life is such a
weak and constant trouble?
A constancy, a refuge to relax in
- as you are to me -
that's what I want to be.

But. Storms and God above.
That man isn't me.
Not now.

Sometimes I let myself wonder what you and I
would be today,
if I were a better man yesterday.
124 · Jun 2019
theist
md-writer Jun 2019
way out in the distant open,
where stars burn
in their stable courses,
nothing but the hissing of
combusted gases
breaks the silence

so much of the universe
is unlivable
so why is it littered
with detail
so fine that the best
our scientists can do
is guess and run their
calculations once,
and once again?

+

pitiable love consumes it's
daughters,
pining after the last sweet
sigh of summer
as it bathes in winter's pain

hungry for bread
for the flesh of the dead,
and waking to groan in the
thousand-year night

simpering sailor of skies
spread like seas,
docks on the island,
the tomb of his breeze

hallowed howling, a temple's
gloom,
wolf and knife and priest
come soon

discovery comes sooner than the drowning
of day,
details unmask
but you knew where
they lay.

Deaf and mute and eyeless
stranger,
pilgrim from a foreign star
pitch your tent on the liar's island,
fuel your way from shore to shore

half-known visions cloud
the sky above,
stars and charts speak dim
and slow
flinging out solutions to the question never
asked
but always posed

why?

why these mysteries,
while scarlet ribbons flutter to the floor;
why these planet-spinning stars
when there is butter spread on bread;
why this life-defying silence,
when from the cradle of a thousand
infants, a thousand infants roar?

hilarity is not the mother nor the
cousin
to this beauty;
it's an apposite distinction
left out to laugh like
empty hulls hung
in wind.

No face is peering through the shutters
of the world,
no hand is sifting through the sea-shore
grit of galaxies left out
to spin amidst the ever-dancing
light

or so they say;
with odd and accurate
predictions that sustain
nothing                                                                                      
but denial
in the face of a world too vast and untamed to pretend for one moment that we all are not the most infinitely consequential of specks to hurtle through the dark and unforgiving void of space lit up with brilliant blues by a feathered mother sitting close and warm in the hatching heat of a nest that has not yet raised its eggs…

skies break open
far above
thunder dies on the ear
in the unforgiving roar
of the undoing
of this mortal shell.

Rejoice, dirt-dwellers, sun-begotten
creatures of the dust and breath of God;
thus the end shall come.
124 · Oct 2018
Part 1
md-writer Oct 2018
I set about to write a sad, sad story,
a tale to tear the hardest hearts of men;
but as I looked about for inspiration -
reaching here, prying there,
and rummaging through
all the wrinkled sorrows that have been -
I saw here and there a twinkle
throwing back my candle's light.

At first I wondered at this
and wandered toward those stars,
for what did light refracted have to tell
about our scars?
But as I bent to listen to the whispers of that dream,
I saw my dim reflection in a
shattered glassy gleam.

Mirror broken on the floor,
am I truly the most sorrowful
of all?
114 · Aug 2019
one day
md-writer Aug 2019
one day

i built a fire hot and wild;
and hid myself within it.
with coal fed coal and made it
hotter,
then lay myself down
and died

there in the heart
of my fire.

but that happened slowly,
bit by bit.

at first
i felt like i was
insulated, safe and warm -
strongest on my own

i wandered through my golden hall
where heat and color fused as one;
all i saw there was my own
built from sinew and from bone.

but then,
by degrees,
my heat began to weaken
and the flames no longer danced
as they did before.

coals still glowed
but ashes gathered,
blanketing
my heart

i curled up
i closed my eyes
i let the winter take me

+

and so it was
that,
later on

with whispered hush
and each step like a feather,
her footprints in ash
singing songs like no other,
steadily steadily
closer She came,
her shimmering figure
all glowing with shame.

She had no shoes.

She wore no garment
and draped no veil;
with nothing to shield her
and nothing to hide,
She walked to the heart of my fire
and died.

but that, too,
happened slowly,
bit by bit.

and
each drawn-out step
crystallized
a certain kind of agony
combined with purest joy.

her face
shone brighter
than my glowing coals
(blistered, bleeding feet ignored)
and when She reached
the dying center,
She smiled and wiped the blood away

and said,

"I love you more

more than the coldness that seizes your heart
more than the fire that surrounds it;

more than the dying,
the self-centered life,
and more than the wounds you've inflicted;

to love is to die
and dying, to live

my life for yours...                                
                 ...and now yours to live."

+

She curled up
She closed her eyes
She let the fire take her

+

one day

She built a fire warm and sweet;
She was the fuel inside it.
with love fed love and made it
spread,
from heart to heart's desire.

i wept at first
i thought i died
but then i saw my fire

spreading
growing
scented sweet,
a miracle of light and heat
and joining flame
to foreign flame
in wonder at the colors.

and i smiled.
108 · Sep 2018
Sorrowrime
md-writer Sep 2018
They thought well of me.
96 · Jun 2019
searching
md-writer Jun 2019
where is God when the
cold wind blows,
when the ice and snow have
covered every leaf
and sculpted stone

where is God when the sun
shines bright,
when the balm and glow have
lifted every moment up
by half degrees

where is God when you are
lonely
where is God when you are
glad,
where is God when every moment
of my life flits by?

in the nooks and crannies - for those
who are looking,
in the wide open places, for those
who are seeking,
in the stillest, smallest voice, for those
who have ears,
in the thunder and the flash, for those
who are knocking

where is God in the darkness,
where is God in the night,
where is God when I'm crying,
where is God when I've died

all around me,
up above,
underneath,
in every cell
God is everywhere that you are,
and everywhere that you
are not
God is present at the grave
God is present at the altar,
God is present when you love,
God is present when you falter,
God is in the world around you,
God is in your own heart, too,
don't look up if you don't want to,
but He's still looking down
at you.
95 · Apr 2019
First Days
md-writer Apr 2019
The heavens warred
above us,
for decades at a time:
with blazing lights at midnight,
and
shadows stalking past at noon.

We took shelter in the depths,
left our children in their
graves.
The old and weak among us
fell beneath

the dying
of
the gods.

Towers tall as mountains,
walls once thick and strong,
cities split like gemstones
by the fountains bursting through.

Scorching heat,
flames born of wind,
the air around us burning,
the deepest depths our
only
refuge from the fallen
fusing forms.

Cold, both long and bitter
followed,
all our caverns covered over.
Unceasing was our journey
and to stall was
certain death.

In time the final judgment came,
and heralds marched the skies.
The soft sweet glow of
sunset,
and the trumpet call of
dawn.
Day by day the rivers swelled,
and life crept up again
through white.

The final moment of the battle came,
with the shudder of a curse,
and the body of a demon
flung from God's sweet
afterglow.

His body left a trail of ash
wind found the bits and swept them,
day by day they sifted
ever closer to our earth.
The rest of him, a smoking wreck,
destroyed our tallest mountain,
fire rose from it
for years,
and then settled into smoke.

Until the dragons woke.
Then came the end.
94 · Nov 2018
wistful
md-writer Nov 2018
if all the lights
and all the shadows
combine to show
the perfect palace
hovering so sweetly
in the air,

is it too much to ask
that somewhere
in the twisting future
you and i can
somehow
make that journey
and meet each other
in that castle in the air
94 · Mar 2019
lullaby
md-writer Mar 2019
wandering, oh wandering
you've lost your way from home
and every time you left the path
you lost the magic your own

wandering, oh wandering
you're left here all alone
the lights above, the lights within,
and darkness all below

if i could fly away
i would take my wings
and burn them

if i could fly, fly far away
i would cut them off
just to stay here by your
side

if there's anything i know
it's that the dragon's breath
will waken hearts in fire
while here below,
we muddle through the night
and here below,
we muddle through the fight.

don't you know that
nothing will take us
nothing will make us
bend
nothing more than him

i'm just a small spark,
from a big, big fire
i'm going out
i'm going out
fading
i'm reaching higher
in my flight to the sky

i want to look down
on it all
i want to see the world spread out
before me
but the higher that I get
the more it's cold
and the more the wind
destroys me

i'm just a small, small spark
from the big, big fire
of God's heart
i'm a small, small spark
flying for my heart's desire

and even if i die
even if i die
trying
i will
still
i will still fly
to come back to your side

up above
the world is wider than you've ever dreamed of
up above
the world is more beautiful than you have seen

darling believe me
oh darling believe me

there's beauty you have
never yet seen
there's beauty in your heart
you haven't seen

so don't cry tonight
lay your head on my shoulder
and let these worries
roll, roll
roll down to your toes

shake them off
don't let them grab hold of you
shake them off
don't let them keep hold of you

cuz i'm here tonight
i'm here tonight

— The End —