late night thoughts

Dreamers dream beautiful things
I started out as a dream born in the mind of God
Before time was named, before there was a mankind to save
Without dreams we lay down to death
Crippled by a fractured soul, where hope no longer bleeds ink in the talk story of our minds eye
Keep dreaming, loving and living, laugh deeply and truly
Let the caress of substance fade away as your heart births a truth more textured than silicone make-believes.
Because we were made to believe…believe in hope even when hope is telling us not to, to believe in the what not’s and what if’s as if…they were absolutes, we create in dreams by dreams and through dreams we are a dream, whether it is for the future hand with ring or the broken soul who needs a word of healing…


Sometimes I close my eyes just so I can remember what it’s like to be blind, I left that world behind for a better portion, distortion sometimes invades my eyes while I dream staring at the sky, making clouds take shapes, then sometimes…I just wait, wait for the thousand silk needles that strike my skin to remind me that im in a case of flesh pressed against space and time trying to keep my heart in line, dreams keep me alive and when I have spent my few seconds of reason dwelling on my past treason, I let the windows fling wide and as light illuminates beauty as the prize, tall grass waving, swollen mists begin raining I believe in the audacity of this living painting. I jump into musical ambition splashing fat bass colors with high hat covers, deep beats that create feats of outlandish redemption, yeah he sings to me in my dreams daring me to believe that he can calm the jealous ocean, he reminds me that the strike of white ivory, harmonized with ebony cries holds power to draw water from hearts of stone, and in moments alone there is a beauty in silence that silences the song of the sirens

I spread my arms wide beneath nighttime skies and let the stars hold me close, close like two hearts beating into one loud pulse of belief, streets carry me deeper into the den of lions homeless vagrants devoured by their jaws, lions of hate, loss, pain and the oh so brutal fate, but I refuse to be subject to the whims of nature, I will take her and make sure that I step side by side with the master. The smell of sour wine born from grapes that were picked to early, earthly and surly rambunctious souls that lose control and wont give nail scarred hands the chance to make them whole, praying with lips pressed tight trying to fight the tide of a losing side. Standing firm in the knowing that he will be showing HIMself like a thousand sunrises, the day the sky gets cracked we all will get back everything that was ever stolen, hope for the bride, hope for all of creation groaning for a revealing, sons of light play lightly with emotions, gravity is pulling us down and sound…is telling us the way to behave, tares in the wheat covering themselves like wolves lusting for blood soaked meat, ill stand still as a lamb and despite the ravaging I smile with delight, knowing death wont be the end

I stood like a wayward orphan on the sands of confusion, deluded into believing that I was nothing more than sand whipped by the winds of chaos, trapped in the invisible arms of another non-sentient pushing, stood like the seated boxer, carved from marble and left in a perpetual state of defeat, but somehow your words came down and like hammers they broke the curse of medusas sight, stone breaking and flying, old world dying, and I was crying out in joy, identity carved into my heart like a seal, my makers mark, a few moments of reprieve to let my lungs crack loose and breeeeaathhe, for the first time in a hundred years, my walls of fear came crashing down like Jericho and that scarlet banner that saved rahabs house reminds me of the scarlet river that saved my soul, stepping out to walk on water, you taught me to run despite never having even walked

hapless

Laying down the found
What I see Hope scattered like a formless fog
But im breathing it in
Swelling my lungs
like bags Filled
With seed for the sowing Exhale
Syllables flowing like streams Wash me
Of broken dreams
Redeem me
from
this
hapless
treason

to the ladies

To the ladies:

Stay classy, not trashy and if you trash he with FOUR LETTER explitives you have lost yourself. Beauty is not given it is won, not like a prize to gloat over or a trophy to show but like the hostage you delivered. Jealousy is bitter, draining the dregs of treason to season the dull taste of love. Love love love LOVE like a fire that keeps the heart alive in the middle of a world frozen by winter. It is NOT the fairy tale, unless you make it a tale to be held in the same regard as fairies...never existing. Stop running and start sitting, the chase is not fitting for the hunchback of soul. Be whole, and giving a thousand broken pieces is not the way to keep them close, shatters will shatter and the shattered leave blood spatters spelling out the letters F-A-I-L-U-R-E. If he chases will you run? And if he runs will you follow? All of you not a just the HOLLOW...shell. What fell from the last cloud 9 love drunk wine soaked adventure. Keep believing in dreams.

here it goes again...for the first time

Here it goes again...for the first time
Like a thousand flying feathers
Pouring out from beneath my chest
Like words pouring from the pen
I saw you, before I saw you
And now these same words
May lead me to see you no more
Delicate…fragile…honesty
Because honestly
I just need to be honest…

The poets words, sank the arrow
Coincidence or purpose, I don’t rightly know
Shaking hand, holding crumpled paper
Lines recited in Latin’s child
I knew then, like I know now
That what I would know
Was not up to me…

Cold hands stealing breaths,
Lips poised to speak but stand crippled
By a sacred silence
Where more is spoken by a look
Than in a word
Be my sacred silence…

Sky scrape

rough draft

Concrete and tar-covered veins poured in from every direction you could imagine; twisting around, under, over, through and beyond, beyond the graves of history’s architects who now lay in wooden coffins and stone memorials where no one remembers; beyond the limits of imagined substance and mathematical dialogue on weight and support; beyond the heaping hills of refuse outside the imagined perimeter of our city; beyond anything anyone could ever imagine or see.

Steel screaming as it is lifted on wings of woven wire; it climbs into the clouds to be set among its kin, Pressed together by gaseous plasma and flame, while blood pours in molten drops to stain the ground with the marks of birth. Form taking on form, abstract becoming reality, paper souls outlined in blue ink; they rise from the ground, anchored on concrete soles, bones of rebar holding together the separation between earth and sky. They are rather ugly in the beginning, dusty, crying, misshapen and crude in design; then coated with skins of glass, they shine like a thousand fire all reflecting the sky, reflecting heaven and the sun, its guardian.

Car horns blast as the screech of brakes bring charging mechanical chariots to a halt beneath the glow of burning electric suspension, filtered through crimson reality. People sprawl out on the walks and paths like a million moving hairs on the back of a new life that we have created.

Cities are alive, sentient creatures.

Cities are the reflection of man and the reflection of heaven, all brought together on the façade of mirrored glass; delicate enough to bow before fire and flood: strong enough to stand before wind and famine. Music pours through organs of mosaic and expression, rhythms so varied that ears can scarcely full hear all that is being made.

There is sweetness in the belly of the scraping giants; bread, wine, beauty and love: there is bitterness too; lust, envy, deceit and murder. Man lashing out against man, against the image of God; slaying what should be loved, destroying what we can never create; Cain enslaved to slaying Cain.

Listen to them now, the cities have gained a mouth to speak.
They groan as earth shakes beneath them, contesting the bloodshed, contesting the evil that is committed in their shadows, contesting the destruction of beauty, contesting the hand of masters that gain pleasure in chaos; so now they destroy, steel shaking and falling on the heads of the broken whom by brokenness break others.

It’s time to heal the world…

Thought

There is this thought I have that the world is finite. It is ludicrous, so very, very much so, the definitions of reality fade between global industrialization, conflict, war and the sunny warm afternoons of summer. It is like a lava lamp; ever circling in a mind warping elastic blob; I HATE LAVA LAMPS.

There is this thought I have that one person can change the world; shift the sway of time and break out from under that cycle of decays and success. Yes, history has proven it again and again, but each generation is born into a new history; grossly effected by the previous history. When that time comes though, we have a chance to stand up in the face of deceit and break away from the monotony. Men and women are born each day and each is given a chance to bring change.

There is this thought I have that the Church is amazing, and grossly stagnate in the west. I’m not going to bash the Church as a whole; just those ones that sell-out to a prescribed, dried out and flaky version of reality. You can see them every Sunday on TV. The same messages recycled over and over and over like a lava lamp.

I have this thought that when Jesus was born he was the spoken word incarnate into the flesh; that he changed the definition of reality to a subjective little nothing. It was reiterated later in the gospels and preceded by the words of the Patriarchs. Prophets and seers, men and women, PEOPLE like you and me. A lot in the world has changed but there is nothing new. We can break the reality, this fake version that people cling to.

I have this thought that there are people like Elijah walking the earth today; that miracles are a viable demonstration of power and that we need to stop making excuses for why we don’t have them. I want to have dinner with prostitutes and the weird men in black suits that work for the IRS. I want to tell people that Jesus is not just a “was” but rather a definite “is.” I want people to see that he is alive in people’s hearts today; not just in words but in deed.

I have this thought that a butterfly is just as beautiful as a flower and that people are more beautiful than anything else in nature because we are the image of God.

I have this thought that dreams have substance and we all need to be dreamers; that I life without risk is not one worth having. There is a satisfaction and honor in taking a risk to achieve something.

The whole world is waiting for you to take a risk and show them how to live.

Giant killers

Destiny doesn’t wait for the soft kiss of a promise; it is in the hands of those breaking beneath the weight of pursuit. They fight for dreams, fight so violently, with bloody knuckles and bruised muscles. I FIGHT FOR DREAMS. Despite this disharmony of some duped cadence trying to swing my heart beat to a foreign key; keep moving you warriors, remember who you are. We are the light on the horizon; bursting through nights cold grasp. We expose the evil and the wicked. We break down palaces that no one has ever seen.

Speak to the wind and tell it to carry your voice far, farther than your feet can go, farther than you can imagine.

I am a message in a bottle, cast into the ocean of the earth. I will stand proudly and proclaim THERE IS A WAY OUT. And I will stay shouting with the threat of arrows whistling overhead. I dare to dream, to tread, to take my destiny and force it make a way for me. I will take my heart and let it beat out a path where that way may not be wide enough for the girth of vision. Come fancy-dance with me, like fireflies mimicking stars. Faith is in my lungs, stretching, pushing heavily against everything on the inside. I have to grow to make room for it. We are children of Abraham, children of promise.

Let’s heal the world.

Creation is waiting for you, longing for you to be revealed. Not to the watchers set in the sky, but to yourself. You are more than you can imagine. You are a message in a bottle of flesh cast into the ocean of humanity. When you land on that shore, no matter what part of the world it is, burst open and shout loudly what is on the inside.

Don’t be defined by the cacophony of deluded wise men, thinking they are religious, but never knowing God. Rise up and defeat Goliath, step up and cry out. Let the whole world see, there is a man who can still fight. Let your bruised fist grasp that worn sling, swing it hard and let the one who wrote that message on your heart guide the stone.

There are giants that kill dreams, but there are dreams that kill giants.

inked

I am in this room. It’s warm and slightly dusty but not dusty enough to make you sneeze or your eyes to water, just enough to tell you it is still and old. Light is coming in the windows, bright white sunshine, splashing the book case with light. On the old cherry stained table in front of me are blank sheets of white paper. The old paper, not the kind you find in a printer. It isn’t that clean and perfect white; crème might be more precise. It is rough too, sops up the ink. There is a quill and an ink jar; both fresh. I pick up the quill stroking my hand against the feather. The jar catches my attention again and I dip the quill, deep like, I pull it out and let a drop or to spill on the paper and watch as it begins to dry. I poke it with my finger.

Stained skin.

It seems appropriate, I don’t think anyone is actually white; we are all more like crème. Some of us just a have a little more ink than others. I like ink though; I like that weird smell it has. I like that I can use it to write down the soul of a matter, not just words. The ink in itself is a word, a word that flows through all languages, it takes different colors and mediums but that doesn’t change the fact that it is very distinctly ink.

When I think about heaven I think about God drawing my eyes with ink. Taking fleshy white marbles and dipping a needle in some ink we have never seen, ink that lives and speaks, ink that changes over time and can never be erased or blotted out ink that came from God Himself. Yeah, I think about God picking up that round white thing and plunging that needle deep and inking my eyes, sort of like a tattoo.
I have two tattoos and will be getting more, but I have some that are divine, not in the really good sense, but in that real Divinity kinda sense. They are written on my heart and soul, on my mind. People ask me about them how I got them and where they came from; I tell them this Jewish guy I know wrote them there. They always ask what they mean; I try and tell them but sometimes they don’t understand that God can write and that He writes on souls. They have this thought, maybe God isn’t real. They know they are written on too, but their colors are fading. They think that because mine are bright I did something different, that I am either a lunatic or I have answers. I do have answers…one answer really; His name is Jesus, He is God. And He likes to tattoo.

Song of songs 8:6 “Set me as a seal—mark, brand, (ink)—upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is as strong as death…” Love is deep you know? It is strong too, stronger than people know; strong enough to rip you apart from the inside out, strong enough to kill you. I tell people to be careful with love; no one ever wants to believe that it can be strong enough to fade their colors. These are the same people asking me about mine. It is ok though, because mine were faded once too; faded like an old parchment with ink that is disappearing, beginning to flake off; faded like the glory of a republic that only exists in minds or like a dream that you begin to lose as soon as you are awake.

Are any of us really awake?

I just woke up, and I can’t see that room anymore. That ink I poked my finger in is fading away. But my colors…they still are bright

BREAK

slam poem

I am chained down/With heavy links of social perception/Expectation and regret, inward reflection, fleshly metallic deception/All day trapped in steel frames/Assigned positions and titles from tongues left unbridled/These illegitimate names/Giving praise to the biggest mockeries/Outright hypocrisy/ Filthy stewards, tainting the purity of Liberty/I WILL BREAK OUT/Break from these wayward masters/Ideas and perceptions producing societies beneficial Bastards/Identity in crisis/I WILL BREAK OUT/Break these chains that try and define the ineffable mind/Plastered a rebel because I reject these crooked chronicles/Labeled a prodigal/I have turned from Delilah’s rise who gained power by plucking out Samson’s eyes/Break out of this invisible prison/Mercy, a jest in the democratic court of a perverse King/Filled with at the sight of man caged/trapped in silence by these wicked sirens filled with bloodlust and violence/Implemented through passive aggressive means/GUILTY through secondary indifference/GUILTY for the hunger in my mind/GUILTY of hoarding the bread but freely pouring the wine/Damned phantoms creeping in cooperate alleys with white gloved hands/Hearts caked with rotting infection/The stench of Dreams long since dead/I WILL BREAK OUT/Because they are out to destroy us/And by they I mean we and by we I mean I…I am out to destroy me?/The dichotomy of a fractured sentience born of false existence based on the perception of lies/Media feeding pride/Promoting racial tensions while behind the curtain legislating unethical missions to destroy ethnic cognition…I WILL BREAK OUT/ because he showed me the way/The jaws of Leviathan have been smashed and Babylon will not hold me down and I will rise with wings born of grace/freely given to me and I will freely give them to any pauper who wants to be a prince/I WILL BREAK OUT/Because these chains hold no power and death will not be my end…

2

2.
Sometimes it is absolutely necessary that we get out of the way of ourselves. Yes I meant to say it exactly like that. Yes it makes perfect sense. Yes I know it isn’t easy.

There is this “Thing” we are running after. Despite what many want to call it: dreams, hope, love, faith, happiness, wealth, fame, or even just a simple kiss; what we are really running after is fulfillment.

I know it isn’t a heavy idea, except… it actually is.

Not in idea maybe, but rather in substance. In substance it takes on a whole new character and taste. Its look even changes and what we thought it was—once getting to that place—is not at all what we imagined. Many people think money will solve all the problems of the world; it really won’t. Africa has proved that.

Fulfillment looks like a billion different things to a billion different people but to every one of those billion the biggest obstacle is the face they see in the mirror, or pond, or passing glass window while strolling downtown. The reasons for it are plenty obvious and plenty flashy.

We have this nature in us that fights for itself. It is selfish and seeks its own gain. On the surface that might not look so bad; every one looking out for themselves, to protect what they have, but the truth is this is the complete opposite of love.

In that world everyone gets screwed.

We want to be happy; I think most people in their sane mind want that, but sometimes we have to trudge through the muddy waters of our own selves to find that happiness. I am not trying to sell a self help “your best life” type of gimmick. What I am saying is this; we constantly sell out every single day to the immediate gratification of stupid little things in the hopes to bide off the pain of that gaping hole in our chest.

We do it with: coffee, shoes, games, relationships; some do it with drugs, lust, hate, murder, envy, the point is we all do it, none of us are any better than the rest.

However we can have fulfillment.

We just have to swallow that huge ball of powdery flour called pride; it doesn’t go down easy, it isn’t meant to. When we do that we will see that fulfillment has been in us the entire time. His name is Jesus.

What’s that you say? You have tried the church thing and it didn’t work?

I am not talking about the church thing: I am talking about that tanned Israeli who showed us the way to freedom and unlocked the door with his blood-that man isn’t church in the sense your thinking. He beckoned us to follow him to the ends of the earth preaching and teaching and healing and casting out devils and pulling down strongholds and principalities and powers. That man is not for a half-ass gospel. Fulfillment begins with him, and in Him we lose ourselves and gain his identity, but in that losing of ourselves and gaining of Him we are re-born into something wholly different but still bearing individuality.

It is beautiful right? We die to ourselves so we can gain Him, but in doing it we actually gain ourselves-or the part of “us” that is real and irrevocable. When we see that we see happiness.

What does it look like to be happy? Ask anyone who has served the poor, built houses for the needy. Ask Heidi Baker or Jacki Pullinger. You ask them what it is to be happy and why they serve and deal with the broken of the broken. Crack addicts, meth heads, prostitutes and the starving, the sick and the blind.

They do it for love; real unadulterated and unselfish love.

Maybe we aren’t happy because we are selfish as hell and do not want to swallow that powdery ball.
I understand, some people choke on that pride and die in the process. Why risk it then? If we would open wide and swallow that pride we can chase it down with the water of life, and a little honey. It really isn’t that bad when you think about it; a moment of pain, or a few moments of pain, for the understanding of a life fulfilled in beauty and having an affluence of happiness that can change the world.

You think I am wrong, that is ok.

Look Jesus in the face and tell him you’re not happy with your life.

But before you do

Make sure you’re doing what he told you. I don’t mean the abstract stuff; the religious empty tradition, I mean the concrete explicit biblical stuff. Stuff like “…all the law and the prophets are summed up in these two things, ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind and love your neighbor as yourself.’”

If you want to be happy it comes down to this, LOVE.

Love unselfishly and truly, bear your heart to be wounded, but know that Jesus can heal any wound. When we walk in love we are fulfilling the entire law and prophets. If you ask me, you can’t help but be happy when you are doing that.