I do

Silken petals spilling over my hand
Jewel-encrusted metal peeking out beneath
With a deep breath for strength
I take one step forward
Into a new life
With you.

The drama of
Planning, anticipating, accommodating
The weariness of
Writing checks and checking lists
The nervousness of
A young bride and her devoted groom
Is all put to rest
In one moment.

I do.

I do promise to love you,
Even when
Your shirts are left on the kitchen floor
The open peanut butter jar has a fly in it
The horror movie you love gave me nightmares
The checkbook is nearly empty
And all of the chocolate is gone.

I do promise to show my love for you,
Even when
My fibro flares and I don't want to be touched
I bring my work troubles home with me
I don't feel like it
My emotions are out of control
And all of the chocolate is gone.

I do swear I won't leave you
Even when
The roof springs a leak
The toilet backs up
The cars are both out of gas
My overactive fears urge me to run away
And all of the chocolate is gone.

I do promise to forgive you
Even when
You forget to say "excuse me"
The bathroom is a mess
I'm the only one eating leftovers
You forget I don't like mushrooms
And all of the chocolate is gone.

I do promise to ask for your forgiveness
Even when
I ask too much of you, really
I forget your promises
Dinner is burned/undercooked/cold (because I can cook if it's not for you)
I impulsively buy things I shouldn't
And I blame you for all the chocolate being gone.

And when we face trials
Our pasts come to haunt us
Wintery depression settles in
Health fades into pain
Loved ones pass away
Jobs end and new ones escape us
Friends betray or just forget to care
Our children, or lack of them, ravage our hearts
We forget, for a moment, how to love each other
AND ALL OF THE CHOCOLATE IS GONE...

I will still love you
I will still need you
I will still be here for you
I will still give myself to you
I will still belong to you

I promise you this.

I do.

A Stronger "Thank You."

Every day I go swimming
Pools of salt water that start a deep jade
You point out the flecks of brown and blue
Then the pools shimmer, spill over
Into translucent drops
Picking up smeared colors
As they drain.

Yet like the bottomless pit
The pools never stop refilling
For each day we dive in again
And watch ourselves drown

"It wasn't like this before"
You say.
"I don't understand why."
I say.
"It'll get better in time."
We say.

But it hasn't yet.

There are many reasons why the pools can't
Just stay intact, whole, sparked instead of soaked
We can come up with so many
Like life in general;
Like pressures of techtonic plates
Shifting us into new worlds, new lives,
Letting the magma beneath rumble to the surface;
Like something mysteriously gender-specific;
Like the weather.

The one credit of nearly drowning every day
Is that you appreciate what moments of life surround death;
You holding my hand
You trying to absorb the pain
You daring to change my direction
You encouraging, reassuring, giving me courage to fight
You attempting, daily, to save me.
You never running away to save yourself.

The English language needs a stronger sentiment than
"Thank you."

Whispers in the Moonlight

Opals spill from Heaven in wavery lines
The reflection of the Sun reflects on your cheeks
Sparkles of silver, blue, green, and possibly purple underline
The dimples you declare don't exist
The soft lines declaring your sense of humor
The sweet lips that curve in warm greeting

And I melt

If this was an oceanside beach I'd hear the tumbling of white-foam waves
Opals scattered among broken shells and starfish searching for their mates

If this was a forest I'd hear treefrogs singing sweet soprano notes
As they declare the warm night perfect for yet another sonata

If this was a balcony on a tall city skyscraper I'd hear the calls of so many
Cars as they say hello, goodbye, and I hope to never see you again.

But this is just a simple lake, a simple country, a simple September date
A simple girl, a simple guy, and a simple thought in each head

So as your hair shines a deep ruby in the moonlight
And your face glows in the coolness of a sweet summer night
I will remember this night I began to fall in love with you

And melt.

Deserter

From Jan to Dean, upon a very bad night of arguments.
Rough draft #2

We knew the war was looming off in the distance
Under a blood-tinted sunset.
We knew it was inevitable--we would have to fight.
Neither of us are skilled warriors in this kind of battle--
The kind where you fight those who know you
The kind where you can lose more than you could ever gain
The kind where hiding until the rage storm blows over is more desirable than ever.

Afraid and hopeful that there would come a new solution
A way to avoid the war
To escape unscathed
We worked hard behind the lines
Prayed
And kept our silence.

There comes a time, though,
When the enemy senses your position;
Keeping still and silent will not save you from being surrounded
And with anger, they confront your fearful heart.

I stepped out of the shadows and began to fight
Trying for peace all along
But knowing it wouldn't come until after great struggle and pain.
You were not caught as I
And instead of joining me,
You hid.
You left me alone.

Abandoned, I cried for you
I begged you to come
Begged you to let me run to you.
Together, we are stronger--
Or so I thought

You knew my precarious position
The sharp weapons thrust at me
The wounds already etched into my skin.
A dagger pierced through part of my heart.
My will would keep me in strength for only so long.
Still, you ignored my calls,
Licking your own wounds in a cave of your own making
Barring the door to my entry
And leaving me to the mercy of my foes.

Didn't you understand my vulnerability?
Didn't you see that our bond might be broken?
Didn't you care that I might die?

I survived the night
With God and a few brief moments of comfort
From friends who heard and responded to my cry
Despite their own battles, struggles, and needs.
But they were not my partner,
They were not my teammate.
They tried to take your place,
But no one can fill that spot shaped as you.

I needed you wild at heart
Timid, you left me.
My pain increases
My tears course down swollen cheeks
I cry out to God and run to Him
He comforts me
He didn't leave me

You cried out to me, so
I comforted you,
Cheered your shaken spirit
After my words of warning brought the war to your door.
You revived and began business as usual,
But you didn't note my bloody clothes
Dark skin marking my struggle
And still kept me at a distance
Where I could tend you
But I was left to fend for myself.

I understand why you ran
I still hate that you did
I understand why you didn't see my pain
I still hate that you didn't think to care
I understand your wounds
I still hate that you dismissed mine

Forgiveness will come
But the trust is cracked

The war will not end tomorrow
But before I again engage the enemy
I need to know--
Should I surrender now, let you be alone and accept my fate;
Or will you come rescue me
Fight beside me
And be who I need you to be:
Someone who pursues God's will,
Puts me first (as I do you),
And lets promises be kept
Even in the face of foul fear?

If you want us to continue
If you want me, at all...

Don't leave me again.

Daisy Love

I love you
I love you not
I love you
I love you not
A child’s game made to predict a choice
Of whether someone’s love would be given a voice
Searching for acceptance, forgiveness, and security
In the plucking of petals full of nature’s purity
Maybe it should be concerning, this turn to God’s inanimate creation
Instead of to the people designed to love in every nation
Why is it that we leave our hearts up to chance
Instead of trusting others in life’s tumultuous dance?
Again, the children have discovered the key
To why we have lost so much faith in “we”:
Sticks and stones may break my bones
But your words will ever more hurt me
Bruises and cuts will heal
But words can steal
Our joy and peace
Hope is decreased
And when you’ve spoken and slammed me to the floor
My soul is crushed, my heart cries, “NO MORE!”
1 Corinthians 13 sounds more like a joke
Or some fantasy a romantic fool wrote—
Do we mean that word posted above our door,
Or is “love” something we have mixed meanings for?
Love means sacrifice—not always fun or easy
Love is not about what would best please me
Love means not grumbling when the lady ahead in line
Has to re-run her debit card for the thirteenth time
Love means not deliberately looking away
When a veteran with a sign needs food for the day
Love means confiding, not screaming to the world other people’s wrongs
Understanding that some lives really are like sad country songs
That what we really need is someone to listen, to encourage, to know
That the sinful person we are has great potential in Christ to grow
But when we love only with great hesitation
Saying that we are far above or different than that person’s station
And rebuke them with so much ill-tempered consternation
Are we destroying our Savior’s reputation?
He Who is in us is reflected in our words and actions
So what does the mirror show of our transactions?
When I haughtily describe a Brother’s mistakes
Does he see Jesus in my frowning face?
And when I look down on other people’s sins,
Is that God’s light shining from within?
When my comments online are scathing and unrefined
Is it “God loves you” or “I judge you” written between the lines?
Our country has given us the right of free speech
But do we use it to love or only to preach
How the world should acknowledge that I am always right
And getting behind me is the only solution in sight?
In a place called the land of the free and the home of the brave
Everything comes at a cost and few stand up to save.
Trusting in a human is like plucking a flower
You’re taking a chance in fallible power
Will what you find be worth the trouble and time
Or will you soon murmur that sad children’s rhyme?
It’s not the human, but the God in them we should trust
Loving them anyway, correcting gently when we must
Knowing that God’s love in a person’s heart
Doesn't make them perfect, but gives a good place to start
Changing the chant when others look our way
Showing them how God can teach us to say
I love you
I love you
I love you
I love you

The Dandelion's Manifesto

Some say I'm a downright pest--
Poking my stalk in among the best,
Bouncing around on my own personal breeze,
Enjoying my days as if they were in ease,
Smiling and laughing though the rain will only drown
And the brilliant sun scorches everything brown.
Nothing's going to keep me down.

My exuberant petals spring from the earth
As if I was gifted Slinkies at birth
To propel me to heights I should never reach
'Cause the joy of my soul is a favorite fluid to leech.

I ruin perfect rows of perfectly planned pansies and petunias,
Purple poppies and potatoes and peas that go right through ya.
Where an exact order of beauty is established through selection and mutation,
I creep into the ranks, a new variable for computation.

My stalk's too fat, my leaves curl the wrong way,
My scent's intolerable, my roots have gone gray.
I ruin everything just by existing,
My rights and my desires--everyone's nixing.

Since I am not always self-sustaining and "properly" entertaining,
economical and ecological
with a smile maniacal
as I recite alphabetical
what is right and good and Cosmo-certified to work in 30 days or your money back
Not that it'll get you back on track
With the credit cards
And manicured yards
Botox injections and
Heart infections
Revealing the disease
If you please
Is not curable by the pill
Or by giving "reality" audiences a thrill
Or through donating large sums to charity
(As though dollars ever buy us clarity).

It's healed through tears,
Fighting constant fears,
Ignoring hateful leers,
Stubbornly insisting, "I'm HERE!"
And nothing's gonna keep me down.

So bring on the Weed-B-Gone,
Pour it out from dusk 'til dawn,
Rip up my supports deep in the earth,
Declare my agony's result is stillbirth,
Refuse to allow me to live or exist
As you get high on your powerful twist
Of what you claim is "the way it's gotta be--"
And there is utterly no reason for me
To breathe
To live
To smile
To give

'Cause my life is a hint of something soul-saving sweet,
But with your lack of faith, it'll be a bitter-tasting treat.
My God-given, spirit-pleasin' remedy
Is just what our P.C. world needs:
A little faith, hope, and love,
Truth without the kid gloves,
The kind of power that can conquer America's permanent frown,
Because you can't keep an agape weed like me down.

Erasing Poetry

Ok, ok. So not everyone likes poetry. I can't really blame them too much--I used to be one of them. I mean, I wrote the sing-songy, uber-rhyming, cliche-ridden poems in high school like many teenage girls, but when it came to good poetry, I really didn't like it. I was even an English major for years and still didn't like it. My poetic problems weren't so much an issue with what I was reading but rather how I was reading it.

Poetry, in truth, was not at all like how it had been presented to me throughout my early years of public education. I had been taught to read the lines and figure out what exactly it was supposed to mean, usually because there was a written response or a multiple-choice question involved. There were right and wrong answers to the symbolism, theme, and meter of poetry, just like there were right and wrong answers to the chemical formula for photosynthesis and subject/verb agreement for "she went to the store." It wasn't until I reached graduate school (yes, my sixth year of English studies) that I learned to appreciate poetry...through a class on how to teach poetry to students. The biggest thing I had to learn was that poetry is subjective by its very nature...and that's ok.

Once I let go of my right/wrong attitude and adopted the better founded/unsubstantiated stance, poetry became intriguing and almost addictive to me. While there were some meanings that wouldn't make sense simply because they couldn't be logically connected to the poem's imagery (and yes, imagery and sound are two of the most important parts of many poems...so much so that the words themselves can be meaningless--just their sounds matter), as long as you could find some sort of decent (hopefully strong) connection, it fit. After all, no one really knows what the author was thinking/feeling/meaning 100% of the time...sometimes not even the author him/herself.

Still...putting words on paper in poetic form was difficult. There were formulas for sonnets and haiku that helped, but to just let go of meaning and enjoy the nonsensical abstractness of words, images, and sounds (especially just disjointed ones) was extremely difficult. Enter a new muse: Mary Ruefle. I met the well-known poet in person once as part of a conference, and while I didn't connect with her personally, I adored a small book of hers. A Little White Shadow. It was the first I had ever seen of erasure-style poetry, a twist on found poetry but more raw and semi-artistic (The hard-to-find Humument by Tom Phillips is extremely artistic and more intense as it attempts to be its own story-within-a-story). The point of erasure poetry was to find prose, even really bad prose, and locate the gems of disjointed words that, when brought together through erasing all that was around them, created new thoughts and ideas. Sometimes erasures are completely silly images or statements. Sometimes they end up profound. The challenge of using only words already printed on the page, and then figuring out how to work with their existing order, was like the ultimate word-search puzzle with hidden prizes under the ink.

I was wanting to play around with this new composing form, so I picked up a 25-cent paperback copy of The Horse Without A Head from a sorority's booksale fundraiser on campus. It had some good words that popped out at me while I flipped through pages, the copyright had to be nearly up if I ever decided to publish my reworking of the text, and the original children's mystery was...horrible. Even the worst erasure of the text would be an improvement. For the next few days, I carried the conveniently-sized book in my purse, along with a purple pen, and began outlining the text I would keep. Over the next few months, I experimented with different types of white-out, acrylic paint, and correction fluids to banish the unworthy words from the page. I rather liked the non-uniformity of the erasing, with some pages glossy with white and others hosting cracked strips of eggshell tape. It was a wonderfully freeing exercise...and the creativity born in erasure poetry not only spurned wonderful poetic images that I wove into my prose, but eventually led to a few freeverse poems that I'm actually rather proud of.

My retitled collection of erasure poems, He With A Head, includes nearly two hundred pages of good, great, and uh-oh bad erasures. Most are to be taken individually, a single moment to be considered, perhaps savored, and then either stored away for future musings or tossed aside like an amusing but meaningless status update on Facebook. Not being able to draw a straight line meant some words were accidentally erased too much...and it was more of a playbook than a truly careful endeavor, so I wasn't super-obsessive about neatness. It's a little messy...kind of like me. Erasure lets me do that.



So to look at the title poem for my rediscovered text..."He with a head should pay dearly for it." What does it mean? Maybe it means that those who have the awareness of decision also have the awareness of consequences. Maybe it means that men who think logically will suffer for it (especially when they're around PMSing women). Maybe it means that being able to think is such a precious thing, a costly thing, something that should be valued much more than it is (the intellect versus, say, braun). Maybe it means that this guy is about to have one huge headache and needs to take an Excedrin. It could mean any of these. It could mean none of them. Ultimately, erasure is about taking away...in order to give. What meaning will you give this piece?



Or this one?

The difference between small and insignificant

I read this at church last week, mostly on a whim (I wrote it that afternoon in the softball dugout) and because a friend of mine and her husband encouraged me to...and I figure that if God speaks through other people to me, I need to start listening more.


Sooooo...the reading went well, even if most of the audience didn't *quite* know what to call it. "Your poem...story...reading...oh, whatever it was, honey, it was good." Hehehe. For your reading pleasure, I present my new poem, still a bit rough around the edges but not half bad. :)





I thought it would be awesome
To have a Mentos God
A God who would drop
Into my Diet Coke Life
And create a chain reaction that would
Douse everyone within a
10-foot radius.


A candy-coated God,
Instantly effective,
Infinitely attractive,
A catalyst for an explosive combustion that would spill
My contents
My heart
My faith
Onto the world.
Instant dazzle.
No work on my part, just a willingness to be open
To His presence.


It worked for others--a bright, passionate light that
Inspired
Oohs and ahhs
Like a 4th of July fireworks show over the Potomac
(Before budgets constricted the celebration).


You've heard about these
Sonic Boom Christians.
They had books written about them,
Their diaries published,
Hallmark movie specials, and
Colorful inspirational inserts in
Sunday bulletins.


Their lives meant something on a grand scale--
And no one could deny the effects of their
Carbonated demise.
So I prayed for the kind of drama that would turn me into
God's perfect 2-liter bottle.

And wished.
And prayed.
And imagined.
And prayed.


All I got was the mundane, very
Un-tv-worthy existance of
An old dollar bill.

No powerful ministry,
No Barbara Walters knocking on my door,
No satisfaction of knowing I have,
In one fell swoop,
Propelled thousands of bubbling Christians to
Heaven's door.


Just a crumpled dollar bill.


I've been forgotten and left behind in the mud,
Caustically bleached in the washer,
Mangled and marred by insensitive people.
The face of a leader that I was
Designed to
Display is
Faded and
Shaded
Almost beyond recognition.
He's still there, but no one seems to pay attention.


I'm not even generic Cola.


All I've done is help Carrie pay this month's rent.
And brought a smile to little Kevin's face when Mama had
Just enough
To buy that Happy Meal.
And symbolized the start of the new business downtown that,
After two years,
Was able to sponsor a youth softball league
And got dozens of kids off the streets.
I was used to minister to a foreign exchange student
During her first Wal-Mart trip with a
Member of Campus Crusade for Christ.
I was used to bail a teenager out of jail
When he thought
No one cared
Anymore.
I was used to send a missionary to China--and his
Brilliant blast to Heaven claimed eighty souls for
Christ before they took
His life.


So maybe I won't implode over the masses in
True Mythbusters Special fashion.
Maybe I won't be a conduit for an impressive shot of
Divine power,
A flash of glory for even the
Blind to follow.
Maybe, in years to come,
No one will remember I existed.


But for right now
Today
I can touch
One
More
Person
In a small way--and that might make a
Beautiful,
Soul-saving difference after all.


It's a multitude of tiny,
Individual bubbles
That overflows the edge.

Untitled Poem II

It has been cast away
So it says
He will never remember
So it says
The sea has swallowed the shame, the pain, never to resurface
So it says

So why can't I forgive myself?

Collapsed Children

You commanded us to forgive
Seventy times Seven
You commanded us to love them
As we love ourselves
And yet our neighbors stand out in the cold
Waiting
For an open door

We've heard the sermons preached from
Pulpits
Desks
Doors
Remember we are sinful creatures!
Repent ye unworthy!
Remember Who must save you!
And we wonder why He would want to.

We have closed our hearts full of pains
We have closed our eyes full of tears
We have closed our minds full of fears
We have closed our hands full of chains

We fall.