The Loss that Changed Everything

This is what I remember,
the pencil sketches on newsprint
that I must translate.

I remember, five, you at two, brother,
the smell of your boy sweat hair,
the grasp of fingers into my shirt
as one we wrestled on a carpet, our imaginary sea.

I remember the morning a week later
you left me:
Father carrying me, whispering to me he loved
me, whispering of
Jesus,
whispering the stains of weeping
on his cheeks.
I remember someone visiting and
giving me a set of
over two
hundred
crayons which even then I thought a gift
too small to match
or burn
the loss.

But mostly I remember sitting in a small
rocking chair while the adults mourned,
hearing the wails and moans and mournings of a
cat that had
homed under our house and
wondering where they had hidden you
and if I could set you free.

I have been told not to write a confessional
because when you grow up,
nobody cares,
but this is for me finally and not
for them.

A Flarf Poem

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Merry Christmas, Childhood

Easter Sunday

men tip their hats

women smile demurely

and children high-five

the risen Lord

in passing thanks

for the egg-grace

hidden in the grass

Sunday morning

the chocolate God love

found on the church playground

or at brunch in new poplin

or at golf

in appreciation

for what happened on a hole in one-less hill in Israel.

I sit and judge them,

but is this day so different

from each day I

assume His grace was cheap?

Lessons Learned from One Dying

Just be.

Birch bark peeled back at the
end of winter.

Thawing ice, in an
abandoned corner of a field,
dripping water on red clay.

The fighting dog, no longer guarding his bone,
circling and lying down in the
sun.

A glass of iced tea with mint and lemon offered in the
heat of July yard work.

A child’s fingers tracing the prickly edges of a
father’s beard.

A tender, calloused hand wiping
a tear from a child’s cheek.

Bleeding palms turned outward against
heavy splintering wood.

Gargoyle

The shortest distance between two points
is the line between the past that is
and the present that was.

I could see evil,
a crouched imp stuffed full of nothing
perched at the foot of my morning preschool bed.

I have wrestled its stories
and believed the claws
and warmth of the embrace of madness.

Inverted prayer knees
pulled to chest as it rocked with
hyena echoes.

There is a sickness there.
Eyes painted on eye lids.
Lies blood-tainting white wedding dresses.

I slept with my door cracked
so I could put the puzzles together—
what they said in the darkness of a grownup world.

The rose-colored, rain-coated window panes
shade the view,
a palette of crimson blurred.

Teachers could not hurt me
with their cuts of bleeding red
over rogue pencil etchings.

After a night of adult words spilling from wine glasses,
even though every power line slashes the throat of the sunrise sky,
and the morning sun was blistering, nothing could hurt me, and
the wings are mine.