A whole month worth of writing could be dedicated to the subject of change. It has been on my mind a lot and I have had to hide away in the last few months and not write very much on this blog. It has been on purpose and I always have a hard time with that because I feel I want to keep this thing going. Here’s a glimpse of that..
I did say I was taking a break..or so it seems? I can’t get away from writing sometimes. I have been in a season of writing a lot of things down and teaching a bit. Poetry for me really started a few months before I had a mental breakdown back in 2007. Summer was a weekly effort to write something with my friend Kyle and a bunch of other all-night people in Kansas City 🙂 Those were some days..
8 years later here we all are. Kyle is married and I am still writing poetry. A lot of times I hit this wall with creative things. How much do I talk about my deep-seated fears and secrets while trying to make it make sense. This is everyone’s issue but pursuing your story and how God works in your pain..that is a never-ending quest that we are on. This reflection goes to present struggles with how easy it can be to not face yourself and face God. We want to slip away. And my jeans really do have a hole in them, so I am sad about that. That is an inside joke for my friends here in Cali..but genes do matter. When we move forward in life we do realize how much our environment shapes us and also how genetic proclivities can also do the same.
Skinny love on the empty penny
Jean holes again, gene holes again,
Gap in his brain made us all insane,
Been deeper since he left,
Upstairs boxes for the taking,
Munchies for the bowls we built
Around you, for the walls we built
Around you—video ideas for the sunrise,
Up with Your films in my head—
I was on the edge, I was a forest lover,
I was a midnight kind of fruit—
I am a plowing man, I am a brakes
Man, love has moved much to fast now,
Brakes are fixed and these eyes are not—
Vision is a puffed up dream for the same
Sermon on repeat, I am what I am not,
I am the west coast, I am the faded left
Handed kind of dreamer—I am here, I am
Not going to run away—
4am was the used to, everlasting was the
Song that was sang softly, into the dark
Breakfast for dinner, dinner in the middle
Of winter, colder air today for finally cold
Is gone,
Holes in these jeans, holes in these genes
I am slipping, its repeating, backwards into
A younger age, few more days with a few more
Waves, twenties to be over, roaring to turn to
Empty—
Now I build, now I continue, for the city is soon
To come to undo this thing called numb—
Don’t slip away into a place called running—
Suitcase those feelings, pack them away,
Face the life that you have today
Taking a break for a couple months from this thing..here’s my reflection for now..see you in a while//
Plane crash was the
Rehash, grew up with gold wings for
Breakfast, always watched you leave,
In and out she came and she went,
Turbulence for the long haul, now you
Can’t call Saul, for he has been converted,
Come all the murderers, come all the broken,
Love has spoken,
Cracks because of me but good was the way I
Was made from the beginning,
He is a former,
We are the farmer,
We plow for you God,
Plane crash kind of life I am living,
Thought I had stronger wings,
Thought I was raised on how to fly,
Thought this running thing ran in the family..
Now I am an eclipse of a better planet soon to
Come, soon to happen like love’s magnet,
Will you plant new seeds in me?
For the old one’s are dead and lost
And this soil fights being spoiled daily,
I take the challenge,
I face You, I face ME,
Pain cannot let go and you are
The white snow in the future,
Where the heat of Your love will burn
Away the seasons,
For now change is the greatest challenge
We all have
One of my favorite writers of all time. This is on fellowship.
“Community, then, cannot grow out of loneliness, but comes when the person who begins to recognize his or her belovedness greets the belovedness of the other. The God alive in me greets the God resident in you.”-from Turn My Mourning Into Dancing by Henri Nouwen
Up against the tides of change
The endless rearrange for all of my days—
Eyes on the light, on the day when it gets
Set right—blood moons for the onlookers
But where is the real danger?
Shaking cities with bodily entrance and in
It we long to depart,
This tent is up for rent,
Paying what I cannot owe
By this grace we must try to grow
For free is just the invitation—
Fallen souls who used to be young
And naïve and without reprieve—
Now we can barely believe in a good
God instead He hangs over the flames,
He stands in distance while our lives
Live with resistance—
I am hardened daily by the scorching
Winds that burn beneath me—
Life is harder when people see all
Of you, but where would I be if it wasn’t
For community?
I delight in the path,
I run from the wrath you have
Hallowed out, with death being swallowed
In a tepid shout—
I cannot agree just yet with what I
Live by for in me is still an endless
Disease—
But I will press forward in this
Tent you ask of me to display,
For sorrow, for pain, for death,
For all the world to see
A three minute talk on our thoughts..related to depression.
Labor day means I should rest but I am working away at a ton of things written over the years and because my computer broke back in March I’ve been all over the place in bits and pieces organizing thoughts. I have three big categories: poetry, theology and film. My own personal journaling is in their too..anyhow what I am going to post will get inserted into older dates but until then..
Ah the sunrise
To my surprise I am
Enlightened by its light–
For yellow has chosen me,
Red has followed me,
Green has come around me
An Emerald sound, a mercy
Cloud above me, its to hard to
Say how lovely You are, yet what
I have seen I never want to see anything
Ever again! Come up here and I will show
Me, I will show You, I will have supper with
You, for it shall be last those who are now
Are first,
Its childhood stays with me,
Scared on the top stairwell
Stirring down there
Living scared,
Living scarred
And trying to hard
To escape the present
And to live present–
Here I am, send me
I am unusually kind to
The way you rewind my
Mistakes as if they never
Happened, as if I could never
Ask for more mercy–
Emerald please, all around
Me
Older Poem from a couple years ago..
To all the teens that have passed through Kansas City and to all the
teens that skate in my neighborhood, this is for you. The song
‘Teenage Wasteland” by The Who ring real loud. For I don’t want to be
one that wastes that time I have been given and I don’t want to see a
generation wasted away either. Here’s my reflection.
Teenager
Teenage wasteland cries out from
The ground, there are souls all
Around, their skateboards
Hit the ground, their dreams
Hit the clouds, their memories
Are real loud
The teen and the American dream
Hit me in the chest and take me
To the best places
Hope they need, can they succeed,
Kickflipped they live, hardflipped
Over and over by a world that
Forgets living forever, skaters
Jaded, jeans ripped, sun stripped
With the beach in the purview,
With dreams in the rear view,
Goths and punks, smoke
Smelling of skunks, dried
And tried they are, tired of
Corporate lies, the machine
Doesn’t faze them, the world
Does haze them
For misunderstood they walk
For parenthood is the chalk
That chases and draws the
Dead bodies in the cement
Does it ever occur that these
Kids are the future? The change,
The groove, the point to prove
Or have I lived to long in my
Own waste of time and gadgets
And endless sunsets of days
Gone by, have I been to busy
To see the skaters and the haters
That walk by me daily, hopped
Up on their ipods, hopped up
On drugs, have I become just
As needed as them—in need of
The wasteland to end and life
To begin
To the teens of America
Help me understand these
Gaps I live in
This video captures a combo of other videos and memories. Our youth pastor Reid Powell has moved and was at our church for 8 years. The footage at the end is the last service he preached and rode out on the red scooter. I have been so blessed by all the friendships and relationships built in the last year and a half at New Life in Pomona. I honor you Reid and Jen..thank you!
An inspiring song that tells me something about God. I am listening to One Republic’s song I lived..”I did it all, owned every second that this world could give..I saw so many places..” First of all I love this band. But a deeper thought is this idea of religion verse relationship. Religion causes you to live safe and by the rules but life with Christ should be an adventure.
Religion depends on a safe God when God is not into comfort but radical trust. Religion has much more to do with keeping up an appearance where as relationship causes us to be vulnerable over and over again for the sake of loving others.
Love makes you do crazy things but usually religion makes you hold back. Regret is everyone’s biggest fear. Wanting to be young again is everyone’s wish but how do we live on the edge of loving God well knowing it is going to cost everything? It’s hard and it’s not worth it is what most would say but how do we fight the fear of not living fully for God with no regrets?
THE RUCKUS JOURNAL 