Gray

Spanish moss, its' choaking shrugs.

BIC's various granite contributions.

Chair-back gray, darker in the curve of crests.

My mothers thining strands,

drained of pigment. Her graying eyes,

weak from the neon chemicals that must be doing

something good. Something gray.

The gray coat drowning childhood bedroom walls with innocence.

Momma painted those, too.

Gray flats on my feet that "bing" as I click my heels in the

gray rain.

Gray light hits the beams that hoist that sail-boat molden bridge,

you know the one.

Gray with freshness; its' roaring strength.

Gray of cracking hands in winter, the tarnished gray that rims my finger

with palace dreaming.

My gray contentment.

The first gray coat of vine charcoal on a blank page;

never black enough.

Gray flakes of clay off his

brown-whale belly.

Eight months removed and still stuck to my shoes.

Gray of haze, blanketing my front porch with the stinch

of an aging man's cubans.

The Minnesota moon; probably still no bigger around than my thumb.

Specs in white knit fabrics, flecs of metal, the pain I never felt.

Thirteen Ways to Look at a Yellow Bead

So our latest assignment in poetry writing was to model a piece after Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways to Look at a Blackbird." We were prompted to steer clear of objects that had any sentimental value or could be taken as symbolic for a larger idea. As I sat in my favorite study room on the 3rd floor of my building, (it overlooks the intersection of Liberty and King with such brilliance) I struggled to find an object in my sight that lacked sentimental value or that I didn't treasure for some odd reason. I honestly sat there pondering objects for atleast 15 minutes and it was growing closer to 10pm than I appreciated. So, I opted to get strange. I prayed. Literally asked God to help me pick an object to stare at and reflect on for the next 1 to 2 hours. And though it may not show up in my writing, there was so much purpose in his choice for me. A yellow bead. A tiny, microscopic, yellow bead.

Somewhere in all of our years of being taught how to grow up, we were forced to lose sight of our child-like ability to marvel at the small stuff. Look intently at things the world deems insignificant and wring out every drop of beauty, or disturbance, we can. To form an unexplainable reaction to something we've seen as pointless to react to, and try to give it a voice.

"I will put in the desert
the cedar and the acacia, the myrtle and the olive.
I will set the junipers in the wasteland,
the fir and the cypress together,
so that people may see and know,
may consider and understand,
that the hand of the Lord has done this,
the Holy One of Israel has created it."
                                -Isaiah 41:19-20

So here's my attempt at being ridiculously descriptive of a meaningless object, and trying not to judge the outcome for beauty.

Thirteen Ways to Look at a Yellow Bead

I

Among a crowded sea of

burnt shag carpet and adolescence,

drowns a single yellow bead.

II

I squint with one eye

And land in a world in which there are many eyes

And many yellow beads.

III

The bead is yellow and it turns

around a fishing line;

a tiny piece of a larger whole.

IV

I hover over a mustard mass

The yellow bead and its’ others

Making one big blob of yellowness

And I stare

V

The green jumps at my eye

And I begin to wonder in my distraction

If yellow was the right choice

Or not

But it’s too late now

VI

The tiny boy with his bubble belly,

Black covered gray with desert dust,

hands me some yellow beads

for they  are nearly falling off his celery-stick wrist.

VII

The chalk dust sticks to the yellow bead

As it scrapes against the border of my board art

And though I am clumsily foreign, they remain intrigued.

VIII

Your wristband beams gold

And you scowl at the yellowness

of the bead you can’t understand the beauty of.

Don’t you know there’s life beyond the borders of

your gated drive?

IX

I know proper words and tricks of tongue

And I could make a name for myself.

I know the pain of parasites but I

know too that the yellow bead is involved

 in what I know.

X

The old man strolls his Sunday route

And stops to put a finger on what’s out of place

in the crest of cobble stone.

He tucks the yellow bead in his trouser pocket

and moves on.

XI

At the sight of the yellow bead

the wide eyed child rejoices

the perfect final touch just before the knot of pretty.

XII

With just one tug, the line is broken

and a stream of flowing ROY G BIV

bounces rhythmically on the hardwood.

Red bead, green bead, black bead

I cannot find my yellow bead.

XIII

The flyer scrapes a power line post

as the townsmen pass by glance-less.

My watch is coated with charcoal,

so I lift my chin to the sky to see

That the sun is standing still,

like a yellow bead.

84 Little Creek Rd.

I've always had a closet obsession with the old, the broken, the left out to dry, things of earth. Maybe because I am somewhat inclined to feel some level of connection to them seeing as I once was just that. Worn, lost, broken. Feeling abandoned, left out in the dark, all of those heart-wrenching descriptors. Whatever the reason, now I find myself pulling into parking lots of abandoned buildings, houses that once were homes, any old seemingly ugly thing I see, and trying to imagine the beautiful story its tatteredness once held. I like to think of it as child-like curiosity. One that frankly, I'm terrified of losing.

Which brings me to this poem. In Poetry class, my professor has been constantly reminding us just how unintentionally criminal our literature lessons from about 2nd grade to the present day have been to our poetic writing skills. We've been taught that all literature and writing must be read for the purpose of understanding the meaning. That we have to examine and draw out what exactly the author was feeling when they sat down to word-paint. She's basically broken us the horrifying news that as writers, but specifically as poets, no one will ever quite get out of our poems what we intended for them to. Therefore, we've been forced to focus on writing without expectations and intentions. Allow our pens to move and the creativity to flow. Ideas from things and descriptions, not the other way around.

So here's an example of me trying to be objective. Write without thought or anxieties about punctuation, style, format, etc. Just write. And miraculously, by the end, I figured out what I was trying to say all along.

84 Little Creek Rd.

I like old things.

Buildings long abandoned,

shoved aside & nestled in ivy vines

with tarnish & fingerprints masking what once was shining.

Washed out paint that chips away from the walls that might’ve at one time

kept  good posture,

but now they are tired.

Wood panels clinging tight by their left-side nail

and swinging with the wind-gusts on the other.

The people pass by at 5 past noon. Quick with scurry,

 no time to slow to a marvel at the old thing

with which I am so fixed upon.

I keep loving it in all its’ glorious ruin and I find my seat upon

a log of wood hung by a tethered rope.

Not much too fit for mounting, but still I sit and

 I ask 84 Little Creek to tell

me its’ story.

The crumbling stone foundation serenades me

with a narration of the day that a soldier man

surprised Ms. Carter with the very willow tree I now hang from

and I feel like I’m intruding on something lovely, but their long

gone now.

I make my way to the nearest droopy-wall and

he tells me about a canvas painting he once hosted of that

very house itself but Ms. Carter sold that and the rest of her work

when she got the General’s call and decided to move back to Boston.

I can see how the planks of fallen pine once lay and

formed the perfect home for

barefoot children.

And I hear the gentle laugh of a young Ms. Carter

as the soldier man interrupts her kitchen-work with

whispers & she swoons.

But the sun is setting fast now and momma will want

me home for dinner cause’ tomorrow I’ll head

back to where I now stay in the midst of all

things new and perfect.

And the doors won’t creak, they’ll shine,

And the yellows will be far from organic.

Too young to have a story.

And I don’t want to grow up.

Relaying the Goodness

I have an eventual aim for this one, I swear. I'm just not quite sure how I will arrive at it. But, that's just how my thoughts have been flowing these past few weeks. In jumbled-mess form. But with clarity. If that makes any sense at all.

I've been thinking a lot these past few weeks about sacrificial worship. I guess, in a way, all of our worship is sacrificial. In investing time, talent and treasure into something, whatever that something may be, we are indeed making a sacrifice. For it is always possible & most of the time favorable to keep those things to ourselves. I've also been considering just how meaningless my sacrifices really are. For example, I am so quick to refrain from watching tv or getting on facebook when I know there are other things to be done, but though I feel as if I am being sacrificial, these trivial things have completely lost their value to me. I can say with full integrity that I do not treasure my tv and I do not treasure facebook. Which is why it is so silly for me to feel at peace in settling with tiny "offerings" such as these.

I'm reading through the Old Testement right now. Which I feel like i've been saying for almost a year. Probably because I have. It's taking me much longer than I predicted. But, with that I am okay. I am learning. I am discovering deeper depths of God's character than I imagined I could. And in that, I am learning to treasure him more. "There is so much joy in treasuring God."-a wise man I know. So anyway, a couple weeks ago as I was finishing up 2 Samuel and I came across this. As King David was commanded, he went to Araunah the Jebusite in order to offer up a burnt offering to the Lord. When he arrived, he offered to pay Araunah for the threshing floor but Araunah refused his payment, offering him oxens to be sacrificed along with whatever other means he needed free of charge. But the king said to him, "No, but I will buy it from you for a price. I will not offer burnt offerings to the Lord my God that cost me nothing." (2 Sam. 24:24)

It's such an elementary idea. We as Christians understand that Christ's death on the cross was the largest sacrifice that God could have chosen to make in payment for our sins. However, though we understand subconciously that this practice should be applied to our own lives, we, or I rather, often fail to see my sacrifices for what they truly are. Nothing. I cannot give to God anything that He did not first give to me. So how, then, can I be so quick to be closed-fisted with the lot that I have been delt. Choosing to "sacrifice" things that costs my heart no pain or sorrow. Exactly, I can't be.

And with this wave of realization, comes discontent. and conviction. and brokeness. and peace.

So I write in the midst of sacrifice. Not a swiftly satisfying sacrifice. But rather, a slow, dragging my feet, chiseling-away-layers-of -what-I-thought-I-knew-was-truth kind of sacrifice. One that hurts, but heals. One that met me where I was and challenged me to up-root. And I write from a Spirit of confusion and questioning, but trust in God. And who His word says He is.

When the image of what I thought I knew was broken, there came the rain.
And with every crack of a raindrop comes a cry for more of my heart.
An offering of peace & clarity.



Someone very dear to my heart provided me with "Job" by John Piper last year. Not only is Job my favorite book in the old testement, but John Piper's summary of it is executed in poem form. Mmm. Stirring to my soul. So into this particular ingenius truth I have been leaning these past few days. Maybe you'll treasure it also.

And now come, broken, to the cross,

where Christ embraced all human loss,

and let us bow before the throne

of God, who gives and takes his own

and promises-whatever toll,

he takes-to satisfy our soul.

He is not poor nor much enticed,

who loses everything but Christ

It wont be long before the rod

becomes the tender kiss of God.

May your offerings be genuinely heart-renching. May your sacrifices cost you more than you're willing to give.

Everything in an Empty Room-Take Two

I like rhyming. I take rhyming without sounding cliche as a challenge. Which is why I took rhyme into account the first time I wrote this poem. But, my poetry professor has decided to challenge everything we thought we ever knew about writing and our own styles of writing. I've LOVED it. Absolutely loved it.

Our first assignment was to write a non-rhyming poem about a physical place. So as much as a love this one, I decided to try my pen at this one again.

Not sure how I feel about it yet...

I catch the reflection of stainless steel,

out of the corner of my eye.

I scurry to where you find your barrier,

the thin film that slices the oldness of you and shields it from the newness of us.

We do not claim the stench of the memories hidden behind your ruin.

My face is frozen, cold against the glass as I peer into your nothing.

A gutted room; abandoned.

You are left to the chokehold of weeds and sorrow.

They cling tight to your bricks and you are worn thin.

No roof to seal you air tight from the raindrops.

Smell them shattering where your marble tile once lay.

Soon the sun will seep through the cracks of your drooping walls.

Beams of light, promising you tomorrow.

Untitiled...for now.

Where temptation led I went

I did not linger where it stayed

My toes caressed the edge of lines

But the cost to cross, I never paid

I felt the thickness of desire

Resistance wore me thin as slate

Remembrance of my heart’s inquire

Caused me now the line to hate

Back pedaling, my calves grow weak

The dust-stir rids my eyes of sight

I slip, a cliff, I catch a branch

My fingers red with lack of might

One by one they lose their grip

Where I’ll land is not foreshown

But then into a net I drown

Reminded I am not my own

Inside this Empty Room

A few days ago my best friend, Catherine, and I were strolling down the streets of downtown Anderson.

I was experimenting with different features on my D-series Cannon, Gladice, taking shots of some of my favorite buildings around the downtown area.

I know this street fairly well because I used to get dance pictures with my classes outside of different buildings, around fountains, on staircases, etc.

However, we never struck a pose in front of this one.

The walls outside were covered with mismatch planks of wood that made their featured centerpiece a glass door.

As we peered through, we were mesmerized by the sight.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Yet, such a story. It was like seeing everything in an empty room.

I was inspired.

So I wrote...

Don't be fooled by stainless steel, for I am far from stainless.

They stripped away the gut of me and did not make it painless.

They wiped me of my gloss paint walls, replaced them all with wood.

They took their thoughtless wrecking ball to where my pride once stood.

My bricks are worn, my roof was torn, the tiles tangled in weeds.

Abandonment was much to add to insecurities.

"Come in, come in," I plead and plead, but no one understands.

I used to host the loveliest toasts when women gave their hands.

The man would cling tight to his bride, he'd spin her round and round.

And do not fear, my chandelier, the total talk of town.

But all has past, and way to fast, no sign of second chances.

You've walked right by a thousand times and no one even glances.

But if you do ever return, you might could bring a broom,

and sweep whats left of everything inside this empty room.