passerby

this morning, riding to work,
i passed a young guy in a blue fleece
he was walking along the sidewalk
and he seemed to be crying.
just now coming home from work
i passed him again
but on the other side of the street.
he was walking with his fleece
around his waist,
talking on his cell phone, smoking
and still crying.
man, sorry dude

i will not sing songs...

so, yeah, i just had an epiphane, namely i prefer to sing songs that focus on who God is, on how great or how beautiful he is. The song, hungry, was played at church a while back and i had to ask myself - am i hungry? am i really thirsting after God and his word? you know, sometimes i am, sometimes i'm not. so i'd rather not sing songs about me and how i feel from moment to moment - my feelings/desires come and go, but let me sing about God and his unchanging, ever-faithful love. let me sing about his sacrifice and forgiveness. let me sing about the cost of following him and how i'm prone to wander and prone to forget and how he is greater still.

a rose is a rose is a rose

nothing ever just is what it is, except sometimes.


oh yeah, and the bagel boy's name is eric.
he seems nice.

stille nacht

sitting there at the glass table,
i am silent
she is staring off
fidgeting as the dog continues to ignore her gestures
for a second she is vulnerable
for a second i am as clear as the kitchen table
the smell of cous-cous permeates the air
you could cut it with a knife
but please don't destroy it
let it be
let us be silent
let us be who we are
together

Buechner says we all suffer to some degree from deafness, or at least we are hard of hearing. We find it very hard to hear what other people are saying, either hard as in difficult or hard as in painful, or really both. he says we often use the words we speak to conceal rather than to reveal who we really are and what we really think.

from the Hungering Dark, which is brilliant by the way:

"The truth of it is that if you really listen to another person, whether on the surface he is talking about the weather or predicting the outcome of the World Series or even preaching a sermon, if you really listen, you begin to realize that what he is really talking about is himself. He is saying, "Love me" or maybe "Hate me" or "Pity me," but he is always saying one way or another, "Listen to me. Know me." Only most of the time people like you and me are deaf to this. We hear only the words. We hear only what is comfortable for us to hear. But once in a while, by the grace of God more often that not, we hear scraps at least of what people are actually saying."

the bagel boy

there's this sad little saying i've picked up on in the work-culture. it goes something like, "time sure couldn't go by fast enough for me today." there are lots of people involved in the behind-the-scenes coffee shop business. people i never would have expected to run into, for example, there's the lady that comes by to make sure we get our Gazettes every day, then there's the USA Today man, and the bagel boy, of course the milkman and the repairman, but the most interesting to me is the towel-man. he comes by once a week to take our dirty towels and give us new clean ones and sometimes he takes the rugs as well. the other day as i was washing dishes the towel man was there doing his thing so i tried to make conversation. and all he really had to say about his day was, "well, it's been pretty good, the time's gone by fast, haven't really noticed it passing." man, and i hear that so often from coworkers. but i don't understand what you do when the day is done and well, the time has just passed and now it's gone. and then what? to what end should time be going by? what have we accomplished, when at the end of the day all we can say is, "it is no more."

may i not gaze at my watch today
may i not let life go unnoticed
may i not continue on unaware
open my eyes
brush my fingertips
whisper in my ears
help me to keep myself awake
so i might suck the marrow out of life

i usually hate the kissing camels

there's this huge spotlight that shines on the kissing camels at night. usually i think it's really tacky and a huge waste of energy, but the other night as i was riding home from work under the stars, i was glad to have them there because they're really familiar to me and then i didn't feel so alone in the dark. i like to think the lovers were looking out for the lone traveler that night.

irises

i was just remembering how i always used to ask this artist friend of mine to paint me a nice flower arangement or something. And he would always say, "you can't do that, you can't just say that to an artist." We would argue about the ethics of it all. i couldn't understand why he wouldn't just paint something "pretty." It's funny now because i can't imagine thinking like that.

We have this art exhibit now at the coffee shop where i work, and i was flipping through the large, neo-over-impressionistic canvases when i ran across a reproduction of Van Gogh's Irises. i'm not gonna lie i actually found the piece pleasing, but then i had to think - this was not an original idea. What was this guy thinking when he painted this? Was he really overwhelmed by all the pressures of the business side of things? did he give in to the mediocre suggestions of a friend? had he hit a wall? was he coming from an inspiration-less relationship? did he feel guilty while he was painting this piece? was he ashamed? or did he even think twice about it? maybe he does classic reproductions a lot. maybe he's even forgotten that he has his own style. maybe he's even forgotten how to sign his own name...

the first poem i ever remember writing was called Iris. i was in the second grade. it went something like this.

purlple Iris in the light
purlple Iris shining bright
bright, shiny Iris
the end.