Showing posts with label original work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label original work. Show all posts

The Most Important Thing in the World

7:09 AM

The Most Important Thing in the World

“The most important thing in the world”, they say, “is to find your center
where the oughts and the want-tos align
“Like a bridge”, they say, “Or like orion on a clear night.”
But then I read 4 poems of Stafford and think, “This
is the most important thing in the world.”

I consume a book on how to teach, no, how to inspire,
cajole, and convince one single student to learn. “Think”, I say,
“Of the trees, of the sap syphoning life to the leaves.
You are a tree” I say, and one single student believes me.
I think, “This is the most important thing in the world.”

My wife and my friends counsel me. I hear their wisdom
like a child sitting outside a baseball stadium.
He hears the crack of the bat,
the ecstasy of the crowd, and wonders what all the excitement is.
“Your children need you” these voices roar from a distance
and I think
this is
the most important thing in the world.

At church immigrants come and tell their story,
tell of a life more difficult than mine, but still full
of fear and labor and hope. Their skin is different
than mine and their words sound different than mine
and they pin their hair up in strange ways.
But they want what I want and
I think,
this is the most important thing
in the world.

I read the newspaper and the pundits say, “Democracy is failing!”, say, “Complete global annihilation!”, say, “Call your senator” and I think, this is not the most important thing in the world.

My students are asking me when their homework is due.
They are not asking me again what is real,
not asking how they can know what to know, not asking
who will tell them truth. They are smolts in a stream
and I desperately want to save them from the ocean.
They thirst for salt, though,
and I think this could be the most important thing in the world.

On the way home I stop and eavesdrop. A dandelion
is saying goodbye to her seeds,
commending them to the sun and the open air,
telling them
not to be afraid of the fall.

I think this is the most important thing in the world.

Advent Movie

11:17 PM


Last fall I wrote a series of Advent videos to film for my Church. They tell slightly altered stories found in the book of Matthew as though Jesus were here today, as the owner of a run-down apartment manager. I've never been part of making a film and I loved the process. I was able to work together with a team of people to make something that we are all passionate about, but at the same time I was able to go hole up in a corner and do my writer thing. Here they are. Please don't use them for anything other than personal viewing unless you ask me.



Written Into Our Story || The Soldier from Ferguson Films on Vimeo.


The Car

4:28 PM


Here is a story of mine.  I've decided to just link to the google doc rather than post the entire story here. But I'll give you the first page or two here.



They bounced alongside the interstate on the abandoned dirt road, each silent, if not exactly in thought, in an attempt to look thoughtful. His right hand and her left rested on the center console, close enough to touch if either of them wanted to. His fingers tapped anxiously on the front lip near the clasp and hers dangled, almost slipping down into the shadow between the seat and the console. He scanned the bumpiness ahead with intensity, looking for any glimmer or waver in the air that would let him know the gypsy lady hadn’t lied. Susan, who could not believe the gypsy woman, rested her head against the side window, staring through her graying hair out at the dust. It  swirled around the car in billowing eddies that belied the clean, ‘new car’ interior. For five years she had put up with this pilgrimage as Arlin meticulously traced the route they had taken so haphazardly on their honeymoon twenty years before. She was ready to be with the nonsense.

Arlin believed in the gypsy ju-ju because he had to. The promise that being in an exact place where they had been in the past at an exact time of the day when they had been there would allow them to go back and relive the past was a narcotic to him. Susan didn’t believe any of it, but told Arlin that she did, sure that the tarot cards and fortune telling had been carnival tricks to fool the gullible and the desperate. On the way home from the fair, when he told her he wanted to try to find where they had stopped the morning after they got married so that they could go back and fix things, she’d simply added the idea to the long list of his deficiencies. She never thought he would take it so far as to go out and look for their old Chevy Malibu, though and only accompanied him because it was the only thing the worked on together.


If you want to read the rest, open this google doc.

Night and Day

1:27 PM

Another poem of mine. I still have edits I want to make. In fact, I removed the second half of the original poem because they were clashing a little bit too much.


At night, the lights from the barrios are the Milkyway.
At dawn, slum and slime wash
over the hills of houses.

The sun sucks life from the morning-glory.
That shriveled flower of the hill where nothing grows,
except faerie-girls named Flor,
All day they sleep off regrets,
Preparing their hidden blooms for night's enchantment

When those hovels are fields of fireflies,
the world is enchanted forest,
haunted by revolution, parity, and miscast god-
mother spells

Pistils and stamen quiver,
petals contort.
The wink and dance and fleeting payoff –
the hum of Flors' wings.
Every pin-pricked light gleams
burnished solidarity.
The fairies and ogres blow themselves out
at the stroke of dawn
when incandescent glass slips into second place.

Sunset on the Beach

9:46 AM


Here's a poem I wrote last fall.


Sometimes my daughter and I waltz on the beach.
I bow, she curtsies, and music rises from across the world.
How gracefully evening serenades the sea.
Does the foam know
those wind-whipped harmonies
are a dirge?

What if the star that winks our cadence
has already burst,
scattering dregs of afterglow
over our wishing?
Would the shattered spindle curse her
Even as she reaches almost far enough to touch
evening's first pinprick.

The sun is just over 8 light-minutes from my head. That half-circle
nesting on the horizon makes up 99.8 percent
of the mass in the solar system. And then there's Jupiter.
We are only an asterisk.
Why can't I just dance and wish for unicorns?

Until now, I've mostly hidden my faults.
And while she still orbits me,
Other lights, brighter,
more massive, threaten to collide.

Her clapping hands will always fit between my fingers, won't they?
I capture this moment. My fists are strong to clasp it to my heart.
The next wave laps my ankle and my daughter's hand
slips from mine as she dances up the beach without me.
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