Gomer

Love is patient, love is kind,

I'll try to keep that all in mind,
If you'll hold your hand in mine.

Won't you hold my right hand,
give me the strength I need to stand?
Isn't that what you promised?

I've been broken, I've been bruised,

Nobody wants to love the used

Love is just another word, for let me hurt you

Will you be my salvation,

the loving arms that won't let me run?

Even though I don't always want it.

Will you persevere?
Break through my walls, and angers and fears
Will you persevere?

Put your hand in mine,
Love is patient, love is kind,

Or so I've been told

Faith, hope, and love these three remain,

won't you bring me home again?

Even though I'm prone to go, go, go, go, go–––?

Will you protect me from myself?

It Is Dangerous to Read Newspapers

While I was building neat
castles in the sandbox,
the hasty pits were
filling with bulldozed corpses

and as I walked to the school
washed and combed, my feet
stepping on the cracks in the cement
detonated red bombs.

Now I am grownup
and literate, and I sit in my chair
as quietly as a fuse

and the jungles are flaming, the under-
brush is charged with soldiers,
the names on the difficult
maps go up in smoke.

I am the cause, I am a stockpile of chemical
toys, my body
is a deadly gadget,
I reach out in love, my hands are guns,
my good intentions are completely lethal.

Even my
passive eyes transmute
everything I look at to the pocked
black and white of a war photo,
how
can I stop myself

It is dangerous to read newspapers.

Each time I hit a key
on my electric typewriter,
speaking of peaceful trees

another village explodes.

-- Margaret Atwood (Published 1968)

A Poet

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.
This may sound easy. It isn't.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel—but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling—not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time—and whenever we do it, we're not poets.
If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.
And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world—unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.
Does this sound dismal? It isn't.
It's the most wonderful life on earth.
Or so I feel.

e.e. cummings (october 26 1955)

Polycephaly

"Polycephaly is a condition of having more than one head.

The term is derived from the stems poly- meaning 'many'

and kephal- meaning "head"."

-- Wikipedia

Little known fact: I think I suffer from polycephaly.

Oh sure, it sounds like it would be useful.

Think of all the advantages to having an extra head:

two brains to contemplate life's challenges;

another tongue to taste all of the bountiful pleasures at our disposal;

four eyes to navigate the world's adventures, not to mention to watch your back at all times;

an extra set of ears to hear the all of our earth's many secrets.

There is no doubt that two heads (or more for that matter) could make a huge difference in our day to day performance.

However, it seems to me that this polycephaly that I deal with is either of a different calibre than the productive version, or I must have missed the memo on how to use it effectively.

Yes, instead of having a more ideal world, my two-headedness has only created problems for me.

Instead of two brains to contemplate life's challenges, I seem to have two critical brains:

one of which will shut off at the slightest hint of a challenge, and the other that is ready to pick a fight with a dying grandmother over the type and colour of yarn she's using to knit her great-granddaughters socks, resulting, no doubt, in a fight to the death, since there is no reasoning with someone who will fight with a dying grandmother over something so trivial.

In lieu of another tongue to taste all of the bountiful pleasures at our disposal, it would seem I have only another tongue [to attempt] to tame.

Rather than four eyes to navigate the world's adventures, I seem to have four eyes that are ready to see that fault of every action I make.

In place of an extra set of ears to hear all of our earth's many secrets, I find that my extra pair only manages to hear whispers of worthlessness, failure, and cut-throat remarks that lurk behind the slightest hint of any condemning tone.

Why is it that I have such a hard time making sure that my head is working the way that God intended? Why is it that I feel a war raging between two selves that exist inside of me?

For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.

//romans 7.22-25//esv

God?

God?

For the poor and the broken,

The proud and the arrogant,

For the sinner and weeper

For the faithless and the blinded

The bitter and confused

For the trapped and abused

For the lost and the lonely

For the forgotten and faded

The beaten and jaded

The sick and the hungry

For the dying and neglected

For the pained and infected

The spent and misused

And the monsters we’ve loosed

For our lack of repentance

And our selfish spent love

For our pride and our wrongs

Our calluses, quick tongues

For our loyalties laid elsewhere

And when we’ve mocked the cross...

... forgive and mend us Lord.

deut7.6-9//

deuteronomy7.6-9 // For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.

The LORD did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples.

But it was because the LORD

loved you

and kept the oath he swore to your forefathers that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt.

Know therefore that

the LORD

your God

is God;

he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commands. //

Overcoming Unbelief

This is my life, am I who I want to be?

I want to happy.

I want to be satisfied that I am doing my best,

giving my all

and working towards the Glory of the Father in Heaven.

I want the Kingdom here on earth. I want everyone to know that I am impatient, and I don't think that my yearning for bigger, Brighter, BETTER and MORE PERFECT THINGS is unnecessary or some misplaced malcontent.

Because when I pray, Our Father, who art in Heaven, I believe He hears, and I believe His longing is what extends into my heart when I long for Your Kingdom come, Your Will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.

When all is said and done, I don't want to be known for preaching at people. Heaven knows that's not a gift I've been bestowed.

I don't want to be known for being a quasi-follower, who hits the church on Sundays, works for the good Christian employer, graduated from a wonderful Bible school and lives an exaggerated life of crime and greed and all other corrupt moral variances.

I want to be Upright, in good Standing, and Blameless before the King.

I want the courage to pray for God's justice and then actually have the boldness to stand in the midst of it. I want to pray for correction, rebuking and God's necessary slap upside the head when I fall outside of His will. I want to be able to say that I fully believe and exhibit in full inward and outward action that I am part of God's Kingdom come.

I am part of God's Kingdom come.

Lord, the Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.

I believe, help me overcome my unbelief.