Desolation comes in many different forms:
A salesman in a crowded shopping mall
Ignored by all who pass.
A child playing in the hall
Unwanted and forlorn.
What creates the loner?
Deserted buildings?
Buzzing freeways?
Setting changes nothing.
Unwanted,
Shameful,
But curable on contact.
Desolation is the human soul
Untouched.
Teach me death Is not death But a door to glory. Make my life a museum Of holy acts. Spur us on Not in rash or rage but Through your consuming blaze. Pain is not pain but Feeling your scars Tracing the path of those furious nails That fury soon swallowed And turned to fuel By which we fight Not further and higher But tumbling, a righteous cascade that bows ever lower, bleeding through the bowels of earth’s hell, not slowed by position or rank ambition, rather, dispelling that novel and ancient myth of progress by constant condescension— lower and lower through the bottom of hell expelled yet promoted into beatific vision.
Everyone scrambles to the top
of the JENGA blocks
and tries not to blow away
(which is hard for a husk of a human hollowed out one grasping handful at a time).
But the howling wind atop the towers cannot topple them. They
Are held down by a lightless power,
A gum-like goo stuck to their shoes that creeps up their legs to their
Heart, inflates them like a balloon.
But before their heads explode with the stuff
They scream, “We will never be finished.
All is never enough.”
Meanwhile below,
Level 0 of the JENGA block tower,
The Have-Nots are having their way—hammering away at the foundations—
giving chaos its way.
A little while now and the big shot bobble-head
Will burst
Raining his sick ambition down
The Have-Nots will have their fill and –that not being enough—will
Devour each other on their way to the top
Still.
And as a new wave scampers up the tower,
Feeling their chests inflated and a certain
New grip in their toes,
The blocks will shift and the structure buckle
And the tower will slowly go.
Except for the Littles.
So small and unimpressive, bracing each other, back to back,
They hold the tower barely standing
About to crush the masses.
The Littles are hollow too,
Gutting themselves long ago, but a song
Echoes from inside them,
Stretching out from their cavities, refracting endless empathy
Singing
Calling.
Throwing our young, apostolic bodies
Into the gears of the field
To slow the churn of angry dark.
It will consume us.
But may it grind our bones into
Fine, fine seed
That springs to harvest
Multiplication through mutilation
Forsaking only that which our hero did—which
Was everything.
There’s a trembling in my bones that shudders to the beat of a windstrung song and shouting throng and a hundred thousand feet. For my Father comes in power and he’s coming for the weak and waiting. Will you come, Lord God, in quiet thunder and echo throughout empty spaces places of decadence and desolation? Will you come and burn with fire fury the tears off of our faces? For those who hear you coming put our ears down to the ground to feel the earth shake and wait, we wait for you, our coming swift salvation. The king of a thousand armies calling in the thump and wink of a heartbeat. Eyes forced and held open in an act of trust while desert dust is flung in our faces and our eyes water freely bleary and fainting droplets hissing in scorn-filled heat. Here together with arms held and up high, forcing breath out weakened lungs to the angry sky, a "Hallelujah!" chorus is our unified cry– as we wait
Why are the nations enraged? When you tear down the DOW flip the market upside down and say, “This was supposed to be about prayer!” How do the governments survive? When the parasites filling up slick suits and nice ties— pompous puppets—finally suck their people dry? Where are the pretend priests— the pastors and their staff protecting— their teeth sunk deep, their bleeding-out sheep? After all, a man’s gotta eat! Can the gods among men, even hear you when they kneel to crush? How can they hear you, if you can’t breathe? Hands in their pockets, do they even care if you praise them? Yet you, Good God and Shepherd, show to mend broken hearts with your own clothes to walk with the weary through the shadow straight through to tomorrow. Our sacred cows are slaughtered, Lady Liberty led off in chains. Left to choose between the narrow gait or Broadway, we sit to entertain ourselves, (unfettered . . . unbothered). Skyscrapers fuel the pyre. Not one Yankee-doodle cobblestone unturned . . . unburned. Hosanna, Hosanna! He comes with fire, germinating his own empire, fed by the tears of the crushed and perplexed that profit and priest never saw, fallen through the cracks of the temple complex.
Land your hand on my shoulder, Holy Dove. Hold me down to the ground, a paperweight rock on my fluttering heart— frantic feather between your fingers inscribing indescribable things. Please, keep me from flying away. Speak your words over me, ‘til they drip like oil-like-lead down into my shoes. Keep me planted on the earth. Sink deep roots through my twitchy feet. Feed me from the bottom up—up from earth’s core, deeply dug glory, subsisting in subpar, sublevel underground stories of futility: the fickle smear of bone and fleshy vanity, digested, petty dreams. Break up, tear down, Humble, till, and turn my ambition and excesses into life-giving nutrition. Compose me new in compost piles. Re-make me true. May the holy seed rise up in me, a growing in obscurity—warmed by a single naked beam of your kenotic light. Bow my neck and bend my boughs in ignominious productivity. Burden me with real success, branches filled by, stooped, by bearing Spirit’s fruit.
Baker Storycraft 