We are close as strangers; I don’t know you when you laugh, or droop, or weep, or sing, or sin, or how you keep when I am gone, or where you go when I return. What stone tower, smooth and white and unadorned is this that I walk through alone?

The back of your hands,
The steel of your eyes,
The space between your breaths while you leave and then come back yourself again, but changed,
The places where you wait when I leave off and then loop back around to meet again but changed,

The fractal edges of my heart, rendered but unseen
The journeys that I make and then each one forget
The paths each pulse and impulse leave in myelin and lumen
The freight a cargo red, electric, transitional, mnemonic.
Out of these grows something sweet
Dark within, like a calf’s eye.

Seas, and skies of shining stars
Deepness grows in seeing deeper in.
Neither fathomed nor contained
Unknown, misunderstood, mislabeled, unimagined and unseen.
Each part a different part of me
Unknown, misunderstood, mislabeled, ill-used and untended,
Silence in the furthest reaches, not silent, neither unknown, nor dark at all –
Alive and feeding life with raging fire
Song that echoes in a soundless void.

In this between, where we all travel slow,
Remember all forgotten things that I still know;
Song and word and pain and tears
Dance and silence, shame and fears,
The ending of another day, another life, another friend.
The beginning of another day, another life, another friend.
Turn over the seas, turn under the skies of shining stars
I do not know you, understand you, or imagine you.

"The right reading for this is the one I'm giving it."
                                         Orson Welles

Draw God’s navel, body hair
See? all your parts were always there.

(He was a man like you, you know
Placenta to an embryo.)

Obscured by white clouds, cherubim
Are all of that which make You Him.

Draw in and then blow out your breath;
Uncover resurrection, death.

Your mortal body He forgives;
God once was dead,
And now He lives.

“I think this is probably the hardest thing to deal with,” he said,
and then, “whatever you choose, just make sure you are true to yourself –“
“that’s all that matters.”

Holding hands affirmed a life
Time wondering,
Watching, waiting, wanting,
Trued all the jarring angles
Even though my arms are long, and his are short,
All wariness, bitterness, dispelled.
My native wit, unpolished charm,
Bumbling stumbling burbling rolling out
We chip away at
Matters mean and great
Detached and riveted
Fixed and swinging.

Tell me, God,
Tell me how to love you both at once –
If I, your son, am known and loved, remembered, named and counted,
Spared within Your sight from all Your other sons,
Not globular but granular,
Not massed or indistinct,
Then I demand You hear this prayer.
If You are perfect You should reconcile now, not later – not after death, but now!
Me unprepared, vainglorious, intransigent, unfaithful, sightless, hopeless, angry and afraid
You came before by grace – to many – just as such
I would smother in the stinking belly of a whale,
I would pass through charring flame
(My dad once claimed he threw me to the wolves)
Let me wither from Your sight and shrink and fade and burn and die
I will not curse You or my birth or writhe indignant;

If truth is reason, give me reasons why.

If Your anointed say again “we just don’t know,”
Will I flee to, or from? This sharp comfort,
“we just don’t know,”
In the age of miracles, of fullness, attended by the living oracles
“we just don’t know”?
Who isn’t praying hard enough?
Who isn’t living up? Who here is unprepared?
What should we do but watch, want, wander,
Wither on the vine
Lose our way, and losing it
Make new friends, lovers, journeys,
Take faltering steps down faith’s last unlit stairway?
“we just don’t know,”
We just don’t what’s true.

WORDLE takes the words from a blog post or site and composes an image by prevalence, more frequently used words appearing larger than others. Not hard to to see which word figures most prominently in “Burn the Book” :-D

Where’d your gardener go?
Has he left you lone?
Clouds began to show,
He packed up for home

Snowflakes fall
Snowflakes fall

Raise your tender shoots,
Now the winter’s gone
Beat back to your roots,
Your first bloom withdrawn

Rise once more!
Rise once more!

Slow at first to
Show your green and
Glow, your roots must
Grow deeper still
Till you press yourself against the rock;
Your thousand fibrous fingers lock
A shoring up of stem and stock;
Sure mooring in the tempest’s knock

Eyes of high passersby
Wouldn’t notice you;
Signs of glories now nigh
Only faint and few
Till the dayspring streams,
And the gardener’s dreams
Break as morning gleams

Rise once more!
Rise once more!

[audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/Metal_Wave.mp3]

        1. Chozo                     [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/01_Chozo.mp3]
        2. For the Birds             [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/02_For_the_Birds.mp3]
        3. Shadowland                [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/03_Shadowland.mp3]
        4. Adrift                    [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/04_Adrift.mp3]
        5. Breakfast with Godzilla   [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/05_Breakfast_With_Godzilla.mp3]
        6. Wake                      [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/06_Wake.mp3]
        7. All Clear                 [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/07_All_Clear.mp3]
        8. Nostalgia Dogs            [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/08_Nostalgia_Dogs.mp3]
        9. Easter Song               [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/09_Easter_Song.mp3]
        10. The Fight                [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/10_The_Fight.mp3]
        11. Midnight Snack           [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/11_Midnight_Snack.mp3]
        12. Veggie Soup              [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/12_Veggie_Soup.mp3]
        13. Go On, Be Still          [audio:http://www.thebutteredslice.com/squid/mp3/13_Go_On_Be_Still.mp3]

All recordings, music, and lyrics copyright Anthony Hall, 2009, except lyrics on 3 copyright Anneke Majors, 2008

I.

In a box, among the papers I have collected and forgotten,
Bound in a white jacket, with a cut and glued spine,
Are the pages that shamed my youth.
The text says:
We are not in our control and never will be;
God hears our cries but will not apprehend or change our hearts;
There’s nothing else that we can do but
Surrender and
attend, attend,
attend.

II.

Attend,
attend,
attend.
Never talk across.
(If you are here at all
You don’t know better what he needs than he)
Sweet understanding, patience,
No one raise a challenge.
For one hour each week,
(or if Dan talks so long again, two)
Sweet understanding, men who know!
For two hours (sure!)
Each week,
Attend, attend, attend,
And never grow.

III.

Disintegrating,
The treasurer confesses that he took the till,
Paid for a prostitute down in Provo.
Disintegrating
– what should be done?
Never talk across.
The thief’s consoled.
I never put a dollar in that hat.

IV.

What “you are, you will always be,”
and “Always would be.”
And what’s the difference then?
The number of the sober elect is four,
Four percent,
The same number, I later learned, as those who never
attend, attend, attend –
at all.
We are ninety-six percent condemned.

V.

Oh, but I believe in miracles.
That God’s almighty hand being flesh
Commands all flesh –
All nerves, receptors, channels, pathways, veins,
All cells, all chambers, neurons, muscle smooth, muscle skeletal and
Muscle of the heart –
Reaching in between a beat
He tunes in fine degrees
Re-turning will with will.
In fine degrees, by our release and say,
When we cry out,
“Oh, my God –
Please hear me. Please hear me, oh my God.”

VI.

At ninety-six
We will be someone we don’t know now,
We will meet ourselves, a stranger on the road.
This is surrender;
What we would always be, we will not always be.

VII.

“Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?”
We do a lot of thinking,
A lot of talking too.
Talk only to each other, men circling up, facing backs to
Wives and mothers, friends and brothers, fathers
Putting them all off outside.
All through the week we think about and
Do the things we talk and think about so much.
And then come back again to think and talk and
Never talk across.
We kill ourselves a hundred times each day
In talking, thinking,
Straining to believe at gnats.
Circling up, again, the end,
Attend, attend, attend.

IIX.

Convention time again.
Attend, attend, attend.
This year’s workshops are so good we barely grow at all.
We sit, stand, eat
With men without the answers;
Men just like us who understand.
In three short days we’re guaranteed
To learn and change nothing,
All the time with other men (and some women, too!)
Who, just like us,
Know all the answers, and never have the answers.

We always get to ask a lot of questions, though.

We always wish this week would never end
– Because,
Once all our thinking, talking, knowing’s done, we’re still not done:
Our final step, XIII
Is never easier
Than when we’re in a thousand men
Thinking, talking, and doing all the things
We never don’t not want to do.

IX.

“Judge not, that ye be not judged.”
And then he said:
“For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged.”
If we judge you then to be crass, and false,
Protecting your own anger, rage and spite, and hate,
And harboring a grudge,
We do not falsely judge.
Then, only truth will be our judge.
Though we have spoke before in wrath,
For we are broken, man,
The sin is ours, and though we all will sin again,
We will not cloak our sin as you have always done.

X.

We all will sin again,
And so will you,
But will our sin always be the same?
Paul never said he would always be Saul.
Conversion, change, God’s transmutation,
Made Saul’s lead will to gold.
It was on the road to Damascus.
He saw an angel, and Christ sitting on the right hand of God.
At that very moment, abruptly as a blacksmith’s hammer.
Those were the days of miracles,
And so are these.

XI.

I had not been for years.
I left their circle.
I felt ashamed and wondered why
If it was right to attend, attend, attend,
Each time I’d gone I’d died inside?
Attend,
attend, attend,
We’d all attended, everyone I knew
(every one, it’s true)
Each group the same, each Tuesday, Wednesday, Sunday,
And as I sat at home, watching Lost,
(knowing now that was absolutely the best thing I could have done with my time,)
The voice would climb up deep and red from hell:
“If you don’t go tonight,”
and
“Then what you always were,”
and
“You will always be.”

XII.

But oh, I believed in miracles,
And God sent angels in my way,
Just like he did for Alma, just like he did for Paul;
These angels, I could shake their hands is all.

XIII.

The final step, my step thirteen,
Is finally to walk away
And work, and work, and work.
Work on ourselves.
Work on our voices, work at loving others. Work on our prayers, and knowing
God
Who is everywhere, and that all things are a path that can lead us back to Him,
Because that alone can be our happy destiny.
Work, on forgiving ourselves, forgiving our fathers we remember by the lash.
That thick white book with the cut glued spine,
Don’t work the steps that never work.
If our hearts are good, we have worked those steps already;
If we have not,
Attend to all the small things.
Attend church, attend our wives and mothers, friends and brothers, fathers.
Surrender and
attend, attend, attend to Christ,
Who won your broken being with his blood.