Nebraska

What is hope? Does need and want necessitate hope? Do the hopeless have the power to hope again? And those that are aware of the hopelessness that is brought by satiation, and yet still are too numb to hope, do they have a way to hope again? It feels impossible to pray. The words are too heavy to take flight. They sit at the end of my tongue with no proper mechanism to transport them out of my mouth. Hopelessness. I find a way to calm the gentle stirring inside my heart. I can read books on the Sabbath and about the prophetic imagination. I can talk to friends or quote poetry to suite a situation. I can write inexpressible thoughts in a pocket journal to alleviate the pain. I can wish upon new friendship to dull the pain of dying senses. I can run, but I can't hide, that to me at least, is the most obvious.

I WISH I COULD HEAR MYSELF, SCREAM.

And this will all end tomorrow, when I awake to find a new day waiting at my bed. It will begin again when I let time fall victim to spatial desires. I will doubt myself only to be the most prideful person I see that day, and will learn to stare myself through the deceitfulness of the mirror...

I do not live a horrible life. I live an overcrowded life with thoughts of revolution and domestication. I prostitute my soul for my ego and then loathe myself because of my inability to override the whims of my will. I think about what it means to build an altar and dig a well. I also think about how not moving is better than moving. Not addressing the unrest in my heart is better than undressing my heart. I think of cool sentences to switch around only so that people will look at me as someone who can manipulate words into clever phrases that fail to do justice to the issue of the heart. I write so I can reread this and pat my own back. The heaviness of desire is too much to bare. If only I could change right?

...if only I could be better... Oh, I might agree that God takes us as we are, and I tell myself that after I blame HIM for the way I am, only to feel guilty for my inability to simply believe.

And you know the times that you really do feel humbled and at peace, those days where the impossibility of change only makes you hope more...those days are so few and far between that the chasm seems to lengthen. An abyss has formed inside my heart - faith, hope, and love do not remember the quiet walks in the garden they once took together. Compassion and Justice remember only better times.

...Or so it all seems in my heart. Pessimism feels so adequate when you think of how to describe this. I don't know if I like that word. Maybe I like to leave it nameless so that when it comes again I can wallow in self-pity just enough that someone notices and pays me some warped compliment that I think will set me free.

I crucified you. I yelled it in the streets of my heart. I reached back through time and turned that palm branch into a veil to hide the gruesomeness of your crucifixion. I denied you three times. I ran to Ninevah. I condemned the adulterous women. I received new life at the well. and I died in order to gain you.

The pure fact that I exist causes me to remember why I hate you and love you at the same time. Why my hate is not really hate, but simply disguised confusion.

Can you cause me to see again? I think I have lost my way, Jesus, I am just a small child that winces when he sees the light - especially when that light causes him to let go of his fear of the darkness.

Frankie Welfare Boy Age Five

my thoughts linger like impossible
so improbable that i could carry the world
Atlas, you must have something I dont.

when the autumn leaves no longer sway
making room for the winter breeze
when people make profits the only way to live
we are reduced to producing machines

the radio plays in my ear,
I'm reminded of times that I wasnt there
when life plays before my eyes
I wish I were older in years.

I wish for joy to turn to tears.





...yeah