Diddle*

Jung roams loosed by a healing muse

and wades in rhymes of cows and spoons;

his lullaby traversed to tickle

the synergy of a diddle.

The anima and animus,

shadow, hero, antithesis

will meet themselves in bread and wine

and lead us through a pantomime.

Pebble weight, a single pining

hoping for a different ending

like stones rolled over to remove

a body from the crooked worm.

Ego with its crude devices

casts shadows on the boot of spite,

from welted breast comes cause to spurn

the bit and bridle of the world.

A hero breaks the grip of scrag,

the Lamb to whom all life is clad,

and Death no more will touch its hilt,

nor feast upon His continent.

With Origen and Gnostics too

Platonic goes the holy food,

the sacrifice sent to suffice

our hold upon the precipice.

The alchemy of symbols pass

up from the altar’s adipose;

and children’s rhymes sent forth to heal

will righteous craft the holy whole.

Let go with me, drift down betwixt

the dark and dawn of crucifix:

Felines fiddle the off-hand tunes

with leaps of faith around the moon.

* Notes 

• The history of “Hey Diddle, Diddle” is varied, but most agree this is a nonsense rhyme which contained something meaningful enough to be remembered. Most children’s rhymes are designed to be fun or instructional, but occasionally some slip through with no apparent meaning at all.
• The earliest recorded use of “Hey Diddle, Diddle” is attributed to Shakespeare, though for the life of me I can’t find it.
• Wikipedia says that a “diddle consists of two notes played by the same hand.”
• In composing this poem, I tried to take all the definitions and history into consideration. I was also thinking of something Jesus said, “Unless you become as a little child, you cannot see the Kingdom of God.”
• This poem is a diddle I suppose… it seems meaningless. For me personally, the theories of Jung are never so clearly portrayed than the in the image of the cross and Eucharist.
• The off-rhyme is intentional—and two inter-locking four lines stanza, surround four inner stanzas, making 8 stanzas with 8 syllable lines. They are both used to indicate “two notes played by different hands” and I was trying to create a Mandela out of the structure.

PS—When if finished this poem I walked into the living room where my daughter was watching Sesame Street. Guess what song was playing??? Talk about synchronicity.

Eating Watermelon

Grandma was there;

happy to force feed us

three-pound wedges of watermelon.

Grandpa and I sat sprinkling salt

on each thick, red piece:

red like Alabama sunshine;

red like grandpa’s lungs

burned from the radiation treatments.

We wordlessly ate the wet flesh of the fruit,

knowing the cancer silently feasted.

His pain met mine in unspoken glances.

Our eager mouths churned

the sweet, juicy slush--

together,

one last time.

Expansive

Expansive wheels, these suns

crying out for their mothers in the cold

of space, which spreads out with time

like a table cloth on which sentience feeds

and starves and births more Reason

through which rises unrealized transformation.

Expansive hurricanes, these galaxies

so alone, widowed expulsions with black-hole hearts

at their centers, sucking down wheel after wheel,

sun after sun, colliding if it were, on rare occasions,

every few billion years, and in between they

stagger outward, spinning like drunken fathers,

casting out their sputtering suns in search of

anything except the big empty.

An expansive universe they say and call it:

‘the big freeze.’ A time when all matter is absorbed

and the last proton breaks apart. Who

could rightfully say if it is a bang or a whimper, or

the backward bleating of a sacrificial lamb,

a lingering breath of divine imprinting,

like a pinprick of light and thumbs…

something perhaps as simple as a flash of color

which vaguely resembles Dali’s smoothest pond

into which Narcissus stared and morphed,

and bled before the melting of the clocks.

Goth by the Pool

This is a poem I wrote for one of my students at High Places, who at the time was a self-defined atheist. I’ve not seen her in a while, but when I stumbled on this I remembered what a special kid she was.

Goth by the Pool

Broad black strokes of lipstick curl

in time and fade in space, when for

one guiltless child it did not matter

if in someone’s eyes she was beautiful.

But here in the valley of the shade

in the loveless interim of ninth grade

with silver nose rings and dragon tats

a prayer of distance slips over the dye

to color the embers of faith and sight.

Her comfort fidgets under jewelry and skulls

and soaks the sun in a shirt pitch coal

as bouncing Christians spring upward from boards;

she watches, listens, and leans forward:

leaning into the shadow of an unseen God

who longs for her with tender palms

and whispers assurance gentle and calm

a rustle of truth, a beauty settled

under the covering of her ink and metal.

And from this hallowed and patient flicker

the ancient brush of God delivers

a timeless masterpiece beneath the Goth.

Hansel and Gretel

Love is thick, squishy dough;

but there is no yeast in a house of candy,

cast to the forest by your mother and father.

Death is sweeter than abandonment

The orphanage fattens your wounded insides,

I offer you the soft crony hiss of prayer;

I nibble home to my own buttered breads.