There is promise in tiny things.  Little buckets filled with jealous memories, scattered links to this thing you had steadied and secure before you stepped foot onto the cataclysmic.  There is danger in comparing seasons or voyages;  each one is whole unto itself.  The comparing is the problem.  Really, the deepest trouble is trying to make one more seismic than the other.

When I step back, as I am right now and finally discover these lost pockets of photos of you and I and then you and I and our beautiful boy, I wonder what in the world I have missed and simultaneously experienced.  Time is not a wheel or even a book.  It is a big awful explosion of simultaneous beginnings and endings bound by distance and arrival.  We are thrown and lost in the belly of some kind of fleeting, hungered giant.  He wants to eat me whole but also offers me the possibility to join him on his back.  I could look out and see my own life pass me by and while realizing this in lucky seconds, make the mistake to think I can snip the wings and let this thing stop in front of me.

I cannot. I look through these seconds and hours and years in these really amazing photos collected that I have not looked on.  They have been stuck inside a hard drive. 

I look now and see the past two years and see something I forgot about even though really, two years is nothing novel or even all that interesting on the surface.  But there can be no judgment in time.  How different my face looks.  Softer and mild.  My eyes seems to be thinner, my jaw like a blotted line beneath my cheeks. I am not old.  But I know my youth is much younger than I remember it.  I see you now in this picture, stuck in that episode between chest openings.  I see my bride pass unto bride unto companion unto friend and onward in masterful beauty. 

I like to think of God as the circuit and the sea.  A passing scent of salt and peach.  Like this sweetness every human knows and discovers in the silent time when we look at each other across drink, bread, awkward glance. There's no secret with the mystic tolerance of our eyes.  How corny I sound even to myself to write this now.  I guess that's the joke on me.

I'm stuck on this thing of passing. I remember you everyday I come home and every morning that I leave.  What is left of life but remembrance?  I do not think living is anything but the remembrance of now and the forever.  It is hard to swallow the truth that that is all.

I can't say this on Facebook, cause well, it just wouldn't go over so well.  Nor would it really serve much of a purpose other than to satiate a need for something that cannot be satiated, that is the need to just get under people's skin and maybe get people to think I am more crazy than I really am.

What annoys me most about today is the incredulous, knee jerk reaction from many "statuses" of my friends/acquaintances from past seasons of life, within the forum of Facebook.  I am tempted beyond any temptation (and have succumbed on several occasions) to respond to the inanity of their thoughts and the banality of spiteful rhetoric in their shallow reflections on the Inauguration of someone that represents something that no one has the right to judge or place some kind of superficially, candy-appled, kindergarten-wassled response to such a momentous occasion. 

Let's get something straight: Hope is not synonymous with messianic arrival. Because people have embraced the man, Barack Obama in a way like none other in my lifetime does not deem that people look to him as savior.  We look to him as a figure and symbol of possibility; as a relief in many ways from the thing we despise of ourselves and what we represent in a world that is complicated and fucked up (sorry bad language, I'll regret this later).  We as a collective of individuals admire the man for the differences he embraces and represents to a world that in so many ways today, seemingly tries to simplify and detain. 

A man or woman, a child or grandparent has the right and privilege to see someone in their lifetime that inspires change for good in their earthly citizenship.  I am thirty-one, young I know, and feel privileged to see Barack Obama enter into office.  But more than this is the knowledge that he represents something that goes far beyond me and my lifetime and the lifetimes of many others that have lived and endured before my lifetime.
 
I have little historical perspective on what today really means.  And yet, on the same hand, I like many others, have a full presence of mind to feel and understand the barriers and ageless prejudices that this new president represents to countless generations. Moreover, I have enough to know in my bones that it feels pretty awesome.  Outside of political dialectics, how on earth can anyone not feel joyful today?  It is something that is rarely witnessed. 

If anything, I am content to know that our country has a clean slate with foreign relations. We have the opportunity, again the privilege to change relationships, to better relationships with others that think differently or alternately than us.  And that is something that I value more than anything:  the ability to live and breathe and enjoy the benefits of persons that I can call brothers and sisters that speak differently, dress differently, eat and pray differently than me.  That is what it means to me to be happy and to know the enjoyment of creation and difference. 

I am a skeptic.  Even a skeptic of my very own deepest, most intuitive thoughts.  But there is nothing in me that cannot appreciate this day.  To not appreciate it, to question it, to bring in this unpalatable comparison of people worshiping a new messiah is denigrating not only to true historical weight of this moment, but is a shameful representation of faith. 

I see the angels masked and adorned
Paraded by others capture
Lost displays on the sovereign tongue
Downed the emerald gut
Through the devil's ass

Capture me as you would
A mind astray
A heart arrest
There's nothing in your motion but idleness
And the distress of not knowing enough
To know a little
And that makes all of your answers the sugar
Complicit with deceit.

Bum bum bum bada bada bada bum, bum bada bum bada bum...

The sound of the lights and song sing out in record requesting your sleep on our monitor.

I like the time of night, when I am encouraged enough to stay up past the midnight hour, despite my body crying out for sleep.

I do not know what to do with my time most of the time.  I do not know time as it were.  I am just starting to come out of the time I thought I had become accustomed to. 

I think of friends.  What else is there.

I started writing again this week.  At my desk at work.  It's been nice.  I have a little folder on my desk top for inspiration.  Or procrastination.  Here's one inspired from a morning:

Aww Shucks, I Feel so Bourgeoisie

Looking down the diagonally equidistant lines of my tie
I fumble to pick up my lunch bag, thermos and laptop bag and
Scramble for the car keys.
But I manage to
Crash-land my freshly shaved cheek onto yours
(Which somehow feels like we never really touched)
For a morning kiss that says “goodbye.”
But sounds more like an adjunct to love

I would have rather embraced you
While wearing just my underwear
And let the world get out of our home for a few hours more;
“Let it sit on the damned steps,” I think to myself
With its chin planted on the cusp of its own hand
Let it watch itself as it is for a moment
Like a kid without any money for the ice-cream truck

Time is like shrink-wrap over syrup
It squeezes but rarely holds the
Goodness you want to keep.