I discovered while cleaning out the trunk of my car today a whole yellow pad filled with what must have been the beginning of an epic poem. I stood in my apartment complex's parking lot and read through it. It spoke of a tree which begins to grow in a town, steeling away the happiness and vigor of the citizens. I am not going to assult you with my poetry, only I want to make a simple observation about a shift in my focus.

In the old days, so many years ago that they have almost danced out of my ability to count them with the fingers of one hand, I used to consider myself quite a prolific poet. I am not now discounting any of those feelings or belittling the poetic inclination. However, I used to complain (or rather, I would marvel) that though I could at moment's notice fashion up bleak scenes of death, winter and starless nights, I could not even in my best attempts form any positive poetry. I became content with my poems pointing out the bleakness of a life without God.

I could conjure up emotional numbness, but not life. Death is easy to portray, life is hard. Dull eyes can be painted with bleak words, but lively eyes, the sort that sing their own song, these are almost impossible. Any attempt at description that comes close lies open to ridicule, but to capture lifelessness with lifeless words is easy.

A group of villains might easily create a picture-perfect scene of desctruction using any number of methods. Anyone can, with enough explosives and buildings, create a set of destruction rivalling Ground Zero in its perfection. It is not hard to destroy buildings.

To create, that is the real challenge. Show me a poem that pulls down our hopes and I will show you the work of anyone with a good command of the language. Show me a poem that builds something real, no matter how imperfect, and we have begun to address the problem of what poetry ought to do.

America's Going Down the Drain

Sometimes you step outside and the feel of the air makes your whole body shiver in delight. At such times, it's very hard to think about wars and persecution. We're here in a world filled with earthquakes and murders, and in the midst of all this a gentle spring day comes so that when you walk through the grass, the dew clings to your feet.

I used to sit in the back of many different churches and listen to my dad give a talk about the end of our society. The talk included many quotes from the seers of the age about how our values were draining away and the manner in which America would fall. Grim frustration would descend and I could do no better than to push it far from my mind.

Today I think these predictions still stand. I do not expect the world to suddenly improve (until the return of Christ); still we descend toward destruction. And yet, these fall days still come, tiptoeing through the turmoil. Each one is a reminder that we may not have a perfect society, but we still have a perfect God.

It washes memories from the sidewalk

I'm sitting in a five dollar chair right now which my parents bought for me at Home Depot before I went to college. The drain pipe is letting down a gentle stream of roof water, and the cars on Massachusetts Street are making that classic noise of wet tires across asphalt. I am outside because of a particularly bad case of writers block.

You see, I have been on this computer of mine since about five o'clock, crafting and punching away at the rough draft of an opinion column that was due yesterday. I am nervous because it will be in the school newspaper. I should not be nervous though, chances are that more people will read this post than will ever make it all the way through my article. I'm just being so darn perfect, so exacting of each word that I cannot seem to be happy with a single turn of phrase without finding some tragic flaw within. For instance, had I just written that sentence, I would have moaned about my lack of ability to come up with anything better to describe a sentence than "turn of phrase."

There you have it, I am not a very free writer. I feel like you do when you go to a party at which you know no one, but everyone knows who you are. It's like meeting the parents for the first time. Every little thing you say, you evaluate for its general effect and potency. I'm tired of being this way, but I can't feel that I'll ever improve without some sort of writer's wd-40.

Among the Petunias

I opened my eyes this morning to the roar of an industrial lawn mower, and found my face a few inches away from a marvelous bed of white Penunias before Wescoe Hall. I'm not sure that I was ever really asleep, but the mower's call and the blanketing sky filled me with that sense you get when much bigger things than you are rollicking through the world. I had just finished a breakfast meeting with Henry before his eight o'clock class and nearly succumbed to the whispers of sleep. The trees swayed overhead and occupied a good portion of the sky. I could see almost nothing of the campus buildings which sat nearby; in fact, in my panorama I noticed only the moving leaves and a cloudless radiance.

It occurs to me that you don't really notice trees unless a) you are in a forest, or b) you stop what you are doing during the course of a day and allow your eyes to wander upwards.

We are all very adept these days at picking out buildings from a map, or pointing them out on far away hills, but do we ever notice the trees above the buildings, ever-rustling, living beings, whispering of God? Perhaps life's course runs not too far from this. If we look straight ahead, we see only trunks of bark shooting up all about us. When God seems far off or non-existent, maybe our problem is not that He has vanished, but rather that we are still looking at eye-level.

The Temptation for Griping is Upon Us!

I was at South Park in Lawrence a few nights ago and my friends Dave and Luke began chasing a bunny rabbit (not out of malice, I assure you). Their large bodies, hurtling forward, came nowhere close to capturing the pure changes in direction which the rabbit would make each second. It was like watching a freight train track down a Hollywood stunt car. I have had many varied and extremely exciting events occur since my last post. Unfortunately, like the rabbit, they have flitted from my mind.

Therefore, lacking a sweet experience, I find a grim character hooded in the back of my mind. He is always urging me to complain about this very blessed life that God has given me. And you know what? Most of the time I give in to him! I know, it's ridiculous, but if you had listened to me these past weeks, you might have thought that I was the most unfortunate soul ever to have crossed the weary paths of this planet. Well, just so you know, I'm not. I'm really quite a blessed man. God has blessed me with the greatest friends that a man could ask for, no, greater than anyone would think to want.

But what have I done about it? Have I thanked Him? A little bit, but not nearly enough. When was the last time I stopped in the rain to consider its wistful course through the lights above? Last night, actually; but other than that, few and far too between. I guess I'm confused by how blessed I am and how little I appreciate it. For what that's worth.

On the Dangers of Working for a Less-Than-Well-Liked Company

Many children grow up with nightmarish fantasies of men with red eyes waiting for them behind street corners and smoking unfiltered cigarettes beneath their bedroom windows. I was no different myself until a few days ago when that vision of a man with red eyes suddenly changed into a woman with a pair of scissors.

It all began with a rather simple trip to my local haircutting joint. We observed all the usual formalities:

Your name?

S-c-h-n-e-i-d-e-r

Sam?

Yes.

We'll be with you in a moment.

And they were. I sat down in the chair wrapped in that shiny black cape that hair places make you wear backwards. We began searching for a subject of conversation to occupy the course of the procedure.

To my old age, I will advise my sons and everyone I meet to avoid the follies of my youth. One such piece of advice. When you get your hair cut, talk about puppies, about fields of daisies, about jolly old men and laughing children. Do not under any circumstances mention your place of work. I was unaware of this and like a blind sheep, trotted carelessly to the sheering.

In the same way that a protesting sheep makes many cries, yet no one pays any attention, I have foregone inserting my own participation in the following dialogue to keep from boring you.

She: What are your plans for today?

Me:

She: Oh, where do you work?

Me:

(I should insert that at this point in the conversation, her scissors stopped clipping and a lock of my hair fell silently to the floor.)

She: I'm never shopping there again, your manager, [name removed by Soviet censors] is a real [expletive removed by Karl].

Me:

She: If he ever came in here, I would give him such a bad haircut that we'd have to give it to him for free.

Me:

She: Yeah, I could write the letters [again the black marker squeegees through the next line] across the back of his head.

Me:

(I should note the speed with which her shears were now scything my scalp.)

She: [A long story that could be interpreted as libel or something if it were recounted, so Ivan's pen has snuffed it out] If he ever showed up on my doorstep to apologize now, it would be too late. I'd probably hurt him. I'm not like that though, but I probably would. And do you know what he did when I asked for an apology? He gave me twenty percent off coupons. Twenty percent off! I told him they were useless because we were never going to be shopping there again.

(She held up a mirror.)

She: How's it look?

Me:

She: You sure we shouldn't take any more off the top?

Me:

She: Okay, so that's a good length?

Me:

She: Really? All right, well, thanks for coming by.

And I trotted through the door in search of a baseball cap.

A Short Post, aimed mostly at easing me back into the whole blogging thing....

I bought a watermelon today. I held it close to me like a newborn and rapped it gently with my knuckle. It sang.

Now I am comfortably full, resting with a cup of coffee.