My heart surgeon is out on furlough
I will nurse her myself until he returns
With firm hands of faith-enough
To resurrect the dead. I’m told.
When he returned, after I had held for weeks….
I hope to revive you into a type of awakening.
My surgeon whispered. Jesus is still real and we are still here
We are still here, my friend. He ended with.
I will always remember him by name.

Pretty moon tonight
You and I, this dark night
Beholding again together yet another sky
What was always here above us all in waiting.
But we didn’t see often or well enough
To know one another as the moon knows earth each night,
Or as a man knows a woman’s hand he’s touched for years in moonlight.

Pretty moon tonight
You and I, this dark night
Beholding again together yet another sky
What was always here above us all in waiting.
But we didn’t see often or well enough
To know one another as the moon knows earth each night,
Or as a man knows a woman’s hand he’s touched for years in moonlight.

Religion and comedy have been my life’s obsession—add art and I’m home.

I will one day in this life or the next write a religious joke book for angels, as I feel they get left out of the conversation. And I have always had a heart for the marginalized, or those living in the clouds in between!

My desire to write a joke book for the angels, has never dissipated. Humans are easy to make laugh (slapstick or easy puns), but get an angel laughing and then you have really good joke that could change the atmosphere.

I hope I’m a good joke for them.

(And of course, angels have no ethnicity, so ethnic jokes are out of the question, which does limit me).

Religion like politics isn’t funny, until you see it in a larger context. I think the angels will get the punch line.

But it must be delivered in Love.

For as a friend put it, “God always has a chuckle in His Throat”.

God is always about to tell a joke.

After chatting with a dear friend…
Alas, I must get back to the boring day—dog walks and bills,
Forms to fill out, sinks to fix, poop to clean up, plungers to buy…
But to talk to you ,took me outside of time for a moment or so…
So I could return refreshed and readied for billboards and circumstances
With a brighter glow about me, as I do the daily worship.
That chat, informed my talk and walk.

After chatting with a dear friend…
Alas, I must get back to the boring day—dog walks and bills,
Forms to fill out, sinks to fix, poop to clean up, plungers to buy…
But to talk to you ,took me outside of time for a moment or so…
So I could return refreshed and readied for billboards and circumstances
With a brighter glow about me, as I do the daily worship.
That chat, informed my talk and walk.

Publish that book
Write that song
Teach that tune
Tell her she is gorgeous
Watch the sunset slowly
Notice each color as it dissipates.
Walk that elderly dog
To his favorite log
Just to let him pee once more.
Praise him when he does
For letting it all out!

Let’ do this
Before me must carry canes
Let’s walk our names around the earth
A few times to make others smile again
Let’s do this
Old men, before our twinkle is only useful to angels
And those in mid flight between worlds.
Let’s do this
Bless all the names we’ve known by name
Before we too are etched on stones
And remembered only for what we were
While we are still here in skin and bones,
Let’s do this, being-here-now thing.
And let’s do it before we are leaning over, wilted flowers
Lurched inside of what we were, and just about to stand up straight-
To be erected by sunlight again, but
Where only angels will see us
And notice our steps….and note
Our standing upwards again.

From a Lover of cities:

All these cities I really knew
Each alley and sunrise by name,
Each person’s wrist turning in the right light of afternoon…
What will I do
With all these lovers?
How can I honor them all well now.
Memorials are not enough. Nor poems.
I was never a tourist
I was a lover, and traveler by name.
I touched to know, I saw to believe.
But having been one,
What will I do with all their names
Inside me, by now, like inner tattoos on my bones.
Scrolled and codified with an ellipses on each one…
Like stones that someone placed in an unseen field or on a tomb
Each So deeply spoken, uniquely broken, I can no longer speak of them?!
Unutterable loves, these cities, I’ve known.
Even from my coffin, which is like a tree, where lovers
Carve their names for free
To remember them each by name
Makes me free.