Questions and answers

Are my words perpetual holes

falling down a miasmic field of dust

or are they rising from the same

burning fissures in the fabric of trust?

What's the truth within:

a shelly face armoring what's real

encasing motives unclear to myself

forcing out some good that I feel?

Do You embrace the carapace

crack it or warm it to growth?

Am I wedded to failure

taking a vow that shatters both?

I am a ragged beam of Your cross

splintered wood that longs to be glued.

I am scattered shard stumbled upon

a nomad pursued.

You are carpenter/potter

using me as fodder for the clay

pounding rounding, kneading, soothing

massaging, forming, coloring my gray

*Thoughts of Richard Rodriguez

   -...what 9/11 should teach us is that religion is a human motive as strong as sex or eating or sleep, and the secular world that has pretended we can simply ignore it is foolish.

   -The notion of a dark God is one that we have to take seriously as the fierceness and hostility of religion becomes obvious.  It seems to me that this is an exciting time to be religiously inclined and also a time when one should be very embarrassed by one's religious faith.