personal bomb

his face was a flag

his eyes were bricks staring

packed with charges atop a hill

to melt those standing below

he was roaming dynamite

a time bomb steadily ticking

eating up minutes with a red glow

his pressure running high

banished like sin from memory

who thought of him as a risk

as a burden needing a sling

to hold up dreams for healing?

so we suffer waiting for death

our peace scarred with anger

left as bread to feed our hearts

as we trudge toward safety faintly had

oh how we yearn to raise the high-five

in pretense that brotherhood was always our lot

but truth won't stop shackling our buckling backs

with each others hate and concentrated lust

i wish i knew what not to do

in weighing the already breaking backs

but i'm caught in the ever reeling cycles of violence

that moved him to charge up the hill

when fraternity has been strangled

and all conversations failed

fear has no face to flee from

and is an explosion walking blind

*Thoughts from Gil Bailey:

-We live in a world that has calloused our sensibilties, a world where we are bombarded visually, ravaged by stimulation until we can't see or hear or taste or feel or touch anything, and in this world the artist is charged with bringing us to our senses.  This is the sacramental sensibility.

-Rene Girard has said many times that we want to talk about language instead of using it - we have a sort of postmodern hermeneutics of hermeneutics of hermeneutics.  "In the room the women go, talking of Michelangelo" is the condition from which the visual artist must save us, and the great mainstream of art in the twentieth century has completely abandoned the task. 

-The three essentials are truth, goodness and beauty - and they are interrelated.  Everything in our culture is either a perversion or a parody of or an inversion of Christianity. For example, we have the western avant-garde's notion that truth is ugly. 

*Tears of a Teenage Mother

He's bragging about his new Jordans

the Baby just ran out of milk

He's buying gold every 2 weeks

the Baby just ran out of Pampers

He's buying clothes for his new girl

& the Baby just ran out of medicine

u ask for money for the Baby

the Daddy just ran out the Door

-Tupac Shakur