Impatiens capensis

You never notice the first few.

They slide in - almost a practiced, practical ease - and hit their marks.

You don't feel those.

It's the next soft touch that drives the full complement home.

What was a flicker catches - a dry fire - spreading faster than you can breathe against it.

This is marrow-changing flame. A deep soul-itch that burns, burrows.

Scorched earth yielding no hope of regrowth, or rebirth.

(As if regeneration were possible from these charred nerves.)

This isn't a miry pit - although somewhere, deep you know that's there too.

This is an incessant, all-consuming integumentary wheeze.

In a pause,

On the shift of a wind, the memory of a scent.

Its half-whisper evoking what feels like a Green fantasy, so far from the here and now.

But it grows.

And sinks deep,

settling against these dry bones with the promise of distant thunder.

Quo Vadis, Domine?

There are books I've not yet read, and projects I've not yet started.

And yet, I've read some. And started some. And even finished a handful.

And at the end of this 30-second-century year, I know I am proud of three things:

• I have stayed the course
• I know I belong to the five
• 586 words

And now, with 2015 crumbling at the chasm of a new year, I'm not sure whether to look with great optimism or fear to the year to come. 

The tension in my jaw and the tightness in my chest don't seem to lend themselves well... and yet there is the weight of those three that whisper, maybe something is to come.

Emmanuel

Oh come

It escapes in a gasp,

slipping past the solitude, the sweet caffeine, the cold and the Word.

It comes, settling and whispering, "this truth underlies all."

Oh come

The heartache breathes it too. It's there, latticed behind it all, a picture behind a picture. 

Oh come

The worn fella makes a quip about the weather.

It's the same one I'm sure is heard the world over; one of those eternal truths it seems. We commiserate a minute, two people in on the joke, and he leaves.

I'm sure he drives a truck.

And the cold seeps again through this window.

And the sweet caffeine is gone.

Make this right

Fix this

Oh come.

12:34

That night the wind blew.

It feels as though it should be a quote, or at least an off-quote, but it probably isn't.

It's not the beginning, or the end, or maybe even the climatic centerpiece.

It's somewhere in the middle, past the exposition and before the denouement - the unpleasant suspense of a story not yet told.

Last night there were stars. Not many. But enough to count.

Tonight, they are hidden; covered with an electric city-lit shroud of clouds and rain. and wind.

Everything doesn't happen for a reason.

But at 12:34am, it's hard to distinguish the things that do from the things that don't. Or even remember why it matters that there's a line to be drawn.

All that matters at 12:34 is that sometimes they do,

and sometimes they don't.

and the stars are hidden.

and

that night, the wind blew.

Sludge

There's no point to me.

No point to this.

The world spins slowly, dizzy on the edge of consciousness, with a sluggish backwash should I move too fast.

There's just no point to me.

I want to have grit.

I want to have meaning.

To matter.

But I'm not sure I do.

I really doubt it.

Steadfast

In the hush and the roar it's easier to imagine the Galilean night.

Now, I don't know if they had cicadas, but they did know locusts, and fields, and wind enough to make a parable.

I lean back, listening to the popping and hissing of the truck and the peculiar quiet of a dirt road.

I can see Him sitting back on his heels in the grass surveying the convergence with a deep sense of satisfaction. He knew just where to find the three. He was there when their heart-fires were lit with a single breath.

And still - tonight - I see them right where He left them.

Jupiter, Venus, and Polaris shine brightly, hanging low in the west, and the horizons unfold, bringing the hopes and fears of all the years.

He breathes deep, savoring this creation.

And there's a deep sense of solidarity.

15

There is a rage that brews up in me.

Cold and crawling.

Desperate, frantic and cruel.

It claws its way

And everything is frozen, tamped down under a cold sheet of numbness.

"Man delights not me. No, nor woman neither," indeed.

And the rage flares again

Fueled by exhaustion, discouragement, and loss.