Messy houses filled with secret staircases
leading neither up nor down and built of starved excuses
stellar and extending to the past and to the future
as a hedge to make secure our souls against their cold inflation.Idols stand resplendent in their regal good deed rags
atop secure safe mantels stolid, still
in false security within these homes of disarray
and all the forlorn deeds of our own self-besotted hands.

No corner is untouched or deemed untouchable,
no conclusion inescapable, for we did soon discover,
no–we were shown–these messes low and broken,
jangly jagged in the pieces of our ruined hostile hovels.This is that tableau displayed of our lost searéd conscience,
disembodied, floating room to room and deeply mourning
what’s been lost, and worse, abandoned
in the losing of idealism’s living throbbing shine.

And our hearts, once lifted up and strong
are finally unadorned and brought down low,
so broken, so contrite and finally open to this Living Invitation
to be drawn at last into a bigger Story…to be remade and molded, gripped and filled, to be enfolded
in the new creation by a Mercy Stark and so unyielding,
by a Love Severe and so unwieldy in our messy rooms
and serial sin-stained walls and monstrous ways of utter horror.

It takes a broken body and it takes a different stain,
one indelible and permanent, scarlet red and bloody glowing
in the darkness of our tragedy’s pretentious phony triumph…
see the Hand that rips our masks away to make us whole again!Eat and drink, remember!  Then forget the past and rest within those ruins
at last cleansed and emptied of their wreck, delivered of the dreck
and durm und strang of fallen souls, set free of weights unbearable,
interminable, mighty, proud and fell and flawed and haughty.

And then, look…out there, thru yon window broken, there!
Behind that dingy jagged pane of brittle separation,
see the Cross so Stark, transcendent, final ever resting place
of all our sin and wrong, and also Final ever new beginning

of this race, we human butterflies set free from chrysalises left behind,
discarded casually forever…and yet never left for death to feed or to devour,
for they will someday be raised again
to catch up with us and to be made one again…to be made whole…
again…at last…again…
amen, again…
amen.