Dear world, I want to teach

Dear world,
I am tired.
I am tired of having to prove
that I am what I say I am.
I am tired of having to show
that I can do what I know I can do.
I am tired of jumping through stupid hoops
and climbing rickety ladders
without purpose.
This isn't my first rodeo,
or clown show, or circus.
I resent being put on display for evaluation
and I resent being compared to a list
that a group of collegial people festooned with degrees
designed for the sole purpose
to make this difficult.

I want to teach.
Is it not enough that I offer myself up
for the scrutiny of students?
Is it not enough that I go to classes
and do assignments that don't seem
to have much use for me in the end?
Please let me be.
Please let me do.
For two seconds of a miserable day,
I wish I could call myself a teacher
without needing that piece of paper
that tells me I can call myself thus.

Faith

Take the responsibility.
Have enough adult sense to know
that God didn't arrange your failure,
and that He doesn't have a plan
to yank you back out of that hole.

Get a grip on gods and deities
and see where they sit in you.
Use the knowledge that you are but
one cell in the body of the world,
your energy a part of everything
around you.

Faith is as real as you want it to be.
It is as powerful as you wield it.
It is as reassuring as you embrace it.

Something bigger than any of us
reaches its way outward like rays
from a sun that will never give up.

For those few

People in your life come and go
some more like tickets that get validated and left behind
some kind of like souvenirs from a long-lost land
and some that stick like lint in the static of the moment
and yet others that trail like the toilet paper stuck to your shoe.

But some choose to stay -
the umbrellas that keep you dry on rainy days
the comfortable old T-shirts that you can't do without
the warmth of sunlight, even in the middle of winter.

This is for those who stayed.
This is for those who didn't look the other way
when it was all you could do to keep your pieces together.
This is for those who cheered you across stages:
graduation, convocation -
teenage angst, quarter-life crises, love and loss -
and for those who had the time to sit in the silence
of your pain,
or say the right thing as you frayed into tangled strings
and confused nothings.

This is for those called friends.
Those who take the beginning
and carry it to the end.
They may, sometimes, come and go -
but spent a lot more time staying and believing and giving
that their goodbyes are more like see-you-laters
and their hellos more like I know you, I see you, you matter.
Those who don't just come
and go.
But also come back
and stay.

Non-religion

This is my non-religion
this is my heart
I believe its beats and rhythms
and trust that oxygen will be there
with the next breath
that the earth will be beneath my feet
when I walk to the coffee shop
that caffeine will continue
to thrum in its race down arteries
and that my voice can thank
as well as my eyes.

My non-religion loves
and feels
and takes in
and gives out.
It is just as your faith
strikes God into you;
mine brings god out
and shares it with everybody.

I may not touch my fingers to my temple
or my temple to the ground
but I do watch the pale purple sky spilled
over with sunset light
and open to the blurred softness
of awe in beauty and calm.

But most of all,
my non-religion
never seeks to convert you
or question you
or judge you
for the very same things
that make your soul feel fed.

I am full -
brimming with the tender acceptance
that is my non-religious core.

Rest aside

I dreamt and wished that I might
not have lived what I did that night.

When it all seems too true
only to wake and dawn that
what had made me so happy
is gone -
I bear it less well than when
something sad comes out of nothing.

You cannot wish for something
that you know nothing about
or miss something that never has been
and so, yes, I would rather,
sometimes, be ignorant of a beating heart
than feel it crush under steel cage ribs
and knowing brain.

If I could my dreams rest aside
and slip through thoughtless sleep,
I would learn to love those night time hours

not quite, not yet.

Winter rain

Let me sit and hear
the patter of soft winter drops on the pane -
they call it rain -
but to the senses so much more
and to the care I grow
to remember the warm days indoors
that constant drumming
in gentle rhythm between heart beats.

The days once more grow long -
yet still short-breathed,
seeming like yesterday I said goodnight.