Halfway into the Prayer

I wake early and drink coffee and oddly leave a lot of lights on which I only notice halfway into the prayer. Being the smartest guy in the room has its charms but inner peace isn't one of them and anyway I'm only sometimes that guy. When you enter the church, do you bring your reasons for going to church with you?

I thought I was relegated to the far corner of the choir but in fact I was relegated to the broom closet and only enter the choir loft after everyone is gone and it needs to be swept. Drawing a deep breath after many weeks of struggling to breathe. Writing by hand, listening to the house hum, the faint interior hymnal growing fainter.

Sliced apples, halved grapefruit, bananas spotting in the bowl. My youngest daughter begins making a braid rug, converting our bedroom into her workshop. When you recognize a good story and then confuse your recognition for creation.

For a long time I feared I was as empty as the men I knew who were empty, but I am not those men but another man. We thought my wedding ring was lost and so we replaced it for ten bucks but years later we found my wedding ring. Tom Petty in 1985, 1989 and then 2015 or so.

I step outside at ten p.m. and the cold darkness welcomes me but I am still lonely in hard-to-explain ways. Often, what appears in the poems is not what we expect and doesn't exactly excite us and yet there it is in the poem. A dream in which I realize through the lens of fatherhood the importance of being happy and having fun.

Practice joy? When we wear masks we think we are anonymous or hidden, but masks reflect the self's preferences as well as any other face. Snow melts in late January to reveal the crest of a curated pile of quartz rocks, some of which I've been lugging with me for over forty years.

One begins to sense the virtue of order and leans into the woman who has proven she can make it so. Forget the dark - it's what your heart left behind when it fell.