“Burn it?” questions the fat man whose fascination with the “naughty and nice” book has inadvertently eclipsed the genesis of Christmas—the true story of God making a way where there was no way, to save the lost when the lost could never be found.

“…or we can explain further

that story gives truth meaning 

like Aesop’s fables 

and Lewis’s Narnian Chronicles 

or better yet

think of Christ’s agrarian parables

that strum the soul

on a spiritual level

with a celestial harp of gold 

and hands of clay that bleed when cracked.”

Godspeed

if you’ve dropped your keys,

hat or hash pipe

into the “rabbit hole”

of delusive fantasy,

whirling and writhing down

an eternal abyss of insanity,

further and further away

from the drain of objective reality.

Does Scripture—

the Rosetta Stone

of what sinners’ call “fire and brimstone”—

employ fear tactics of emotional control?

Give me Narnia or 

Give me the Wild Lands of the North. 

Give me Aslan or 

Give me the White Witch

and her black dwarfs.

God: “Truth is self-love that sets you free and enables you to see your sin as an opportunity to talk with Me about why you sin so we can have conversations like this one and walk further down life’s path together. This is My heart. This is discipleship.”

This poem is for all of us,
horse lovers,
who feel that horses
make the world
a better place.

This world is so unfriendly and unkind.   How’s a teenager with Zeus’s ADHD, the rage of Achilles and the passion of Paris supposed to survive the suburban hostility of drive-by bullets of bullying and cliques of cruelty with privileged popularity without losing his mind?   If you want to get to know me then…

“A diary,

documenting a life in hiding;

her pen,

an ally in the fighting,

inciting a literary rebellion

against Svengalis and Nazis—

cannibals,

tearing body and flesh

to pieces;

spitting out bones

like animals,

praying in the name of Jesus”

The neon sign

to the promised land

has faded.

To the working-class

happy endings

are overrated.