Dammit

Why do stupid, trivial, easily avoidable things have to ruin good days? I wake up to a pancakes and bacon breakfast this morning, thinking, This is great! No class, great food, and lovely company. Now I can get caught up on all that crap I need to do.. But wait, turns out I did have class, I missed talking about my favorite character in the Old Testament for great books, I lost my phone, I have to miss a dinner date I've been planning for weeks, and by spending my time straightening this out I have accomplished nothing I intended on this day off. I need to get over this hump and get my butt in gear, or I'll blow this whole semester.

A sound without a voice, a song without a tune, resounding and echoing in this beautiful void

I try to gather thoughts and words to reflect the truth that I see,
but they fall like grains of sand through my fingers.
I know my words are less than drops in the Ocean
compared to giants like Milton, Poe Homer, I am less than a spot
in the vast array of poetry and prose,
and even they are but pebbles at the foot of the mountain
a puff of gas in the nebula, burning brightly and beautifully and then gone.

Even they are but drops in your ocean.
If they are so small,
microscopic titans, geniuses made playthings,
What can I ever hope to be?

“Vanity, vanity” Solomon called it.
Catching wisdom is impossible;
with every step I take it grows further and further
from where it seemed before my steps began.

All the books I can never read, all the things I can never see,
the discoveries made and the conclusions drawn as man grows into itself. . .
I can never see even a fraction of them.
There is too much!
I want to drown in these beautiful words, imagines, sounds, and ideas
I am drunk with them already, though I have not even finished my first sip.

The effort is hopeless, but not pointless, beautiful in its impossibility.
I see the perfect imbalance in the symmetry,
the perfect order in the chaos.

I run wildly like a dog chasing its tail,
not knowing why or what I’d do if I caught it,
but oh such a chase.

“Vanity,” he said. But such magnificent vanity!
All these thoughts and these wonders,
these marvels and miracles
I can never count them all.

Perfect stars in perfect constellations in perfect galaxies
that move in perfect harmony in the universe,
chords and notes and scales that layer into songs and themes and symphonies . . .

It explodes in brilliance, reborn every second
I can’t focus, I can’t say it all.
It’s too much. It’s too beautiful.

Oh God, to see your mind and the vast array of knowledge, of beauty, of truth. . .
the very idea is too sublime, to beautiful for words.
I am lost and drunk with the very inkling of it.

I’ll never be able to read and see and think and hear them all,
much less understand them.
Oh but I long to try. And I will.

I see your beauty in gentle curves of the female body,
as it dances through each day and night.
I see your wonder in the man’s back as he struggles,
moving mountains, poetry in motion.

Their embrace moves me to tears.
Oh Lord, my heart cannot bear the wonder.
It cannot hold it all. It will burst.
But don’t stop, let it burst and erupt in the wonder,
exploding into such a wondrous light that no star could ever rival.

They complement each other perfectly,
two bodies, one flesh,
two hearts, one soul.
The symmetry is so sublime.

I cannot stop to even my verses' feet,
to arrange my words in the perfect rhyme and rhythm I hear in my heart.
Science, history, citizenry, soldiery, books, songs, treatises,
farming, running, flight, questions, answers, drama, . . . it is all an art.

So beautiful is you creation, so beyond my pitiful vocabulary.
I see now that it is more than any of us could ever hope to know.
I see it in the perfect geometry in Babe Ruth’s swing and the
symmetry of two lovers embracing,
I hear it in the hum of Stevie Ray's guitar,
a soul older than time or earthly bodies,
older than himself,
singing with notes and chords and scales he cannot read,
reverberating and echoing long after he’s gone.

It’s in the effortless perfection in Poe’s meter, Milton’s tone,
in Dylan’s verses that sing with beauty that needs no pretty melody to be a song.
It’s in Sinatra’s voice, in David’s proudly undignified dance.
It’s in Rembrant’s brush, Da Vinci’s plans, Jefferson’s pen,
Einstein’s equations, and Euclid’s lines,
Perfect works pouring forth from imperfect vessels.

How can they make such things without you flowing through them?
How can any of it make anything that resembles sense without you?
How can man’s warring desires that enslave him
release their vicegrips on his mind without you?
How could reason, order, natural law, logic, or pattern emerge without your hand?
How could such things crawl out of the sea of random chance?
It seems more likely to drop a set of keys into a bucket of scrap metal,
Watching a porsche emerge. . .

I heart it in a baby's cry, I smell it in the rain, on the earth,
in the housewife’s feast, in the perfumed fields of Eden.
I feel it in the ground beneath me, in the air above me,
and in the bones and soul within me.

How can they say you hide, Lord?
You are everywhere, you are everything and more.
You pierce time, empty space, wandering thought,
muddled mind, troubled heart, and scarred soul. . .
I am overwhelmed.

Even your word,
the written embodiment of your glory,
is a faded, pitiful reflection
compared to the incomprehensible awe of your presence.

And I so I stand:
merely a sound without a voice,
a song without a tune,
resounding and echoing in this beautiful void
without ears to hear it
a key without a lock,
until you make all new
and fill in the missing colors of my paint by number dreams.

Your glory and magnificence transcend the words we use
to describe or even name them.
In abject humility, I lie, prostrate before you.
All I ask is to remain here at your feet,
drowning in the vast seas of your wonders,
catching beautiful, wonderful glimpses of light,
bouncing off a picture too vast for me to see.
All I know is that what I see has beauty,
beauty transcending my mind’s feeble imagination.