Genius.

Not me, the new genius application on itunes. I am trying it out right now, and I think that I like. we'll see though. I certainly have enough music for genius to choose from.

Hmm........what am I going to do tonight? not sure, maybe go see a flick? We'll see.

New favorite poem, seriously:

psychosis in atlanta
Nic Gibson

At what point do the pens of the past converge?
Whether mystic Rationalist, pietist of rigorist?
Kierkegaard used to speak of the return of Luther,
And what he would say.
That he would have no patience for our pretense.

But is that what we are today?
Are the churchgoers frozen for lack of passion of for abundance of fear?
Anxiety that the truth is not true
Anxiety over the either or
Afraid to be wrong
Afraid to loose what little there is for a greater dream that is not.
Afraid to be pitiable to all men
To be a fool for true folly.

And so here I am trying to find virtue
In not choosing
In not living
In both cashing out and trying to play one more hand.

Who would have conceived this to be the true route,
To cool and disappointed religion.
The ongoing faithfulness of the faithful,
Married to a man they don’t know how to knowand yet don’t know how to leave.

The religious looses hope but hedges his bet;
Experiencing neither world, resenting them both.
Neither caressing the breasts of the one,
Nor exhausting the endless hope of the other.

The Mystic hopes that the Dark Night will yet give way
But the successful have always been few.
Some finding rapture
Many finding manipulation,
Most collapsing from exhaustion.

The Legalist dies the death of pride or despair
And usually he dies both and twice.

The Pietist cannot escape his sinful heart
Where sincerity is everything,
The heart’s inadequacy is all the more exposed.
And the reality of self-doubt overcomes the supposed virtue of certain feelings.
And all that remains is a subjective legalism
Twice bankrupt
Out of touch and ugly.

The Liberal sees his faith in his life.
But life absorbs all of objective faith
Can supervenient sentimentality be the firm anchor for the soul?
The harbor will soon be lost and the land will fade from vision.
Sentiments will change as life evolves and billows roll.
Those adrift cannot be saved by drifting itself.

But then how can Christ re-find me?
How will this modern anxiety be relieved?

Has the sponge of the enlightenment really wiped away the horizon?
Or was it the brush of the ancients that put it there?

And so here I am in Atlanta’s airport
Lying in Solomon’s bedchamber,
Composing proverbs
Caught between my desire for the mountain heights of wisdom
And the bosom of a thousand willing women
Hoping expression will carry away what the pen cannot fix.

But like a pathetic blogger who publishes to no one-
It is the deafness of the world that intensifies the void’s silence
That wretched silence,
All the more eerie as it can be sensed even over the din of distraction
By men scurrying about on spinning wheels.

It was the opposite ever man always wanted
And it did come to pass that humans heaved idols of wood and stone
Heaved aside for a speaking and hearing God.

Like an arrogant, unpeopled, pregnant, unwed Egyptian slave
Crying to death in the desert
I’m in need of Shema-El-
The god who hears and also speaks.

My kinsmen have so attacked all that has been spoken
All that purports to be true Word
Seeking the bottle of our own chirps
While spurning he breast of spoken sustenance.

And thought I love the substitute,
I do also hate the part of me that loves it,
And I hate that my heart’s mistress is crazed to kill any alternative lover;
Any word but her own
Anything that stands against her.

And like an adulteress who wonders if she really ever loved her husband,
Or if he was ever what she thought he was;
Here I sit in wonder.
I wonder what happened.
I wonder if I’m loosing my heart
Or if I’m just afraid to face reality.

But whatever I will hear,
A Word has been spoken and reported to me.

A Word too strange, that I would not invent it.
A Word too other, that I would not expect it.
A Word too selfless, that I would not imagine it.
A Word too direct, that I cannot ignore it.
A Word too bloody, that I cannot wink at it.

It burns away the mystic haze.
It proves the rational pride small minded
It anchors pietistic sentimentality and the romantic’s liberality
It frees the legalist from the law, to finally obey the law

I have held this incarnate letter in my hand all my adult life.
It has not changed.
And the rope that is tightened stretches
But it does not give way.
And here I dangle
Still daring to believe
That this alien message
Is so alien because it is quietly divine.