I meant to sleep tonight, but then today happened
so i thought i would make something profound of if in a poem
but my nostalgia for someone else's childhood
and a dream that may be taken away
doesn't make much of a lullaby now

I'm both leaving and staying
maybe getting halfway there and stopping
maybe i can inch just close enough
for a hand that can pull me through
but for all my disdain of boundaries
my own fences are bleeding me

i am not authentic
only pieced together
from all I stole from you
and the others
even the dreams i have borrowed
in my playing at sincerity

does anyone have a little hope they can spare?
because i'm not enough of a politician
to manufacture sympathy for my own cause

i could always use a little love
and someone to hold me, just hold me

A dark night

There's a lot I don't write here because it's sometimes a little too much to share, but I needed to send a little cry for prayer out to the world tonight because I'm caught in a dark place - maybe sleep will provide something of a cure, but that's been pretty elusive of late.

It's not so big and yet it's everything and the looming threat of rejection is too much, too much. And I was going to Chicago this weekend in hope of finding my future, but tomorrow, tomorrow could change that - okay, put it off for a while, but that's painful enough.

I'm vague, I know, but I'm not sure I understand it well enough to make sense of it in words, except that someone else holds a big decision about my life in his hands, and I don't know how the cards will fall.

A Lack of Shame

"With all this talk of budget gaps, the biggest deficit among our nation’s political leaders appears to be in shame." Chuck Collins, The Shame Deficit

I read this article several weeks ago and pulled this quote out - the focus was on the budget (and still should be), but I was thinking how appropriate it was in a broader sense as well for all that has happened in the past couple of weeks.

The blazen exploitation of a family tragedy, the reckless and violent talk directed at the judiciary, and now the political opportunism of some congressional leaders trying to score a few points with Catholics in the wake of a holy man's death - and all the talk of a "culture of life" and the President himself saying something about the strong needing to stand up for the weak - and now shall we take a look at that budget again? - that guts healthcare and other life-sustaining services for vulernable people, that threatens natural life and our future by eviscerating environmental protection programs, that hangs a heavier yoke of debt on my generation and those following me, that perpetuates arrogant militarism and endless war....

Would someone please explain to me how these folks became the spokesmen (no need to be pc here because they are mostly men) for "moral values." There really is no end to the shamelessness of it all.