Selah

[Selah (Hebrew): a musical mark, an instruction to pause and listen, to contemplate]


The Universe is infinitely great, mirroring the quantum vastness inside every atom.

Universe and atom, each turning with their own perfect precision: order, structure, harmony; under the dictate of laws laid down by their unseen Sovereign.

Measure the span of height and depth, heat and cold, light and darkness, motion and stillness; the totality of Everything.

Every bit, every particle, each crumb in existence is internally in endless, vibrant motion, yet having form and substance.

Massive and timeless: an iceberg, a mountain, a planet; they remain steadfast and unshakable belying the churning motion within.

Matter takes form, an entanglement of particles like beads on a string, laid up strand upon strand.

Each bead seemingly without substance: full of infinitesimal space, a blur of energy and sub-particles spinning in constant orbit; like a galaxy inside a raindrop.

O Lord, our Father. How wonderful this Your handiwork. You spoke the neutrino and the star into being.

One day, freed from our limiting veil of flesh, we shall sit at Your feet and see the vastness of Your Creation with You.

Selah.

Steppin Out

Daddy’s watching the TV

Soon he’s nodding his head.

He’s not mindful of Mama,

He's just going to bed.

Moma’s walking ‘round real quiet,

On the down low and out of sight. 

She's puttin' that red lipstick on and

Steppin’ out on Saturday night.

A dull life seems so exciting

Like a naughty child doin' somethin' wrong.

A shiver running down her spine

When she thinks of Daddy at home.

Out on the town signals flashing,   

A low-flying Romeo.

One thing leads to another.

Steppin’ out on Saturday night.

Is it worth it all to

Take that spin of the wheel?

A big chance, a little romance,

Paying a lot for a thrill.

The stakes are sky high,

Losing what money can’t buy. 

Ain't perfect, but that house is a home.

Beats steppin’ out on a Saturday night.

© Craig Roberts 1986

Blue Lady

Blue Lady, your mind is an island,

A hidden place where you can go.

It's lush and green there, a land of creation,

A place where marvelous things grow.

Blue Lady how I’d love to follow you

To your island far away.

You hold a beauty there that my heart’s forgotten.

Blue Lady take me away.

If I were to steer my ship alee of your isle

Would I be received or sent away?

If I put ashore on your sheltering island

Could I walk the shore with you?

Blue Lady Blue Lady

Blue Lady how can you bear to leave

Your lovely island in the sun?

To walk each day in this cold, grey world

Where everyone is hurting everyone.

If you were to sail your ship to my safe harbor

There I could protect you from all harm.

I’d keep the world away from your fragile island

Where we could walk the shore, me and

Blue Lady, Blue Lady, Blue Lady.

© Craig Roberts 1987

Give Up

Some people stumble all through their lives.
They won’t take a stand, they just cover their eyes.

They travel the smooth path of least resistance,

Letting the crowd rule them instead of their conscience.

Do you want to make a difference with your life?

You must give up your self, and let your heart be your guide.

The life you’ve been given is not yours to spend.  Oh no.

Not to spend on yourself and your own ambitions.

Your place in the sun, the game you want to win will be won

When you’ve given your all for somebody else.  Someone else.

Do you want to make a difference with your life?

You must give up your self, and let your heart be your guide.

It’s time that we look to the needs of our brothers.

Time that we give out of our own abundance.

The talents we have, the gifts God’s given us

Were given to bless somebody else.   Someone else.

Do you want to make a difference with your life?

You must give up your self, and let your heart be your guide.

Don’t try to save up your life and keep it all for yourself.

You’ve got to get up and give it away, give it away.

If you hide yourself under the old bushel basket

One day you’ll surely find there’s nothing there, nothing there at all.

Do you want to make a difference with your life?

You must give up your self, and let your heart be your guide.

© Craig Roberts 1987

Farewell to Mr. Chrome

We unloaded the car at the curb.  I didn’t realize it at the time but this was the end of a long road for Clark and me.  We had traveled together for years cutting mostly circular trails through the confines of our home turf. Clark had played Sancho Panza to my Don Quixote, jousting windmills together we took no notice of our folly. More than friends – we were codependent coconspirators, mutual detractors and social vagabonds.  The tendrils of our dysfunctions knotted us together in a dozen different ways.

I had known Clark since elementary school.  Back then I called him by his first name, Jeff.    We were in classes together for years but weren’t very close.  We got to know each other as friends through sports starting with junior high football.  As three-sport jocks we spent a good deal of time together albeit in group settings.  By our sophomore year in high school we were turning away from athletics and focusing our attention on music.  We listened to a lot of rock and roll and eventually started picking up instruments at a friend’s house.  We formed a trio and jammed day in day out for hours at a time. We soon found that alcohol mixed well with our musical aspirations and in fact made them almost believable.  The drugs followed soon after.  We spent our remaining high school years listening to music, learning our instruments, playing in jam bands and dreaming of better things to come. 

After high school Clark’s father got him a job as a highway toll collector.  Clark’s dad was a senior toll collector so it wasn’t hard for him to find Jeff a part-time slot when one opened up.  Clark was able to hold down that part-time job, get high and play music, so life was good.  Clark’s goal was to make a living as a musician, he was a drummer.  He earned enough from his day job to buy some fancy drums, a ten-piece set of chrome-skinned Pearls.  Man, that kit was something.  Nobody had drums like that in our neck of the woods.  And it had to be Pearls because Buddy Rich played Pearls and nobody beat out Buddy in Clark’s eyes.  But the Pearls were only part of Clark’s grand design.  There was another critical piece, a new set of wheels.  Clark believed the car made the man -- you are what you drive.  I suppose that’s not unusual, the right car was important to a lot of us back then.  But in Clark’s case it was a bit more emphatic.  He had often spoken in demeaning terms about his family, characterizing his mother as stupid, his father as lazy and a slob, his brothers as red necks, and his sister a slut. No doubt about it, he resented his family, considering them all to be lowlifes.  He was hell bent on creating a classier image for himself.   The solution to the image problem was simple enough, he needed a Cadillac.  I was never quite sure how he pulled it off, but in no time at all he was driving a late-model Sedan Deville, candy apple red with a white vinyl roof and white leather interior.  With our friends driving Pintos, VWs and the like, I felt a little odd tooling around riding shotgun in a Cadillac.  But I have to admit that was one sweet ride. 

So Clark was set!   Red Cadillac and chrome Pearls at the ready, fame and fortune on the horizon.  Just one more thing, a show biz name to match this refurbished persona.  Clark went to the local print shop and ordered business cards, “Geoffrey Chrome – Percussionist - Music for All Occasions.”   Clark, aka Mr. Chrome, was now ready to take to the road in his Deville and land a gig playing in cocktail lounges on the Holiday Inn circuit.  From our vantage point, the Holiday Inn circuit was “making it”.  We knew a kid from high school who had landed a Holiday Inn gig playing guitar, traveling the circuit, his room and board were covered, and he was making a cool $10k a year.  We didn't think much of the music those lounge boys were playing but we had to admit the kid was a success.  Sleep all day, play all night, living on the road.  We couldn’t envision anything better. 

Clark had gotten a few fill-in gigs around town but his big connection hadn’t materialized yet.  In the meantime, while he was waiting for his ship to come in Clark agreed to transport me and my gear across several state lines in exchange for gas, meals and as much weed as he could smoke.  I had decided to head south and hook-up with another high school music buddy who was forming a band and needed a bass player.  We packed up one summer evening headed for Tidewater Virginia.  I don’t remember how long it took us on the road or much about the trip itself for that matter.   We arrived at Drew Lane early the following afternoon.

Clark and I said our goodbyes the next morning as he needed to get back on the road and return to his job at the toll booth.  I gave him a bag for the road and a couple of twenties for gas.  He waved, slid in behind the wheel of the Deville.  I watched him as he drove off.  I would not see Clark again. 

RIP Jeff Clark, December 2009.

[Excerpted from “The Parable of The Born Again Band”]

© Craig Roberts 2011

The Colliery

A clear, white dawn breaks over the dreary town as they make their way up the dusty road.  Their trudging cadence is marked by the clink-clink of tin lunch pails and canteens slung on shoulders or carried in hand.  Up the hill they rise.  With a scuffling tread these grey men pass like ghosts through the lifeless landscape.  Purged of leaves and green a grove of trees stands long dead with crooked limbs reaching pleadingly to heaven.  All is sooted by dust from generations of toil, the work of a thousand men drilling and blasting, breaking coal from rock and sorting rock from coal.  This is the colliery.

The scarred mountain stands mournfully, draped in slag and crowned by the monstrous breaker rising like a gallows casting its pall over the sodden workers at its feet.  The contraption is built of heavy timbers, bolted and braced, made greasy by the black dust, its trestle reaches grasping arms from sky to earth clutching the hillside.  Interwoven with iron rails and steel cables, the breaker’s trestle plunges headlong into the mountain’s gaping wound and downward into the man-dug abyss where the black treasure lies.

On this hilltop, from the engine house perched atop the breaker, emanates an incessant clanging of machinery and the intermittent hiss of escaping steam.  The din is buttressed with the rumble of heavy wheels, drumming pistons and the rattle of chains.  The machines roar as onward come the men of mines.  Slouching into queue amidst smoke and steam they await the morning’s descent.  Eight men to a flat car, they sit side-by-side, butted against wooden cleats, as they ride the trestle down into the pit.   Knees drawn up to their chests, arms hugging their legs, they jostle and bump as the car rolls down the track, slowly picking up speed as it goes.

Through the gaping portal they pass from life on earth to the life below where all is black and damp.  Down they ride with eyes wide straining to adjust to the utter darkness.  They rumble along until the sudden bump of the railhead announces their arrival at the bottom of the pit.  In the deep stillness there is the sound of water trickling over rock, droplets ploinking into pools.  Soon the quiet will be shattered by the clanging of irons swung in the miners’ toil.  The darkness too is broken by splinters of light as davy lamps are lit and hung upon the miners’ caps.  

Some say a day in the pit passes like three on the ground.  The plodding work is spent with no movement of sun or shadow to mark the passage of time.  Here the hours are measured by cartfuls of coal, the minutes by lump and shovelful.  The thumping and clanking of pickaxes and sledges sound like clock chimes counting the movement of the time.  Slowly, by blow upon blow, the rock gives way to the strength of iron and the perseverance of men.

Eat at Joe's

The morning began with my usual stop at Joe’s Big City Luncheonette, a living memorial to the guys who built these nondescript stainless steel prefabs back in the 40's.  Joe's establishment looks like a retired city bus left for dead on a corner lot, the bus having somehow taken root and become a building.  This wreck is skirted by a strip of dirt, festooned with a clutter of bottles and broken bricks, greened over by a summer’s growth of feral vegetation.  I scuttle up two quick steps and I’m off the sidewalk, through the steel door and into the ambiance of Joe’s.

The scent of coffee and bacon is in the air while a row of chrome-stemmed, red-capped toadstools stand like sentinels along the length of the lunch counter.  The counter is empty except for a pile of donuts stacked on a plate hiding their age under a glass dome as it hovers above the counter on a steel pedestal.  All the action’s in the back, grandiosely referred to as the dining room.  I slide onto the middle toadstool and tilt my head taking a sidelong glance down the counter towards the people in the back.

Tables encircle the room, an assortment of square two-tops, each appointed with two or three stack chairs in a variety of shapes and colors.   The furnishings give the room an institutional air, kind of like the day room of a state-run flight deck I once had occasion to visit.  The scene is warmed by the colorful splash of the “Sights of Greece” placements and each table adorned by a solitary plastic rose leaning forlornly out of a Coke bottle vase.  I don't remember any such amenities in that day room.

All the morning regulars are in attendance.  Everybody's chatting, sipping coffee, some puffing curls of blue-grey smoke.  Just past the counter sits the largest group at three tables pulled together, these are the up-and-comers.  They're a very close-knit little society, assuming and self-possessed.   To know them is to love them, and to appreciate their bright accomplishments.  Of the seven seated together I know most all of them by name, two or three well enough to say “hello”.  But together in this group they're unapproachable and appear not to notice any outsiders in spite of covert glances at everyone who comes in.  They speak among themselves of the people and things that truly matter.  And of course, the people that truly matter are they.  "Snobs," I growl to myself.

No one is working the counter today.  I’ll have to order for myself at the cook’s window at the end of the counter.  I think about a domestic scene of the family dog slinking back into the house after it spent the night outside now trying to slip by unnoticed by any of the family members.  The up-and-comers are the family, I’m the dog.  On my way to the cook’s window I walk with head down past Table Number One, the Stammtisch .  Leave it to the Germans to coin a word for a cordoned territory reserved for the elite of the house.  Whether it’s a large venue or small, every joint with a crowd of regulars has one.   

The cook behind the service window offers his greeting, “What’ll it be?” he says.

“Morning, Joe.  Coffee and a buttered roll to go.  Say, where’s Shirley this morning?”

“Ah, her kid’s sick, she’s home playing nurse,” he replies over his shoulder as he flips two over-easy.  “She’ll be in for lunch though.”

“Lucky for you,” I answer as I lean back against the counter.
"You said it," Joe replies.

I turn my head a little and my eyes tour the rest of the room.  A couple of late-fiftyish gals sit talking, nodding their heads and flipping their hands for emphasis.  As they chat they puff long cigarettes held aloft by the manicured fingers of shapely hands.   Seated across from each other these ladies make a sort of mirror image of themselves as they respond to each other’s movements and conversation.  Heads nodding at each other, hands waiving around, emphasis and empathy washing back and forth across the table.

At the next table Mr. Businessman sits alone behind an upraised Wall Street Journal.  He raises a foot and crosses his legs as he turns a page, pants pressed, creases straight and shoes shined.  A coffee cup mysteriously levitates off the table and lowers again as the man, his arm and hand remain hidden behind a newsprint curtain.

A couple of tables away two kids, probably 19 or 20 years old, sit leaning towards each other across the table, foreheads almost touching.  Goo-goo eyed, in quiet tones they exchange thoughts, hanging on each other’s every word.  They’re speaking quickly the way kids do, but privately, with four hands holding each other in the middle of the table.  Coffee cups sit unmolested, growing cold.  Oblivious to their surroundings, they're aware of no one else in the room, similar to the stammtisch crowd, but different, genuine and purer.  They smile in unison.  He leans in closer, their lips meet in a gentle kiss.  Young love, newly discovered.

There’s a four-top off to the side where three power company guys are sitting.  Their forearms and elbows form defensive perimeters delineating their respective table turf.  They’re big guys and they lean into their coffee and eggs with gusto.  They are yucking it up, something about their service manager back at the shop.  They seem like good-natured, regular guys who enjoy being together as a crew.  Their morning rendezvous at Joe's is as much a part of their daily routine as punching the time clock or grabbing their hardhats out their lockers.

Behind them Ed sits alone with his papers, the New York Post and the Daily Racing Form.  Ed is one of those guys whose pretty much OK, though a little quirky.  Maybe he has a tale to tell.  By definition he’s homeless but he maintains a reasonable grooming standard, is reasonably polite and he poses no threat.    Rumor has it he was CPA from somewhere out of state and now he lives under the highway bridge, plays the ponies and hangs out at Joe’s.  Ed is sipping his coffee with brows furrowed as he assaults the Post's crossword puzzle.

“Morning Ed,” I say from my corner of the counter.  Ed raises his head and nods a hello.

A funny thing about Ed, when Shirley’s on duty and Ed comes in she always gets him coffee and says, “Ed, can I get you something to eat?”  And every time he gives her the same answer, “No thanks, just coffee.”  Then Ed sips his coffee and reads his paper, and talks a bit with Shirley.  When Shirley’s around Ed is downright chatty, otherwise he’s quiet as a tomb.  After twenty minutes or so Ed will say something like, “Hey Shirley, maybe I will have something.”  Then proceeds to order a light repast, usually two scrambled eggs with white toast and no butter.  Ed comes in everyday, never for breakfast, just coffee.   But he never leaves without eating something.

Brown bag in hand Joe sidles around the kitchen corner. “Order up!” he says.  Wiping his free hand on his apron he reaches for the register.  “That’ll be a buck twenty.”

I hold out two wrinkled bills.  “Here you go.  No wait, here’s a quarter.  Thanks, Joe.  Have a good day,” I say as return the spare buck to my pocket.

Joe flips me a nickel and says, “See ya tomorrow.”  I turn to leave, another day starts just like the one before.

©1999 Craig Roberts

I Wish

I've heard it said that “wishing is for kids”.  I think the point of the statement is that rather than simply hoping for things to be different, or for some action to take place, I must be an instigator of change in my life.  I agree intellectually with that premise.  That being said I still find a reservoir of things that I’m wishful about.   

I wish I was a natural athlete.

I wish I knew then what I know now.

I wish truth was mandatory, sometimes.

I wish I knew how to heal the wounds I have caused.

I wish I hadn’t spent all that money on [fill in the blank].

I wish people, self included, would say what they mean and do what they say.

I wish I could keep the wheels of my emotions out of the ruts they tend to swerve into.

I wish my better angels held more sway over me.

I wish I knew how to help the people I see struggling.

I wish they would revise the recommended height/weight charts.

I wish the noise in my life wouldn’t drown out the whisper of the Spirit.

I wish I had enlisted when I was 18 instead of going off to find myself.

I wish more people could see deception when it occurs.

I wish my heart was softer.

I wish everyone in Washington would leave public service go live on a farm somewhere.

I wish I could explain how Christ has changed me.

I wish I would actually do half of what I want to do.

I wish I could forgive myself for the weight of things I believe the Father has already forgiven me of.

I wish I had ordered the medium instead of the large.

I wish I had chosen fealty over self-gratification.

I wish people understood that liberty carries an obligation.

I wish I understood what it means to love.

I wish I was one with the Father.

I wish my sins were gone forever.

I wish the trumpet would sound today.

8/31/10

Channel Fish

There is a gray cold desolation in the midst of the river of life,

a solitary channel which flows amidst the teeming waters. 

It is set apart, a stream unto itself,

its cold waters don’t mix with the warmer currents

cordoned off under an impervious thermal layer.

In the deep cold of the channel there is neither life nor light

only murky haze  

severed from the beauty of life.

In the great waters of the river there is joy.

Fish dance in schools twisting and sparkling with delight.

The waters are roiled by their exuberance

and the surface broken by their ecstatic leaps.

In the depths below

the channel fish sense the movement above

but do not comprehend its source.

There is no understanding,

no interaction between the channel fish

and the great waters above.

A channel fish cannot survive in the warmer flows.

It would surely smother in the closeness above.

And the fish of the great waters have no desire

to probe to murk of the channel,

polluted by the sludge and detritus of a million lost souls. 

The channel carries the reek of death

unnoticed by its inhabitants.

The river flows on as life in the channel ebbs slowly away.