My body is growing new skin right now
right there, on my hand. I can point to it.
I can watch it grow. We could time lapse it.
I can very clearly tell that tomorrow
things will look better on that cut
than they do today, or did yesterday.
I didn’t tell my body to do this.
It just does it.

I’m getting caught up on life:
tour dates, blog posts, poems,
finishing books, starting jobs
paying bills, tidying loose ends.
Straightening out the knot that I was
and the bumps on my hands start to fade.
I didn’t tell my body to do this.
It just does it.

And someday soon I won’t itch, in my mind
or on my hands. But for now
I watch the skin grow, and the bumps fade
and I praise that I can reset,
for that God knew I needed a rest,
not just from school, but from myself
and worry, and bad faith
and all those things I do when I can’t believe
that I don’t need to tell my body
(or my God)
to do things.

You didn’t strip the building to its beams.
You stripped the beams from the building
while the outside stood: the same haircut,
beard, mole, eyes, general weight and height.
The building doesn’t sway as much, but I
find myself missing that romanticized sadness:
nostalgia, knowing that it won’t ever come back.
Or, at least, that it shouldn’t come back,
and I don’t want it back.
I don’t want to be who I was in the place I am now;
I want to be who I am now in the place I was then.
Things would have been different, you know?
And I don’t know why I had to be like I was
for things to turn out this way, but I did.
Not just for my sake, but for others’ too-
paths that divulged from mine
would not have taken such crazy angles
if the impetus were not so strong to leave.
I can only apologize so much for who I was;
at some point it needs to go like Calipari’s UMass.
It happened, but it’s not officially recognized.
Real, but also not consequential. Unlisted. Asterisked.
And that romantic sadness is, instead, a starting point
for joy; new ground to break after turning over the old soil.
In seven years, the ground isn’t the same at all;
in seven years, the body is composed of entirely new cells.
And in seven years, I will be somewhere, doing something,
completely new, remembering the day I wrote this,
looking back and wondering why I had to be who I was
so I could become who I am; the inescapable now
crashing into the inconsequential* past
looking toward the inscrutable future,
inside the same unshaken building.

Everything inside my body wants out
And as it breaks the skin, I itch.
I desperately want to feel smoothness
but there is no way to it
but through unpleasantness.

I fear the words I use for this.
I fear that someday they will be read
and they will haunt me, hanging over my head
causing controversy, causing offense
and I will be cornered.
I fear this tremendously.
It is bad, bad faith.
I am afraid to even publish this.
It is bad faith.
Jesus Christ is Lord,
there is nothing in life that matters but this.
I have already said this so many times
in so many ways
on this blog.
and yet I am afraid anew
not because of any change in God
but a change in this man,
having seen a tiny speck of what is to come
and where I am to go.
And instead of entrusting that to him,
and resting in all that He is,
I retreat, retract, try to protect that vision
Nevermind that I would abandon my means
to protect my ends; neither are mine,
and neither can be abandoned.

I am afraid of the place where I stand:
on the edge of making waves,
a second away from making noise,
a choice known but unspoken.
Further alienating myself ideologically,
further pressing in to Christ.
Who do I really care about?
How do I best show this?
What really matters?

And how do I get past the shame that I’m not doing enough,
the fear that everything will be ruined by my doing,
and the itch that won’t go away to do what I ought?
Only Christ can conquer.