Honk


Strolling hand in hand

I felt your feathers intertwined with mine,

As we meander across lines

Yellow and white

Dotted and solid.

We don’t care about the world,

We’ve got our love to keep us warm.

Even if those are cars honking at us,

Even if this is a busy road,

Even though we’re geese.

Honk.

– Vagabond Prophet

Bloody geese stopped traffic this morning, they really did look like a couple.

Thronging


Wind rushing

Blood gushing,

Enemies thronging in my blind spot.

You said you’d watch over me

Until the end of the age.

Everyday I understand better

You meant that differently than expected.

Watch me closely I beg of you.

It’s getting dark and my feet

Are unwieldy and easily misled.

You’ve always been a brutal teacher,

And yet I’ve learned.

Salvation can’t be self taught,

Self help books will only ever be kindling

For the fires of hell.

Let me learn from every turn

Of this journey you’ve set me down,

Just please don’t let me know

What it’s like to feel your presence lacking.

– Vagabond Prophet

Rigid

Some people just want to get along

With everybody at all costs,

Insisting everybody can be right.

They cut off the branch they sit on

As a shelter for themselves.

Afraid to offend people

By disagreeing with anything.

All that proves though,

Is a refusal to stand for anything.

No land to defend

A nomad belonging neither

To truth or lies.

You can’t swap gravy for hummus

And tell me it’s the same,

And if you try you’ll always feel anchored

By the weight of your own name.

I’m not inflexible

I don’t refuse to listen

But some truths really are that rigid.

And just for saying that

You gawk in shock and disbelief,

That I would dare to say

That the definition of North

Can’t be stretched

To also mean south.

– Vagabond Prophet

True North

Like a ship graveyard

Where we sort through the rotten planks

To find the few good ones.

Together we may salvage

One seaworthy vessel

From the thousand capsized.

We all push off from shore

Without giving the land a last glance

We go past the breakers,

No map, just a promise.

A common faith

Of a country far away,

Something I’ve always known of.

It’s like the way the moon

Chases a Sun it’s never seen

Except for in dreams.

We all work the ropes

And steer the rudder

For the compass is etched

On all of our hearts.

– Vagabond Prophet

Ice Machine


He’d painstakingly inched along

From his room, in a wheelchair

So slowly that with each rotation

The world made a rotation on its axis,

He made glaciers look swift.

He was so very old

That time had made knots in his mind,

And knit wrinkles in his spine.

He sat in front

Of that silver machine

And asked me

“How do I get ice out of here?”

Honesty is the best policy,

Or so I’ve been told

So I plainly told him,

“Sir, that’s a blanket warmer.”

– Vagabond Prophet

Malcontent


I haven’t been honest

Since the womb.

Lying about

Why I’m crying.

Not crying about being torn

From my home,

I cried for the world I was born into.

I heard her heartbeat,

Beating in time with her malcontent,

She didn’t even have to say it

I felt it in the blood she gave me.

The world is unsafe

And we’re made for the next one,

Just help some people get there

That’s what she told me.

– Vagabond Prophet