Click here to spoil the riddle-rhyme,
Or keep on guessing. Take your time. 

Just give me a heel;
You might find me a tougher
Wrassler than I look. 

Could four and one-half centuries be cleanly swept away,
I'd spare you Dudley, doom, and death and marry you today. 

Dusty dry in dusky drear,
Quiet, quizzical and queer,
Milky Mister Mystery,
Feather, fur and foliage free.

Pointing? Pulling? Possibly.
Hailing? Hello, handless he.
Waiting? Welcome-waving? Why?
Shading? Shooing? Shutter-shy?

Horseless headless hairy haunt,
Glazy green in garden gaunt,
Stiffly stuck in statue stand,
Loner living locked in land. 

You say that purest white is never painted
But only seen in contrast to the stroke,
That earthly beauty true is beauty tainted
And Heaven-minded art a Hell-born joke.

You say all truth is beauty, fair or frightful,
And truth is darkness mingled with the light,
The dreadful always marring the delightful,
A dash of wrong for every dish of right.

You say it is a mercy to be candid,
To paint the world a dark and loathesome place,
To discourse on the darkness you are handed,
That Heaven's light may seem a sweeter grace.

But if I love your soul, I must remind you
That someday you will live without your crutch
When earthly darkness all is put behind you,
For Heaven is beyond the Devil's touch.

Dark histories will never be repeated
Once laid before the judgment seat of God;
And though the saints will sing of sin defeated,
We never will rehearse the paths we trod.

The singing there will glorify the Master,
The Lamb who for our rebel lives was slain,
In one dark hour destroying death's disaster,
Forever as our Light to live again.

And never will there be a recitation
Of falsehoods that were once considered truth,
For darkness will be proved an aberration,
Regarded as perverted and uncouth.

And how then will you recognize your glory
Without the stroke of Hell so thick and stark?
How will you tell the good without the gory
Or know the light for light without the dark?

At judgment you will mourn for minutes wasted
In morbid contemplation of the wrong
And earthly joys you never truly tasted
Because you could not trust a cheerful song. 

 

That was a good read.
The firemen got there in time,
As I remember. 

Sometimes I think it's cheating,
Like winning without beating. 

Mr. Fungus, you may eat me
But you cannot so defeat me.
Munch my heart, you gnawing scum;
Send me where you cannot come.
 

If you had just picked
A less provocative name,
We could be good friends. 

Normal goes a rubber band
Upside down a Roman God
Backwards in prospector's hand
Getting both will cost a wad 

It's six o'clock on Saturday
And I don't have a word to say
About the call of Abraham,
So recklessly I start to cram.

Most likely in an hour or so,
I'll give the pen another go,
And set it down in mild disgust
That what I cannot do, I must.

It won't be that I haven't read
What older, wiser men have said,
But simply that I'd rather share
What sits already written there.

Why not take Matthew Henry's book
And let the students have a look?
Why bore them with my clumsy thought
When his is so superbly wrought?

All week I piece together lines
That others write and Google mines.
Is this my Sunday calling too,
To manufacture verbal glue?

But paraphrase is Andrewsbane:
I seek to summarize in vain.
My words are sprawling and confused,
My punctuation overused.

And rather than a synthesis
Of godly thought, I end with this:
A stream of comments so disjoint
The class despairs to find a point.

And such a stream I balk to write
While it is early in the night,
So first I'll call piano break
And give the living room a shake.

And then perhaps I'll get a get a snack
To fuel the mind as I come back
My weekly conflict to engage:
The Battle of the Empty Page.

I'll copy out tomorrow's text,
And ask myself, "now what comes next?"
I'll add a bullet point or two,
And running dry, cry, "What to do?"

With starts and stammers such as these,
The time will pass as does the breeze,
And twelve o'clock will find me still
With forty minutes left to fill.

And that is when the words will come
As steady as a beating drum,
But not because I've been inspired--
Instead because I'm getting tired.

And just as in my college days,
I'll wonder if the "better" ways
Of managing my time could work
Or if they'd make me go berserk.

At two a.m. I'll call it quits
And hope my outline sort of fits
The David Cook curriculum
(But hopefully is not as dumb).

So if the students learn a thing,
It won't be from the cruft I bring.
We'll say the Holy Spirit moved,
Or God His sense of humor proved.