You took life by the horns and tried to hold on tight, for fear of being ripped to shreds, left bloodied and battered.

Poetry is an abstraction bloodied.

Prayer inserts me into the middle of any battlefield regardless of how gruesome or bloodied. And in the carnage of whatever that battle might be, it allows me to deliver a force greater than any raging on that field.

The world takes us to a silver screen on which flickering images of passion and romance play, and as we watch, the world says, "This is love." God takes us to the foot of a tree on which a naked and bloodied man hangs and says, "This is love.

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wondering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty bats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them...