God, Poke and Me

God, Poke and Me

I stood in a malaise panic! What? It seemed strange leaving Poke my imaginary friend behind. No more foreplay in the after pinning. The word, after pinning, unknown to most men but widely accepted in the imagination, what I like to call the playfulness of childhood reality where imaginary creatures, great and small, that spoke in Irish gaelic and hummed lull-a-byes in our ears as Poke and I transgressed the normal boundaries of imagination and dream.

Foreplay consisted of walking into a reverie, a trance like state, that land of hobbits and fairies which guided the follower into an after pinning. An after pinning meant one crossed over the antipodal line in the mind where questions and answers disappear and the traveler finds a santoric-like vision of the ideals of childhood and what makes little boys and girls most happy aside from the love of there parents. Here is the ultimate play!

But now that was gone. She approached in penguin like fashion in her black and white habit touting God, His Holiness, as the realm to heaven. Sister Francis have you ever met Poke, I asked myself, in the silent language of the child’s world? Evil disguised as good forbid the child’s mind to these imaginary lands. Catechism, mass, and prayer replaced the small little friends that I and Poke cooked up over the years

“Poke, I asked, will you come and pray with me”? He remained silent, standing toe to toe with his new imaginary friend God. God and Poke stood in a dusk like atmosphere where distinguishing one from the other proved difficult in my new imaginings.God, the light of a million candles, reached beyond the twilight. I visited him alone, beyond the twilight, always seeking Poke’s company, in awesome reverence, afraid of His mighty hand, always missing those happy days of yore when a child finds a piece of imagination that make him a whole person. Poke, teasing me, playing illusionary tricks with time and space, rendering me silly and foolish and always laughing with me in my doubts, dreams and make believes. Faithful Poke now gone, living in a pile poured time spilled sand, unknown to him or myself whether we will ever meet again. Poke faithful in his theology and questioning all the questions and all the answers that are cast upon his mind. The old trickster, who merrily danced by my side, lost and found together in all the thick and thin imaginations of a boy.

Silently I stood in His presence. The penguin lady pushing me further into the depths of God’s soul. He knew where I should be and where I wanted to be. I felt HIs great empathy upon me and the same longing that I, Sam Barber, an element of the imaginary Poke linage, felt in my panicked malaise. Prayer streamed from my lips but my heart laid elsewhere. The dream of a thousand days in the company of ancient songs, rhymes and happenings both mysterious and playful stood on the brink of elimination. My mind traveled as my lips moved in “Our Father who art in heaven” fashion. “Oh help me Lord” said my heart, “help me to the land of my dreams, I pray you come and play in the fanciful world of make believe, become the child, Like Poke and me, in our shortened world of time and space.”

Poke’s bigness filled the skies, a monster of a heart, had lead him here to God and me and so we laughed in God’s company, aided by a fanciful dream. It seemed as though Poke, himself, had pushed the Almighty as we moved along lighted corridors of enchantment and majesty. Lights and spectrums of lights, haloes, astounding beauties of heavenly architecture moved by us. Saints and angels brighter and more beautiful than anything I had ever witnessed. God’s hand embraced mine and I embraced Poke’s hand. Out unity of littleness, our trinity of being, like air, water and soil wrapped us in the delights of a unified whole. We smiled all the way to the kingdom of fiction, the very essence of God’s soul and here in the wonder and magic of it all I saw God as a child playing in the midst of all creation.

In the years that followed I lost Him and Poke. A confused adult reality visited my soul and I wondered about lost in a sea of lies and freedoms. Poke mortally wounded and God becoming an endless array of buildings and icons lost somewhere between here and now. Until that day I saw Him……everywhere, clearly and most beautifully in the silent waves of the ocean, in the morning sunlight, in a kiss that awakens the soul or a likening to the imagination that the real church never understood. He lived in the everywhereness but a thousand silences played in my heart before finding Him. Perhaps it’s the everywhereness that confused me most? And my old buddy Poke came back to me all the way from the intuition of a child. I see him too in the early sunlight waving to me like an old friend of yore.

“I missed you”, he said in our imagined togetherness.

“Come see the beauty, capture it now”. And so I became the artist and the boy, pen and camera in hand, a silence that I carried in previous years followed. God and Poke alongside walking within me out and out of me from my imagination and soul into the eternal land where all the joy and wonder live.

It is how I see thee now………Lord!

Reviews

[Alfred Kukitz]

Thanks SSR!

Very anxious to have someone read the piece.

Regards,
Al

[AcasualPawn]

And so I became the artist and the boy, pen and camera in hand, a silence that I carried in previous years followed.


Its good piece......

Keep the good work fellow writer