What follows was inspired by a few things. One, words of Christian theologian Willie Jennings spoken soon after the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor: Jennings’ observations on anger and God surprised me and further illuminated my own long struggle with a grieving outrage that sometimes feels debilitating. He also gave me permission to feel my anger as part […]

  ‪#‎NRADeathSquad‬ by Jon Trott Easy enough to conceal who you are with the hip-carried friend Sending someone else far away from this place, this life, their universe of time and rhyme gone — snap — watch it congeal on the sidewalk near Leland and Malden I heard the bang-bang-bang-bang-bang And the girl start screaming that they shot her baby […]

C. S. Lewis in 1917, left, with friend Earnest Moore during World War I. Moore was later killed, as were many of Lewis' friends. Lewis, due a promise to Moore, cared for (for a time may have loved) Moore's mother. Threads of despair and fantasy are woven together in a poetic work C. S. Lewis, best known for his post-conversion […]

The Manger’s Complaint By Jon Trott (Dec. 2006) Your judgment seems flawed, your reasoning strange To want to live there in my smell and wet straw Your beauty, your wisdom, your heavenly power How can my wooden ugliness hold You without flaw? Your taste in surroundings leaves much unexplained The waste of the beasts, their bleats, brays, and moos How […]

A lyric inspired by my daily reality living on a second floor next to an Uptown, Chicago alley….   To Change Things (Jon Trott) Every mornin’ the man stands on his fire escape Drops the trash down to the alley below Every evenin’ he wanders on down those metal stairs To puke delirium tremens from a bitter soul And every […]

He was standing on the bottom of the abyss; there remained but a short distance in any method of mortal reckoning for him to take before he came to a more secret pit where there is no measurement because there is no floor. – Charles Williams, “Descent into Hell” All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world…. […]

What’s So Special About Jesus (c) 2012 Jon Trott -=- We swim in a billion stories We drown in facts without meaning We thirst for relational love But violent lust is what we’re screening The lights go low on an empty stage The script is missing to the play We ad lib our collective fib Love in the silence we […]

Lowerby Jon TrottYoung, I imagined the limbs of black women wrapped around me, desperate for rescue, desperate for one white heart that understood. I strove with them in loving lust, Knew gentle every inch of skin, a Kiss kiss kiss of my own body, The hope of love rushing toward Only me, there, in the darkness of my white and […]

The Long Way to God (c) Jon Trott, October 2012 Be wary of the words you speak, friend Take care for truth and don’t pretend You know so much when you should know less Trade owning the certain for tenderness The long way to God is a way no less The road she travels is stoney and hard Few there […]

  Beauty and Grief (c) 2012 Jon Trott Beauty and Grief spin inside my prism Colors spilling down across my cheeks I’m not sure of anything except this thing A man will find what a man truly seeks If I write a story that denies self denial If I sing a song that’s too sad to sing My voice will […]