It barks at no one else but me.
A guitar walks on cushioned toes
brushing the strings, simple cords,
eerily staged into an ache of calm,
folded along an upholstered wordless hum, gliding.
A perilous, dropping injection of harmonies
melded with soft rain from a great height.
Like it’s seen a ghost.
I think of you, the only.
I forget the words, I forget myself,
I’m a rubber man, in fake plastic earth.
Inside the song
you taste like the real thing.
The melody’s door flies open,
a constellation
formed with yearning flowers
handed to me in the clutch-reaching tenor voice.
No alarms, no surprises, silent.
Wake, from your sleep
It’s not exit-music from a film
I guess it’s seen the sparks a-flowing
The lonely guitar tries to get some rest.
Its pick inflated by the airbag, absorbing the crush.
Rain down
A hand coaxing me
into overlapping vocals against the wall,
inside me, melting into revolving spaces
between the sadness, the separation.
No none else would know,
but you know, you always know, all the time.
Hey man slow down, slow down!
There is a song to keep us warm.
It’s a job that that is slowly killing me.
The guitars rush in front of the drum’s trembling skins
while chance tells me you never wear out.
Sometimes I get overcharged.
That’s when you see sparks.
Please don’t bring up the question:
where the hell I’m going.
I don’t know, I just feel you moving
at a thousand feet per second.
If only I could be who you wanted,
all the time.
Hey man, slow down, slow down
Idiot, slow down, slow down
Everything is in its right place.
Today we escape.
The dripping harmony is locked
in the echo of my sinews.
I choke on chicken voices repeating in my brain.
Breathe, keep breathing.
The guitar quiets its ecstatic pull
having its way with me,
insides turned out.
It can’t get rid of itself.
When I am king you will be the first
to remember my name,
amazed that I survived this.
I spend time observing people’s manner and personality wondering about motivations often absorbing content with only half an ear.
Does everyone else also have a preoccupation with form whether it be listening to others or listening to oneself?
It all seems silly since prisms often slip through the barbed interface between the act perceived by others and the planned motivation for the act revealing spectra of unaccounted for offerings that are the playground for critics.
I sit in the same spot every morning with my coffee and my thoughts. Vito lies at my side breathing in the stillness. Books sit face down with open spines, exposed to my markings, waiting for light to lift the words up into me. Wristwatches are nearby recording time, some in sync with the now and others stopped during a forgotten moment.
I set down a turquoise carton of coconut water and watch the sun, rising through the glass doors, play with the topical reflections I see shifting from the simple cardboard container into memories of blonde sand and seductively leaning palm trees.
Next to the arched books sits a cylindrical leather case with small tools inside. The leather is cracked brown cowhide. This is designed to hold pencils and pens, a child’s receptacle for school. I use it to hold small screwdrivers, spring-bar tools, case-back knives to fix watches. There are also a host of tiny surgical tools taken from other settings like forceps and hemostats and polishing tools with abrasive edges.
The tools are all collected in this cracked brown leather case with worn ripples, aging seams and wrinkles around the patina where antique beige stitching holds. The new light comes in and cuts new dimensional interest into the character crevices of the leather shining back alternating matte textures and burnished edges. The tool case leans to one side with its top unzipped revealing the black and red plastic handles of its contents.
There are many imaginative tools used to extend my hands inside there. Art is extending the hands into a new domain. Rallying thoughts migrate and actions form in the fine-motor memory of my hands. The space where hands reach and extend with a tool, brush or pen unlocks an unconscious barrier trapped within. Oceanic clusters in unconscious dreams marry tangible shapes and words to mold and admire.
The leather holds on to the new light. Tools are secure. The day enters over my shoulder through the glass. I see beauty in the worn edges and the cracks that remind time to tell me again to appreciate what surrounds me.
I mustered the courage to push all my force toward her
inevitable death
I felt her dying
Others predicted it
A final gust at the end of a hurricane splitting the column
bearing the past truths of unity now
fallen to ashes
It was inevitable
Hate and vitriol turned inward fight the battle within the
bloodstream
Inside of cells
Tearing viscera
Forcing renegade mutations in the neatly ordered alignments
of DNA helices now unwound and crazily strung out into flailing tendrils crying
for help
Screaming into the lamp-lit fog of a destitute street
Death feels inward hate mounting
Death feels the crumbling constitution fragmenting along
feeling’s interior dirt roads
Hands rub together forming a friction flame
Torrents of hate forge new alloys bent on self-destruction
Teeth sharpen their elements on fire
The engine harnesses the horses toward the cliff’s edge
I saw it all the while
The whole time it was happening
The subtle changes in permanent expressions
Muscles over maxilla draw weapons
Creeping into the brow and marking ruts into countenance
A tint of dark pigment in a sulcus under the eyes
The way the gaze now looks past
Without sweet eye-contact into a blank atmospheric void
Eyes cancelled like bad checks
Feelings gnashing into animated images dancing on the
vitreous screen
I couldn’t look into her eyes anymore
The glance charged up the spine
Into outgrowths of inconceivable vocal torrents
Rain punishes the cobblestones of the heart
The heart that I once held in my hands
Hides under a cast-iron veneer
Still beating
Constraints narrowing
Inching inward
Suffocating the free flow of serum
Through vessels narrowing the vision and foresight that once
loved immensely and now fights to breathe above water
It is impossible to watch sanely
Where is my medicine?
My fix?
Where did I receive this blessing of watchful gratitude that
is filling me up
The blessings of participating in this sinking and the
dissolution without wanting to lose myself in in pools of alcoholic oblivion
Where did I gain this footing that helps me keep one step up
One more day sober
One more day present
With spirit entering me from the ether without my will
To nourish my true self
The part that only wants to love unconditionally
I do not know anymore why I have been given this gift where
I can bear myself openly to others
Empty the poison from my own prison
Share the pain
Open the vessel to store other’s pain willingly for a short
time until
They can take it back transmogrified into the form of joyful
medicine
I am blessed
I am blessed
I am blessed
I have something involuntarily that is not mine and it opens
my eyes for the first time
It sustains my desire to love like I never have
I can love in a way I have never before
Shine the reflection of a divine gift onto this death that ravaged a life out of sync with existence tearing the fibers of a corporeal being who clung to the earth with nails dragging the firmament up into her chest, dying while trying to use control…
All manner of steel driven into her own flesh attempting to survive and never knowing the peace of spirituality for even a moment before the harrowing wind closed her eyes for the last time in the throes of an anxious way of life always forcing, always venomous, always biting never grateful and then she did not see death coming for even a second.
For some this opens a new volume of tales to come
Born in this moment
A rebirth upon the corpse
Transforming a new version of self
I can feel this
I want to share this
Where this is coming from
I do not know
I don’t know
I don’t know
I only feel
Gratitude
Immense gratitude
A drive to share with the ones I love
A rebirth and a new day to be alive
For those who I love
A new day
An infinite cascade of feeling gestures
That may not look grand
But if you really look
Really look
Into the eyes
Into the spirit flow
There is infinity waiting
To share this peace
I cannot hold onto it all
It is too much
I cannot balance it all
It spills over
Like gravy made of confetti showering you and only you
With my unconditional love
We must enjoy this manic moment together
This spiritual experience
Born of death
And that is OK
If death initiates a new spiritual height for one who loved
that person
I can feel the simple strokes of ink on ivory sun-bleached paper.
I love you more than I have known before.
Now, the words stare back. These words may be warnings about the primitive elements of repeated failure. Love can never be failure.
Love is alive and bursting it containment; overwhelming the senses and stimulating the shared ancient depths. A flow from twin hearts, arteries fused into a pulse-dance between two souls still figuring it out.
Tamed love houses meaning under the advice of silence. A bristling love emerges out of words, runs its own way through corridors and parlors storing blood as a gift. I say this as hope molds love’s meaning to me in the discovery phase where glances are pure as a mirrored lake and eyes are not eyes, rather, they are portals to open wider and explore and undress while desire seeks to sprint and the heart beats so loud, the only action is patient shared hypnosis.
What if the child in me doesn’t realize that the love whispered with hands spread wide is stronger than any feeling before? A drowning where the feeling of love outgrows the boundary; the corners and caverns of the body hollowed out by the muscles of song, pushing tissue into snowdrifts that pile onto curvatures of weightless powder; a sprinkling of faith punished into a new season of discovery that keeps its disguise and may not give back.
All along, love’s vintage elements report back from bygone moments redolent in memory. It may just be puppy love incarnate, disguised, yet holding everything that encourages the mating ritual to become an indelible tattoo. Memories of grief are stricken from the record and a new flow state, inside the gauzy comforts of vulnerability, holds the embers of a fresh start within the membranes of an everlasting feeling.
Love comes and goes, yet it stays inside couched in forms that can become unrecognizable. It registers in families, chosen friends, and strangers. The satellites that fixate a child’s being do not depart the atmosphere of chance encounter where hope and faith never wane. After I’ve taken all the utterances at face value and weighed all the primitive articulations, I would rather have words sacrificed of all their meaning so simple gestures can carry the heart’s weight.
There is no reason to talk further about love. The moon will always keep trying to kiss the sun. And, the great vocal catalogue recounting the details of daily life is often just a mad stylus at work on scratched vinyl. While I contemplate and expand my love of that special one, and life continues to faithfully restore childhood memories to their eternal set-point, the lantern I use to find my way becomes a lighthouse.
