It’s difficult

To hear myself in the day

So much noise, so many noises

Often I long for the gentle hummof electricity

It flows through my lights and shines on me

But even when I turn them off, I hear a hum, a static, a sound

I think sometimes silence might silence me.

So I can deal with a genteel hum. It’s the doors and hinges

Brakes and phones, rustled clothing that hurts me

And my words escape like birds from an open cage

Catching them is as likely as grasping the wind whisking away.

But at night my birds haven’t flight, the wind is not strong enough

And they stay, and whisper me the things I think all day

Even on my shoulder, they never visit long

Yet grateful am I for every single song.

Murk

Every morning every dusk, inbetween suns, inbetween different sides of the mirror, reflecting the landscapes wavy and straight, hardlined reality there plays the death game among the wings and legs and fins and buzzers and scales; create the rippling effect that shakes reality and changes their world and world perception and makes my mind boggle because it happens so fast and so often as the body absorbs the energy created in death, absorbed and gone, beautiful disturbances all the differences lasted only a moment made, captured by nothing, rippling created circles smaller than my eye or larger than my foot plops into the murk to bend the trees made in the placid mirror a little less substantial than concrete and a lot trickier than my own mind where I imagine all this connection between the two worlds, a plane where they go to die and to live, on that plane undulating balancing, what if it all tipped and fell, mixed flushed tossed and distorted no representation hazy image mud and tree and muck and bug smashed and blurred blended lessen confusion and wake would fall from dream in a ripple, my own disturbance.

-- this is my shot at a stream of consciousness

in all its glory

The filmed figures
glorious in grayscale greek
comic and classic with missing
still stained by shadows
folk tales and faeries still fly
through frames black and white
while damsels defend love professed
i sit writing unable to tell
between blank and gray, man and ass
the piano sympathizes

Union

Like yellowed keys of an organ, sections of sidewalk lined a dirty city street. Buildings crowded around looking down at the street with rusty iron frowns. The tarnished metal faces of the city looked as if they had never been new, and even a hurricane could not wash off the grime left by so many tires and shoes. Run down shops accumulated junk behind broken barred windows, and the cracked glass crunched beneath beggars’ feet. Graffiti spattered across stained concrete walls, writings of years past. A few streetlights still rained down a sodium glow as early morning light crept through the air. The pungent sewer smell lingered at rat level, but the breeze blew in tumbleweed trash and left the street with the mustiness of old boots.
Next to a rubbish bin and a pile of garbage, a man’s weathered, stubbly face stood out, cheek pressed against the concrete and trash. The blankets and jackets and newspapers making his bed hardly separated from the overflowing garbage. His breath let out a telltale mist as he surfaced from his dreams, awakening with the street he knew. Serene blue eyes opened above a twice broken nose. A gloved hand reached for the knit hat covering his head as he began to smile wide, remembering the warm mornings inside. As he sat up, he gazed around at the early morning on Union and leaned back against the concrete wall. He rose and began walking toward the rising sun.

As We Know It

It’s the end of the world as we know it! Wouldn’t that be great if you were relieved of all responsibility because tomorrow, it’s all over.

Just don’t worry about getting up stay out all night – drive way too fast listening to music that will hurt your eardrums and keep you from hearing your grandkids when you’re seventy, but wait. You won’t have grandkids, or even kids because the world ends tomorrow when the sun rises. Walk off into the woods to be with God (and keep walking) or go crazy out in the city crashing at someone’s house because this is all the time you got and you won’t be remembered for it. Now total anonymity because everything is wiped clean tomorrow, no memory, no grass or trees or music or papers or cars, watches, stairs to climb forms or lines lightbulbs to break while being worried about backing over the neighbor’s cat. Nothing. Literally clear off your desk, smash your phone into the wall and break the empty plates and push the snooze button with a sledge hammer, because a clean slate is what you’ll have and a clean desk is what you want right now. Call up your sweetheart from highschool tell her how you really feel because it’s the last night! Pull out the stops and kick in the doors; doorknobs are becoming increasingly useless!

What if. As Christians, we realized that the dawn of our time in heaven is much closer than we acknowledge, and that our reputation and stance on earth matters not. What if we weren’t afraid to love like there were no consequences, to screw sense and to screw what we feel like we know we’re supposed to do. What if we jumped out of the boat and hit solid water and kept running? What if we weren’t so concerned about showers and food and clothes? What if we relied on God’s infinite capacity to love so that we could love like He loves? What if we looked at each other and realized that to follow Christ means the end of the world as we know it?

life of a string.

so this is a poem i wrote at one o'clock one night a few months ago, obviously inspired by guitar. i've played around with a few of these verses to help rhyme and flow, but as they say, art is never finished - only abandonded. so i may come back and change it sometime.



Listen to the way the note dies, reverberating because of well veined, straining fingertips and strong calluses deftly dancing up and down the rosewood board

I don’t think a note ever dies but merely enters the haze,
The wraith of a half-life floats spiraling a downward maze
Every variance of pitch finds its place in these dead days
Every color spinning all at once, every direction, the final phase

So the creator carefully listens, learning and teaching how to orchestrate and manipulate and duplicate all for the sake of a song
Vibrating gyrating strands of steel tell stories with tone and mood and pitch
Any sorrow any joy any thought the strings create comes from the fingers deftly dancing on a rosewood board.
Each song, each note and word composed, have synergy- sung, strummed, hummed
But the sweet sound of song-making is matched by the sorrowful screech of the string breaking

The Self Promise

I think every person should be required to make at least ten promises to themselves every year or so. These promises would be different from New Year’s resolutions because 1) New Year’s resolutions are lame 2) No one keeps them.

The biggest difference (aside from the name) would be that these Self Promises are preventative. Rather than vowing to lose weight, a Self Promise would vow to refrain from eating at McGreasyWhataburgerKing. The essential part of a Self Promise is that it must prohibit something you would be prone to doing.


For an example, I have compiled my own list of promises that I vow to keep myself for time indefinite:

I promise never to address ‘loyal readers’ in any blog that I ever write.
I promise never to consciously encourage cliché without being satirical.
I promise never to pop my collar unless it is A) Cold or B) in Boston
I promise never to obsess with cars that I can’t afford
I promise never to refer to a blonde pop star by her first name
I promise never to resort to Bush-bashing to seem politically aware
I promise never to judge someone by their musical tastes, unless it involves a previously mentioned blonde pop star
I promise never to play Smoke on the Water in a guitar store
I promise never to spend more than $20 on a t-shirt
I promise never to get lazy and use your for you’re or its for it’s

If you can think of a good promise, please leave at least one as a comment =).