Sparked

4-19

Things on my mind:

Wandering the streets without worry in a city that actually looks alive, standing behind artists whose work I’d love to touch and make my own, connecting with the people in this city that I feel I need to know. 

Riding the skyway across the river with a sun that dims in excitement for the night, a panda bear hat and a matching guitar. Words written in a guestbook - mi amor - on a second floor I’ve never visited in a building I’ve been in over and over. Rugs on the floor and on the wall, guitars in laps and smoke in the air. 

Fast new friends with flying fingers and dreamy atmospheres, our eyes are red but our noses clean. 

The humidity and hot collective sweat of bodies locked up tight in close quarters, the pull of breath. In. Out.

Rickety stairs and painted walls, chaos, music.

Feet meeting concrete with handfuls of golden beer in plastic cups, periodically filled up, and the swaying begins. Lured in by trombone blasting brazen and bold, dark faces hooking fingers through my soul.

Spirit animals. Connected and combined.

I swear the beer turned to wine when you lifted your fingers and swung your voice into mine.

Electric Fence

I cannot take the warm and friendly faces

That I in turn will greet with smiling glow

And calculated social paces. I will dance this dance,

For what? There is a barrier to our closeness

That we will never breach.

I cannot take this happy toddler and her sticky chubby cheeks;

She tells me she loves me with reasons plentiful in garbled child speak.

Resignation stains the conversation; jokes are forced

And met with consternation. I can’t react the way I’d like.

I focus, instead, on the untucked hair that frizzes forth from your head

With no care to decorum, modesty; the little things we do to show

We know our worth:

Shirt tails out--

Jeans and sandals--

Forgotten details on display like internet handles clad in public privacy.

I hate that time is so little and wasted when I can’t cut straight

To the meat-- to the heart skipping along with this desire

to be your child

And kiss you sloppy sweet--

To hold your hand and listen, looking both ways

Down each street. I wish that we could meet.

I cannot take the chubby cheeks of little girls--

The grins I know will dim after lifetimes of knowledge

Begin to take and hurl these barriers anew.

I will get to watch and say how “finally she grew

Some sense” and feel the withdrawal of tiny hands

Careful not to touch this electric fence of distance we dispense.

Feeling otherworldly

And for a moment my fingertips

Have lost their memories--

My own skin is a foreign entity--

A stranger to be known and hushed, the sensations of

Lightest and softest magnolia blossom of touch

Against skin-- with lights that grow and diminish together.

Hands that move, that belong to me and do what I say,

With nailpolish chipped and cracked like mine...

But these fingers are new.

They are someone else’s hands,

A woman that I don’t know.

Hands that move fluid like black ink

On paper, lifting and twirling in

Loops of words--

Fragments.

Hey smiling strange

4-22

You are a source of words for me, caged and bittersweet.

I picture green hair long under bandannas, free range grass

and dirt on hairy hippie feet.

I thumb through my vinyl and I think of you.

and, through you, the summer of 95 calls to me

playing out like home movies full of grain and static.

Still frames of bright blue water over your summertime skin.

I see no wrinkles, only you

and dusty records in the attic

I see no wrinkles, only grooves

for me to play over with fingers

young and curious.

::NOISE::

Last night I journeyed to arguably my new favorite space in Jacksonville, the CoRK Arts District,

and found myself in the middle of several different walls of noise.

Literally. Noise.

I had seen an event invite on Facebook and, recognizing none of the bands, decided I had to fill what was an already full weekend to the brim by heading down to Riverside on a Sunday night, bringing along some friends with me.

This would turn out to be an interesting idea.In the dark of the waiting studio there were bodies moving, wearing giant masks, focused on wheatpasting their art onto cardboard boxes, while a lone figure sat with them hunched over synthesizers and pedals flashing with light. A low reverbed hum throbbed around the room. 

Last night I had my brain shaken.

I was enthralled watching the artists work together, fluidly pasting the glue and paper prints in one seamless motion, and listening to what is called “noisebient” music. Absorbing the multicolored flashing lights into my bloodstream and feeling my cells vibrate. Though admittedly I was skeptical of the “music” being played, this music with no immediately obvious rhyme or reason or melody, yet still handcrafted - I was intrigued.

This feeling only magnified over the next two acts that we stayed for, with the second one immediately dividing our group’s sensibilities, leading to very lively discussion on the ride home. While the aesthetic of the first noisebient offering was musically unintelligible, there was still a somewhat pleasant atmosphere created as compared to this new act before us. There were no artists working, no lights, just two men inside of a wood frame structure, and a wall of sound. Sound like the distorted transmission of a message through the dark nethers of space.

Sound like what you might hear roaring the empty stretches of a silent tunnel at night.

I found myself lit up somehow by what I was hearing because it was a puzzle from every angle, something different to be looked at and studied from all different sides. It was not anything that would immediately be considered music to any outsider listening in, but it was being presented as music. It was not anything that I could see myself listening to in any other scenario like at work or in the car, but yet it turned my brain inside out. I was simultaneously put off by the extended waves of discordance and also intrigued, my thoughts racing to try to make sense of what I was hearing. Trying to make sense of the people around me and how they were interpreting what we were hearing. The fact that we as a group were here together indulging the whims of these two musicians, the fact that these two people had come together and intentionally, deliberately, placed note upon note to form this soundscape.

I sat on the floor and closed my eyes, ignoring the text from my sister pleading “can we go soon?”

No. I don’t want to go yet. I want to wrap myself around this sound that is warping its way over me, making no sense. Trying to make sense. Objectively observing my visceral reactions to everything happening, thinking about the definition of music and if this could fit inside that definition, if music needs defining at all. If the questions “is this music” or “is this any good” were relevant at all.

We didn’t stay much longer as some of my group were growing restless, and on the way home it was clear that we, the six of us at the show together, were all over the place in regards to how we felt about what we had just seen. It was actually a pretty even split – two of us were really excited by what we had seen, perhaps irrationally so, two of us were on the fence or maybe didn’t even know what to think, and the remaining two were adamant about how terrible the “music” was and how absolutely unenthralled they had been… again perhaps irrationally so.

And so we talked. I tried in vain to explain what excited me about what we had witnessed, about how I do in fact believe that it is irrelevant if the audience members thought that the sound could be considered music or if anyone thought it was any good at all, that the sole fact that we as audience members chose to stay and take part in something that made no inherent sense – that this was more of a psychological experiment than a concert. I’ll admit to being more open-minded when it comes to situations like this – even if something is terribly unpleasant and discordant I am more than willing to give it a chance and try to derive some meaning – any meaning.

I suppose that because of the many many years (I’d say all of them I’ve lived) I’ve spent surrounded by and studying all types of music, there’s a large element of predictability I find in most musical types. Most songs will end one of a few ways, will have one of a few cadences, will have one of a few chord progressions. It’s why I find it easy to sing along to a song I’ve never heard before. But… there was nothing to be predicted about the music presented that night. There were none of the usual landmarks of a song, be it lyrics or a hook or a bassline dropping. None of it. It was a completely new listening experience for me, and it turned my brain on in a way I haven’t felt in a while. I felt buzzed, like I had closed my fingers around an electric fence, finding myself accidentally trapped.  

I felt, and I feel this now, the call of pure creation crying out for me. If two people my age can stand before a crowd and hurl dark frequencies around in the pitch black studio at a probably obscene decibel level…. then what in the hell is stopping me from pursuing any of my creative interests? If they can do it then I sure as hell can. Who cares if what I create is any good? Who cares if anything is ever any good?

Let me repeat that, for emphasis, for my own future reference: Who cares if what I create is any good?

It seems so simple in this moment of clarity – it is not the creation that matters so much as the act of creating. I know rationally that I am not alone in my open desire to see what other people are creating in all of the wild and varied ways that thought manifests into tangible reality - I know it. I know that there are people who want to see what I am up to as much as I want to see what others are doing, and the only thing stopping me from reaching these people is a lily-livered lack of courage.

A waning lack of courage, might I add.

I suppose that is what touched me more than anything that night sitting in the darkness with ambient static sound surrounding me – the implied courage it takes to stand before a crowd of people and play something completely unconventional. The balls to plug in your amps and guitars and say here goes nothing (everything). Here, this, is what I have been working on.

Christ I’m so thankful for people with guts.

Mostly manufactured

Behind the Morocco Shrine Temple

I worry that each measured step of painstakingly learned efficiency that drags me away from the terrifyingly free days of my early twenties is one step closer to the calculating coldness of the perfect Adult©. Every time I perfect one of the tiny tasks that has always for some reason eluded me, from oil changes to learning that keeping track of important paperwork now will save time later, I get this image of Carolyn Burnham, the mom from American Beauty, and I fret.

The war wages on and I feel split apart, pulled to pieces, 

tendon from ligament from slippery sinew.

How is it possible to hold on to anything good 

when the illusions dissipate and run from you?

 

Everything we want is nothing like it initially seems and the happiness dims as soon as we grasp for it, ruining everything beautiful like grubby little child hands smearing the life dust from diaphanous butterfly wings.

But is that just the way it is?

The faint rumble of rebellion rolls around my guts like faraway thunder and I can’t help but feel the urge to exclaim “Tis I can buck the system!” because it’s difficult for me to give up in resignation, with Failure dancing around menacingly and laughing in my face- and yet it’s difficult for me to shut the dreaming factory down. My dreams roll all over the place in winding circles of contradiction as almost every dream I have rules out the possibility of any other dream.

I have no choice but to give in and endure the wonderfully painful lashes of each branch of future lives raining down upon my flesh, giving myself over to a masochism I’ve really mostly manufactured

and I wonder if anyone else can see these scars of futures forsaken

Done.

Building new facades: University and Old St. Augustine - Jacksonville, FL

  

On my mind: How marriages don’t always end in happiness, and how we (oh. duh.) only hurt the ones we love.

How the happiest of people can only sustain for so long. How, like the needling tingles of a mild withdrawal, even the sensations that are supposed to be pleasurable start to slow into annoyance. Get away from me, don’t touch me, but don’t worry I’ll be back in the morning.

Until one day it takes an extra day to get back to normal, to regain perspective and remember that you love this person occupying your bed.. until the moment you pause and consider that the action of remembering implies the action of forgetting. Implying the terrifying realization that sometimes, however infrequently, you forget to be in love with this person standing next to you.

And how I, in all of my obsessive self analyzation, can catch these damaging thoughts in their tracks, can reason my way out of this terror, introducing the idea that my partner has melded into me and obviously will bear the brunt of my self loathing from time to time. That there are days where I hate myself, with toxic little hate droplets oozing out onto whatever is closest to me, as if not only I am to blame for this unrest but you are too and it’s all our fault and I hate everything but of course that feeling diminishes. Because it has to, right? Because I can look that feeling in the face and tell it to shove off, and then next thing I know you’re saying something cute and my funk bubbles away and I know that I was just being silly so let’s go listen to music and be silly together.

But right now it is the opposite scenario that hangs heavy on my shoulders.

The one where he forgot that the ooze is impermanent and let it spill over everything, watching with Hamlet’s eyes as the black poured a seamless cover onto all of the things he used to love, hiding the light that used to gleam back and forth. A thousand tiny mistakes lead to ruin and a thousand tiny bubbles of seething resentment turn into the kind of slow irrational hatred that becomes impossible to outrun.

Done. With a capital D.

Semantic Satiation

4-7

I want

to bring you here

to play chess

We’ve played so many games

the moves are all rehearsed

I can see your next three

projected on your chest

The jest is on both of us

determined not to let good day

blending into good day

blendingintogoodday

get
the best
of us

Bold Bean Coffee - April 7th

Dungeons and Dragons

To add to my ever increasing list of random hobbies, I recently accepted an invitation to play a biweekly game of Dungeons and Dragons with some friends of mine that just moved back to town. 
This is the brief back story that I wrote for my character, Bienefeldt Orianen.

Bienefeldt – Eladrin Wizard

Bienefeldt Orianen is calm and ageless, carrying secrets by the handful. Bienefeldt lives alone in a city on the edge of fey and human growing ever frustrated by the feeling that he is incomplete. Truth be told, there is a girl. There was a girl – but isn’t there always? A girl that slipped away, enchanted by the pull of normalcy and domesticity.

In earlier years, Bienefeldt was drawn by the curious odors of adventure and left his home to traverse the mountains on the horizon, getting sucked into a great fight against the Drow, the dark elves. He did not know then (but he knows now – oh how he knows now) that the shimmering-haired girl – Irina – in his hometown, that he had always taken note of in the markets and town gatherings, had taken note of him too… yet tragically he never gathered up the nerve to say anything to her until the night before he left town. He expressed his love and she reciprocated the emotions silently, her eyes glistening with tears and adoration, knowing that they could never be – something that Bienefeldt would soon come to understand. She did not want adventure, she wanted the sounds of laughing babies and the smell of baking bread – and a husband that came home every night. Bienefeldt left the next morning, feeling both relieved to have told his love the truth but also a simmering anger at the universe for arranging the cards in such a tantalizingly frustrating manner. He made a pact with himself to make sure that Irina was always safe and taken care of, though he was determined not to disrupt the life she had created for herself. An act of true love, he told himself as he left his home behind.

In the fight against the Drow, Bienefeldt met up with Traevaran Silvermane [a groupmate’s character], a relative of Irina’s, and the aftermath of carnage and destruction led to Bienefeldt’s family taking Traevaran in. The two became fast friends, even studying together under the same Master of Magic, though their different styles of magical ability led to yet another parting of ways. Traevaren felt the magic more intuitively through his emotions and passions, while Bienefeldt connected more to the magic of nature - he also studied much more by the book as opposed to Silvermane’s instinctive sorcery. After they split Bienefeldt realized that he missed Traevaren more than he let on, as over time he had grown attached to the qualities in Traevaren that reminded Bienefeldt so strongly of that girl with the dancing eyes – though of course Bienefeldt would never admit as much out loud.

After years of living alone, though content in his comfortably cluttered cottage in the woods, Bienefeldt began to wonder if perhaps there was more adventure yet to be had. Danger awaited, for sure, but it was distraction that Bienefeldt sought, for even after all this time he loved Irina with the hazy gaze of one who stares into a nostalgic past more often than the present. He set out, lying to himself in attempts to find excuses for his excursion, not wanting to admit to himself that he hoped to check in on the lovely Irina and the family that should have been his.

Verse Versus

 

Thank you, to whomever it is

that anonymous thanks belong,

for making the scratching of pen on paper

sound productive by default

so I can look like I am working when I am really

indulging last night’s thoughts and leftover bits of song;

of elbow patches on worn professor jackets

made of woolen tweed.

Lecherous, indeed.

Thanks to you for useless business meetings

that would be a waste of time except for

this sacred stolen opportunity

to withdraw, to leave my body here

and scratch my way back to lasers dancing

on layers of oak branches and their leaves.

Now back, I am relieved.

Thank you for the Mason-Dixon line that separates

the frosty numbness of my unprotected spine

from the golden-hazed warmth of the fire on my legs,

and thank you for the bodies sitting close

and leaning in,

for the words said under breath

to light my ears and incite sin.

Thanks for the ability to lay back

my head in solemn ecstasy,

my every breath a prayer wrapped in grins

and soaked in guitar necks next to me-

thanks for what this might begin.

I will not thank you, however,

for another entry into the annals of the bittersweet,

as if I needed more disdain for desks.

I already knew that elsewhere there are wooden decks

that lead to marshy water streets -

you didn’t need to rub it in.

You really didn’t need to remind me

of art farms and babies sleeping wrapped up in our poetry

with lumbering canines drinking sips of stolen wine

choosing my feet to slumber under – mine.

But thanks nonetheless for name-dropping peers

and multi-colored mason jars hued by Belgian beer.

Thank you for a row of twenty-somethings children

dangling drunken feet from docks

too skinny for things like mortality

or ticking hands on time bomb clocks.