Boogiewoogie Doogiewoogie

9-21

Every now and then it is nice to shirk all responsibility, to blow off work -
To go downtown at 3pm on a Friday -
To listen to jazz and scribble in my journal, fueled by Chamblin’s white bean and spinach soup.

To watch birds spread little wings
To watch clouds dance around the sun

To put a dash of cinnamon in my tea.

To watch fathers holding
the tiny hands of daughters;
Men with dreadlocks at waist length
engaging future men in handshakes.

 
I want to hear the music that the man at the table next to me is making. I want to be surrounded by music at all times. I want to answer the question “do you dance?” with “a-woogie doogie boogie-doogie,” eyes closed and fingers snapping.

Out there...

8-21

It appears to be one of those days where I do not have the energy to be myself.

Where the effort necessary to extract myself from my parked car to go meet my friends feels like someone is asking me to dead-lift my car instead of simply... getting out of it.

I am aware of the symbolism inherent, I promise.

But I’m warm in here. And out there...
it’s only the end of August but it’s a rainy one at that and I can feel the chills creeping in.
I can sense the day shortening, the light slowly and painstakingly receding.

Chocolate Phillies

8-27

These words are meant for typing, no pen and paper today.

There is a meaning to all of this, a swirl of beauty for me to collect together and make sense of.
It will happen, I’m sure of it.

This one is a dark one, a beautiful one and a strange one.
Intelligent and unschooled, untamed.
He is the most Lost of them all, I think, and one who sunk in without intention on anybody’s part.
An accidental friend, a side effect that turned into a function all his own.

I’m writing to commemorate, I think, as I’m scared that this beauty is about to be altered by institution.

Exploring Hart

9-15

And so I sit on the banks of Jacksonville’s original landmark, 
here before the need to mark land and here, indeed, before there were people to do the marking.

I am sitting here underneath the Hart Bridge on a pile of concrete chips yet I could not be more comfortable.
What is this place, that has been here for centuries, that will linger after I pass?

 

I am sitting here alone pondering the existence of ‘ancient’ and ‘future’ and how they overlap onto my ‘now.’
What did this river look like a thousand years ago? Were the river grasses dotted with tiny snails then, too?

 

Burro

8-29: Intoxication at Burro

And, well, this is a strange mixture.

And I don’t know that I ever anticipated that the soft guitar would lift me this way, would send me off. The change in genre was a swift one, switching from packs of young men screaming and punching their way into musical oblivion...to the sweet delicate girl with her fingers perched in practiced positions on dusty silver strings.

I am spending the next few seconds embracing the puff of air that rushed over me as you slipped past, leaving perfumed wind in your wake. The sudden coolness spreads like frozen wildfires in a flash over the whole of me, and I am dumbstruck, helpless to move or breathe until that instant spell of yours is broken.

What a feeling it is
to see men where once
there were boys

What a feeling it is
to feel the beauty
in all of this noise