8.31.2012

Jewel Case

In another room a man has a stack of jewel cases in his hand, clacking as they shift. He stands, as stone might, before hastily crafted wooden shelves. With a pattern of colors chosen randomly and shifting from visit to visit, the CDs lay at rest in their shiny and encrusted homes.

Stacks of clacking jewel encrusted tomes
Aural manuals, audible missives of tones
Collected into groups of chords and arrays of voicings
An auditorium of musical expression.

In another room, he carefully peruses the vast selection before him.

Astounded that this grand display of a collective thousands of hours spent in recording studios, tour buses, and lonely 3 am writing sessions is still only a miserably scant selection compared to the entirety of rehearsal spaces, thrift store instruments and boardroom meetings that make up all of the cds in the world.



8.30.2012

Earphones in, Pencap off

8-29: written in Chamblins

Do you believe in the hype?

I want to say something;
I got something to say.

I want to tap more into my subconscious. 
I want to hear the things I know, the things that are buried in the Security Clearance Only vault.

Now this... this is a place I like to be.
Earphones in, pencap off

I really want to believe that there will be time for this sacred ritual in the later more matronly days of my life.
Will my poetic heart survive the suckling youth?

..Ok even I rolled my eyes at that.

...I’m also curious about that constant stream of self-deprecation and stupid jokes I’ve got going on. It gives me cause to wonder how many hours of “family friendly programming” I sat through before I had this infomercial style of language memorized. How long it took for all of the rimshots and plastic laughter out of a can to work its way into my ways of thinking.

As if even in my most private of pages I am unable to take off the microphone. As if I’m always addressing someone with these coffeeshop capitulations.

It’s an interesting thing to note how, in many ways, I am the product of everything I hate. Do I hate it so much because I know there’s not a single part of my personality that hasn’t been affected by this giant monolithic plastic television that I hold with such hostile regard?

Of course I can’t explore that train of thought without remembering that, in all actuality, I’m pretty in love with myself, about 80% of the time... and logically it would then follow that I have to love my corporate overlords that so carefully designed who I should be and what I should like.


Cue brain explosions. Jesus Christ. Fuck you, logic. Fuck you and the weird alleyways of thoughts you lead me down.

*sigh*

Well... I suppose that if I had to have a manufactured life (joke is most definitely on me)... this isn’t such a bad one to be stuck with.

I choose to accept the food from
the hand that feeds
and also to bite
and rip

I have to say that I am most proud of myself when I prove that TV is not necessary for my life. That moments with only the slightest bit of technology are absofuckinglutely delightful.

On that note... why do so few people create anymore? I’m talking an everyday kind of creation, an expression. It’s strange to be strange, I guess, at the heart of it all.

8.27.2012

Ambassador




I can feel my efforts paying off. It is a very nice feeling to want to stare at myself in the mirror, checking myself out. Equally nice to read through words and catch glimpses of beauty.

I think I’m getting closer to the point where what I write and what I’m trying to say are getting closer together. Coming together to a point of singularity and then perhaps colliding and collapsing into the density I’ve been hoping for.

“Because honestly, fuck that voice.”

Indeed. Fuck the voice that tells me I’m still a fatass and fuck the voice that tells me my words are insipid and futile. Fuck that voice because I always have been and always will be an ambassador of change and beauty.

An ambassador of surprise, indeed.

8.24.2012

The way you dance

8-24

It’s funny how the waves of creativity come and go.

I’m enjoying being objective, digging deep into self-analysis mode. It occurs to me, as it occurred to me yesterday listening to a friend talk, that there is literally no such thing as perfect objectivity in dealing with self-analysis... but how useless of a train of thought is that, right? It’s a self-analysis of how self-analysis is intrinsically flawed.

Just writing that sentence makes me roll my eyes.

Anyway it’s pretty obvious that a part of me loves drama, but in a quiet way, so that only I am affected.
That’s why I have the dreams that I do, dreams that would make innocent minds gasp and cringe.
Dreams I probably shouldn't be having, sure, and that I probably wouldn't choose to have, but as I cannot control these dreams, I see no reason why I shouldn't enjoy them.

I rather like living this double life.

By that of course I am referring to the ways that I present myself, passively, to the viewer so that any such onlooker may create their own impressions of me and move along, never knowing that the impressions they have were premanufactured especially for them by a socially calculating mind.

I rather like living as an ambassador of surprise.

Back to objectivity:
I enjoy pondering the small personality changes I have undergone through the years, and who might be to blame for each of them. Who is behind the way I like to silently watch the people I come into contact with? I used to boldly interact with little care to consequence. Who is behind the way I have no care for social mores, apart from acting in a socially acceptable manner? There is a coldness, a selfishness I did not expect when I was younger.

Luckily I have it under control.

I wonder who is to blame
for this primal creature that breathes
heavily, breast heaving, underneath
this prefabricated exterior.

sleepstate dreamscapes
of panting gasps and sweat
of things that are wrong
Dreams that fluster
that make me blush just in the recollection
that make me want 
She speaks through my eyebrows
each lift a vulgar statement of
desire, unfulfilled intent, underneath
this exterior that is determined to behave

8.23.2012

Dreaming mature thoughts

 

8-16

I am not afraid of my mind.

If anything, I am eager to plunder the hidden depths for epiphanies and...

Well, and whatever else is hanging out, silent, taking up residence in the folds of my lobes.

Fruit of my loins
Folds of my lobes


I have no brain for mundanity today. How can I focus on paperwork when there is uncharted territory in my possession begging for me to explore?


“Let’s get a little deeper, friend.
You have no idea where I can take you -
and I want to show it all.”

I have a tinge of that uneasy feeling, 
the feeling of squashed down compression with a hint of nausea - primarily because I keep forgetting to breathe.
The lines between dreams and reality have been blurred, perhaps even irrevocably.

8.22.2012

Vestige



Written in the spring of 2006

Your excitement lights me up like a pinball machine
the vibrance in my eyes reflecting the colors of your shirt
Your chapped lips dance and your tongue screams for freedom
the ideas that spew hit my reflexes like a man entitled MD

Your apathetic intelligence rings so familiar and warm
makes my mouth mimic yours and makes me want
to let your smoke drift from my softer lips

so that my smoke
and your words

can play along the ceiling of your truck



Every now and then I revisit old words that I have written, and I am always struck by what I create. Not that it they are anything of exceeding beauty or depth or originality...but that they are mine.

8.20.2012

Chipper

8-15

The hours between 8 and 10 in the morning have become my favorite hours in the day. Obviously waking up is still a slog of haze and bleary eyes filled with hatred for the world at large...

...but after I overcome that initial hurdle, driven by the sweet and all-encompassing motivator that is necessity, and force myself to make the hardest journey of my day (from bed to car), the rest is smooth road.

Too smooth, apparently.

I say this because it is far too easy of a temptation to give in to to spend the two hours entirely behind the wheel, pointing the nose of my Kia in various directions with an ever-shifting destination.
For instance, this morning, I let the Kia guide me and landed back at my familiar roost, on the breeze-kissed patio at Chamblin’s, listening to an old man play piano.

 





Delicious.

8.16.2012

Crash

8-13

You are the rocks
that dot the shoreline
and you come
with your own
irresistable
pull



8.15.2012

Little Talbot

8-11


It is hard to focus my pen on the paper before me.
Little notebook, you have no eyes so I will use words to describe the scene that I am witness to.





Imagine if you will the Spanish moss dripping down from the oak trees drenched in lichen. The shade created covers our campsite, but allows the Florida sunlight to shine through in pockets of warmth. The perfect temperature is created and two oddly sized human beings have perched themselves at a picnic table.




Gypsy music waltzes through the tented canopy and across to the fire pit where seasoned onions and green peppers are roasting over an open flame.





Imagine the contentment contained in such a vision; imagine such a holistic happiness.





Watch as two humans, desperately in love and so very happy, watch as they doodle and scribble in notebooks as the insects sing all around them.

8.09.2012

Windy

Her face, normally lit up with whim and fantasy and a baseline of lightheartedness, was drawn and closed.
Eyes focused on the blank middle distance, lids open but no data was being transmitted from the orbs to the brain.
It was a worrisome sight.

Resting a large hand on her thigh, he contemplated her sudden sadness. Any other person might dismiss the strange silence pouring out from her being but he immediately noticed the change. Quietly he watched her as she twisted the steering wheel in its sturdy column to the left and right in a practiced dance with the road, her autopilot light blinking.

“Where are you...?”

...but his query remained trapped on his tongue. His fingers tapped on her naked flesh, trying to grab a glance from her, and it worked...she turned and flashed that fake smile of hers, the one that stands out in such contrast from her usual smile that it was almost painful to behold. She was lost in thought alright. Absent. She’d return, he knew.
She always did, and with just as much energetic vigor as always.

“Doesn’t stop it from hurting.”

--

I wish there was a way to speak these sentences, in real time words created by mouth and lips and tongue. I wish I could show you that I see these moments from every angle, from mine and yours and the third-person narrator I’ve conjured up. That when I have fallen temporarily from behind the wheel... that I am so extremely aware, of everything, analytical of each feeling that I’m having and each feeling that my feelings make you feel and I get so paralyzed by the weight of all of the topics that need starting, all of the moments that contribute to this temporary sadness that needs explaining... It crushes down on my shoulders and squashes all of the light and humor out of me. I have no laughter to spare, no appreciation for the absurdity of anything. It is a stark feeling of sudden alertness and comprehension of the sadness that lies in wait for each person on this planet, and I feel it all at once.

How can I explain the sudden rush of love and empathy I feel for people I don’t know?
How can I explain the lingering residue of love and empathy I feel for people I used to know?

It is not an appropriate thing.

--

“Roll your window down.”

The words leave his lips with a hopefulness that reaches her, wherever she is, deep inside of her thoughts.
She rolls her window down and he instructs her to take her hand and feel the rushing air.

“Feel the wind around your fingers...how you can grab it but yet you can’t.”

--

If only you could understand how fitting and perfect your words are. I grab it all, and yet it slips by me.
In this moment I am looking at the road, and my hand, and your face all at once. My autopilot is finely tuned and we cruise a steady two miles above speed limit even when the speed limit changes. My hand moves fluidly through the cool breeze that lingers after the summer storms, the ones that leave every afternoon windy. Your face...

Your face. I watch your face as you gaze so intently at me from the passenger seat. I wish for once I could let you drive but my knuckles grip the wheel so tightly that a crowbar would be necessary to prize them away. I want to abandon the road and dive into your arms, I want to shrink so tiny I could wrap around your neck and sleep for a thousand years. I want to forget about all of the other faces and voices crowding my mind and hear only yours, see only yours.

I want to go home, but I feel so far. Your tapping fingers might as well be your voice loudly calling me,
telling me to come home. I know. I feel it. I hear you, though it’s windy out, I hear you.

8.08.2012

*ding*


8-7

It is the day of my birth, 24 years post.

Haha what a ridiculous sentence. That sentence does nothing to convey how I actually feel today...well, perhaps in tandem with all of these far sillier words. I feel silly. Silly and solemn and soporific and stupefied and smitten and sensationally smashing insofar as sibilant strings of sentences go. I feel silly because I went to sleep with two or three hours to spare before I had to get up again (there's the soporific for you), solemn because of sentences like "we met ten years ago today" that remind me that it's been 10 YEARS since my first day of high school, I feel stupefied and smitten by the world around me ("how strange it is to be anything at all") and all of the rest of those S words are simply me showing off my skills.

I feel good, on a day such as today.
I am trying to pay attention to the tiny nuances of such a feeling in order to conjure it back up on days when the somber outweighs the sweet. I’m just sayin, I had an apartment full of people lavishing love upon me into the wee hours of the morning and then I got to drive around for three hours with friends and love alike listening to music of my choice. I can’t really see any flaw with that scenario, at all. In fact if I were asked what I wanted for my birthday, I would say, with no hesitation, “to be surrounded by people I love and make them all laugh."

So...success.

“Work waits for no crab legs.”






 
-later-

HoL - page 350

‎"No matter whether you’re an electrician, scholar, or dope addict, chances are that somewhere you’ve still got a letter, postcard or note that’s meaningful to you. Maybe only to you.

It’s amazing how many people save at least a few letter
s during their lifetime, leaves of feeling, tucked away in a guitar case, a safety deposit box, on a hard drive or even preserved in a pair of old boots no one will ever wear.

Some letters keep. Some don’t."

8.07.2012

Root



She done worked a root
Done worked a root that will not be reversed
Then I go on, go on my role in her play
With no rehearsal

Said, I left my mojo
Left my mojo in my favorite suit
(yes I did, yeah)
She left a stain,
Left a dirty stain in my heart
I can’t refute

She done worked a root
In the name of love and war
took my shield and sword
from the pit of the bottom
that knows no floor

like the rain to the dirt,
from the vine to the wine
from the Alpha to creation,
to the end all time



I feel my soul is empty
My blood is cold and I can’t feel my legs
I need someone to hold me
Bring me back to life before I’m dead

She done worked a root

8.06.2012

Coffee

8-5

I’m giving you a night call
to tell you how I feel
I want to drive you through the night
and down the hills
I’ve got to tell you something you
don’t want to hear
I’m gonna show you where it’s dark,
but have no fear

There’s something inside you
It’s hard to explain
They’re talking about you, boy
But you’re still the same

...muss es sein? Must it be?

I appreciate that life always has the capacity to surprise. I appreciate that me, the glowing essence, that I am resilient. The me that writes in cryptic words in the middle of night (or on a rainy summer sunday at 10 in the morning, as it were). The me, the me that is primal and urgent and slinkily duplicitous...she lurks.

The dance between superego and id is just something I am growing accustomed to, nothing more. Soap operas and literoticas may play in my head but I am capable of distinguishing the true literature from the smut, the unwanted words that I will not allow to decorate the margins of my life story.

However...
At this point, on this morning, I must admit that I am more interested in the thoughts trapped in the minds of the characters in the stories I read. I want to know their forbidden thoughts.

It grows exceedingly obvious that I was allowed to read too many books and watch too much television when I was a kid.

Deep breaths are necessary at this point. Too much coffee?
Yeah, that’s it.
The strain of attempting normalcy;
the strain of attempting to stay as far the fuck away from normalcy as possible.

Strikethrough text is necessary, at this and all points. O muse...

Speak of the devil
and she will appear

It is an irony (perhaps? never can quite nail that fickle bird down) that the parts of me that are dancing with fate are at the hands of the parts of em that create my fate. It is unfortunate that my id has such a loud voice, outmotoring and outdistancing the rational and reasonable at outstanding paces.

Just keep on singing, give it a try
give it a try.