ALBUM TITLE: Still Life
RELEASE DATE: June 7, 2024
1. Still Life
2. Lament For Lucienne
3. Gorgeous Gifts
4. No Sense In Complaining
5. The Couch, The Kitchen, The TV, The Yard
6. Buckets
7. The Story Of A Boy From Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
8. The Calm Of Heaven
9. Wistful Wanda On The Violin
10. Stoned Aces In Peculiar Places
11. Note By Note
STILL LIFE
The crickets were a-chirping on the lake outside my room. I saw an escape clause in the contract with my subconscious, so I awoke a bit too soon. I was startled by how lively I felt after such a desperate dream. Familiar shirts strewn upon the floor, all darkened corners could now be seen. I threw on a shirt and felt quite spry. I did a spin on a concrete divide. Like Gene Kelly I welcomed the rain. My eyes were open wide. I saw a newborn baby, a lady, a bird, and the greenest park. I felt the glare from the sun on the rain-drenched streets and in each stranger I felt a spark.
I stopped into see my doctor and I asked him about my health. I said wouldn’t it be great if I could stay away from you and just be allowed to judge well-being by myself? Away from those nightmarish seas where I’m drowning in cold sweats. He said I think it would be dull on dry land if you never got wet.
Heaven’s right here. Can’t you see it, dear? But it’s not a painting, it’s a story told by narrator you can’t know.
So I left the sterile office, feeling like I’d been duped. Why did I pay good money just to have my hopes rebuked? I’ll cry and cry and won’t know why and I don’t think it will help. But this helpless feeling translates well when I make a record of myself. So don’t worry, be grateful, for all that you’ve been given. You’ll cry all night and won’t feel right but your spirit it has risen.
I always wanted a girl like you who wore emotions on her sleeve but sometimes I see myself as a dying tree with the emotion of brown leaves. It’s a problem, it’s a problem and I hope one day we fix and make it null. These geometric shapes of love must be divisible. As the human race just multiplies and the doctors try to make it math I think that we will kiss each other and feel the euphoria of it all.
Position your perfect pear. Your paint will capture it there by the rickety chair. The story will be told by the narrator you can’t know.
LAMENT FOR LUCIENNE
Lucienne, are you still residing in your manor on Queen Anne? I sensed there was a lot of gloom inside but I only set foot inside one time. Your sister was partying with some unfriendly friends of hers. I think I learned how to be unkind from those icons I encountered. Their words are still with you now, as play with the tetherball by the playground. You remember arguments about absolutes. You stand solid like one of those statues that the pigeons surround.
Lucienne, your sad, sad eyes made me write fifteen pages. Something about the way your tears splashed like a cymbals made me key into the wisdom of the ages. To call this a love affair is to make much of nothing, but I slept in your bed, I guess, and people told me to keep trying. Your sister was always asking for someone to take care of you. You wept as you looked out the window and I was pleased that you could feel just as bad as I do.
I don’t spend much time thinking about what kind of cataclysm we could have created. Yet, tonight I see the emotion runs deep, as that Ben Folds song plays, even though we barely dated. But don’t ever forget me, Lucienne, and our brief, brilliant idea about how to live. Because sometimes the one’s who can’t connect have the most love to give.
GORGEOUS GIFTS
I have lost myself a great many times. I speak the language and hope it rhymes. The days, the hours, the nights go by and I wipe a tear from a blinded eye. We disguise and cloak the truth about gifts. We mistake the innumerable champagne fits. We think that life at its best is life sublime. We underestimate the severity of the climb.
Dark pathways into empty taverns. Crowded but desolate in empty patterns. I want to let everyone know that I loved! I loved so much and so deeply. Here’s the proof: I loved phone conversations in preteens. I loved movies. I loved freshly cut grass. I loved girls and girls and that’s basically the only reason for living: girls. I loved food and faith and report cards. I loved the search for meaning in all experience. I loved the bond with others. Those meanings are still so strong. Each city is beautiful, each palm sublime. Each drop of water a symbol of something divine. I do not know what the snake oil salesman draws on for inspiration, but we all have to draw on something. No matter what, we have an innate ability to breathe meaning into experience.
And I have loved. It’s all about the girls. Even as one grows old and you can no longer feel the emotion in your body, your brain remembers the loyalty. The strength of the loyalty, the way the ideal burned brightly in your youth. The night, the star, shone across 5 continents. The beacon, the banner, the flames in the cold night. The name of each star-crossed lover.
Alone in a simple home. I stand alone with the moonlight on my deck and I look at the gleaming team in the busy street; the buildings, the stately homes with chandeliers, the symbol of the white, safe from the wet, garnished by the raindrops. These couples, these symbols of perfection. Oh, god, why am I possessed with such a moribund predilection for these resurrections?
Oh, the kitchen, the dining room, the coq au vin. The raindrops, the night shirts, the softest hands. The shiny knives, the pizza, the burritos, the forks. The placemats, the napkins, the antique chair. The gorgeous gifts are everywhere.
NO SENSE IN COMPLAINING
I.
So I’ll write in a little journal about how the day was so sh*tty and I’ll write it in scribbles cuz I can rarely write neatly. I’ll plan out all my moves and I’ll imagine all my grooves each night before I slip into bed. I will curse the sun in the morning because my headache came without warning and I’ll wish that I could sleep in instead.
And each day I do the work. I struggle for comprehension. Nothing makes sense. Everything contradicts everything else. The heroes are fakes that make mistake after mistake. Didn’t we always know that, any how?
I mean who’s running this company? Who’s running this country? Who’s running this world, I can’t say. I have faith in the burning bush. It might lead me the right way. Abraham killed a son. God confused him, and in the end, like always, God, of course, won.
I was talking to a vixen in a coffee shop in Seattle. The bookshelf stood stark behind us as we listened to Chopin’s crescendo. The conversation quickly became a dream when it ended. I hoped each word she spoke would be the sophisticated kind. Not the kind that turns me off or puts a jealousy in my mind. As I talked to her in depth I thought only of what we would do when we left. She talked and talked about God and I focused on the power of breath. And I couldn’t stop thinking about how she had such an unfortunate last name. Every time you try to pronounce it,
you do it wrong and take the blame. Her mouth moved fast. Her eyes were bright. She spoke in passionate waves. But my thoughts were drifting, quietly lifting me above this haze.
Snap!! She caught me escaping and she felt so damn offended. I wasn’t listening to her manifesto. I wasn’t hearing what she said or how the story ended. So, this led me to the conclusion that no one can ever really love. We think we’ve found the reason for what was sent from up above, but ultimately, we’re alone. Trying to fall asleep. Trying to get away from all those fears that quietly creep. They find you in bar room. They find you on the stage. They find you when you’re hiking. They find you at Thanksgiving. They haunt you at reunions. They slap you at the bus stop. They crash the poker party. They surround you at your job. Your cubicle can’t contain them, so you rush off to go home. But these fears catch you on the highway and they follow you when you’re alone. So find some unsuspecting lover to keep you from yourself. These are the days when we can try to be unified, in sickness and health. You throw those things on the scale: Companionship versus Contempt, and you wonder if the machine is accurate…if your money was well spent.
I think that my coffee companion will be leaving soon. I’ll remember her favorite song. I’ll remember the way she operated the spoon: two spoonfuls – stir, two spoonfuls – stir. I wanted to do the spoon. I wanted to sleep in until noon. She didn’t measure up to the ideal. It’s a feeling we’ve all had before. When she leaves, I will not cry… at least not about her.
II.
I wish that I could give you the things you think you need. I think maybe you should think about working on the way you’re thinking. I would send you to a doctor, but I can’t believe that the doctor understands your brain better than you do. Maybe you can use some philosophy to fix this malady. Maybe Socrates would shed some light if you read his words as closely as you did last May. Your friend died in December. You blacked out in January. Put some chump in the hospital when you vacationed in Belize. Those fears are coming back again. They’re gonna take you out, my friend. Knock you blindsided like you knocked that innocent vacationer. The only way to fight these fears is to tell them to f*ck off. You can shout this out in a traffic jam. They’re part of you but they don’t listen and they don’t speak your language.
So I’ll compose another Sonnet for the album of the month. I could churn one out day after day
and I might will my way out of this slump. Because all that I would be feelin’ would be starin’ at me from the page and I would feel like friends who get lost and anonymous in Europe, free from the judgment and the praise. Far away from home you can go crazy. Doctor, won’t you agree?! There are no words to describe the sound of unending misery. That sound’s a distant bullhorn. That alarm’s a distant dream. People will throw pellets of poison at ya and you will respond and seem to understand that nobody’s alone. They all feel this way, too. You feel alone and strange and ugly. Others do, too. You ponder this as you smoke pot and turn up Miserlou.
III.
If we happen to die tomorrow within five blocks of this coffee shop and these strange, abortive sorrows get lost when coroner comes and our legacy has little to put us above the bums who haunt the streets and haunt the souls of our safe little communities, well, that’s our fate, I guess and we can’t control it now. When your dreams from childhood are dashed and your flying high times they crash and you reduce all joy in life to a science and you strip yourself of all emotion so you can finally handle devotion and not be a flighty bird in a silly zoo, the jungle wouldn’t suit you. Too many monkeys, not enough lions. No, this is your fate and this is mine. No sense in trying to define. You’re the only one who knows what’s going on in your brain. The drugstore, the coffee, the sugar-free Salad days. Oh, they are behind you now.
I would say it’s good enough to have each other, but you say, “So many people have never loved! Toddlers die of cancer. Teenagers get in car wrecks and virgins OD in college dorm rooms,
appropriately and tragically alone.” This is all very true. I think Blake surely knew that love is an idea, not a thing. Procreation, adulation, flirtation, copulation. These are scientific exchanges of soul. I can’t define the sun, but one truth I can extol, and that the life you live is no one’s but your own.
So, honey cancer didn’t catch ya and I the car wrecks didn’t wreck ya and I certainly know that you aren’t a virgin. So, let’s go and buy some ice cream. You can tell me about your bad dreams. We can go for a long jog when dessert is done and we can talk of why we’re working out when we just drank a bottle of wine and it will never ever, ever, ever make sense.
We can cast off all responsibility. God, long ago, took most things from me. So now we’re coasting seaward towards the waves. I’ll hold your hands so tightly and I’ll say “I love you” nightly and I’ll never, ever, ever let you go away. You say never doesn’t exist and all good intentions stray but we can fight this with our convictions and our faith. I don’t know what these words mean to you and I’m not sure if I tell the truth but tonight it they have meaning than any other sound. The February rain hits the ground. You should savor these words for as long as you can. Any sense of permanence, please feel it in my hands. My actions, like a commander in chief, my emotions, like a thespian. I’m elected for this office and it’s quite a weighty job. I said my piece and you understood that times would be tough. If there is anything I’m capable of, it’s a passionate, tempestuous relationship with the idea of love. You know, ‘cause we’ve already talked about all this stuff. I just hope I am enough.
THE COUCH, THE KITCHEN, THE TV, THE YARD
So I saw you at the drugstore. You were looking so lovely. You had on your new clothes from your trip to London. Your face looked a bit tired. I still could trace your beauty and I knew that you felt nothing for me. Oh, sometimes I feel like the guy who had everything and then threw it all away. Still, other times I feel like I’ve been deprived all my life and didn’t have anything in the first place. A number of my drinking buddies agree.
I fell down to my knees and I spilled my guts out to you. I got my face close to the floor. I told you about how I love you because you’re sweet but I’d like it if you were a whor*. Well, when you tried to be a whor* you seemed like quite a bore. So, I’ll have to call it just a fantasy and we won’t have that dialogue anymore.
So you stay up at night, watch cheap cable movies. You watch make-believe tales that you want to use to create meaning. But it always feels so hopeless, such a let down. You’re moping. You get up from the couch and you wander about. Maybe smoke a cigarette. Walk around the neighborhood and look for some evidence of a supreme being and a reason for happiness. You need it to bring you through. You are high from the nicotine. It keeps you from falling asleep, it seems. And your head is full of nothing, full of nothing. Well, isn’t that what you want? Isn’t that why you smoke those things?
You listened to an album by a visionary poet. The rags have named him Chairman of the Board
but he’s only 22, so much younger than you and it seems he has seen things in a way you’ll never see. What is this life that alludes you as you walk through the neighborhood smoking somebody else’s cigarettes, using someone else’s lighter? Is it the bar in Tahiti? Is it a vacation to Fiji?
Is it the car you cruise along the viaduct that makes you feel inadequate? Impossible – because long ago you cast away all superficiality. Things like that shouldn’t ever weigh you down.
Maybe it is some sweet lovemaking, some sexual forsaking, that leads you into the middle of the intersection but doesn’t provide you with a proper sense of direction. You were never good with geography, never good with trigonometry, but always good with words, always good with words.
Maybe it’s Vegas. Maybe it’s Paris. Do you have any money to make that green freedom a reality?
Go party until the day escapes you. If your family feels forgotten, you’ll be able to console them. Each minute passes quickly. Each quicker than before. The distance to your dreams becomes longer and you wonder if you’ll know what to do if you ever land on those distant shores.
BUCKETS
So you blew me off again and I quoted Macbeth to see what that would do. I struggled for each line. My memory can’t do what it used to. Talent wasted on the hazards of early success: wealth, brawling, babes, and booze. I always wished I could quote the right verse when life dealt me a tragic hand and it couldn’t get worse but it’s not over till they roll out the hearse. Now you are older and on in your years and your therapist counsels you to confront all your fears. The anxious start aching, till out rain the tears. Reign it all it in and fill up the buckets.
Well, you watch the movies because you want to get transported to a place where man dictates the actions of the world. Oh, you feel so dumb. You are slipping, slipping, slipping, slipping away. Oh, brain damage is a bitch. You haven’t been quite the same but you’re now such a beautiful witch!!! Oh, and how smart you can be.
Still, you know that life’s a futile play where the actors fade away and no one really cares how it ends anyways. You carve nuggets of wisdom into your desk that each suggest that it’s not worth the fret and that logic will save you in case you get wet. Wet with the storms, wet with the blood, wet from carrying buckets that you discarded in the mud. No, it’s insane to fight the reality that you’re limited in time and years. As Seneca said, “Why cry over the parts of life when the whole of it deserves tears?”
THE STORY OF A BOY FROM BETHLEHEM, PENNSYLVANIA
I.
The pimps and the hustlers cackle in the gray streets of Brooklyn. The Seattle mother weeps as she reads an erotic book when her Texan lover flies to the strip club in Houston. I stare at the blood in the sink. It took a decade to get to the place where I felt like I could pay all my bills and still load the deck with compelling reasons to push for a better sunset, under some other sky, on some other soil, and I’m wondering if it was worth the toil.
II.
My mother left when I was two years old and left me with my great aunt and uncle, who raised me in the country with a scythe and a sickle and each time I asked of my city roots they bathed me in a bristling story that I could not understand. Now I’ve learned to be guarded when I found I was abandoned and nobody else can know how it feels and I can’t tell them. The key to happiness is to cease to be so hopeful, then you won’t be so let down when your world comes crashing to the ground.
III.
I guess that’s where our story starts, in the small town of Bethlehem, under Pennsylvania skies, my uncle crunched the numbers for the steel men. He was an accountant all week and wrote poetry in the evenings and on weekends. He also spent that time crafting wooden birds, you should’ve seen them! I loved them up until the age of ten. All my teachers made me feel good, but I was looking for something better. Now my memory is full of forgotten letters. The A & the F and I could always be more of a go-getter. What would the structure of my memory be without the report card? Well, I guess it wouldn’t have tried so hard.
The small town culture held nothing for me, so I judged I should get out when I got into my teens. Maybe become a boxer, maybe become an actor, just get somewhere where I can be seen. At 15 I had a girlfriend. I fell prostrate to her silver lining and her straight shot to heaven’s gates. I still recall the mystery behind each date, where we held each other’s scrawny hands in the moonlight. I imagine we were quite a sight.
Each story has an arc and I arched my back and left. I sprinted to New York City where I thought the angels slept. Existing somewhere within a pugilistic, beefcake kind of dream I felt so hungry for something to eat. Oh, MTV, VH1, ETV – bullsh*t. This is not the medium for happiness. It makes me feel so bitter. I thought that I could hang there. I thought I was a star. I thought I’d make it so far. But now I’m stuck with the blues and an out-of-tune guitar. Damn straight.
IV.
I opened up my eyes. It was in a cold apartment. The blinds had been drawn and I knew I was not alone. My heart was beating fast. There was a pipe on the table and a chef with a needle and a spoon. The guitar is still out of tune. It was her – was it my teenage love? – no, it was another, it was a lanky German TV star. Above my bed she hovered. I said, “What’s wrong with me? Can I change this?” She said, “You can’t…it’s pointless to try.”
“But I love you anyway and I love that fact that we can hold each other and cry in this anonymous town, where no one’s gonna care when we pass away, drift away, slip away.” She wasn’t angry, she was overcome by the sadness and the grief. Still she was staid, so demure, and it must have been a relief for a girl as young as her to have a strong belief that you do best when you accept your fate. We hugged and kissed as Bethlehem faded away.
V.
So now I’m washing my hands. There are cuts on my forehead. I’m alone the studio, as the crows whip their wings outside. A million birds fly and they have sense of geography. They don’t analyze it, they don’t see much periphery. They focus straight ahead and don’t get bogged down by divinity and humility. They just push forward, in formation, towards an uncertain destiny. What was it that you said right before you ran away from me? Was it about Seattle, was it about Houston, was it about New York, was it about Bethlehem? My memory of location is foggy…but my memory of words is crystal clear and elephantine.
You said, “We’ve spent our whole lives trying to figure out the mystery.” You said you didn’t care that there was never enough. The chase was what made it worthwhile. You were pondering your place in the universe. You said, “It’s inevitably lonely.” You said, “It just gets worse and worse until the worse of all befalls me. But the big bash is approaching so let’s wear our co*cktail attire. We can dance our little lives out on the tightrope thin wire. We all have our own story, we all have our own mire, so let’s get the thing that we all desire. I think one little lifetime is enough.”
VI.
That’s my story. That’s my fiction. All these characters spread fast throughout the country. They disappear into America. I just relate the tale. The book continues. We’re not sure how it ends. The older I get, the more I realize that the story depends on Bethlehem, New York, school, apartments, on lost love, on those choices, oh yeah. We’re like those birds, moving without knowing and not even sure where we’re going, even though we have a sense of the right direction. The closest we came to heaven might have been somewhere near the beginning. We place too much value on winning. The loss defines the story. The end creates the beauty. If you planned on something special, God will call your bluff. I think one little lifetime is enough.
THE CALM OF HEAVEN
I’ve become complacent, full of apathy. Sitting on the deck at my lover’s apartment. Staring at the dogs as they walk through the courtyard, the longest walk, and they settle. I think of my receding memory. I look out upon the large lake and wonder if this is the place I was destined to spend the final hours. Destiny has replaced heaven. The holy calm of heaven is now a faint whisper, a hush. Jesus suffered just as I do and he had the brains to overcome his pain. I think I did, once. But now, this is it, it has come to this. My memory fades, my passion fades, my will to live fades, and I am left with nothing but a vessel. I see the coffee, the whip cream, the fruit, the pastries, and I know that these things cause pain. No more sins, only virtue from here on out.
My lover says that I think too much about death. I say, “Webster did, why can’t I?” She laughs, then the smile disappears, and I think that she is hiding tears. I tell her that the sun does not offer me the comfort that it offers her. Balmy sun, beautiful dusk, the palm at the end of the beach. I can’t see these things. My solace is only is the moment. I have denied myself all joy. My logic is inescapable, I tell her. The rain, the snow, they all lead us to an unyielding reality: that grieving is worthless and that being attached to anything in life, including life itself, is worthless. So then, what is the point? Elation, frustration, motivation, incantation? All these beautiful repetitions, these undulations that define our days. I can’t believe in heaven, but I can believe in these.
The Greek Gods have unrealistic beginnings. No birth, no diapers, no health scares. Large hands, large ideas, large motions that move mountains and wrinkle the history of man with mythic and perfunctory exactitude. Those Gods have doomed us. The ability to conceive of a God. And the ability for this reproachable thought to continuously come up at co*cktail parties, at graduations, at funerals. No, God has no grand plan. If he does, see it in the star, see it in the sea, see it in the sun, see it in the rock, in the balance of the face of a beautiful girl. Paradise cannot be found, but we keep searching. The friendly forest turns hostile; the resplendent meal turns to cold wine, then cheap chardonnay. Glory, love, and honor glide into our lives and inspire us to greatness, then fall downward to the blackness.
My lover says, “I see the beauty in your face. That is why I love you. You put the ugliness of the world to the test.” I can’t bear to answer to this, and I point to the dogs in the courtyard and the birds on the top of the apartment complex. “These birds push and soar, and they confirm our belief in greatness. But when the day is done, they sink into darkness. That is the only fate for all of your imaginings. They are gone, gone forever.” Nothing endures. Nothing endures. Not the bird, not the shades, not this remote spot of the land near the water. April comes and April is gone, just as it has done so many times before. Movies, dreams, goals, loves…they become distant memories. It matters not whether things disappear now or later: the truth remains that nothing endures.
She cries, she cries so much. I tell her that the pain is not worth it and that she should accept her fate. The flowers, dogs, and buildings will die, and will not be beautiful in their December passing. “I want for something to last! Something!! I believe in things lasting? I know the meaning of perishing, and I know that most things perish, but not this!” Just as she says this, something dies, she sinks a little, into the couch. And there is a slight quivering at the edge of her mouth. I say, “Touch my body, it is soft and warm, true, but I can tell I’m dying. Once I am gone, you will know me more than you do now. In my wintry passing, hopefully you will find something everlasting.” Plant the flowers, cut the flowers, plant again. Feel the rage as you cry for them.
Was I duped as a young child? Was there a deal made that I didn’t fulfill? Or were the rules made before I had a chance to report? Does my body rot just as this apple does? You bet!! Those flowers are going, so am I. I grew once and I smiled in my age of blossom, but the time has passed. But why the disappointment? We’ve known about death, it has been the white elephant, standing in the living room of our lives since the first day. Do we expect it to go away? She says I shouldn’t ponder human misery. I say, what else is there? The silk upon the bedroom floor causes me to prophesize. All my best times were times of indulgence; when I was high, it was great, when I was low it was great. I know this now. But still I move about this warm apartment, craving sleep, but denying sleep.
Church doors will open and I will enter. I will chant, I shall baptize, and Sundays will be full of holiness and pomp. The sun will burn in the sky, and we will imagine that is always going to be there. But God is not with us, God does not answer my prayers, even in this desperate time. I see no reason that he would separate me from the savages. I am a savage, beneath his holy sky. The chants will go on and we will lord about the house. I think I might even see a mouse. He and I will meet the same fate. The trees, the moss, the choir of the hills, the birds echo through the countryside and I fall asleep. I’m not sure if I will wake up. I feel so bad, so bad about it all. Eventually, a new chapter will begin and I won’t be part of it. Oh, I can’t celebrate life as it’s taken from me. The dew will gather, the sun will rise, but I will not.
She thinks of me like a painting on the wall. She doesn’t hear the sound, but she remembers the voice. I ask her, “Do you love me?” She says, yes, over and over. The spirits drift about the church, the sepulcher and blood are everywhere at once, and she doesn’t understand the chaos that we have lived in our whole life. We’ve depended on tradition and tradition has failed us. The apartment building is empty, only vacancies, and we have no place to turn but tradition. I am not gone yet, she is not either, but we know that we are not long for the world. The fast food restaurant, the birds, the cars, the fruit, the children and us…we all amble and we wait. Let’s puff up our chests, let’s dine in style. Even if we’re only at this table for a short while. As we sit, we know that all those exhibitions of beauty are like Kamikaze planes in the sky. Beautiful, life-filled birds, exploding and destroying yet creating new beginnings in a few quick moments before disappearing into the soil.
WISTFUL WANDA ON THE VIOLIN
The way you play guitar, the sound, in the heavenly reverberations touch the round, as well. So this music you play is ours, not just yours, it is public domain. And I would like to hold you for the rest of the night. Would that be OK? Would it be all right?
Imagining you in a long, white dress. The one you always wear, when in pain. This sound between us is what I feel when I see that young neighbor girl walking through the pine trees. You think that we need to be on the edge in order to be real. That being cruel is being real. And that if the hands haven’t clawed to grip then they can’t really feel.
I watched you in the garden. That was a thing of beauty! You, striking the chord, loudly and clearly while the old folks watched and I rated you so dearly. Throbbing, pulsing, the sound continues and in the silhouette, I see your sinewy shape and form. A body, so strong. I feel the physicality, then the sexuality, and I know that it is music.
You kept hidden your rose and I felt the strain and the music played and we relayed prose. Well, I believe that being honest to ourselves will get us no where. No, it is the deception. We can’t be cruel. Honesty is cruel. No one gets hurt, no one really knows. So, the simple sounds of the settled storm remain.
Down by the river, in the soaking dress. Sun coming through the rain. I so digress. I can’t explain what I feel for you but you’ve made the sound, you feel it too. We cannot express this endlessness. So, too, do the elders know that this is fleeting. A diminishing part of the shore, a tide that is receding.
I will hold your hand and the music will play and we will hear the cymbals crashing like waves as we turn away. I’ve played the drums so many times. You always complemented me with those chimes. I asked for drunken hodge-podge solos and you only wished for an old oboe.
The shakes, the cymbals, the whipping winds. The quick way out, the dapper end. Your white dress was soaked by the end of the storm. The doorway was littered with rain-soaked thorns. You lit a candle and we waited all night. Hand in hand, soft and white. Biblical tracings of whispering truths. This disappeared and my drums were replaced by lutes.
Our time together was but a moment – a flash, but how graceful it was; wholly mortal.
The time is gone and the songs will remain. The window closed when I was so wise. When my heart understood what my body denies. Waves of sounds, waves of experience. Your rose is in the garden and it will not live through the next season. Neither will any of us and yet the beauty will always be there. As the casket sits open and the choir songs are shared.
Our stamp is on this expansive earth. Our verdurous love hit the deepest note. To regret what we can never regain is to fall to the serpent. The body dies, the memory recedes. The young woman does not meet her most basic needs. But the experience of being alive will continue as long as we hear the sounds of the violin.
STONED ACES IN PECULIAR PLACES
She said it’s extremely important to be moderate. This was on the bus, when we first met. She said I’m not a good on the phone, but I’m a great conversationalist. She’s got a picture of Ginger Rogers done by an impressionist. She doesn’t have a high scorecard. She had a boyfriend for seven years but now she slept with a teddy bear that didn’t cover her rent of $650. But making rent isn’t that hard.
I told her I went to prep school. She said she was one of those kids from across the street weren’t so cool. She’d put on black mascara and smoke at the bus stop. Talkin’ about guns and the way to beat the meter drop.
She somehow manages to write a poem a day but what are these damn words worth anyway? She said people hang with me because I’m so boring. Like my roommate and her kids, they’re always adoring. She said I hate it when people make small talk. She said I like to watch you do your John Wayne walk. She asked if she could kiss me, I said that would be OK. I wondered if she wondered why I didn’t opt to stay? We listened to Citizen Cope in the van. She said, don’t open your eyes when you kiss. If you try to look, something will be missed. It’s better to give more than you take when you kiss. Citizen Cope went off, but I could still hear the stereo’s hiss. D’Artagane’s Theme was about dying in an unmarked grave. I surged with excitement – this theme was my fave. She bristled with anger, I lost the metaphor. She held onto my hand and I opened her door. She said I liked you best when we were on the bus. With a bus-load of strangers almost touching both of us.
So I left her at Aurora and 85th. She stepped onto the curb. Close enough to downtown Seattle to not be the suburbs. But it’s not like New York where you tap the vein of the hip. So, artists like us are on a lifeboat, far from the sinking mother ship.
NOTE BY NOTE
Oh, each of us is a critic and we’re all artists
I know stockbrokers get their kicks playing poker
The lawyer has the history books on the wall
The orchestra pit bull cellist has a doctor to call
It’s a myth that one can be original
It’s a myth, there’s always some trick to pull
Look at the writers and they’ll feed you bull
What do they know about fillin’ your tank till it’s full?
If this is a play, I’m not sure if I’ll stick
Around to see the second act
This must be a play and the play
Doesn’t make sense
After all, the play
Doesn’t make sense
But note by note, line by line
The story is immense
To be nothing but free, to serve no God but thee
It’s a cruel trick to think that you can escape misery
They say, “Ben, this doesn’t really sound like you!”
But I never am the man that you thought you knew
I heard a record today and it blew my mind
Just the kind I like, guitars and organs unwind
And the writer he writes with a pen so fine
That it makes you think of scenes from pages that you’ve never read
If this is a play, I’m not sure if I’ll stick
Around to see the second act
This must be a play and the play
Doesn’t make sense
After all, the play
Doesn’t make sense
But note by note, line by line
The story is immense
Well I can’t live up to the grand idea
I’ll hang in Barcelona and we’ll sip Sangria
I could never sip enough around this town
To turn the rivers blue and the ocean brown
