All seven of the dwarves have rubbed their knuckles bare with the work that makes them bleed. Their sweat breaks hard like rifting waves crashing into the sands of footless blessings. They look in my direction and the sleeping one dreams of me. They know they have it better. They mine deep and toil like Captains. None of them would wish their lives upon my labours.
Hawks and falcons screech above with a shrill cry that cracks the soul of the moon in half. They circle above shrieking loud intermissions from the fluted chirps of extended evolutionary grace. Is it mating or intimidation? Asking again and again in order to distract myself from the midnight tasks at hand, the tasks that make the little men laugh, makes them cry.
There is nothing to check out anymore. The corners have all been turned, the circles erased and made square and then they fade into lines that no one will ever observe anyhow. A conundrum of whether or not to persevere, to carry on, to move on down the road with some sort of tune that could quite feasibly be construed as theme music. Everyone needs theme music. My speakers are blown and my ears have bled. My cerebral oatmeal is dried and gummy; a fork points up to heaven with it’s tines buried deep between the receptors. Synapse, my friend, neurons - thought. No more, never needed much anyway.
Thinking back to girls dancing in dresses that kiss their ankles as they twirl and ravage the cortex of visual digestion. Dance, mama, dance! No money makers, but shakers none the less, and the music can not be eaten by my soul anymore. It all has become so redundant that not even the dancing girl can be formed into that mind’s eye; only traces of outlines can fade away into what they shall never be again.
Lay down and breathe. Inhale so deep that your back hurts. Make it hurt. Hurt. Hurt. Deep. Let go, exhale. A rush of existence in one simple action. The time to need to be one with time. A simple yet profoundly abstract acceptance of our own mortality all in the eyes of something far more mortal than we would ever want to admit. Sometimes it is as simple as function. Time does not exist. It is an illusion we all accept to justify the moving forward that is inevitable. Sad but true. Yes, that is what I said.
Fat thumbs make young boys sick. Brassiere fumbling should not be confused with smoking braziers or Brazier Foods. Written words can be destroyed, spoken words last forever in the hearts of those that hear. Little bus stop bumper boys throwing sticks and stones. Someone grab the fat kid and put him down.
Rest in the breast of a lover and her smells. The thought of never having to leave those arms and never having to ever say anything again. The ultimate truth of silence. Silly, silly silence, noise is for kids. And then you are there. A moment when the pin tip dots of light shoot through what you thought were shut eyes but they were not shut at all. Never a thought between the wink, blink and nod. Sail high above the birds boys, as the little men watch you and your syllabus of action in action.
Look under the covers, look behind the bookcase. Under a car seat somewhere. Maybe in a soul that never has been rattled or flung open. It might be time to clean the cage.
Drink through the curdled cream until your throat burns like sandpaper scrapings. Shreds of torn flesh to choke on. Never a thought given twice as the mouths move and gums flap. Silence! Throw down the gauntlet and make a stand.
While I was ‘away from my desk’ I found plenty to occupy my mind and it was that pre-occupation with discord that left my pages bereft of phrase or verse. I would like to share with you all where my head has traveled and maybe we can all laugh about this brochure of distraction when it is all over and done with; after all there are far more serious and entertaining things for me to be writing such as my fiction.
It all began with becoming introduced to a place, a show, a video clip that made me laugh and for some reason made me want to laugh harder than I could seem to muster and this is where I was left for days upon days. These finite extensions of my doubt only left me wondering why I could not participate with more zeal. I laughed more than I thought, but it left me empty somehow:
The ‘Wheel of Fun’ seemed to be far more profound to me than it should have been to anyone, even a recluse on a mountain side gazing off into the infinitum of malnutrition and bizarre odors. I would awake in my morning with both the theme song and the party song stuck in my mind. They played over and over again until I was one with the clip; I even had a little bum wiggle dance that I did when I sang the line “gorgeous tiny chicken machine show”. I had integrated with inventive stupidity.
This is right around the time that I took a hard serious listen to the supermarket muzac at work in hopes to be inspired by some sort of upbeat tune that would get me going into fourth gear and get some serious shelf stocking done. I found one song that would come on every now and then; I would only catch a melody and a word or two here or there. You must keep in mind that I am on a five year delay of ‘hip’ music. In other words, I don’t listen to a lot of new music at all and then about every five or six years I listen to it all and play ‘catch-up’. I am right now at the tail end of one of those ‘suspensions of all things hip and new’. The song reminded me of Led Zeppelin in some sort of way so that led me to WolfMother and then to The Darkness. Finally, after really listening to the words and writing them down I found this:
The White Stripes are who I found and I was kind of disturbed that I was enjoying them as (after hearing one of their other songs a couple years back) I did not understand the hype. When I went around melody humming to people (much like Al Bundy singing ‘mmmm … go with him’ to everyone) I found that the most common reaction was to mention the 1965 Dobie Gray song titled ‘The In Crowd’. I then would describe it to people as Prince singing ‘In Crowd’ while Led Zeppelin backed him up. For days and hours I was filled with this song and the plate smashing images and piano pulling pictures shown in the video. I go where the ‘in crowd’ goes.
This brought me to another weird-similarity-to-other-creativity found in a popular piece of current music. On my ride into work I would hear it on the fabulously predictable and boring, yet ‘cutting edge’, KROQ of Los Angeles. The whistling in this little ditty haunted me with it’s reverbed presence that made me wonder how big the hollow log I just crawled into must be to make that resonance evade escape. I found that it reminded me of a group called Yo La Tango but, alas, it was not. I found it’s similarity in something completely different. While you listen really get that whistled melody stuck in your head and compare with it’s mental solder in my cerebellum afterwards:
Does anyone remember the Saturday Night Live skit with Horatio Sans, Jimmy Falon, Tracy Morgan, and Chris Kattan playing a small band that sings the Christmas song, ‘Christmas Time Is Here’? It is the one where Chris Kattan is the member who holds the keyboard and moves his head from side to side. Tracey Morgan just snaps his fingers and kind of wiggles in place. Horatio Sans plays his ‘traveler’ guitar and sings. The guitar solo he plays during the song is the same whistling echo heard in the above song by Peter, Bjorn and John.
Of course all of this video viewing led me to many minutes and even hours that I dedicated in some sort of zoned-out hypno-surfing on YouTube that even led to me having a small but present favorites list. Yay! I came across one clip of amazing music and beautiful everything that inspired me to come to terms with the hiatus and to end the sabbatical and drift backward in time in order to catch up to now and be part of the present. It was more the bridge and chorus in this that grabbed me but the imagery in this video is worth the price of admission and a large popcorn:
Regina Spektor captured me with her story and imagery. The wavering lyric of ‘mind’ is almost breathtaking and brings a tear very quickly to the edge of forming and falling from my eyes, while the ‘he-art’ chorus is so upbeat and full of hope and smiles that it illuminates all that could make up anything close to a soul in this old cupboard of me and my being. Something to be said for colour to be found in the black and white; or is it something that we really must make a mess with in order to fully partake of their impact on us as a whole? How many voices are in that mind? Halcyon anyone … ?
Then back to the store to remind me that all is better than Trans-Am/ Firebird boogie of Revere nights and hair so big that even the Aqua-Net is afraid (and how scary is that - my Word spell check recognizes Aqua-Net!). I thought back to a supervisor I had on night crew in a different supermarket back in my early twenties. The song ‘Stroke’ was the only song that could rise this guy from the proverbial dead and get his ass moving fast enough that he could get the store looking primo for the arrival of the store manager upon the dawn’s early light. Not ever being a huge fan of the song to begin with, I now can not listen to it at all with out screaming. It has become a personal torture and trauma to have to endure even just one moment of that little ditty. However, I can rock, roll, and get it all done while listening to this:
Billy Squire. This is what I get for shunning one man’s positive productivity just because it was not my cup of tea. The lesson to this one is that understanding is the only thing that makes diversity happen with any sort of progress and ease is understanding (it is also worthy to note that understanding can accomplish the same ends as diversity but diversity can not go it alone thus requiring understanding which is just fine by itself). The other lesson is that I thought this was Led Zeppelin too and I obviously have something for any fem-bot-boy voiced lyrics about sex backed by heavy riffed blues rock being music that I like but would never instinctively buy or play. Mmmmmm … everybody wants you.
This is where my head has been. This is what stopped my writing for a month. I was far too busy playing music detective to scribble down pieces of prose to be read by the masses and accomplished by I. From chickens spinning for fun and dancing unicorn-cows all the way to the last lines of the Squire: “The more you understand, seems the more like you do. You never get away...everybody wants you “.
Could it even have made sense if I tried to make it make more sense than I may or may not have already manifested without malicious or malevolent motivation?
Empathy and apathy girly-whirly-swirled into smooth glass marbles of black and clear. In a fishbowl vase ribbon wrapped rightly that sits on the table. The marbles worn smooth by the erosion of being and so forth and so on. Smooth. Sheer. Worn down just right until the hardened surfaces of each little sphere were streamlined just so, and there never would be anything so smooth anywhere ever.
Blackened glass death eyes reflecting back, so black was the black. Three or four kissing in the bowl forming an atom of faces staring back into your curiosity. A million and five emotions all stretched out and then compressed over and over again to make the black so deep and shiny that it becomes it’s own infinity. If you gaze too long, too deep, you find the heart of the Succubus devouring the souls of Plebes. Such silly sass saunters are seen before the reflection springs back to your eyes. You are already taken, digested, devoured.
The clear spheres have never seen themselves in the shimmer of wretch yet they have rubbed and caressed each other’s existence while millennia passed by like the seconds of seconds. You can peer through the transparent vessels and it as if you are not actually casting your vision through anything at all. With such fabulous ease does light find it’s rays pushing in and on through as if nothing were there but air itself. The whitest light you could ever smudge a rainbow into being emanates on. Brighter than magnesium could ever want to be. Hot. Clear. Smile.
Both so smooth. Both so cunning.
Empathy and apathy baked together in a pie.
Never quite knowing which side will taste better today.
Sit down. Stand up. Rage on and stumble beneath it all as if the paisley tablecloth should have been hound’s-tooth and it knows damn well that it does not like the current state of affairs. A desolate road of never a headlight seen. A simple truth of it all not being the same for us all. An individual experience; each with many breathes and never a sharp thought or dull point.
Simplicity may be far more complicated than anyone had pared it down to be.
Trapped in a moment between inhale and exhale and never really recognizing the breath itself. One deep transference of elimination into existence. Stupidity and inconsideration run the gamut and clog the drains with a sludge so thick that drowning is the only progress and of course that action, in it’s own right, impedes any sort of being. How many times must a sign be posted, an intent made known, a succession digressed?
A voice from here, a shadow from there and only in between is the sleep that cancels the light but never lasts long enough. Spirit and intellect combined into razor wire shredding the souls of contact. Some people should not be let out of their cages.
Wallpaper peels and paint flakes down and off, down and out, and it would appear that only the sun fears you or takes you seriously, which ever the case may be. Stand tall, lay down, break a sweat and die. Nothing is ever good enough if you stop smiling. A repetitive fortune of manifest destiny. Crawl into the cookie and speak loudly when the shell is cracked; you may never get another chance - regardless of what they all say.
Shades drawn. Door locked. Only the light above the stove to let you know that you are awake or alive. Up behind the light you can see a grease smear of yellow that was never cleaned properly the first swipe around. If you pay it no never mind it will remain and be thankful for the grace and charity provided it. Something must live inside it. It is probably more successful than you and it knows it for it is still there as you wonder about the validity of your consciousness.
All that is needed to be fast is far too slow; all that is intended for lack of speed flies by with unwanted expediency.
Rusty, dusty, decrepit. A simple day just like them all. A motion and movement that only is exceeded by the notes that numbly shake the muted air. It is all the same. Up, down and all around and even the hokey-pokey is exhausting thus allowing you for a minute to actually know that shaking your ass in and out is most certainly not what it is all about.
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