The Maltese Englishman12/29/2016 My Englishman looks out onto the Maltese sea
And I see him breathe His high shoulders calm under starched jacket Dripping with shiny, foreign things With meanings you could stretch like hot sugar Until you’re sure he could have been something His brow an ageless, sun-soaked groove His lips still and set with practiced assurance The guns go off I squint to see where the metal goes With no splash to condone an existence No evidence but the lazy smoke Circling like vapid possibilities around his head And although my Englishman could look up for me His heart is in the sparkling sea I lean over and make mirrors of my eyes Watching for what hope he has out there I turn and wait He only breathes
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Grand Traverse Bay12/5/2016 When in my mind
I row out to Grand Traverse Bay At setting sun I lie back And look up at stars At the end of their journeys Allowing my legs to hang gently Over the edge And skim the surface Of the stars’ reflection Disturbing their form But not their brightness The book in my hand Has nothing on this night sky Of a billion stories Ones far more daring Than any I have known As if I could even imagine As I listen and pretend I know its telling The boat drifting softly with me Pontchartrain12/2/2016 To witness the fluid breadth
Where the darkness shifts to meet it Is to remember a time When I was floating upon it Unmoored Like a pale petal in a desert At the mercy of winded sands Or a footprint in a jungle To which there are no visitors A speck of blind consciousness In a wise, unblinking blue As willing to rest in its vacant gaze As to sink forever into its consequence In New Orleans12/1/2016 In New Orleans
The wind blows underground Salty and sultry and laughing Effortlessly weaving himself Around cracked pipes and swollen peat Kissing the swamp water And telling her bedtime stories Dancing madly under our feet Swirling under bursting sidewalks Thundering through his sunken kingdom Like drunken Rex on his cold courir That’s how come you can feel it His release is found in endless fissures Torn in his blind ardor Through streets and concretes and floorboards And single blades of moon-yellow grass Through layers of rotten pavements And beds of rivers and doomed flowers Tangling himself in giant oaks Up through trunks and into branches His wildness protecting his urgent secret And we who have never seen him Know exactly what it is AboutWords are the backbone of my music. They often reference powerful ideas that strike me in my readings or develop from my life experiences. The creative expression of these ideas sometimes begs for musical form, and other times it comes out on the page. Here is a selection of my lyrics, poems, essays and other writings. Archives
June 2020
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