CARLY Z | SONGWRITER | MUSICIAN

The Maltese Englishman

12/29/2016

 
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 Bay

12/5/2016

 
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
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Pontchartrain

12/2/2016

 
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
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In New Orleans

12/1/2016

 
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
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    About

    Words 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.

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