Absolution1/4/2019 If you need to find the music again
Pole out to the Okavango Delta Find Raps Navigating the veins of Earth Like he knows something about the heart Cover your feet in thorns And dirt And kill And then wash them in a basin Ripped from the bleeding, reaching fingers of the Zambezi Take life give life Let Setswana drip From the sharp edges of your crown Nail your feet to the river Tie your hands with reeds So you can no longer look for what wants To come upon you by surprise After a time The Unknown Singers of the Okavango Delta The aural apparitions of the almost dead Come like water Or blood Or both Take music give life It is finished.
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Bayou Sonnet1/25/2017 I stroll on the edge of the water and search
For bodies of lovers and wisdom and time The waves are the pews and the bayou, my church Opacity such that it must be divine I dare not approach and disturb its old hymn Its shoreline the bound’ry of life and demise For God knows the trouble I’ve seen and the sin And on every altar a sacrifice lies Instead I just walk and I cast out my gaze For something as ancient as feeling and fire And think of the heaven-like hell in the waves Of beauty and sorrow and pain and desire And out in the distance walk all of God’s sheep With bodies as faceless as those in the deep Jeff and the Mississippi1/9/2017 Most people think
that rivers are only water But most people don’t know what you knew That a river is a virile body just like yours With just as many secrets To learn that they would have to do what you did They would have to have been there on that night To sink into your mud-filled boots black and caked To allow your fish-fed t-shirt to spill over their chests To lie back into the endlessness like lured lovers And to sing like you An air that nature remembers and vows to reclaim Pouring itself down their throats in a show of jurisdiction Most people don’t know nature’s price for wisdom 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 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 Swampstillness11/23/2016 The trees of the swamp
Their slim sticks like shepherds' staves Or circus stilts abandoned in a fever The still, vertical swimmers With strokes as stiff and aimless As the lazy air around them Who, when the heron alights to rest Recline into its weight Like lovers with their sleeping brides The sticky sunlight saps its mortal servants Surrounding them like a queen Envious of their simple existence And the stillness - The stillness. The kind that is centuries settled With no plans for the rest of Earth’s eternity As if sleep is not a succumbing But a state as knowing as wakefulness As if the awakened ones could understand That beauty and survival are the same And that these sublime swamps sleep In the palm of their fumbling hands 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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